Contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Welcome back to the Hammer and Grind podcast. On this episode, we're going to be talking about rules of engagement. What happens if, right? What happens if? What happens if... X happens in your business. What happens if this situation now rules of engagement, that's actually a military term I'm using here in place of, you know, basically an SOP or a handbook, which we'll get into that here in a second. But in the military, we have what's called rules of engagement. If you go before you go out on a mission, they they'll do a brief and they'll say, here's the rules of engagement. Right. You're allowed to engage if this happens. If you see this, you can do this level of engagement, blah, blah, blah. You don't just go into a city and just drop bombs on everything and kill everyone. Right. There's certain rules of engagement. Do you have eyes on? Do you have visual confirmation? Do you know the enemy is in that building? Are there civilians around? Like there's always rules of engagement that you have to follow in war, like in an actual war. And a lot of those are or even governed by the Geneva Conventions that the U.S. agrees to. And sometimes it's not even fair because the enemy doesn't even apply, use or abide by the rules of the Geneva Convention. There's rules on how you treat prisoners. There's rules on how you can engage. It sounds kind of funny to have rules in war, but the reality of it is we try to always be the better person in that situation. This also applies to your business. What rules? do you have in your business that you apply, that your employees are expected to abide by, that you're expected to abide by, and even your clients are expected to abide by, right? So there's really different areas of business that we can talk about here. We can talk about a handbook, like an employee handbook, which outlines all of this. We can talk about it from a subcontractor agreement. What does your subcontractor agreement say about, you know, even as things as little as like, how do you pay? How do you pay your sub? Do you pay them as soon as the job's done? The day of, do they expect you to be there waiting for them to be done on Friday and you hand them cash? Do you pay them net 15, net 30, net 60, net 90? Do you pay them on a draw schedule? Like, how is that set up? Right. These are all rules of engagement. This is how we're going to conduct ourselves on a daily basis. And I'm going to share with you some lessons I learned about rules of engagement. Lessons I learned about not having an employee handbook and how that cost me money and stuff like that. So let's dive into it. I created in my business because in my in my construction business, we did both remodeling and handyman work. And within the handyman side, basically I called it service work, right? It doesn't matter if it's like cleaning gutters, hanging a picture, installing a door, you know, repairing siding, whatever. I just call it service work. And so I created a document called the perfect service call. And what is that for? What does that mean? It's basically step by step. It's like one through, I think it was like maybe 28 steps. Seems like a lot, but not really. And it was everything from the expectation of what you should do on a service call. And if you did all of these items, then in fact, you just performed the perfect service call. And it had things on there like when you should show up, like you should show up 10 minutes early, that you should call or text that you're on the way, where to park. And some of you may think, well, that's stupid. Like, it's common sense, Brad. It's common sense, Brad. Everybody knows you just park wherever. Right? No, it's not. It's not common sense. This goes down to what I've said hundreds of times before. There's no such thing as common sense. It doesn't exist. There's common experiences. That's it. So if you know, like if you have an older vehicle that leaks oil, you shouldn't be parking it on the customer's driveway. You just shouldn't because you know it's going to leak oil. Right? If you have a vehicle that doesn't leak oil and it's perfectly fine and you know that it's more efficient to work out of the vehicle that's parked in the driveway, backed up to the garage door, especially if you have tons of material to unload, like you're going to do that. Why would I want to park, you know, halfway down the block and have to carry or transport a ton of materials to the job site? That would be stupid. But there's areas you're not even considered. What about if the customer has to leave? What if the customer's car is parked in the garage, I park in the driveway, and then 30 minutes after I get there, the customer has to leave? Well, then what do I have to do? I have to go and move the vehicle, right? I have to go and change stuff. So what does that mean? Well, you need to have rules for this. And this may seem so minor that it's like you never even crossed your mind. But I'm telling you, when you have everything outlined and documented and the expectation is set, the rules of engagement. or disgust, there's no room for air. It takes the human element out of it. Right? So my guys, like I have guys that would always want to park in the street. And I'm like, dude, why are you parking in the street? Park in the driveway. You know, you're going to have to go to the van in the beginning or, you know, the truck or whatever. You're going to have to unload all the tools when you get to the job site. That's, you know, that could be 10 trips. Let's just say it's 10 trips to unload the tools and materials. Let's say you're doing a job around back. You're doing a deck install or whatever. So you get there and you park in the street. And from the street to the front of the house is, let's say,80 feet. And then around the back of the house is another 100 feet. So it's 180 feet to the back of the house where you're going to work. Now, I don't know about you, but if I have to make 10 trips. I don't want to have to make an extra 160 feet because 80 feet times two there and back is an extra 160 feet. Well, if I have to make 10 trips times 160, right, that ends up being a lot. You can do the math. It's a lot. It's over 1,000 feet, extra feet that you're taking. So if I can back my vehicle into the driveway and I can reduce that 80 extra feet of steps. which is 160, now I'm saving over 1,000 feet of steps that I have to take. How does that translate into time? How does it translate into energy? Well, if I have to take 1,000 less steps, that saves my energy for the job that I'm doing. And that's just in the morning. What about in the evening when you're at the end of the day when you have to put everything up? And now you have to make five trips back. Just by parking in the driveway, you could potentially eliminate. 1,500 extra steps in one day, right? And if you're doing that every day, if you have to unload and load up every day over the course of a week, right? Now it could potentially be 10,000 steps in one week by simply the difference of parking in the driveway versus parking in the road. Outlining what that looks like. We even have asked the customer, is it okay if we park in the driveway? Is it okay if we park here? Is it okay if we do this? Right. I'm outlining this, what you can do. I outline how to engage with the customer. I outline how to finish up the job. I'll give you a tip right here right now that will change the way you do a lot of stuff. It sounds very simple. But the one thing that I found, especially working inside homes, outside is not as bad, but inside is definitely worse, is leaving tools on the job site. I can't tell you how many times the guys would leave tools on the job site and we'd have to go back to the, you know, go back and another day, another trip, waste an hour, this and that inconvenience the customer. It's a pain in the butt. Or, you know, if it's way out, we'd have to wait two weeks until we were on that side of town and then make it just a pain in the butt. It's completely avoidable, but it's a pain in the butt. So here's what I learned. Here's what we do. I'm going to tell you what we all do. You're all going to shake your head in agreement. And then I'm going to tell you how to fix it. This is so simple. So what do we do at the end of the day? The job's done. We managed to somehow miraculously get done by 4.30 at the end of the day. And we're trying to load up tools, right? We make several trips to the truck. And we got one last trip left, right? What are we doing? We're holding three bags of tools. We got a level in our hand. We got something over our shoulder or tool belts over our shoulder. It's the last trip to the truck and we're done. We're going to take everything with us on this very last trip, shut the door, turn off the lights and leave. Right. We do that. And then what happens? You forget or find out later that you had your tape measure is sitting on top of the cabinet. Right. The battery charging. the battery that's charging is in the other room because there wasn't a receptacle in the room you're working in or available in. You're working in the bathroom. You had a battery charging in the master bedroom around the corner. You missed it. You forgot it. Now, I know you're listening to this, and every one of you are shaking your head. Yep. Yep, I've done that. So here's how you fix that. My rule, my rule for engagement that I train my employees to do is this. When you leave the house, when you take your tools to the trip, to your final trip to the vehicle, you have to go back inside or you have to go back to where you worked with no tools in your hand. Nothing. Your hands have to be completely empty. That's a requirement. And you have to go back in and you have to look at every area that you worked in every room that you went into and check from floor to ceiling. And make sure you didn't leave anything. And I go even as far as to tell them, and I don't have this in writing, but I tell them, take your pointer finger and literally point in the direction you're looking at every area. So if there's a cabinet, I'm pointing at the cabinet. I'm pointing on top of the cabinet. I'm opening the cabinet. If I knew that I opened it at one time, I'm opening the cabinet. I'm looking in the cabinet, right? I'm looking on the other side of the bed. I'm looking everywhere that I went. And when you do this, I can't tell you how many times myself and my team have found things that we forgot about. And it could even be like trash. Like sometimes you have trash you missed. It's not just tools. That one little simple trick has saved me tons of time. And it's outlined in my perfect service call. It's outlined in how we do business. That's the level. That's the level of intentionality that you guys should be working at. Now, some of you are saying, Brad, I get it. It makes sense. But, you know, I only have one helper. It's me and one helper. Like, I don't need to have all this stuff documented. And I can say that, yes, it's probably not as important right now. But what I can tell you is that when you hire a second person and a third person and a fourth person and you get busier and busier and busier, you will have less time. And therefore, you will have less motivation to do this. And when it's not documented and you hire that second person, now you have to train that person on everything you trained the first person. And then you hire a third person and you have to train them on every single thing that you've told the first two people. So now you've told three people the same information three times instead of just having an employee handbook or some type of rule of engagement. That says, this is how we operate. And I just hand it to him. And I say, read this. And I say, tomorrow, I'm going to test you on it. I'm going to ask you what these are. You should know this. Don't just say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll take a look at it. No, I'm going to ask you about it. Because I want you to reiterate to me what it means. Right? So having rules of engagement for how you conduct yourself. Now, the other thing that military does is that they always have contingency plans. Right. Because like Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face in the military. It's, you know, the, your plans never, um, survive the first, the first shot. You got a plan. Hey, we're going to go out here. We're going to patrol this neighborhood. We're going to check for IEDs, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you get out. And as soon as you get out of the truck, you get in, you get ambushed. Well, your plan or what you plan on doing is now no longer viable. So what's the contingency plan? What are we going to do? How are we going to react to that? So you can have contingency plans available in how you operate your business. The things that you need to address in these rules of engagement, and I'm going to go through a list of them here, not in any particular order, and I'm going to deep dive in some more than others. But one thing is, like, how do they deal with an irate customer? Like, seriously, what happens if your guys are out on a job by themselves? The customer comes home and just starts ripping their head off. You guys, you parked in my driveway and I got oil all over the driveway and now it's ruined. I just had it sealed last week. They told me to stay off of it and do this and now you've done that and blah, blah, blah. And they're pissed. How are your employees supposed to handle that? Have you even had the conversation? Right? Is it okay if they just punch the customer in the face? Is it okay if they yell back at them? Brad, it's just common sense. No, it's not. It's not common sense. What happens when you get the egotistical guy working for you who's brand new and he's got a chip on his shoulder and he had an abusive father and, you know, so he has a trigger there. He has some PTSD and a trigger and the husband comes home and starts yelling at him in the exact same way that his dad did. What do you think is going to happen if he hasn't learned how to control that anger? What do you think is going to happen? Right. Have you talked about it? Have you even had this conversation with your staff? I must say most of you, the answer is no. Right. Because you believe that hiring people and running the business is that people should just know how to operate in the world. They should just read my mind, do exactly everything I do and have the exact same emotional intelligence and how to learn how to deal with problems and how to deal with anger. And they should just know how to do all this stuff. you know, on their own. And I shouldn't have to teach them any of this stuff. If that's you, you haven't hired enough people. I mean, just you have, you don't have enough experience because you would learn that when you hire enough people, you're going to start getting all different types of personalities. And the more people that you hire, the better you'll get at pre-qualifying these people, identifying these red flags and understanding, you know, what type of personalities to hire. But when you're just starting out, you're not going to know. You're not going to know. I hired a guy one time, and this was my last year in business. The last year that I was open, I hired a lead guy. And he came from the cabinet, kind of like the cabinet-making world. Like the company that he worked for for a long time, they made like vanity cabinets and kitchen cabinets, custom cabinets. They would also install them. But I would consider him more of like a cabinet maker. than I would a carpenter, right? And so a lot of his time was spent in a warehouse by himself or with the owner building cabinets with very little interaction with people. And one of the very, very, very first jobs that I ever sent him out on with one of my, you know, one of my helpers, one of my apprentices who had been with me for over a year. So like he understood how we operated, but he didn't have the technical knowledge. as much knowledge as this new lead guy did. And on the very first job, I get a complaint from the customer. I had been in business for, you know,11 years, never had one complaint, but I never had more than one complaint about an employee in 11 years, over 2,500 jobs completed. And his first job that he ever went to, I got a complaint from the customer. And it was petty. I'm not going to lie. It was kind of petty. But it was justified by the customer. And so I had to write him up on the very first job that he went to. Now, part of it's my fault for not making sure that he had gone through all of the information that I had put out, the handbook and understanding all that. I take that hit, right? But it was an eye-opener. And that was after being in business for 11 years. and hiring dozens of people. You have to be able to document this stuff on how you're supposed to react. What happens if a customer gets irate? What are some de-escalation techniques to be able to remove yourself from that situation? What do they do if they get propositioned for side work? How is your employees going to handle that? Have you ever had a conversation with them that says, hey, you're not allowed to do side work? Or I don't care if you do work for your friends and family on the side. And sometimes I'll even let you borrow my tools. But if I find out you're doing work for our customers, it's immediate termination, right? Have you had that conversation? Have you talked to him about it? Have you defined that? And I don't mean just verbally. Have you defined it on paper? Because guess what, guys? If it ain't written down, it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. I don't care if you've told him 1,500 times. If it's not written down, it doesn't exist. In the court of law, it doesn't exist. It has to be written down somewhere. And I'll get into some experiences I had with that and how it cost me money by not having stuff written down. So how do they deal with being propositioned for side work? One of my subcontractors that I used, he was a full-time firefighter. He just worked on his days off for me as a subcontractor. He had his license insured a legit way. Sometimes I would just send him work and say, hey, go do this. He was a Mason. So he would go, a lot of times he would go do like brick mailboxes and stuff for me. But also sometimes he would just come and work for me, you know, on a job for like as a, as a laborer basically. But anyways, he told me after working for me for six or, you know, six, eight months or so, he's like, I get, I get asked all the time. I get asked all the time to do side work, like all the time. But I tell them. I'm not going to do that because it wouldn't be fair to Brad. It wouldn't be fair to the business. He keeps me busy. I don't want to ruin that relationship. So do your subcontractors and your employees know what the rules are for doing side work? They're getting asked. 100% your subcontractors and your employees are getting asked by clients to do side work. 100%. Even if it's completely unrelated to what you're doing. Maybe you do roofs. Maybe you're a roofer. And a client asked one of the guys on your crew or the sub crew, like, hey, I need a new mailbox installed. Is that something you think you could help me with? Right? Totally unrelated. It's not taking away money out of your pocket. Like, you know, to most people, it's not a big deal. But if they don't have, if you don't have a policy in place on how to handle that, what do you expect? Right? You can't get pissed off at somebody on the back end because they had no idea how you felt about it in the first place. And I see comments like this all the time on the free Facebook groups. If it's not on paper or discussed, it doesn't exist. I want you to take common sense and throw it out the window. 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. Imagine being part of a community of winners where you can find out exactly what they've done to be successful. That's exactly what you get when you join the Profit Club. But it's not just a community. You get lifetime access to all of my course-related material, including all future material that I add. But wait, there's more. Each week, you'll get access to three group coaching calls to talk about sales, marketing, and business problems and answer any questions that you may have. Still not convinced? How about personalized one-on-one coaching to help you overcome your limits? And here's my promise to you. I guarantee you will double your investment within 90 days, or I personally will work with you one-on-one until you do. So don't wait. Elevate your game with The Profit Club today. Now let's get back to the show. Just throw it away. Stop thinking like that. Common sense with assumptions. is what's going to get you screwed more often and harder than anything else in business. Stop assuming common sense. Stop assuming people know. Stop assuming that it's just everybody, you know, it's what you mean you have to breathe. I mean, I can't assume that you know how to breathe. I would think you do because you're still alive, but maybe you're too stupid to know that. Maybe you're too stupid to know how to breathe. Should I assume that you know how to breathe? Maybe I need to tell you how to breathe. Right? You're like, bro, that's stupid. That's stupid. Everybody knows how to breathe. Well, then why do they have box breathing techniques? Why is there breathing techniques to lower your heart rate when you're anxious or nervous? Most people don't know that. Most people don't know how like special forces and Navy SEALs practice box breathing where they count the four, inhale, count the four, exhale, count the four, inhale, count the four, exhale. Box breathing technique. Or the Wim Hof technique to get more air in your lungs. Like, this is what I mean by like, oh, your breathing is common sense. It happens naturally. Yes. But there's also advanced techniques on how to breathe, on how to deal with certain situations. Right? Did you teach people that? Did you teach the guy that has the anger problem how to count to 10? Right. That's common sense. Everybody tells that. No, it's not. No, it's not. It's not common sense. You have to tell people this. I know it sounds so stupid. Me even saying it sounds stupid. I know that. You have to build a business as far as systemize, as far as documentation, as far as the actual process. It has to be built to the lowest common denominator. You don't build a business based on, I hire people that know how to do their job and I don't have to tell them anything. That's not a business. That's a hope and a wish. And that's how most of you run their business. I just hire somebody that's got 10 years experience and automatically he should know how to deal with customers. And wrong. How are they going to deal with being propositioned about like sexual things like getting hit on? I had a young employee who was very attractive and he would get hit on all the time. But he knew that in a professional setting that wasn't right to do that. So he would not respond to those advances. Have you had that conversation? Seriously. Have you talked about any of that stuff? Right? What about language on the job site? What should you talk about? What kind of conversations can you have? Should you talk about politics? Should you talk about religion? Should you talk about sexual content? R-rated stuff? We had a policy. We don't talk about those things on the job site, even if the customer's not home, because they may be listening. And with technology today, it's probably almost guaranteed there's a ring doorbell. There's a camera inside. There's microphones. There's Google hub, right? There's Amazon. It's listening. They're recording you. You don't even know it. Ring doorbells can pick up conversations that you're having at the curbside. You're out at the truck. You're like, I'm not in the house. Nobody can hear me. And you're out at the truck talking about, you know, what you did to that pretty blonde last night in the back of the car. Guess what? They can hear it. Plain as day. I mean, some of that stuff is stupid and there's no place for it in the job site, in your business, right? I remember one time I was doing a job. It was a closet install, like a closet system. And my subcontractor I was talking about earlier, he was there day one setting stuff up and I came in the second day to help him. And when I got there, All the shoe boxes from the closet were like stacked up on the other side of the bed, which made sense. They had to get all of their stuff out of the closet. They had clothes on the bed, tons of shoe boxes. She had a lot of shoes. And then like halfway through the day after working there, I look over and realize that the boxes were kind of stacked as a pyramid. And then like in the middle, one of the shoe boxes was missing and there was a webcam sitting on the box pointed right at us. She was literally recording and watching us all day. I had no idea until like halfway through the day that that was going on. What if I didn't have any policies in place about it? And we walk in there and I start saying things like, you know, racial comments or sexual comments or anything that we're just two guys having a conversation on a job site. And they were able to hear that. What do you think would happen? There was a story I heard one time about guys working on the outside of a house. They were doing like siding replacement or gutters. And two guys are up on a ladder. It's like a two-story house. And they're up on a ladder. And they're on the outside of the house. Makes sense. You're outside. People can't hear you inside. And they're talking about, you know, one guy's talking about all this sexual stuff they did to this woman, you know, the night before, the weekend before, like graphic details. What the guy didn't realize or what both of them didn't realize was that they were outside the window of the 13-year-old daughter's room. who was in the room while they were working and could hear everything they were saying through the window. And then she went and told her dad, and the dad was irate, as he should be, right? As a father of two daughters, you don't want your daughters to hear grown men talking about all the stuff they do to women, especially if you're a young woman, you know, a young girl, a young daughter. That's stupid. It's such stupid and simply solvable things. That happened. But if you've never had the conversation, if you've never put it in writing, how do you, how can you get mad at your employees for that? That's your fault as the owner. Take ownership. You didn't have that conversation. Did you know, like, I'll go back to the military. One of the things that we were told when I was in is like, we don't, you don't smoke at night. Like smoking was a big deal. You don't smoke at night. Why is that? Because through NVG's night vision goggles. You can see someone smoking cigarette from up to a mile away if there's clear vision. If you're out in the field, through an NVG, you can see a guy smoking a cigarette from a mile away. You can literally see him when they're puffing, it gets brighter. And so what do you think, if you know that's the enemy that you need to take out, do you think you would have an advantage of knowing when it gets bright? Because what's that tell you? It tells you literally where their mouth is. So if you need to take a shot. All you have to do is shoot at the bright puff when it gets bright because you know it's where it's at. So you're not allowed to smoke at night unless you're in a secure area, right? Now, what's I got to do with construction? Well, it doesn't have direct correlation. But what I didn't realize until I got in the military is how sound travels, how light travels, how things work. At night, your sound travels way further. than it does during the day. At night, if you're on a lake and you're at a campsite next to a lake and you guys are sitting around having a conversation, you can hear that conversation across the lake, you know, maybe up to a half a mile away. You can literally hear what they're saying. And so that, by having that experience, it allowed me to understand that like, it's not just two guys on a ladder having a conversation out on the outside where they don't think anybody can hear them. It's sound travels and understanding that people can hear all this stuff. It's understanding that you're being watched and recorded. I always tell my guys, like, you should act on a regular basis as if your whole life's being recorded. And one day you're going to run for president of the United States. Because if you have your whole life on recording, I guarantee you when you go for a public figure, people are going to start digging and they're going to look and say, here, you know. Here's one time where you said something really racist. Here's one time when you said something really sexist. Here's one time where you did something really bad. Right? I know as I'm saying the same thing over and over and over again, but I'm just trying to hammer this home. Like if you don't talk about this, if it's not documented in a, in a employee handbook, you're setting yourselves up for failure. You really are. So what about some other areas? How are you going to handle smoking? Can they smoke in your job on a job site? Can they smoke? In the vehicle, company vehicle, can they smoke on the customer premise? Like where can they smoke? Can they smoke? Right? If you're doing new construction, probably not a big deal if they smoke. If you're doing remodeling, probably don't want your guys smoking inside their house. But can they smoke outside the driveway? I mean, my guys go to the road. They were not allowed to smoke on the premise of the customer's property. And they're not allowed to smoke in the company vehicles. So the only time they could ever smoke, they have to walk out to the road. and smoke a cigarette standing on the road like an idiot. That's my policy. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. Right? What about drugs and alcohol? What about that? I had a guy who wanted to work for me. He told me that he smoked pot in the evenings to help him sleep. And Indiana is not legal to smoke. And I said, well, dude, you can't smoke pot and work here. And then the day before he was supposed to start, he was like, Well, I won't smoke it during the day, just at night to help me go to sleep. I'm like, it doesn't matter if it's in your system, you get an accident, you're screwed. I'm screwed. Okay, I can't work for you then. I got to be able to smoke pot. It's like, okay, whatever. How are you going to handle that? What's your alcohol policy? What's your drug policy? What's your smoking policy? What about appearance? Does that matter? Does it matter if they have tattoos or not? Does it matter if they have face piercings or not? What does that matter? What if they have a big swastika tattooed on their forehead? Does that matter to your clients? You have to answer that question. But if you don't address it, how are you going to know? If you don't have rules of engagement, how are you going to know? How are you going to react to that? What about attendance? What happens if they don't show up? What happens if they're late? Right? What happens? You have to be able to address all this stuff. What about inclement weather? What's your policy for that? How do they know when to come in? It snows. You hire a new guy. He's been working with you for two months. You get into wintertime and it snows. Snows two inches overnight. You don't care about that. You always work in the snow. He doesn't show up for work. You're like, hey, dude, where are you at? What do you mean? It's snowing out. Yeah, but we still work in the snow. Well, the last place I worked, we didn't work. If it snowed more than an inch, we didn't work. Right? That's common experience. His experience is that if it snowed more than one inch, he doesn't come in. Your experience is if it snows, it doesn't matter how much it snows, you're going to work. But you never had that conversation. You never outlined it. And you probably never even thought about it until I just said it just now. These are all things that need to be addressed. What about non-solicitation? I used to work for a developer before I got started my own business. I worked for a developer and we did commercial, residential, light commercial and residential construction. And I remember one time he had an office that we were in and he was, he had a meeting with like five or six other people that were business owners, like really high end business owner, not high end, but like successful business owners. And I remember they were talking about, they were meeting for a MLM, network marketing. This is back in the early 2000s, right? Before pyramid schemes and network marketing got a really bad name. It was common for people to be in network marketing businesses. I was in an MLM business, multi-level marketing business. And so when I found out that's what they were doing, and because I was in an MLM business that was separate from what they were doing, I thought, oh, well, if they're interested in that, they would definitely be interested in what I have. And the company that I was working for had magazines that they could give out. So I took it upon myself to go and give every single one of those guys a magazine. Right about what I did didn't take into consideration like my boss was there to sell them on his so he can make money. And then when they were done, and they left, I went into the room. And all of the magazines that I had given them was still sitting on the table. None of them took it with them, because none of them give a crap about that. And I realized like, huh, probably shouldn't force my beliefs or my thoughts on other people to probably find out if they're interested in that first. But essentially, I was soliciting business while working for my boss and even competing with what he was trying to do. Never dawned on me, right? So soliciting business, how does that work? What if your employee sells, he's in an MLM, and he's trying to sell your clients while he's there working? They'll be polite. They may entertain it. They may, you know, they may say, no, sorry, I'm not interested. They may not even say anything to you or they may call you and complain. But how do you handle that? Right. Is there a solicitation policy? What about safety? I mean, what happens if safety, you know, somebody gets hurt? Well, then what? Then what do you do? You got to have a policy for that. One time I was at a job. I was actually working at my parents' house. And the guy down the street wanted some, wanted the estimates. So I go up there to give him an estimate. And my two guys were working at my parents' house. And then my lead guy was like, started blowing my phone up. Like three calls in a row. Well, I'm talking to the customer. I'm not going to answer. Trying to be polite. And he says, hey, finally, I called him back when I got done. He's like, hey, Eddie cut his finger on the table saw pretty bad. I had to take him to the ER. I'm just letting you know we're not there. I was like, okay, thanks for letting me know. Like they acted, they had, they just, they just knew what to do and they went and did it. But do you have a safety policy, right? On how to do that? What happens when someone gets hurt? Another simple thing. I am on the, at church where I go to church, I'm on the safety and security team. You guys have heard me talk about doing competitive pistol shooting, being in the military, pretty good at shooting, pretty good at all that stuff. So I volunteer on the safety and security team and it is an armed security team. You know, hopefully it never needs that, but soft target. You know, church is a soft target. But we go and train. When we go to the range and we have a brief beforehand, one of the things that we do is we have an actual response plan, emergency response plan. What happens if someone gets hurt? We have a vehicle ready to go. We designate and say who's going to be a driver. You know, I'll be the driver. The leader's like, I'll drive. If I'm incapacitated or if I'm the one that's hurt, who else is going to drive? Okay, you know, Chris, whatever, you're the second driver. Who's going to be the one that calls in 911 and tells them what we're doing? Somebody else volunteers. And it could be a hasty plan that you only come up with in 30 seconds, but then it's written down on the board. And so now everybody has a responsibility of what to do. You can have safety plans before you start a job. You can have plans of engagement, rules of engagement. What happens if, right? All this stuff needs to be figured out, guys. It all needs to be figured out. What about PTO time? How do you handle PTO? I learned this lesson with a, I learned two lessons about having an employee handbook. The first one is if you don't have an employee handbook that outlines how you handle this stuff and someone quits or gets fired and then they challenge you and they say, well, I didn't get, you know. I didn't quit. He fired me, even though the person quit. It's his word against yours. Right. And if you don't have like a history of like, well, I warned this guy five times about his behavior. Here's the, here's the counseling sheets, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't have a case. So I had a guy that quit. He quit. He rage quitted one day and I was upset. And I said, you know what? Let's just take three days. Let me think about this. We'll figure out what to do. Three days later, I decided it wasn't the best decision to continue letting him work because of that outbreak and stuff. And then he went and filed unemployment. Well, if you quit, you can't get unemployment. At least in Indiana, you can't, right? So he challenged that, like, yes, he did quit, but then after three days, I actually fired him, right? There was a technicality there, and none of that was outlined in the employee handbook. So he actually won the case, and there was nothing I could do about it. because I didn't have an employee handbook that outlined how to handle that. The second thing that happened was I hired a guy one time, a lead guy, and because he already had plans, he had vacation plans like three weeks after he was going to start. I went ahead and granted him vacation time, you know, PTO time as a benefit to him as compensation. And then like three weeks, like three days before he's supposed to go on vacation, the guy has such a big ego, I had to fire him. Fired him on the spot. Right. We're doing our clothes out stuff. He's got to bring his uniform back. I give them their last check and he had his wife come in and meet me. And so she goes, I said, here, here's his last check. She goes, well, what about the PTO time? I was like, what do you mean? Well, you, and your, you know, and your report said he was going to get PTO time. And I thought, well, he didn't work, you know? And I went and asked and inquired and guess what? Because I had it worded. as a compensation structure, I had to give him that PTO time. Now I could have fought it, but it was like $200 or whatever it was, $300. Like it wasn't worth it. So I just went ahead and wrote him a check. Right. But then I learned that is if it's a benefit or if it's a compensation and does it outline in your employee handbook that whenever you quit, you lose all your PTO or is it guaranteed to them if they. have 20 days acquired, and then they quit, they get that PTO time. How is that dictated in your employee handbook? What's your state laws on that? You got to know that stuff. You got to have it in there. And then last thing, a couple things here is, and we kind of already touched on them, but like conduct and violence, like how are you going to handle that even with other employees? What happens if your lead guy gets in a fight with the new apprentice? Do both of them get fired? Right? Does the person who started it get fired? How are you going to handle that? What's the policy on that? And then also sexual conduct, not talking wise, but actual sexual conduct. If you guys are, you know, if your employees are hitting on customers or hitting on other employees or doing inappropriate things, how are you going to handle that? So these are all, a lot of these things need to be addressed in an employee handbook. And, you know, you can call them rules of engagement. You can call them standard operating procedures. You can call them whatever you want. I don't give a crap what you call it. But these are all things you need to consider on how you're going to run your business. And it's a hell of a lot easier, guys, to do it when you're small than when you're big. Because if you've got four guys working for you, and now all of a sudden you're going to say, hey, we have a late policy now. In the past, if you showed up late, no big deal. But all of a sudden now, if you're late five times in a month, you're fired. Well, now they're going to have a problem with that. Right. Because now you just changed their entire job, how they interact with their job. So start doing this stuff today. But while you're small, if you're small or if you're big and you haven't done it, still do it. Start doing this today. And it's worth the money to hire someone to write a an employee handbook for you. You can get templates online. But it's really beneficial to hire someone in your state because every state has different requirements. So if you go online and there's one that has things in there for, you know, Montana and you live in Illinois, like some of that stuff may not even work. Like you might even open yourself up to liability. You're getting sued. So it's beneficial to hire an HR person in your state who can help you craft an employee handbook. And even if it's a couple thousand dollars, it's worth it. Just telling you right now. So that's all I got for today, guys. I appreciate you hanging out with me. I do have a question for you. I've been debating this and I want your feedback. So send me a text, an email, a message, WhatsApp. I don't give a crap. That rhymed. I didn't mean for that to happen. Send me a message and let me know what you think about this. What I'm thinking about doing. is starting another podcast that is more of a show talking with other contractors and just basically shooting the crap, talking about business in general with no real topics, you know, ideas or anything in mind. It's just going to be me interviewing other contractors, seeing how they do things in really a more relaxed, you know, open format. The Hammer and Grind podcast is really specific to delivering good, valuable information and interviewing industry experts who can bring value on specific topics. And I want to keep it that way. But I'm thinking about having another podcast that would be a more laid back and more conversational with you guys, with the contractors and doing that. Let me know your thoughts on that. I'm seriously considering it. I want to know your thoughts. It's obviously a huge time commitment. for me, but I want to know if it's going to be valuable. Let me know your thoughts. Send me a message. Tell me. And then we'll go from there. And guys, I appreciate you hanging out with me. You know where to find me. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook. Search for the Hammer and Grind Podcast. Until next time, remember, profit is not a dirty word.
