Say the word “chainsaw” to a lot of people and the movie “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” immediately comes to mind. The iconic film that was filmed on a very low budget ended up being a box office success and is now regarded as being one of the best and most influential HORROR FILMS of all times.

Now, as you all know, Jayne and I have lived on acreage in rural NSW Australia for the past eleven years. We bought our farm as a weekender in 2022, and decided to move here full time in 2018, after I retired myself from practicing clinical dentistry in Sydney Australia because of arthritis in my hands.

And now, as successful coaches and speakers working primarily from home, it really made more sense to us that we didn’t really need to live in suburbia, and that we could actually live anywhere that we wanted to.

We now live on sixty eight acres, where we raise beef cattle.

From time to time on that acreage, we have tall trees that come down or lose branches. Often when this happens, we have an arborist come in to help with the fallen trees and tree limbs. Where possible, the arborist turns them all into serviceable pieces of firewood. Or, if it’s not practical, we simply pop the big pieces onto a burn pile to be ignited at a later date.

From time to time, there are occasions when these fallen branches do need to be dealt with more urgently, or quickly, rather than booking the arborist and then waiting for him to have availability.

And it’s for this reason that I decided it might be wise for me to get a small chainsaw for myself, for those rare occasions that I would need to do some urgent tidy-ups of fallen tree limbs, or to do those non urgent tidy ups of branches that are lying around some of our paddocks and just simply getting in the way.

The trouble is chainsaws can be very dangerous.

Like really.

Really. Dangerous.

If you’re using one, and you’re not concentrating, well, you could easily cause serious damage to yourself.

And so, I’d bought this small Ryobi chainsaw a couple of years ago from the local hardware store, and because of my “fear” of it, and of my respect for what it could do [for good and for evil], it had sat in its box all that time and never even been unpacked.

Meet Mick the Fencer:

I’d like to introduce you to Mick the fencer.

Mick comes around our place from time to time and builds fences and repairs gates and latches and fences on my property.

He used to live locally and is an old school friend of Dan the arborist. But now Mick lives and works a couple of hundred kilometres away, so he’s not around as often as he used to be, but he’s a very handy friend to know.

The good thing about Mick, is that he can operate a chainsaw and a wood splitter really well, and from time to time he comes around and helps convert fallen trees into useable pieces of split firewood.

So here’s what happened last weekend.

I received a phone call from Mick that he was going to be in town, and asking whether I had any work for him.

And of course I do… there are a couple of fences with broken wires, and I’ve got a handful of gates that need longer chains on them due to settlement and movement of gate posts.

So, I asked Mick to come over and do some work.

When he got here, I also thought I’d ask Mick if he could give me a first hand lesson on using the chainsaw, and I’m so glad I did.

Because, by the time that Mick had explained a few things to me, and it was time for me to start using this little chainsaw, I was terrified about what bad things could happen if I didn’t fully concentrate on exactly what I was doing with it.

The good news is that I now feel confident on being able to use the chainsaw to do those small jobs that I bought the chainsaw to do for me.

But the best lesson is this:

I could have swatted up on YouTube videos and taught myself how to use a chainsaw, but it was the personal tuition from Mick that really made the big difference.

You see, despite the fact that everything that I might ever need to know about chainsaws and their use is probably available on YouTube or available online, the simple fact is that having Mick teach me his way, and his BEST WAY for me to use this chainsaw properly was invaluable to me because it meant that I avoided making any stupid errors while I tried to figure out the DIY side of the instructions.

Sometimes when you’re learning how to do new things, having a coach there to hold you accountable and also to stop you from making silly mistakes that you might be unaware of, is invaluable.

The last thing that I wanted to be was a human headline on the six o’clock news.

And having Mick there as an onsite coach and mentor was invaluable in this instance.

He saved me time doing research and he was there to give me great advice as I needed it.

And he kept me focussed on avoiding those silly errors that I could have made that might have put me into an ambulance…

And that personalised advice is priceless.

In your business…

In your business, are you wasting valuable time trying to research “how to” and “better way” information, when what you really need is a coach or a mentor that has the knowledge and the ability to keep you streamlined and in your lane, and focussed on the end goal?

Because most of the time, dinking around trying to work stuff out on your own can cost you a fortune in lost opportunity, and lost time, while you try to save yourself pennies on instructional costs…

And really doing it that way doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense…

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Have you read my book , How To Build The Dental Practice of Your Dreams [Without Killing Yourself!] In Less Than Sixty Days.

You can order your copy here: Click Link To Order

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The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.

Email me at david@theupe.com