A contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. And welcome to the Hammer and Grind podcast, the podcast built for contractors to help maximize profits and get you off the tools before burnout or bankruptcy happens. I'm your host, Brad Hebner. And I'm here to help you on your journey to self-mastery. Make sure you check us out on our social media platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast and you'll be able to find me there. Consider joining my free Facebook group called the Contract Your Profit Blueprint. I created this free group to give you as much information as possible to help you in your business. I go live in there once a week, tons of content to help you in your business. If you want to accelerate the success, consider joining my paid coaching group called The Profit Club. In there is a great community of contractors all willing to share information and help each other succeed, as well as hundreds of hours of training, coaching calls, everything you need to accelerate your business. If you want to learn more about that, you can find out more information on hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club. Or just send me a message and I'll be happy to share that with you. Now, let's get on to the show. All right. Welcome back to the Hammergrind Podcast. This is episode number 106, The Profit Blueprint. This is the exact blueprint that I have created and teach in The Profit Club. And I'm going to unpack it for you guys today so that you can understand what it takes to actually be profitable in your business. And we're going to deep dive into this. Now there's four steps. There's four parts of the profit blueprint. Number one is mastery of the mind. Number two is pricing for profits. Number three is accelerating your sales. And number four is systematizing and scaling. And we're going to deep dive into each one of these and really kind of unfold this blueprint for you so that you guys can have the right profits in your business. Now you have to bear with me again. I don't know what's going on. I don't know if it's the weather or what, but I am sick again for the fifth time this year. It's been very annoying. Got lots of doctor's appointments and stuff scheduled to try and figure out what the heck's going on. I think it has something to do with I had septoplasty surgery or deviated septum surgery last fall. And I don't know if there's some stuff happening because of that. bear with me as I try to get through yet another podcast being sick. Hopefully the last time for this year is I'm really getting sick and tired of it. So with that, let's get started. Guys, the profit blueprint, I've made this as simple as possible. I could make this 27 steps. I could make it 15 different things and all these different stuff. I can make it as complicated as I really wanted to. But I want to make it simple because like me, Being a contractor, we need things simple, right? The more complicated it is, the less likely we are to actually do the things. So I've spent the last two years through coaching contractors, through getting feedback, through really trying to figure out a very simple process that can easily be taught to contractors that has the greatest level of success. And that is what the Profit Blueprint is. So number one, mastery of the mind. This is one of those things that most people don't realize is what's affecting them. It's what's keeping them where they're at in their business, keeping them stuck. Most of you, if you simply do step one, which is master your mindset, you will unlock all of the profits that you could possibly want in your business. This is the fundamental part of everything else. And this is why it's number one. The problem with mindset, anytime you're talking about mindset, people don't want to talk about that. They don't want to think about it. They don't want to think like, oh, there's something wrong with me personally. I'm the best. I'm awesome. I know I'm good at what I do. Right? Our pride and our ego. starts to puff up and we have to go buy big trucks that are jacked up with big wheels and all that stuff so we can compensate for our ego and other things. Some of you listening right now, that may hurt a little bit, but this is true, guys. And it's not just a truck. Pick whatever you want. Tools. I compensated with tools. Oh, I got to buy all these tools. I got $40,000, $50,000 worth of tools because buying tools made me feel like I was winning. in my business, the more tools I collected. And don't get me wrong, tools are cool. I love tools. But a lot of times we buy things that we really don't need because it makes us feel like we're actually winning. It's a tax write-off. It's something we need for our business. I have to have multi-tools. I have to. I have to have this $2,000 tile saw. I have to. I have to have this one. We justify all the time about stuff that we need. Our mindset. is what keeps us locked where we're at. It's what keeps us stuck in our business. And until you understand this, you're going to be stuck. I can teach you the other three steps. I can teach you how to sail. I can teach you how to do all this stuff. But if you don't believe that it's possible to charge more money, if you say things like the economy is holding me back. I can't find good help. People won't pay this much money. There's too many competitors in my town. Everybody's cheaper than me. I'm the most expensive. If you say those things, whether internally or externally, if you say or believe those things, you have a mindset problem. You have a limited belief system. You have blocks in your mindset. This is so important to unlock this. This is the fundamental reason why you're not successful. Like I said, it's not sexy. People don't want to think there's anything wrong with them. They don't want to work on themselves. I've been working on my mindset for the last 20 years, and it doesn't happen overnight. And there's different things that you have to deal with. Sometimes our mindset blocks are from childhood. Sometimes it's from abuse, alcohol. physical, sexual. Sometimes there's abuse there that's locking us down. Sometimes it's fears, fear of success, fear of failure. There's all these different things that are keeping us blocked where we're at in our business or keeping us stuck. I say blocked because that's literally what it's doing. It's blocking you from receiving the correct information that you need in order to move past this area in your business. See, if I tell you, you just need to raise your prices and your block, the block that's in your brain says, I can't raise my prices because everyone else is cheaper than me. That is a block that's keeping you from receiving the information, which is you need to raise your prices. And you will dismiss that information as long as you have that block in place. As long as you have that limiting belief in place. you will not be able to receive the correct information. So if you're putting up resistance right now, if you're saying, no, that's not true, that's not the case, I don't have any mindset problems, if you're saying those things, then you definitely have mindset problems. You definitely have blocks in your life and you definitely have limiting beliefs. And so I would encourage you to work as diligently as possible to remove that. to work on your mindset. And there's lots of books and things out there, but I would recommend one book. It's called Mindset by Carol Dweck. Read that book and it will kind of set the foundation about how a lot of these limiting beliefs that we have now, how most of those came about from our childhood. And now you can start the process of unlocking those things. So mindset, mastery of the mind. Number one, and I'm just going to read these here. This is kind of what I wrote out. But believe it or not, your mindset is what's holding you back. So the first thing we do is a lobotomy on your limiting beliefs. Those beliefs like other people are cheaper, clients won't pay more, I can't charge for estimates, I can't sell over the phone, I can't find help. These are all limiting beliefs that are keeping you from achieving your wildest dreams. So that's number one, mastery of the mind. We have to remove these beliefs. And it's not true, guys. These things that you say are simply not true because I know from my own clients and from talking to other contractors in Facebook forums and all over the place, TikTok everywhere, that they are having success in their businesses across the US, across Canada, across the world, and they don't have these issues. And so for you to simply say that customers are too cheap... There's that, you know, they don't want to pay more money. If that were true, if that were a true statement, then everyone across the board would be suffering with that exact same problem. And there are tens of thousands of people, examples where this is not true. So if we use a little bit of logic here, we can simply say that that is not a true statement because if it were true, it would be 100% true across the board. I have clients who live in towns of 5,000 people who had these beliefs. I can't charge more. They joined my program. We've removed these beliefs. They start charging more for their services. And guess what? People still bought. In a small town of 5,000 people. You don't have to be in a town of millions or in towns of hundreds of thousands. It works everywhere. Okay? It's the limiting beliefs that are keeping you from having success. Number two, this is the second step. Once we get your beliefs aligned, your mindset mastered, the second thing is we got to get the pricing right. 90% of contractors that join my coaching program are not charging enough. 90% are not charging enough. So once we remove these beliefs about being too expensive, we make sure you're charging a premium price for your services. So when you do this, you'll instantly change your financial future. The real secret here, like if you could, if you just want me to give you the exact blueprint in one simple step is you need to charge more. And that's it. If you simply charge more, you will have more success. The problem is all of the things around that that have to be fixed in order for that to be effective. I can sit here and tell you just simply charge more. But if you don't have good marketing in place, if you don't have good branding in place, if you're not good at sales, if you don't understand how to deliver high-level service, then you're going to struggle selling jobs and producing and getting more money. The answer is charge more. The problem is putting everything in place that will allow you to charge more. And that's what we help you with is to figure out what you need to have in place. But you have to make sure you're charging more. And here is the formula. I've said it before. I'll say it again. It's your COGS, your cost of goods sold. That includes your labor, your materials, your subcontractors, any overhead like permits, plans. anything, rentals, dumpster, anything like that that's specific for that job does not include any overhead whatsoever. Your electricity, your admin staff, your office manager, maybe your internet service. If you have a building, the rent, none of that is included in your COGS. Your COGS are the cost of goods sold, meaning what does it cost you? to produce the goods. And in this case, the goods is what you do. So it's not your electricity and all that stuff. What is your COGS? Times two. It's 100% markup. Times two, a factor of times two is the same as 100% markup. So if your total COGS is $10,000, let's say you have $5,000 in labor, $5,000 in materials, that gives you a total COGS of $10,000. Meaning that if you didn't, if you charge $10,000 and you did that job, you would have zero money left over, right? Because that's what it costs you to produce that job. So you have $10,000 in cogs. We take that times two. That means we need to sell that job for $20,000. Not $1,500 markup, not a 25% markup on labor and 50 on labor, or I mean, I'm sorry,50 on labor and 25% on materials. None of that. 100% across the board. If you simply just do that, you will have money in your business. And I get a lot of pushback on this. Not from the people won't pay it. Not so much that they won't pay that much. Yes, I get that. But I get a lot of pushback on I don't want to rip people off. I just want to be fair, Brad. As long as I can buy a six-pack of beer. and have a little bit of extra money, I'm good. Guys, that is a terrible, terrible way to run a business. If that's you, if you just want to survive and just live, go work for somebody else. Seriously. Because you can go make a lot more money working for someone else and have none of the stress of owning a business. The whole purpose of owning a business is to control your destiny, your future. your legacy for your family. That's the purpose of owning a business, to be able to control everything, all of your life, control your time, everything you do. Otherwise, there's no sense in all the stress that's involved in running and owning a business. Go work for someone else and probably make more money, honestly. But that's the formula for pricing is your COGS times two. And this whole thing of being fair, You're thinking short-sighted. Your body will not keep up. Your body, as you get older, you will not be able to work as much. Some of you will not even be able to work at all on the job. You'll get arthritis. You get knee problems, back problems, all kinds of problems, and you can't physically work on the job. This is why the handyman business model is really not a very good model for long-term sustainability unless you have employees. Because if you want to be a one-man show, that's fine. You can do that. But eventually, your body is going to quit. And once your body quits, not only can you not work anymore, but you cannot produce income for the rest of your life. So if you're not making enough income now to carry you in the future, then you're screwed. You're going to have to close your business down and go be a greeter at Walmart or be a salesman at Home Depot making $12 an hour. because you didn't plan far enough ahead, all because you wanted to be fair. Well, take that word fair and shove it up your butt. I mean, I freaking hate the word fair. I hate it. I hate seeing people post on there, I want to be fair. I just want to be fair. Guys, if you broke your back and you couldn't work anymore, are your clients going to come and pay your medical bills? Are they going to come and cook your food? Are they going to come and cut your grass for you? Hell no. Your clients are not going to do crap for you if you get hurt. So don't sit there and tell me you want to be fair to them because they don't give two craps about you. Yes, they may care about you as a person. Yes, they may be sympathetic towards you. They may feel really bad for you. But at the end of the day, they are not going to do anything financially to help you. So this idea that you're being fair to them is ridiculous. You might as well just say, I'm too scared. I'm too chicken to charge people more money. And part of the backside of the mindset is some of you guys don't feel like you're worth more. And that's unfortunate, but it's not true. Everyone who owns a business is worth more. Not even that. If you're alive on this planet, you're worth more. Unfortunately, we can't always charge and get what we're worth all the time. Meaning I can't charge a million dollars an hour, right? It's just not feasible. But I am worth more than what a lot of people may think. And you are worth more than a lot of people may think. And you are worth more than what you think. So this whole idea about being fair is BS. Eliminate that word. The truth is, is that when you charge appropriately, You actually can deliver better service, better quality, better experience for your clients. That's the truth. When you charge more, you deliver better experience. Because you're not running around trying to hurry up and get this job done. We got to hurry up and get it done because we're already over on budget. We're already over on time. The materials cost more than I thought. We got to hurry up, hurry up, get this job done. And now you're just... You're doing less quality work and less service because you got to hurry up and get this done all because you wanted to be fair and not charge too much. But in reality, your fairness is actually making it unfair because you're actually delivering a lower quality product and experience because you didn't charge appropriately. You got to take the word fair and throw it out the freaking word. Just throw it out. Eliminate it from the dictionary. Okay? You have to charge appropriately, guys. Now, what about Mrs. Buttersworth? My God, did that? Mrs. Buttersworth down the street, an 80-year-old lady who's on Social Security. Her grandkids don't do anything or help out. She's in a wheelchair and she just needs some help. I want to be fair to her. I'm not trying to price gouge her. I really don't want to try. I'm not trying to get rich off of one person. Again, these are limiting beliefs, guys. If you want to help Mrs. Buttersworth, then go down there on your off time and do it for free. Don't discount your pricing during peak working hours because you're screwing yourself. You're not helping Mrs. Buttersworth by doing it at a discount. What you don't know about Mrs. Buttersworth is that she's actually a millionaire. She just lives very frugally, does not have any flash, and she knows how to work the system. So there's not a, I don't know a single person on earth that would say, no, I don't want a discount. No, no, please don't give me a discount. There's very few people on earth that would actually do that. If I was a multimillionaire and you came to my house and said, hey, I'll come and cut your grass and I'll give you a discount. I'm not going to say, oh, please, no, please don't give me a discount. I'd be like, oh, okay, that's great. Thank you. This idea that everyone who's old doesn't have any money is ridiculous because the truth is if you statistically look at the population, the majority of older people, like 60 and above, have almost all the wealth in the country. The boomers, right? These old boomers that don't know anything, they have the majority of the wealth. They just don't spend it on stupid crap like cars and trucks and all that stuff. So you're not helping her by giving her a discount. You're only hurting yourself. I've said this before too. Don't run your business like a charity. Run it so you can be charitable. If you charge appropriately for everyone else and you're making really good profits, you're making plenty of money. Now, as a charitable thing, you could send your guy over there and do it for free. Now you can go over there on a Saturday and do it for free. Right? But stop discounting your rates to help someone out. I'm not saying anything wrong with discounts, guys. If you want a discount for veterans or stuff like that, as long as the numbers make sense, I'm okay with that. That's a marketing strategy. But don't discount because you want to be fair. Don't discount because you think you're charging too much. Don't discount because you believe they don't have any money. You don't know their bank account. Are they going to show you your bank account? show you their bank account. Hey, here's my bank statement. I only have $27 in there till next month. No, they're not going to show you anything. Don't discount your money. Don't discount your prices. So pricing for profits is literally that simple. It's your COGS times two, right? It's going to give you a 50% gross profit. We're going to job cost every single job and find out, did I really get 50 %? I did. Cool. Now I can pay my overhead out of that 50%. And you're going to have a lot more money available in your business. I have clients that are making money hand over fist. They didn't change anything in their business. They didn't change anything else except they raised their prices. They didn't change necessarily their marketing. They didn't change the way they do things per se. They just raised their prices and instantly sold jobs and made more money. See, a lot of you believe that if you raise your prices, you have to do more. You have to offer more services. You have to include more things. You don't. You simply charge more and that's it. One of my clients who's been in since January, he's had a lot of success in the last few weeks selling jobs. And I was talking to him the other day and he was like, he's like, I can't believe for the last several years of running my business, I've been working my butt off. And now all I've done is raise my prices and I'm actually making more money than I did and I'm not doing anything. It almost feels illegal. And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly right. Welcome to owning a profitable business. This whole idea of working harder, not smarter, working hard, you got to work hard. Yes, it's hard work, but that don't mean you got to work 70 hours a week on the job site in order to make money. No, you just got to do the things that's required to make the money. They don't have to be physically exhausting every single day. That's not how businesses are built, is being physically exhausted by working on the tools all day long. Okay? So that's pricing for profits. We got to get the pricing right, guys. You have to get the pricing right. Now, once you raise your prices, you may get some pushback because you may have some clients that are not the right clients. Okay? This is a common... step in the process. So number three is accelerating your sales. And that's a combination of marketing and sales. But here's what I have for number three. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. That's a quote by Mike Tyson. And see, what I hear a lot when I talk to contractors is that every contractor thinks they are good at selling until they see what real selling looks like. I'm just as guilty of this. You'll learn how to sell any kind of job at any price over the phone, get paid to go do the estimate and never waste your time on another tire kicker. Just this part right here is worth the entire cost of my program. Just learning how to effectively sell is worth the entry fee. It's worth the investment. Because it's not what you think it is. It's not the, oh, I just got to get in front of them and wow them with my good looks and my personality. Everyone loves my personality. No, they don't. Get over yourself. They don't love your personality. They love your cheap price. That's what's really happening. They love your cheap price. And even if you're priced right... Yeah, people can love someone to get out there and meet them, but you don't have to do that in the beginning. You can still pre-qualify people before you get to that point. So now you sell them over the phone and then you go out there to double check everything. And that's when you really seal the deal. But you're skipping the step of pre-qualification and you're going out and looking at all these people only to find out they don't have the money. The timeline doesn't work. It's work that you can't actually do. Blah, blah, blah, blah. All these things that end up being a waste of time. And so you're doing 10 estimates a week and only closing five or six and losing all that time. There's no reason to spend, have a part-time or full-time job just doing estimates. Especially if you're a small contractor who still works on the job or has one or two employees and you work part-time on the job or do the management side. You don't have time available to go look at 10,15 jobs a week and only close half of them. It's not worth your time. When you have your marketing set up correctly, the marketing makes the selling 10 times easier. If your business is properly marketed and properly branded, whenever someone finds you,90% of the selling is done. The phone call is just a let's make it work. Let's get this on the schedule. But I talk to guys all the time that don't even have websites. I was talking to a lady yesterday on Messenger. I'm not going to say who it is, but she moved to a new area. And so she lost all of her clients. She's been in business for a while, but had to move. And so she's starting over. And she moved to a big city where there's lots of competition. And I was talking to her. She's like, I'm really struggling to get leads right now. And I said, well, what's your website? Well, I don't have one. Okay, well, there's strike number one. What's the name of your business? It's this. I look on Google. I can't find you on Google. Oh, I didn't do Google because I can't. It doesn't work. We couldn't get to work where I used to live. Okay, so you don't have a website and I can't find you on Google. How am I supposed to find you? Right? That may seem obvious, but I get this all the time. Because some of you who started in the last two to three years... when all you had to do was stick a magnet on your truck and people called you all day long, that is slowly going away because there is a downturn in the market. It doesn't mean people aren't buying. It just means it's not as easy. You have to do a lot of marketing efforts, guys. You have to have a website. I don't care how busy you are now. You have to have a website. It's non-negotiable. You have to have a business profile. It's non-negotiable. You have to collect reviews. I have to have a way to go and find out information about you. She said she's in this city. I said, Oh, I know lots of contractors, general contractors. I said, Do you do sub work or just all retail? She said, We do both. I said, Oh, I know several general contractors in your city. I might be able to introduce you to them to see if they might be looking for subcontractors. And that's when I asked her what her website was. I don't have one. What's your Google list? I don't have one. Well, how am I supposed to call my general contractor acquaintances and say, Hey, I got a subcontractor for you. If you're looking, the first thing they're going to say is, do they have a website? No. Oh, well, how can I get it? How can I look and see if they're work? Because they're going to social proof you guys. Every single person will social proof you. If you got a referral, if someone gave you a referral, They referred your business to their friend. Your friend may call you, but I 1000% guarantee you they've social proofed you first before they've called you. They've gone to Facebook, your website, Google. They've checked before they call you to make sure that you're not just some flake. If you don't have these things in place, you're screwing yourself. You need to have these things in place. So you want to have too many leads coming in. I've talked to other contractors that say, I really don't want to hire a professional and get leads because I'm afraid I can't handle the amount of leads coming in. Well, that's the problem you want. That is the recipe for scaling your business is having too many clients calling you. You're not going to be able to scale your business by not having enough clients, like just having the right amount of clients coming in. There's all kinds of things you can do to reduce the amount of people calling. But if you don't have the abundance first, you can't narrow that down. You can't narrow down from nothing. But you can narrow down from too much. So you have to get the phone ringing off the hook. And then you can narrow it down from there. So getting your marketing and your sales right so that you can pre-qualify quickly and effectively. And that way, you're not wasting all of your time. He's a landscaper. He saved over two months, a year of his time by stopping doing free estimates. Two months. I'm talking about the total time saved, like eight hours a day times five days a week times four or five weeks a month, a total of two months of his time per year saved. Do you think you can... work on your business more if you can save two months out of the year? For you that are doing free estimates, that's like instead of having a 12-month year, you get a 14-month year. You get an extra two months to work in your business. Do you think that would be beneficial to your business? If you say no, then you need to leave this podcast right now. Because everybody should be saying yes. I would love to have an extra two months of time available. That's what actually learning what a sales process looks like. The last step in this is the systematizing scale. And this has to be last. I can't tell you how many people... And this was me, by the way. This is my belief. The only way you make more money is by being more efficient. So that's where I invested in a lot of tools, a lot of technology, a lot of things because I'm like, Oh, if I buy this one tool, it saves me one man hour production a day. That gives me an extra hour of time, blah, blah, blah. That is not how you scale and make money in a business, guys. You don't make money by systematizing and scaling your business. You make money by charging the correct amount first. Then you add on to that by systematizing and scaling. But a lot of you don't charge enough. And so here's what happens. You have two employees. It's you and two employees, one good carpenter and one apprentice. You're doing, let's say, bathroom remodels or kitchens or whatever. So you're out in the field, five to six hours a day. You got your main guy who can run the job when you're not there. And you got a helper who just does whatever he can. And you're like, man, I'm not making enough money. I'm just not making enough money. I need to make more money. So what do you believe you need to do? You believe you need to hire more people. And so you hire another person. another carpenter, and you think that's going to make it better because now you can charge, you're making money off that person, which is true. But because you're not charging enough, you're making a very minuscule amount of extra profit. And so you believe I, you just, you add more people to make more money and all you're doing is scaling a turd. And when you scale a turd, it's still a turd, except it's a bigger turd that you have to deal with. So not only are you scaling, the problems that you have, but you're scaling, you're actually creating more problems. So you have to first get your profits in place because you may not even need to hire another person if you got the correct profits. If you can make an extra $75,000, $150,000 a year without doing an extra job, then all of a sudden it doesn't matter as much. I got to hire one more person. Because I can make the profits I want with this three-man team. So you have to get your profits right first. And then once you get your profits, then you can systematize and scale. But people want to be efficient. I need systems in place so I can be more efficient, so I can make more money. That's the last step, guys. Efficiency is a bottom of the funnel activity. You make your money at the top of the funnel when you sell the job. You're going to make the most money at the top. You make the least money at the bottom through efficiencies. And if you... Let's say you do a job, you're super efficient. And through your efficiencies, you might save $1,000. Because of your efficiencies, you saved $1,000 in productivity. That's great. You made an extra $1,000. But all I have to do... Let's say I'm not efficient. My business is not as efficient as yours is. So I'm not going to make that extra $1,000 through efficiencies. But you sell a job at $20,000 and you save $1,000 through efficiency. Congratulations. You made an extra $1,000. But all I have to do is sell that exact same job for $25,000, not be efficient. Because I simply charged $5,000 extra and you made an extra $1,000, I still made $4,000 more than you. And I'm not efficient. But once I become efficient, now I'm making $6,000. Or $5,000 more than you, but $6,000 total. Because I made an extra $5,000 sale, now I save $1,000 to efficiency. That's like adding $1,000, that's $6,000. If I become efficient, I make $5,000 more than you doing the exact same thing. And then total, I make an extra, I make $6,000 through efficiencies. That's why efficiencies are after you get your pricing right first. That's why these four steps are in this order because you have to do them in this order. You systematize and then you scale. So what is systematize and scale? Systems are what remove you from the day to day. It's not just a nice thing to dream about. We help you put the right systems in place so that you can create a business that runs without you. Once you do this, you will have the freedom to scale your business like you've always hoped and wished for. Scaling is the very last thing that gets done. You cannot scale until your systems are in place. You have to fix your mindset. You have to price the job correctly. You have to learn how to do marketing and sales correctly. You have to create your systems and then scale. That's the order. That is the profit blueprint. If you do those things in that order, you will have a successful business. But your systems have to be put in place before you can scale. Like I said earlier, if you don't have systems in place and then you try to scale, you're just scaling a big turd and you're actually creating more problems for you. That's why you guys who run around like a chicken with your head cut off, putting out fires all day long, it's because you scaled before you systematized. That's what's happening. If you're running around crazy, you scaled before systemizing. You have to systemize and then scale. It doesn't mean you have to go fire everybody and start over. But you need to start putting systems in place immediately. Immediately. The problem with systems, let me tell you this, why people get so hung up on systems. I talk to contractors all the time as well. What do you need help with? I need systems. Systems. They believe systems are what's going to save everything in their business. And yes, systems will make everything easier. But it's not the savior of your business. Because systems have to be created in order to remove the dumb stuff. See, a lot of people believe that I'm going to put a system in place so that all I have to do is hire a carpenter or a lead guy, whatever it is, a lead painter, whatever you do. Let me take a step back for a second. Let me hit this from a different angle. A lot of us believe the way you grow your business is you hire a skilled person. a lead guy, a foreman, project manager. And then that person intuitively, without any input from you, knows how to do the job correctly. And that is complete fallacy. You hire someone who's skilled because they have skills, but they don't know how to do things the way you want them to be done. They may not have been trained the way exactly that you were trained. So this idea that you hire a key person, that person comes into your business, takes over all that responsibility, and now you are completely advocated of that responsibility. Meaning you no longer have to worry about it because John over here is going to take it over. That is complete fallacy and that's not how it works. You have to create a system that you plug John into. And the system lets John know what to do. And then you manage the system and you manage John. John manages the system. You manage from a top down. So when your lead guy is calling, hey, Abbas, what should we do on this? You don't have a system in place. You're relying on their skill set to know what to do. And that is not how it works, guys. It's not how it works. Is it possible to hire someone that has all the knowledge and knows how to do everything? Yes, it is possible. Those are called unicorns. And you're going to pay a freaking crap ton of money to get those people because they will know their worth. And it's okay to pay for good people. But this idea that you're going to hire someone to come in and just take over is ridiculous. You're kidding yourself. You put the system in place that manages what needs to happen. And then they take over. And systems are not designed to teach people how to do things. Systems are designed to keep people from doing dumb things. Let me say that again. Systems are not designed to teach people how to do things. Meaning like, this is how you install drywall. This is how you lay tile. That's not what systems are designed to do. Systems are designed to keep people from doing dumb stuff or forgetting things. You can have a checklist that says, before we hang drywall, we need to check and make sure that is the plumbing done? Is all the plumbing fittings been glued? Do all the mechanicals have strike plates on the two by fours? Is the electrical finished? All of these things in place, before we hang drywall, you have a checklist of these are the things that we need to check and make sure are done. That is a system that prevents things from being missed. before a major part of the project is done. Once you hang drywall and something's wrong, it sucks because you got to cut it out and it's a big deal. So you have a system of checklists. This is what we check. That checklist does not teach them how to do it. It's just making sure that dumb things are not missed. And that's how you create systems. And lastly, with systems, and I want to take a quick time out here to talk about something that's part of it. It's like a system and I want to talk about this. I have created what's called the Profit Journal. I made this for myself because I've used many, many different types of journals to really try to get better for myself. Some people think it's all foo-foo and silly stuff, wah-wah stuff. Oh, you can write down your thoughts in journal. No. Guys, all the most successful people in the world journal. They take notes. They have a way to guide their day and their thoughts. And so what I did was create what I call the profit journal. This is not a scheduling book. It's not a calendar. You don't put in there what you're doing each day. All you're doing is you're writing down things that are going to keep you focused in your business so that you make the most profit. And there are things in here like three things I'm grateful for. Having the right mindset. Remember, we got to master our mind. And if you write down three things every day that you're grateful for, it helps to block out all of that negative stuff. Because remember, garbage in equals garbage out. So I put three things I'm grateful for. I have a section for five new ideas. We need to increase and promote creativity. So if you start writing five new ideas every day, it will start to energize you. It will start to open up the creative process in your brain. implement new things in your business. So there's a section for 5 new ideas. You write down your sales goal for the month so you can track your goals and profits. 3 action steps towards goals. 3 I am statements. These are statements that are affirmations of like, I am a sales master, whatever. These are just to help boost your confidence. And then at the end of the day, we have our biggest learning lesson today, looking for a solution to X problem. How did our day go? And some other stuff. So if you guys want to have access to my profit journal, I'll have a link in the show notes. You can go and download it from a website and they'll ship it right to you. And just like what I want, the reason why I wanted to bring this up now is because in any system, when you create a system... you're not going to create the perfect system from start to finish. You create a rough draft of the system. You implement it. You get feedback from your team, from everyone else. You make necessary changes. You make the improvements. You try the system out again. You make a few more tweaks. You imply that. You do it again. And eventually, over a period of time, you will have the perfect system. But it never, ever, ever happens from day one. So we procrastinate on creating systems because we want them to be perfect from the start. This profit journal is not perfect. I had a couple revisions before I made it public, and there's already things that I want to change. But I'm going to put this out there because I want feedback from you guys. This is a first rough draft. This is what it is. It's good enough to put it into the marketplace and then get feedback from it. So when you're creating systems for your business, Get feedback as much as you can first. Put it into play. Get more feedback. Make adjustments. That's how you implement systems, guys. And once you do that, you just start knocking out systems. You have a problem in your business, create a system to solve it. You solve that problem, find a new problem, create a system, solve that problem, create a new problem, create a system, so on and so on and so on. Eventually, you'll have a whole SOP. a whole network of systems because one big system is comprised of many, many, many, many little systems. So you create one little mini system and eventually you'll have 100 mini systems that make up one big system. Whenever you do this, then you'll be able to scale with ease because now it's just a matter of hiring people and buying equipment. Once you have all that in place, now all you got to do is get the phone to ring more. hire people, buy product, capital, equipment stuff. You need to put another vehicle out on the truck, on the road. You got to hire two people for that vehicle. So you have a system already in place. All you got to do now is hire two people, buy the vehicle and equipment. Once they get going, you get more leads coming in. You hire two more people, you buy another vehicle. Whatever that looks like for you, that's how you scale. But you don't scale until everything else is done. So we went long on this podcast. I actually didn't think it was going to take this long, but I really wanted to deep dive into this. If you guys follow these four steps in that order, I promise you, you will have a profitable business. If you do them out of order, you may or may not have some success, but it's not going to be as concrete as if you do those in order. And if you want help with this, guys, please reach out to me. This profit blueprint is responsible. for helping lots of contractors generate hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional profit each year in their businesses. One of the highest level of success was an additional $900,000 of profit in one year. He added almost $900,000 of additional profit, not revenue, profit in one year. And lots of other guys have done hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional profit each year. if you do it correctly. And if you want to have that level of success in your business, please reach out to me and I'll be more than happy to share with you what that looks like, what the investment is, and how I can help you. Guys, I appreciate you tuning in today with me and listening. Hopefully, you will implement these four steps in your business. If you want more information, reach out to me. Find me on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Just search for the Hammer and Grind Podcast. I'll have links to the show notes for those as well. as well as my new profit blueprint. Go pick it up and let me know what you think. Try it out for a couple of weeks. Give me some feedback and then I can make some adjustments and get the second rough draft out there. All right. Thanks, guys. I appreciate you so much and for listening. And remember, until next time, guys, remember, profit is not a dirty word.
