Episode•April 15, 2024•43 min

EP162: From Procrastination to Action: How to Stop Second-Guessing Your Business Choices

We often say that we can't decide because we're afraid of being judged for what we do. This fear can stop us in our tracks, keeping us from making choices that could help us grow or make changes we need to make. In this episode, Brad talks about: Overcoming indecision and fear of judgment in business decisions Fear of judgment can prevent us from taking necessary actions in our businesses Examples of making tough decisions like hiring, firing, and rebranding Importance of asking key questions to reveal underlying fears and uncertainties Instincts and decisions based on logic rather than emotions Links to Resources: Get the blueprint to create financial freedom & more free time before burnout or bankruptcy happens. A complete Done-With-You Program - Join the Profit Club Join the Free Facebook Group - The Contractor Profit Blueprint Get Paid for Estimates - Free Sales Guide Plan Your Profits - Profit Journal Help us get the word out to other contractors by leaving us a review or sharing our podcast! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Transcript

0:08

Contractors journey to self mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to hammer and grind. All right. Welcome back to the episode today. We'll be talking about something that is, I think everyone deals with like every single person on earth, not just contractors, everybody on earth deals with this. And this is really like indecision. Okay. And so today we're going to be talking about, you already know what you need to do. Like legitimately, any problem you have in your life, almost a hundred percent of the time, you already know what you need to do intuitively. Yet we procrastinate and we overanalyze and we overthink. And we fear monger ourselves into believing that maybe this can't be true. This can't be the action I need to take. And then we try to like justify, you know, every decision or I should say every indecision under the sun because of fear. Right. We're going to dive into this stuff here. As I've said before, and you guys probably know, I talk to a lot of contractors on a regular basis, hundreds and hundreds of contractors, either through social media, direct messaging, you know, comments, actual coaching. Like I talk to a lot of contractors and after a while you start to see repeating patterns, right? You start to see. you know, contractors that do one thing and they get one result, or you start to see a certain fear that's prevalent in a lot of, you know, contractors, or you start to see belief patterns, limiting beliefs, right? All of these things are not unique. A lot of times we think our situation is unique. And this is usually, this usually manifests when I'm talking to someone new, if I'm doing an evaluation of your business, which is something that I offer for free. If you guys ever want to schedule an evaluation call to look at your business, look at your profit, your estimating, make sure you're charging correctly. It's completely free. You could just schedule it. There's links in the show notes. But whenever I'm talking to contractors and I ask them a question about, you know, like, it could be like, how much money do you, you know, what's your revenue? What do you do? Or, you know, how much money do you pay yourself? Stuff like that. Almost always there is a answer. followed by a long drawn out explanation of the answer. So if I say, what's your revenue? They may say, well, it's only, you know, I'm only doing $200,000 a year, but this year is a little bit lower because this, this, this, and this, right? There is a explanation to the reason on the back end. And the reason why we do that, why we put that little exclamation, that disclaimer on the end is out of fear of judgment. Straight up, I don't want you to have a misrepresentation of me as a person. And if I only give you partial data, then you may formulate an opinion about me that's incorrect. And I don't want that to happen. So I need to add a disclaimer on the back end. That way, you know, every piece of the detail. Now, when I'm talking to a contractor for the first time and they don't know, you know, we haven't talked before and they don't know what I do. They don't know that their situation is not unique. There's only, if you guys were in my shoes and you get to see what I do, there's probably, I would say somewhere less than 10, somewhere probably close than five of specific types of situations that you can fall into. Right. I mean, there may be a little bit of a, you know, slightly different outlier to one thing, but I could very easily fit. 99.9% of the contractors that I talk to into five categories of problems, if you will, or types of businesses. Definitely no more than 10, probably somewhere around five. So when you come and I'm talking to you and you think your situation is very unique, I promise you it's not. Very, very rarely do I ever hear a situation where it's like, huh. That's something I've never heard before, right? Very rarely. And so a lot of times we think as people that our situation, our life, you know, our upbringing, our business model, our services, our town, all of the excuses that I hear on a regular basis is unique. And guys, here's a trick or a tip for you. I'll let you know a little secret. I used to think all of this stuff. I was the person that I always talk about in these podcasts. Everything that I say negative about a trait or something that we do, I did that. I want you to understand this. Like I'm not above, you know, this idea of making mistakes. I've made every mistake under the sun that you could possibly ever think of. I've made them all. That's why I know when I speak from experience of what it's like to make those mistakes. And then what it's like on the other end when you do it correctly. I've had both sides of the experience, both sides of the fence, if you will. So if you haven't got to experience the other side of the fence, you have to trust me that I've been there and I understand it and I know what you're going through. And your situation is not unique. I promise you. But we always do this where we want to add a disclaimer on the back end. Everywhere. Every single where we do this. Hey, why were you late today? We could just say traffic was bad. That's it. I mean, that's a legitimate reason of why someone might be late if traffic was bad. But what do we do? Man, traffic was so bad, you wouldn't believe it. It was backed up all the way to the highway and there was an accident. And we have to, like, embellish this excuse. To justify the reason. And we do this all across the board. The reason why we do that, like I said, is the fear of judgment. Right. And so when we have a problem in our business and or live or relationships, whatever, we have the problem on one end of the spectrum. And then we have the solution or taking action on the other end of the spectrum. Right. In between that, in between the problem and taking action is one little thing called fear. And it's the fear of judgment. How will I be perceived if I take action on this? If I do this thing, if I make this decision, how will I be perceived? Whether it's through a loved one, a partner, you know, employees, customers, family members, the general public, whatever. I don't care. How will I be perceived once I make this decision? That is like, that's the fear of judgment. And you should be like shaking your head right now because again, I've done this. And by the way, I'm not like, I've done these things and I never do them again. This stuff still happens to me. I'm not immune to anything that I talk about. And sometimes we go through, we have highs and lows in our lives. We have a high where nothing bothers us and then something happens or we get into a winter of life and things do bother us. And I'm not an exemption to that. And so this still, I still do these things on occasion and I can get myself into winters where things happen. Or maybe I go a minute where I don't do exercising or I don't, you know, read the Bible or prayer or do any kind of meditation or I don't write down goals or whatever it might be. Or I don't go to bed on early, you know, early in time or I don't do my normal routines. Those things can slowly, you know, lead into these winters, which then affect your decision making as well. But I want to bring it back to the main topic of this episode, and that is instinctively. We know what we need to do. And so whenever I talk with clients, you know, for the first time versus also existing clients, when we have our calls, there's always this, what should I do? Right? I don't know what to do. Now, there is an element of not having the information you need to make the decision. But is it possible for you to make a decision without having the correct information and still get a good result? Yes, it's a possibility. Is it possible to make a decision without having the correct information and have a bad result? Yes, it's a possibility. But what we do a lot of times is that when we don't have the information, what do we do? We procrastinate. We stop, right? I don't want to make a decision because I don't have enough information. And therefore, since I don't have the information and I don't know where to get the information, I just won't make the decision. And not making a decision, by the way, is a decision in and of itself. Choosing not to do something is a decision, right? At the end of the day, you still have choice. You can have choice of making a decision without the correct information or waiting until you get the correct information, however long that may be. Could be minutes, days, months, years, whatever. But it's still a decision, and we have that. We have the freedom of choice. We always have the freedom of choice, you know, no matter what's going on. And so, like I said, in between the problem and the actions, this little thing called judgment, which is fear. It's fear of being judged by someone else. I don't want to take this risk. You know, I don't want to risk. Last podcast I had Paul Neal on, he is a expert in commercial real estate and he helps fund people trying to buy their own buildings. And so if you're leasing a building and you're like, I don't, you know, and you want to buy it and you're like, I don't know. It's kind of, it's a lot of money. I don't know if I want to do that. You know, what if I buy the building and then I can't afford the payment, right? Like we think we're looking at it from a financial standpoint. Don't get me wrong. Like you obviously have to have enough finances and you have to have enough, you know, common sense and wherewithal with your finances. But if we do have the finances. but we're still on the fence to maybe buy this building that we're working out of. We try to use fear or we let fear turn our feelings and emotions into and try to sell that as a logic. You know, we try to sell it through logic as to why we can't make this decision. I don't want to buy the building because what if business slows down and now I'm on the hook for, you know, $800 a month payment or whatever it is, $1,500 a month. Right. I don't want to do this because I'm, quote, scared. Right. But what I'm scared of is not really I'm not really scared that I'm going to like financially be ruined. What I'm really scared of is the judgment that will happen on the backside of the financial ruin. See, we we look at it as it's financial ruin. I don't want to make this decision. But what I'm really, really scared of, if I go deep enough, is judgment. It's fear of judgment for my peers, family, friends, people saying that was a dumb decision. Why did you do that? So on and so on. One of my clients is rebranding. And this happens. I have two or three. I'm trying to remember. There's two or three, maybe four people that come into the profit club and then they, through the process, come to the realization that they want to rebrand. And that's perfectly. Okay. And I tell, I told, I was talking with one of them and, uh, he was, he, he's been, he's, he spent a long time, like several months going through this, the idea of rebranding and should he do it? Should he not do it? And then you have to add in, well, what's the new, what's the new name of the business and what's the new logo and all that stuff. And he got through all of that. And he even got to the point of, you know, he's got the logo approved. Got the business name approved. Everything's ready to go. He's ready to switch over his business. And he goes to a B &I meeting and he's talking to one of the people there afterwards. And he's always telling him, like, I guess he's doing a rebrand and he tells him the name of the business. And two people come to him after the meeting. One is a branding expert. The other one is like a marketing person. And both of them say, man, that's not a good idea. Like, that's really not a good idea. You already have all of this and this, you know, brand. And then all of a sudden, he's second guessing this whole decision. And so we talked about it on one of our calls. And I said, man, you have to understand that the second you make this change, you're going to get people out of the woodwork coming and telling you, why are you doing this? This is not a good idea. You're going to lose all of this. You're going to set yourself up for failure. You're going to be this, this, this, and this. Like out of the woodwork, people are going to come to you and tell you it's a bad idea. But I'm asking him, like, how do you feel about it? He's like, I love it. It fits our personality. It fits our culture. It's what I want. I'm like, okay, you need to prepare yourself for what's about to come. And so that with the B &I thing happened. And then he mentioned to somebody else he was rebranding and specializing. He's niching down into one service. And sure enough, he even messaged me. He's like, dude, you're right. It's already starting. And he's sending me screen grabs of people, you know, instant messages and stuff. I was like, Hey, why are you doing this, man? You're going to limit everything you that you're doing. You're going to, you know, it's going to cost you money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And people aren't going to know you. And, you know, back to the one lady that was like the name of his business. I don't want to give it out here, but the name of his business is like. specific trademark to the area, like a landmark. And so like there's several people who, you know, use that same name, if you will, in the name of the business. Like just as an example, like say you're near Grand Canyon, right? They, you know, there may be Grand Canyon Pizzeria or Grand Canyon, you know, electric or whatever. Like everyone uses that kind of landmark and this is a similar situation. of the area that he's in. And I was like, well, she's like, I can tell you 10,10 companies off the top of my head that have that, that, you know, that name in the, in the business or, you know, have the, have that name in their business. And, uh, you're just, you're not going to be able to differentiate yourself and all this and that. And I said, well, I said, well, man, how many of those companies are service-based companies? And he did a search and none of them, like none of them are service-based. It's like, It would be like Grand Canyon ice cream, right? Or Grand Canyon tire shop. And he's a contractor. Like those things don't conflict with each other. Come to find out she just was trying to sell her services to him. You know, we'll come, let's meet next week and I'll do a free assessment and then I can sell you my services for branding. Okay. She was doing this for her own personal gain, not for his. The point of this story is that there's plenty of people that are trying to keep themselves safe, right? And they think it's manifesting as like, I'm trying to protect you. I'm trying to protect you from doing this. But where do they get their information from? Are they a branding expert? Do they have experience rebranding their business? No. And even the branding expert who was saying that, you know, that's just one opinion of many. OK, because he hired professionals. He hired professional services to create the logo and help with the branding and stuff. So like it's one branding expert against another branding expert and they're contradicting each other in a sense. Right. So which one's right? They can't both be right. So like all of these things that are going on in these decisions, it's fear of judgment. And he like he when he when that lady said, I wouldn't recommend he went into a depot. And I'm like. bro, you got to come out of that. Like we've already went through this. We've already made the decision. Like we already pulled the plug on it. You've already spent thousands of dollars doing the logo and stuff. There's no turning back now. Right. And so he finally embraced it. He's like, you're right. Move forward. Now he's in the rebranding process, getting ready to launch his new brand. I'm excited for him. Like I'm his cheerleader. I'm like, this is awesome. Just wait and see what happens with your business. when you rebrand, right? But there's so much garbage and noise out there and people with opinions that the fear of their judgment is what keeps us from making decisions. Because the truth, here's the truth. I say all the time, like, don't put your name in your business. Don't use your last name. And I do believe that that's a best practice, but it doesn't matter if you, if you use your last name, you can still do well if you take massive action on the right things, you can still do well with any name of any business. It's still possible. Like that's not a limiting factor in what you do, right? But the fear of judgment of what's going to happen is what keeps us from making those decisions. So here's like some help to figure this out. Feelings that we have about something like. This lady said, I wouldn't recommend you changing it, you know, this and this. And so he had some feelings, right? He had some feelings about something. Feelings are not emotions in the sense. When I say a feeling, I mean like a gut feeling. Like you walk down a dark alley and you feel like someone's following you or watching you, right? That's like intuitive. That's what I'm talking about. When you have a feeling. that something's not right, that's not the same as emotions. If I'm walking down a dark alley at night and I feel like someone's following me or watching me, I don't go, oh, I'm just being paranoid. I'll just continue with my face in my phone and not paying attention to what I'm doing. So, you know, and surely everything will be okay. I won't become a victim then, right? No, it's like, okay, something's not right. I got to look up, get my posture up. get my head on a swivel, right? Maybe put my backpack on all the way instead of one arm, like get ready for case something happens. Like you don't ignore those feelings and your feelings are messages that your subconscious is trying to tell you or is trying to share with you like, Hey, something's important here. Right. And if you're not listening for those feelings, then you might miss something important. I. e. you're walking down a dark alley at night. You get the feeling someone's following you. You ignore that feeling. Next thing you know, you're robbed and murdered, right? Because you ignored that feeling. You ignored the message that your subconscious was telling you, right? And so you have to understand that like, this is not like an emotional thing. Like, oh, I'm just overthinking it. Sometimes, yes, you are overthinking it. But these feelings that we have about something are indicators that we need to take action. So how does this apply to our business? I had two calls today. I had two one-on-one calls with clients. Whenever someone joins the Profit Club, we do three months worth of one-on-one coaching with myself. And that's to help you really get down in the nitty-gritty of your business. And so I had two calls today with clients. And both of them. We're going through a situation that applies here. And this is honestly where I got the idea for the podcast today. I've mentioned before, sometimes I don't know what I want to talk about until five minutes before. But after I had these two calls this morning, I thought this is going to be a good topic. 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.

21:35

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 the 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.

22:26

So the first one, he is he recently joined and he's having some success with. uh raising his prices he's posting that he's selling jobs at 100 markup he's getting 50 gross profit and the first time you do that the first few times it's life-changing you realize how much money you've been wasting and how much possibility you have in terms of revenue and and growth and how much money you're going to make in your in your you know put in your pocket and then change the legacy of your family it's very emotional Right. This is the emotional part, not feeling. This is an emotional experience when it's like, wow, I can't believe this has finally come into fruition. So he's had some of those. And now he's at this crossroad of needing to hire a lead guy. He has a helper, but he needs to hire a lead guy so he can get off the tools and focus more on selling more and produce, you know, the business side of it. And so we're having the conversation and he's scared. Like he's scared to hire. He, he, I should say in the past, he's had multiple employees. He's had like six, seven, eight employees in the past, but he hired the wrong ones, hired too fast, had a major, you know, problems with them and then ended up, you know, stopping like firing them, starting over basically. And so there's, this is that, um, it's that judgment coming in where like, well, what if I hire someone and then I can't produce enough work for them? What if I hire them and then I run out of money because I don't have enough jobs? Right. That fear of judgment. And by the way, guys, I'm not saying you shouldn't you shouldn't take care of employees. You should. It was one of the most important responsibilities I ever had. But at the end of the day, business is business and you have to take care of the business and you can't do the business without people. So yes, people are important. Yes, you want to take care of them, but not to the point to where you're robbing from your family and screwing your family in order to try and protect or keep the lights on for someone else as long as possible. Sometimes we have to make the decision of letting someone go because we don't have enough work. Right. And that's just that's the sucky part of business. It just is. But you can't avoid that. I mean, if it happens, you can't avoid it. It's just part of business. But you can't also be so scared to make decisions for growth that you don't make decisions. And so I'm talking to him and he's scared to go out and hire someone. He wants to, you know, he wants to save up a bunch of money. And again, you need to have some responsibility here. I say, well, if you hired someone today, like how much work do you have? He said, well, I probably only have about three months worth of work. And in my mind, I'm thinking that's a lot. that's a lot of work to be able to hire someone. I remember I didn't know what I was doing two weeks from now. And I had three or four guys. I didn't know the nature of what we were doing sometimes is that we didn't, I didn't have stuff scheduled for two weeks. But then the phone calls come in, the sales are made, and then we always stayed busy. We always manage to stay busy. But when you're scared to make a decision that you know you need to make, that's where that judgment keeps you from making those decisions. So for him, You know, he's like, I don't want to run out of money. I got to keep them busy. And again, those are healthy things to think about. But what's your feeling? You know, what's those feelings telling you? He's like, well, I need to hire someone. I'm like, okay. And so by the end of the conversation, he was on board that he needed to hire someone. And all I did was reveal some things. And I want to share a couple of questions that you can ask yourself if you come into these. You know, the purpose of this podcast is to share some. Some questions that you can ask to help reveal if you're scared of judgment, right? Or if you just don't have enough information. Sometimes you don't need any more information, but it manifests as not having enough information. But some questions you can ask are, so for him, he needs to hire a lead guy so he can get off the tools, right? I asked him, I said, what's the downside of hiring someone? What would be the downside if you hired a lead guy? Well, I guess, you know, the downside would be I could potentially run out of money or we could run out of work, you know, and I wouldn't have enough work for him. Okay, well, what would be the downside of that? Well, then he would have to, you know, he would have to go get a new job. Okay, what would be the downside of that? And you just keep asking this question. I mean... None of these decisions that we make are going to lead to death for the most part. You're not going out and getting loans from loan sharks, right? And you got to repay them. You're not going to come bust your knuckles and, you know, break your kneecaps, right? That's usually not going to happen. You're not going to have financial ruin. I was like, well, what's, you know, what if you go bankrupt? Well, I guess I could go get a job because I wouldn't go bankrupt. I go get a job if I had to. Okay. So you wouldn't go bankrupt. And so like we went down this path of what's the downside of this decision? What's the downside of this decision? Right. And then on the backside of that decision, you can say, well, what's the upside of not doing this? So what would be the upside of not hiring this person? And there wasn't very many other than he could probably keep a little bit more money in his pocket because he's the one self-performing and not having as much overhead. But then that keeps him on the tools, which is not what he wants. And so by asking these two questions, what's the downside of you taking action and what's the upside of you not taking action? You can usually plainly see, like in black and white, which decision you need to make. And now it's not an emotional decision. Right now it's not a fear of judgment decision. Now you've actually looked at it logically because you're asking what's the downside and what's the upside. And it's not how do you feel about it, right? And so that's just two questions you can ask in that type of situation if you're on the fence and you're trying to make the right decision. He knows he needs to hire someone. He knows it. I didn't even have to ask him. He already knew it inside. He had that feeling. He was just ignoring it based on fear, right? The second call I had is a contractor. who his family member is his lead guy. And his lead guy is taking advantage of him. This guy is a nice guy. And, you know, he's too nice. And so he gets taken advantage of by his employees and people. And I'm like, bro, you got to quit doing that. Right. You know, you got to do this. You got to, it's your business, your responsibility. You got, this is the sucky part of business. You need to fire him. Right. And I don't just come out and say, this is what you need to do. I ask a series of questions that allow them to come to the conclusion on their own that they need to make this decision. And so I asked him if you could build your dream team, you know, money wasn't an object. You had access to any person to build your dream team. Would these people, him and your helpers or specifically him, would they be the people that you would pick for that position? And if the answer is no, then you don't have the right person in that position. If the answer is I can't think of anyone else that I would want to do that job, then you do have the right person. Now there's, you know, there's degrees. Don't get me wrong here. There's degrees to what you can do, like who you can hire and who you can find. But sometimes you have to, you know, you have to cut out the bad ones and the other ones you keep on board until you can. trade up into someone better. And that may sound bad to some of you, maybe like, that's not, you're playing with people's lives. Again, this is business. There's no feelings in business other than the feelings of contradicting myself here. There's no feelings in terms of emotions, right? There's no emotions in business. We want to listen to those feelings of intuition, but there's no feelings in business terms of emotional. We don't get emotional in business. There's no reason to be emotional in business. None whatsoever. If you're a very emotional person, you're going to challenge, you can have some challenges. You are just telling you not saying that you can't be a compassionate person. You can't have empathy, right? You can't be, uh, have show love or, you know, any other type of, uh, emotion towards people, but you can't be emotional in the sense of. If something happens, then, you know, you can't function on a daily basis because you're too emotionally distraught, right? If you haven't laid in bed at night wondering how you're going to pay your bills, you're not trying hard enough. I'm just telling you right now. Yeah, I mean, that's just the reality of it. But for him, he needs to fire this person. And he's scared to fire him. One, it's a family member, so he's going to see him all the time, right? And I get that. But he's getting taken advantage of. And he was sharing that he out of the last few months, he's been late like 26 times in the morning. I'm like,26 times in the last few months? And you're tolerating this? Like, you're definitely being taken advantage of. Right? I mean, that alone by itself is a fireable offense. I'm sorry. 26 times, you know, maybe two times that would be acceptable. But 26, no. And so I asked him a couple questions, and I said about the dream team, you know, if you could build your dream team, what would it be if it's no? Okay, you need to get rid of them. The second question you can ask is, if nothing changes from my current situation, am I completely okay with it? If I have an employee who shows up late 26 times every couple months, leaves early sometimes, doesn't respond to text messages or whatever it is that's going on, doesn't follow directions, forgets to do things, this and that, all of these problems. If nothing changes, am I completely okay with the current situation for infinity? If the answer is no there, then you know that changes need to be happening. You know you need to make some decisions. Now, obviously, you should, you know, first in this situation, you would first do counseling, you know, try to come up with a course of action, a way to measure their performance and so on and so on. This had already been done twice for him. And so now it's like we just need to, it's just time to cut it loose. It's just time to cut it loose. And I also asked the question to him about, you know, what's the upside and downside. Come to find out he has a part-time person. who helps him, who is phenomenal, who wants to come full-time, but doesn't want to come full-time with the other person that he currently has working. I'm like, dude, I know you can't see the trees through the forest right now because all you see is the fear of judgment of making the wrong decision, but this could literally be the best decision you ever made. And I learned this with my lead guy that I had. I had a lead guy for almost three years. phenomenal, you know, craftsman, like you could tell him that just to do anything like, Hey, go do this. He could do it. Most time, you know, a lot of things he was better than me at it. Like he could do just about anything, right. Terrible employee. I mean, just terrible drama, drama, drama all the time. Late. multiple times, uh, have to leave early multiple times, phone calls and texts all day from his, his wife. Cause she was controlling like just drama, drama, drama, problems, problems, problems, drama, drama, drama all the time. And so when I had him, I thought, oh man, he, he, what a blessing. Like what a blessing to have him in my business. Yeah. He's got a couple of things wrong with him, but you know, definitely a blessing. And so after three years, he actually quit. I didn't fire him. He quit. He got, he got, um, He got upset with me and he ended up quitting. He walked off the job one time and I never talked to him. Like he wouldn't answer nothing. Just never talked to him again. After he quit and then I hired some other people, I realized that this person that I thought was the solution to helping me grow my business was actually the reason why my business wasn't growing. And that was a hard pill to swallow. And, you know, if... If he happens to be listening to this, I don't know. But if he happens to hear me say this, it's something I wouldn't say to his face. It's not that he's a bad person. He's he's he is a good person. It's just that he let a lot of drama infect his life. And that combination was not the right fit for me in my business. Right. I've had drama. I've had problems. Right. So like there's times where I was that person to someone else that I was working for. Matter of fact, I actually had a job one time when I was going through a divorce. I quit. I quit the guy and he was like, you don't need to quit. I was like, listen, you're paying me salary and I'm a commissioned salesman. And I'm not selling anything because I can't think straight. And so I'm just, I don't want to take your money. I can't consciously come to work every day, not perform and, you know, take your money and you need it because it was a new startup. He's like, I understand it, but just stick around. I was like, no, I can't do it. And actually he ended up going out of business several months later. Right. But I mean, like I've been through that. I was that employee. Like now I had, you know, in that situation, I was the one that quit. But I'm just saying, like, sometimes you need to be the one that let people go. And if they're not performing. and you've done everything you can to give them the tools they need, the resources they need, the training they need, all that, and they're still not performing, you can't intrinsically motivate someone. If they don't have that, you can't make them do that. It's just not possible. There may be some extrinsically, is that how you say that? Extrinsically? I don't know. Somebody spell correct me. Maybe externally motivate someone, but those typically don't last. very long. Um, not everybody's motivated by money. Most are, but not everybody. Some people are motivated by having being, you know, uh, being appreciated and stuff like that. So these questions is just, it's the reason for this podcast is to get you to start thinking and asking questions. Anytime you're like, I, you know, I really shouldn't work for this client. I talked to them. I went out and met with them. But I just got this feeling that they're going to be a pain in the butt the entire time. But I really need this money. That's a dangerous combination. When you really need the money and the client's a pain in the butt, I would bet money, I would probably bet maybe $1,000 that you're going to lose in that scenario almost every time. If I bet 10 times, I would come out a winner. Right? So, again, that feeling. You intuitively know what you need to do. I need to say no to this job, but man, I got bills coming in and I really need the work. I'll just do it. That's when you just seal the deal for you. That's one thing. That feeling is you got to make the right decision. I know I need to fire this guy because he's not a good employee, but I don't know anybody else and I don't want to go back on the tools and so I'm just going to keep him around for a while. Meanwhile, he's the cancer to your business and two or three other employees quit because of that guy that you didn't fire three months ago. That happens a lot. Remember, people leave people. They don't leave jobs. So when you have a cancer in your business and you know what to do, but you don't do it because you're scared, that's when you get in trouble. And one of the greatest responsibilities you can have as a business owner is making the tough decisions. It's rebranding your business after you've been in business four or five years and everyone on the outside saying that's a dumb decision, but you still do it anyways. That's what being a business owner is. It's pivoting. you know seven eight ten years after you've been in business and completely pivoting services because you can see you have enough foresight that the economy's changing that things are changing eventually there will be robots doing most of construction and if you're the guy that's going to be like no i'm dumb robots can't ever replace humans you'll be the guy left behind meanwhile the guy who had enough foresight who saw robots coming And he went and got trained on how to program them. And now he is the engineer of the robots who are doing all the building. And he's the first early adopter. And he's the first contractor who hires robots or buys robots, I should say, and implements them. And everybody's laughing at him and telling him he's stupid. And that's a dumb thing. And you're stealing jobs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Until you wake up one day and you're a genius. Because now. It's working and you're uber successful. That's what being in business is. It's making hard decisions every single day. It's waking up knowing that you could make a decision of the day that can wreck your business, wreck your life, wreck other people's lives. And that's stressful. And that is that alone, that by itself, that reason alone is why you need to charge more to put up with all that. So. I hope this was helpful. I hope it helps you to start looking inward because you guys know, all of us know what decisions we need to make. You know if you need help in your business, right? This same person that's struggling to hire someone, whenever he joined the Profit Club, he told me, he's like, this is the most money I've ever spent on anything. And now he's getting, you know, three, four, five,10x return on his investment. Like, you know what you need to do. You're just letting fear, the fear of judgment, keep you from making those decisions. You know that you need to schedule an evaluation call with me to figure out what's going on with your business, right? But maybe that fear of, well, what if he's a scammer? What if he actually tries to sell me something that turns my whole business around? I don't want to be sold something that turns my entire business and life around. I have to laugh because... It's just, it's silliness. You guys know what you need to do. You know, you need to fire that person. You know, it's time to hire. You know, it's time to pivot in your business. You know, it's time to take action. Guys, you know where to find me on the socials, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. And what's the other one? YouTube. Yeah. I said, it's like 160 times. You think I know this by now, but just search for me on the socials hammer and grind podcast. Shoot me a message, schedule that free evaluation call today, and we can talk about your business and what you can do to start, you know, turning around and making those decisions. And remember, until next time, guys, profit is not a dirty word.