Contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Brad here. Today, I'm going to talk about assigning tasks, basically creating an environment for your team that gives them the opportunity to excel. Because here's the reality of what most of us do. This is what I did myself before I learned how to do this in a much better way, which we'll talk about. But most of us are task masters. Okay. And we're going to talk about why that's bad. And we're going to talk about steps you can do to eliminate yourself from being a task master. Real quick, I want to ask if you're watching this video, I got a different hat on today. It's a light gray instead of black. Let me know your thoughts. Do you like it? Don't like it? Go to the comments. Let me know. This was actually a mistake from the hat, you know, embroidery or the place that did the hats for me. They just put the wrong color in. I said, let's rock it and see what happens. I want to get your feedback. So if you're watching the video, go let me know in the comments what you think about this color hat versus the black hat. So now what I did in my business. Early on, and really for many years, is I became a task master. Now, what does that mean, actually? It means that we assign tasks to our employees to go do, and then once they're done with that task, they come back to us and say, okay, boss, what's next? So let me give you an example. You're doing a, let's say you're doing a kitchen remodel, and one of the tasks that you give the guys is, Uh, go, go demo all the old cabinets out, right? That's the task. Hey, day one, we're starting, uh, Johnny, he's the apprentice. I say, Johnny, go in and start demoing out the cabinets and throw them in the trailer. Okay, boss, you got it. He goes and he starts demoing out all of the cabinets and, you know, six, seven hours later or however long it takes, he comes back to you and he says, Hey boss, all the cabinets are done. And you go, okay, did you put them all in the trailer? And they go, yes. And you go, okay. And you go in and you check because you don't believe them. And you go in the room and you check. Sure enough, it's all done. Awesome. Now, here's the next task I want you to do. I want you to remove all of the whatever, electrical cover plates, right? Because we're going to replace them. All right, you got it, boss. And he goes and does that. It takes him like 15 minutes. He comes back. And now you're like, you don't really know what else to have him to do. And you're looking around. It's like, okay, go help. Go help Tim with the. Whatever, you know, whatever he's doing. And so like you just become a task master. There's no plan in place. It's just you're going to assign tasks to everyone. And then once that task is completed, you assign them another task, right? That is a task master. And that is exactly how most of you listening to this run your business. And that is the one reason why you'll never be able to get off the tools right there. Because they are relying 100% on you to tell them what to do. And so what do we think is the solution to that? We think the solution is we hire a, quote, foreman or lead carpenter or lead guy or project manager or whatever position you want to call it. It doesn't matter. We think. This person is going to step into the business and operate with the exact same mindset and knowledge that we have in our brain that we've never written down. And they're just going to instinctively know how to do the thing. We interview them and we say, hey, Sam, it looks like you've had 10 years experience doing kitchen remodels. Yes. And Sam says, yeah, I've been doing it for 10 years. I've done all kinds of stuff. Everything you can think of, throw it at me. We can get it done, boss. No problem. You're like, cool. You're hired. Sam is an expert. He's done all of this. So now he can just replace me. I go and I work on the business and I all overnight become a millionaire because everything is fixed now. And you throw Sam to the wolves and Sam walks in the door and he steps into a complete nightmare. Because the place Sam came from actually had processes in place that everybody knew their job. And you're expecting Sam to come in and basically fix everything for you, right? He's going to be the savior of your business. And all you do is you set Sam up for failure. Because day one, at the end of the day, you go, hey, Sam, I'm going to throw you to the wolves. Just get in there and get at it. We're doing this kitchen remodel. We're going to demo today and get started. Here's the blueprint of what we're doing. You say, Brad, I gave him a blueprint of what all needed to be done. What else do I got to give him? Right. And you give him the blueprint. And Sam's like, oh, okay. Yeah, we'll get after it, boss. At the end of the day, Sam comes to you and says, I quit. I quit. You're like, what? It's the only day one. He's like, dude, nobody knows what they're doing. It's a complete mess. You got two people that work for you and none of them know how to do their job. And you're like, yeah, that's your responsibility. Your responsibility is to tell them what to do every day. Guys, that is not how business works ever. That may work with an apprentice who's never done anything before. But if you have employees, they should know how to do their job and all the tasks associated with it. So what you've done is effectively create a task master and a task rabbit relationship. You're assigning the task, they're doing the task, and it repeats. And it 100% depends on you to be the delegator of all tasks. You're the master of the task, right? That is not how you run. a construction business. It's no different than if you hire an electrician to come in and do the electrical. He's supposed to know how to do all of the electrical up to code and best practices. And all you're doing is providing him maybe with a floor plan or you're just going with him in person and saying, hey, we're going to put a receptacle here, receptacle here, receptacle here. This is the garbage disposal location. This is the dishwasher location. This is the light switch location. We're putting can lights here, here, and here, right? And then you turn the electrician loose, you know, quote the subcontractor, and he's going to know how to do his job. That's where you want to be with your employees if you're running an employee model. But you can't do that if you have a task master slash task rabbit relationship, a hierarchy. So one of the things you need to do, is actually give them an outcome of what you expect, your team. Say, this is the outcome of what I expect to be when the job's done. And then you give ownership of that outcome to individuals in your team. So let's say you have three guys working for you. Right now, you're the foreman. You got two carpenters, one apprentice, and you're doing kitchen remodels. One carpenter has like four or five years experience. Another one's got a couple years experience. And then you have an apprentice who's just started, right? The two carpenters should know what their job description is. They should know how to do their job already. And if they don't know, then you have to teach them how to do that part. But you can do it by assigning specific outcomes. So maybe your most senior carpenter, he is responsible. for setting the cabinets, doing all the trim work, making sure all the joints are tight and all that stuff. That's his responsibility. And maybe the junior carpenter, his responsibility is, you know, managing the demolition and all of the aspects of that, managing the subs or whatever. Like it's whatever you want it to be. I don't care. But there's responsibilities assigned to that. And there's also responsibilities within the business on a day to day. So maybe your lead carpenter's responsibility is to make sure that the other two guys turn in their time sheets or fill out the daily work log every single day. That's your senior carpenter's responsibility. Maybe your apprentice's responsibility is to make sure the van or trailer or truck is organized at the end of each day. That's one of his responsibilities. And by the way, they can have more than one responsibility. It's just you're assigning responsibilities within the specific job that you're doing. And as a side note here, this is where as owners, when you're off the tools, you screw stuff up. So if you're off the tools, you have a lead guy, maybe you have two employees and you show up whenever you're not busy, you show up to help out on the job. And so when you walk in the door, you just take over and start doing stuff. And your lead guy who has been running the job up until the point you walk in the door says, oh, the boss is here. I'm going to sidestep out of the way and now let him take over. And you come in in the middle of the project and start barking orders, start tasking your task rabbits with things and mess up the entire ecosystem of what's going on. Right. And then you work for two hours and you're like, look at me. I'm still showing the guys I know what to do. Because I can come in and I can do their job and half the time, look how awesome I am. I'm going to show up and, you know, show them how to do it. The boss still has it. And then you come in like a tornado, freaking destroy everything and then leave. And your lead guy's like, man, I wish he just would stay off the job site. I wish he would just not come here and let me do my job. Right? Because people who want to have responsibility, they actually want. their responsibility, but you're holding on so freaking tight to that responsibility, you won't give it to them. And you have this battle going on between you and your good work, your good workers, because you don't want to give up responsibility. You have to give them, you have to assign them the ownership of the outcome that you're wanting and that specific responsibility. Now, let me give you an example outside of construction where this works and then i'll share with you how i did it and how i applied this to my business in the military specifically in the air wing the uh it's there's a unique dynamic that you don't find really anywhere else in the military and that is with like a a crew-sized helicopter like a ch-53 or a 46 ch-46 any of those that are like crew size where you have it's not just like a cobra or apache or anything like that you have two pilots and you have a crew chief And you may have more enlisted people like door gunners or whatever assigned as well. But the crew chief is an enlisted. He's a junior Marine. He's not an officer, junior to an officer. Your pilots are officers. Your crew chief is an enlisted Marine. So in the hierarchy of ranking, your officers outrank enlisted, right? But a crew chief is actually responsible for the aircraft. So using like a CH-53, a sea stallion, the crew chief is responsible for the aircraft and everybody in the aircraft, whether that's cargo, whether that's actual troops, whatever. The crew chief is responsible for everything that happens in that aircraft. The pilots are just flying the aircraft and the pilots are officers. So in this scenario, if there was a situation where the pilot wanted to do something, you know, with the aircraft or whatever. And the crew chief, the crew chief did not like that or did not agree with it or did not want to do that. The crew chief can out rank the officer basically and say like, no, sir, we're not doing that. You know, we're not going to fly over there. We're not going to lift this thing. We're not going to do this, blah, blah, blah. And the crew chief is responsible for the aircraft. Hey, just a quick timeout from the show. In the next 30 seconds, I'm going to tell you exactly how you can transform your contracting business. 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And then as you go down the seniority, you know, they have lower and lower and lower responsibilities. One of my clients who does like buildings, agricultural buildings, post-frame buildings, stuff like that, he has a lot of his junior guys are responsible for the radios. Now the radios are pretty important part of their day to day because they're working on large. Sometimes they're working on large areas outside where you may have guys spread out over a couple hundred yards. And so they use radios to communicate. Well, every single day your radios need to be charged. And so he assigned the ownership of the responsibility of making sure the radios are collected at the end of each day and they're charged so that the next day they're ready to go. That's a very important responsibility. If he doesn't do that and the next day they don't have radios, it makes everything difficult, right? But the only way you can make that work is to give them that responsibility 100% and even let them fail. Because let's say you give them the responsibility. A week later, he's hurried to get out of there and he forgets to collect the radios and doesn't charge them. You know, you come in on Monday and all of a sudden the radios are dead. Where is the egg on the face? Where is the disappointment? He's going to be disappointed because he didn't do his job. And everybody else is going to be disappointed in him because he didn't do his job. And that is accountability built into responsibility. You don't even have to scorn him. You don't even have to tell him. You could just say, John, what happened? You know, you know, it's your responsibility to make sure the radios are charged. And John's going to say, boss, I'm so sorry. It won't happen again. I left early on Friday. I was trying to get out of here because I had a hot date and blah, blah, blah. And I'll make sure it never happens again. And it's like, okay, that's cool. We learned a lesson here. You can see how it affected our work today. Please don't let it happen again. If it does, we'll have to talk about it and maybe put some more training in place or whatever it is. We'll have to write you up or whatever. And your guy that's responsible for the radios now feels bad for letting the team down. That's built-in responsibility and accountability, right? So you do that with everything in your business. Now, obviously, you don't give the guy who's brand new on the job the responsibility of operating heavy equipment when he's never done it before, right? You got to use a little bit of common sense here. But that doesn't mean that he can't have the responsibility of, say, making sure the equipment is locked up at the end of the day. Hey, your responsibility, Steve, at the end of each day, this is your responsibility. You go around every piece of equipment. You take the keys out of the ignition. You make sure the doors are locked and you hang the keys on the key box in the trailer and then lock the trailer at the end of each day. That is your responsibility. Right. You can assign that responsibility to the low man because it's not a hard task to do, but it's an important task. And then you do the same thing. So what I did in my business, going back to the helicopter squadron with the with the crew chief and all that is I would run two man teams. I would have a lead guy and a helper and they would drive a van. And the helper was responsible for all of the tools. And the van, the lead guy does not need to be worrying about putting the jigsaw back in the correct box in the correct spot in the van. That is a low level task that does not require the lead guy to be doing. The lead guy needs to be running the job. He needs to be making sure that everybody else is doing their work, right? Making sure they're doing their responsibilities. And so at the end of each day, When it's time to clean up, the lead guy would often like be finishing the work and the helper or the assistant or apprentice, whatever you want to call him, he starts taking stuff out to the van and getting it ready at the end of the day to stop. Or he's organizing the tools in the job site so that's out of the way. He's initiating the cleanup stuff. And then at the end, when everybody's done. the lead guy and he's done with all his tools and everything, then, you know, he may take the tools out like to the side of the road or to the side of the van. He may set them in the back, whatever, but all the lead guy is doing is taking the stuff out there. And the helper's responsibility is to make sure everything's put up where it goes. Everything is organized how it is so that the next time it's in the right spot and that's his responsibility. I don't need my lead guy in the van. You know, putting the jigsaw in the box and put it in the right location because that's a low level task and the helper can do all that. So the lead guy is simply driving the vehicle. He has no responsibility of the vehicle in terms of organizing and cleaning it. And whenever we would do every Monday and we have a staff meeting, we would go through the vans. We would clean them out, take all the trash out. restock all of the things that we would use on a daily basis. And the helper, because he's intimately familiar with the van, would be the one restocking, recleaning, or not recleaning, but cleaning the van, getting it ready for the week ahead, while the lead guy and all the lead guys are asked for having a meeting to talk about the week's head work, right? I don't need the lead guy and they're cleaning the van. Now that doesn't mean that he's... You know, he doesn't have to clean the van. A lot of times they would help out. They get done with the meeting. The lead guy goes over and says, hey, what do you need? What's left? You know, I'll help you clean, blah, blah, blah. It's still a team effort. But the helper is in charge of everything in that van. And he should intimately know, like, hey, lead guy, we're running low on screws. When we get back to the shop today, I'll make sure that we fill them up. But we're running low, right? That's his responsibility. To make sure that van is operating at this maximum efficiency. So that task is assigned to him. The responsibility of making sure the vehicle is done right and always maintained is the junior person's responsibility. And you can do this with all of the tasks in your business and what you're doing. Now, this ties in, and I wasn't really planning on talking about this, but this ties into why it's so critical to niche down to what you're doing. If you haven't listened to the podcast two episodes ago with Brian Gottlieb, He exited his three businesses for $100 million. And one of his businesses that he did, all they did was like one day showers, one day shower and baths. It got so easy that they could train an 18-year-old kid in four weeks how to completely install the system on his own. It was a four-week training time from knowing nothing to knowing how to do the work, to being proficient. When you do kitchens and bathrooms and roofing and decks and fences and landscaping and concrete and electrical and insulation and drywall and painting and you do all of these things, each one of those things has a time period of learning required. And so when you hire a kid who's 18,20 years old and you expect him to come in and know how to do all this crap. in like three weeks, you've lost your mind. You've lost your ever living mind. And one of the things that plagued my business, because we did so many different things, and it will plague you too, is that you don't do the same thing every day. So like one of the things that we would do is build decks. But I would only do maybe three to six decks a year. I wasn't doing a lot of them. And so, you know, at the end of the summer, when it starts getting cold, we're not doing decks. And so from say October to, you know, maybe April, we're not building decks. And all of that time of not doing that task, and then come April, May, or June, and you're going to go build your first deck, you've almost forgot everything because you're not doing it every day. When you niche down and you're only doing one thing, it's very easy to assign responsibility to people. Because when you walk in, your apprentice knows the first thing we do every time. is X, Y, and Z. Your lead carpenter knows the first thing we do is, you know, ABC, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's how you become a well-oiled machine. That's how you can turn production and increase productivity to be phenomenal, to where you're making really, really good money. But when you're doing a kitchen remodel today, and then a bathroom remodel after that, And then you're doing a roof after that. And then you're building a deck after that. That's four or five jobs in a row where you're not doing the exact same thing. It's very, very hard to build that cohesion, that synchronicity. It's a good word. Synchronicity in your team to know what the next step is. You can't expect the helper to know the next step when he's never actually done it before. And so every single job that you do, you're spending 5,10,15,20% of your time training the new guy on how to do that task. And then in six months, he quits because it's just so much information. He always feels like he's failing on a daily basis because he can never get it right because you're only giving him one at bat. Imagine being a professional baseball player where you only get one at bat. every game. And if you fail, you let the team down, right? That's what you're doing when you're doing multiple different things. You're setting yourself up for failure because it's too much for a new person to remember. And you don't realize that you've been doing it for 10 years. You've had enough at-bats to be somewhat good at it. If you only got one at-bat every game, right, over the course of one year, maybe you only did that task 20 times. But if you've been doing it for 10 years, you've now had 200 at bats. You've had experience. And so for you, you forget what it's like to be a beginner, right? Because you have the curse of knowledge now, which means that because it's so ingrained in your brain that you do it every day, you just automatically assume that other people will be able to pick it up as quickly as you have. The reality of it is you've just had 100 times more at bats than they have. And you're not giving them enough at bats at the one thing. This is why it's so critical to niche down and do one task. It's so, so, so, so much easier to train your team. It's so much easier to find good help. Every single day I hear from you guys and say, you can't find good help. And I look at what they do and they freaking do everything under the sun. It's like, no wonder you can't find good help. You're expecting a clone of you. You're expecting a mini me of you and you've had 10 years experience. It's unrealistic. It's completely unrealistic of you. So stop being a task master and start assigning responsibilities to your team. And you can have conversations with them. You can ask them, hey, what do you feel comfortable with? You know, talk to your lead guy if you have one. Hey, who on the team would be good at this? Here's the 15 tasks that we need to do on a regular job. Every time we do a kitchen remodel, these are 15 things that we need to do or whatever it is for you. We need to assign all 15 of these responsibilities to somebody. And if you only have one employee, you may take seven and he takes six. You may take 10 and he takes five. If you have five employees, maybe each one has one and a half or whatever. But you have to identify that and then assign those responsibilities. But I'm telling you guys, if you keep trying to freaking do everything under the moon, it's going to be 100 times harder for you to grow a business. I promise you. Go listen to that podcast with Brian if you haven't done it yet. Phenomenal podcast. Brian has so much gold in there in how he grew his business and exited $100 million. That's not an easy task to do. And he talks about in there how at one time he had people lined up outside his office door. waiting for him to solve the problem. And so finally he said, this isn't right. I got to fix it. And he changed it. Right? So start assigning responsibility. Stop being a task master. Guys, thanks for hanging out with me. I appreciate it. Let me know what you think about my hat. And then also go and let me know what you think about this podcast. Go leave reviews for me on your favorite podcast platform, whatever you're listening to right now. Just take 30 seconds. If you've gotten any set of value, any bit of value from anything I've ever talked about, do me this one favor and go leave a review on your platform. I would appreciate it. And if you want more information from me, you can go check me out on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook. Just search for the Hammer and Grind Podcast and you'll find me there. And remember, guys, until next time, profit is not a dirty word.
