Episode•November 3, 2025•51 min

EP243: The Cost of Chaos: Why Your Business Feels Like a Circus and How to Fix It

Many contractors are not genuinely running a business but rather managing a chaotic circus with a stressed ringmaster and a bunch of unorganized clowns rather than a legitimate business. This chaos is not merely a symptom of external factors but is primarily rooted in the absence of effective systems. In this episode, Brad talks about: Understanding why many contractors run their businesses like a circus. Common misconceptions about chaos, including hiring and customer issues. How a lack of systems leads to chaos and inefficiency. Key indicators that your business is disorganized. The hidden costs of running a chaotic business. Simple systems to implement for better organization and efficiency. The importance of proactive management in building a successful business. Link to Resources: Grab Brad's tell-all book: The Contractor Profit Blueprint https://thecontractorprofitblueprint.com 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

0:05

Most contractors are not running a business. They're running a circus. And the difference is, is that in a real circus, the clowns are professional and they're consistent. Hey, welcome back to the show. On this episode, we're going to be talking about how to turn your business, aka the circus, into a real business that does not thrive on chaos. So let's get started. Okay, what's the main thing here about businesses? Why do contractors struggle with running a business that doesn't... kind of mimic that of a circus, right? In other words, most of us have a lot of clowns running around in our business and we're the ringmaster trying to organize everything and trying to, you know, conduct what's happening. What's the next act? You know, what's coming up next? All that stuff. Why does that happen? How does that happen? How do we get to the point in our business where we end up running a circus instead of an actual business? Well, let's start by unpacking what causes the chaos, okay? So what chaos is not? The reason why I'm saying what's not is because this is what a lot of people think is the problem in their business. And almost always, it's not the problem. I'll have contractors that call me like, hey, I really need help hiring. I just can't find good help. Once we dive into their business and we start looking at everything that's going on, it has nothing to do with hiring. That's the least of their problems is hiring. There's all kinds of other chaos happening in their business, but we have to kind of unpack that. So let me help you right now with things that is not the reason why your business is in chaos. Number one, it's not because you have too many jobs. That's not the reason why your business is in chaos. I know you think it is, but it's not. It's not because you have too few employees, like not enough employees. Again, that's not the reason why your business is in chaos. It's not because you have bad customers. That's not the reason either. And it's not because you have, you know, material or supply chain issues. Those things are not what's contributing to your circus. Okay. Now I'm not saying they're helping the fact. Those are, those are issues that we have to deal with for sure. But that's not the main reason why you have chaos in your business. Chaos is almost always. caused by a lack of systems, a lack of clarity, and the owner trying to run everything out of their head. Okay? That's the number one reason. You're trying to run your entire business out of your head, and you cannot do that. That is not a business. That is a circus. Okay? That's why you can't turn your phone off. That's why you can't go on vacations. That's why everything relies on you. That's why all of your employees are calling you every single day, asking for your input on the simplest things that you in your mind are thinking, dude, this is common sense. Why can't you figure this out? We've done this a thousand times. That's because you've trained them as the ringmaster to rely on you solely to make sure the show goes on. Okay. You are responsible for the chaos in your business. I've also used the term like you're the firefighter and you're also the arsonist in your business. Like you're setting all the fires and you're trying to put them all out. Well, you're also the ringmaster, right? You're running the circus and you got a bunch of clowns working for you and they're not professionals. Okay. So let's keep going. Like the circus equals reactive business. A business equals proactive. So if you're reacting to everything that's happening on a daily basis, if your employees are reacting to everything that's happening, you are running a circus, period, full stop. That's it, okay? A business is designed to be proactive and know what's going to happen, have solutions when it does happen, and be able to solve problems without any input from the owner. Now, this is a process, okay? You're not going to listen to this podcast and at the end, like, fix everything in your business. I'm not promising you that. That's not realistic. It takes time. This is the hard part of running a business. This is the grind of running a business. The whole reason that franchises exist is because the owner of that franchise has already solved all of the problems of the business, all of the bottlenecks, all of the situations that come up. They've created the system and now they can hand it to you in a binder and says, hey, just follow this system and you will make money. That's the reason franchises exist. Now there's pros and cons to franchises. You know, I'm not going to get into that. But if you're not going to buy a franchise, then you have to create all of the systems in your business. All of it, everything so that it can run without you. OK, now this isn't a systems podcast episode. Like we're not going to be talking about like, you know, all the systems that you need to do. That's not what we're going to be talking about. Some what we're talking about, the idea is that you can't run a business out of your head. It's impossible, guys. It's impossible when you're a one man show. Sure, because you're the employee and the salesman and the project manager. You know, you do everything so you can remember everything. or at least try to, that's not a business. That's just a job. You're self-employed. You've created a job for yourself. So when you're running your business right now out of your head because you're the only person, and then you want to hire people because you want to get off the tools, you have to create all of the systems to pass the information on. And this is where most of you get tripped up. Before you hire your first person, you should be documenting and creating the systems that you're currently using out of your head. In a perfect world, if someone came to me and said, Brad, design the perfect process, you know, step by step of how I go from being a one man show to having, say,10 employees, what would that look like? I would tell you before you hire your first employee, you should be documenting everything you're currently doing so that when you hire your first employee, you're plugging them into a system. And then you're tweaking it as you go because it's not going to be perfect. You're not going to know everything. Like it's not going to, you're going to put it on a piece of paper and it's going to be perfect. No, I've talked about this before. Everything you do in your business is the first rough draft. It's always a first rough draft. Let's do a first rough draft. Let's throw it on paper. See what we got to tweak. Make the tweaks, you know, evaluate, make the tweaks, evaluate, make the tweaks, evaluate. Eventually, over a short period of time, you're going to have a system that works great. And you're going to have your business is going to be made up of thousands of little systems that make up one big system. OK, so here's just this is just some very basic. If I came to your business and I looked at your business, if I if I looked at these areas, this is going to determine if you're running a circus. OK, this is a self-evaluation of if you have a circus for a business. OK, number one, your trucks are disorganized. I mean, they're just traded disorganized. We all know what I make fun of, the contractors that have a dashboard that's just full of coffee cups and notepads and trash. If that's your truck, you are going to have a serious problem growing a business, like actually creating and growing a business, okay? You're going to have to have some people in your life and your business that can keep you organized if you're going to have success. But that's not... Like if you, if your dashboard looks like the back of a dump truck, I mean, a garbage truck, you're struggling, man. Like you're in trouble. You're in serious trouble because one, there's no reason to have a dashboard like that. And two, it just proves that you're disorganized. Okay. It doesn't matter if it's physically disorganized or mentally disorganized or digitally, digital, digitally, is that a word? Digitally disorganized. It doesn't matter what. you know, what medium you're in. If you're disorganized, you're disorganized, period. If you're disorganized, think about the people that are trying to do what you're telling them. They're going to be even more disorganized, okay? If your trucks are a disorganized disaster, you're running a circus. And I don't mean your personal truck. I mean all of your employees' trucks too. There's no reason for your employees' trucks to be disorganized. At least not, you know. I understand that like a couple of days they may be, but it should not be a consistent disorganized. Okay. Number two, nobody knows the schedule except you. You're the only one that knows that the Smith job starts on Monday. You're the only one that knows that you got to order materials for the Johnson job on Tuesday. If no one knows the schedule in your business, but you, you are running the circus. Period. Full stop. If you have surprise material runs every day, and this really got me, like this hit home with me for sure. If you're running surprise material runs on a daily basis, you have a circus, okay? If employees ask the same questions over and over, raise your hand right now, everyone, you are running a circus and you have untrained clowns working for you. If tools mysteriously disappear, and I don't mean stolen, I mean they just disappear and then maybe a week later, a month later, you find that tool. If they mysteriously disappear, you're running a circus. If you wake up putting out fires, not building a company, you definitely have a running a circus. I mean, straight up, you're running a circus. If every job has one more thing that nobody planned for, you have a circus. And lastly, if customers text you directly to solve all of their problems and answer their questions, you have a circus. Now, be real here. Be honest. How many of you are like, man, this applies. Most of these apply to my business, like apply to me, like two or three, four, all of these apply to me. Okay. I mean, take it, take an honest assessment. Raise your hand. I want to see your hands raised up high. If this applies to you, it does. I know it does. It applied to me in my business. And if you're listening to this podcast, you're trying to get better in your business. If you're struggling in your business, that's the reason why. Because you're running a circus, guys. You don't have things figured out. All right? So let's think of some of the cost of this. The cost of having a circus is that, you know, the chaos of running a circus is that you're spending one to two hours every day of wasted labor per man. If you have five employees, you're wasting five hours a day of nonproductive time because of the chaos of your business. I recently did a on-site consultation for a client and they have a pretty large business. They're doing remodels and they have several crews. And the way that they were doing it, when I first found out, it was blowing my mind. I was like, what are you guys doing? They do remodeling and like they get, you know, a kitchen remodeling and they get cabinets from a, you know, there's a local knockdown cabin. They call them the RTA, ready to assemble cabinets. They come flat packed in a box and you got to put the cabinets together. It's a pretty common way to get cabinets today. Well, the company that makes the cabinets is local to them. So like they can just run over to the warehouse and get the cabinets that day. Most of us that have done in the past or don't do RTAs, you got to order the cabinets and it takes eight to 12 weeks, right? To get cabinet orders in and then you got to do the job. Well, they, because of the proximity and the ease of just getting the cabinets that day, they would sell a job, a kitchen remodel. They would go and do the demo. And then that day after the demo is done or the next day, they would take final measurements. to double check their measurements. And then they would go and get all of the cabinets that they needed for that job for the next day. This was happening in real time. And what was always happening was that the initial measurement, which was kind of a quick and rough estimate. meaning it could be a half inch off or a quarter inch or an eighth inch off. They would build the cabinet layout for a design based on the rough estimate. And then they would do the demo. And then their final estimate would be a half inch off or sometimes an inch off because of various reasons. And now they have to shift the design of the cabinet. And then, you know, a cabinet, you can't just add an inch to a cabinet or they have to change the cabinet. And like this was every single job and it was pure chaos. They had three full-time runners that all they did was drive around and get materials and deliver them to the jobs and do all this stuff. And every single job had something go wrong. Every single job had to have one more trip back to fix something. Sometimes they would go to the store, to the warehouse, and they would be out of a cabinet. Even though they stocked a bunch, they would just be out of one specific cabinet. Well, they couldn't install it. So they had to wait a week or three days. for that cabinet to come in, then they'd have to make a trip back to install that one cabinet. And sometimes that would hold up countertops, it would hold up other stuff. It was just chaos all the time. And the first thing I said to them is, you have to stop the just-in-time, what we call just-in-time material delivery. You have to stop that immediately. Because, I mean, the writing was on the wall. It was so obvious to me. They were losing so much productivity because of all of these mistakes. I said, you have to order these and get them in and get them in. Like have them shipped to your location because they had a location. They had a warehouse they could store them in. Ship them to your location. Make sure you have all the stuff before you start the job and then go start the job and do it. That's, I mean, night and day obvious. Okay. The other thing was that They needed to get good measurements on the initial estimate. They were just getting good enough to get in and get out. Like, get on to the next estimate. Get on to the next estimate. I got a bunch of estimates. Got to get in. I was like, you have to slow down and start taking exact measurements. Because again, when I was doing kitchen remodels, like we would take a measurement with the old kitchen and that was the final. And the final dimensions were always there. Now, there was always, you know, an occasional situation, but it definitely wasn't. normal and it didn't happen on every job. So it's definitely possible. I mean, you can definitely do it that way, like order cabinets in advance, deal with any situations that come up. That's just an example of one way of doing something and not reflecting back and not looking at what's going on in your business because you've built it so big and everything relies on you. that you don't have the brain capacity or the time to actually sit down and solve problems. So you're just in full 100% of the time, you know, trying to solve problem mode, firefighting mode, and you don't have time to actually stop and look. By the way, this is one of the benefits of having someone. like myself, come into your location, do an onsite consultation and look at your whole business because I can see it from an outside. I have no emotional attachment to your business. None. I will come in and look at it and be like, why are you guys doing this over here? Because that makes no sense whatsoever. Right? So like, that's just a, I mean, that's not an advertisement. I'm just saying like, that's the benefit of having someone else come in is because you're emotionally attached to your business. I'm not, I don't care about. the emotions that you have towards your business. I'm going to come in and say, this is wrong. This is screwed up. This is stupid. Stop doing this. Start doing this because you're too much in. You're too deep into it. You can't even see what's happening. So that hidden, the hidden bleeding that's going on, one to two hours a day, a waste of time, lost materials, lost tools, redo work, delayed jobs. Angry customers. If any of these things sound familiar to you, you're running a circus and you need to stop. I mean, you just got to you got to make some changes. You really do. You know, and then obviously the last one, like frazzled owner. Of course, you're frazzled. I know this from experience. You're worn out. You're waking up in the morning and thinking, man, I don't know if I can do this anymore. I joke all the time, you know, I would quit my business. 365,000 times. Like once a day, I would quit my business in my head. I'm like, this is stupid. I'm not doing this anymore. You know, and then I wake up the next day and I'm like, okay, I can do this. It's just, if you're, if that's you, if you're living in that constant state of stress and you don't know what to do next and, you know, I don't know if I want to keep doing this. It's not worth it. You need help, period. You need help. Stop pretending like you're going to figure it out some way. Stop pretending that it's going to fix itself. It's not. I tell people all the time, if you have a turd business now with you and two employees and your business is a big fat turd, meaning it doesn't work very well, if you scale that, if you add more people to that, you're not going to solve the problem. What you're going to do is make a bigger fat turd, which is going to be harder to even deal with. You know, if I got a little pile of poop right here, I can deal with that. I can move it around. But as you add people, you add complexity, you add more crap to your business. Now you've got a ginormous pile of crap and you can't move that around. That's what happens to 99% of contractors who think scaling their business solves their problems. It does not. You have a benefit if you're small. If you're a one-man operation, you have an enormous benefit right now. by starting to solve the problems before you add complexity to your business. You know, like I said, if everything relies on you, you've built a circus. You have to build systems in your business and you have to create, you know, systems that people can run. So people without systems create clown shoes, okay? People without systems create the big fat clown shoes that are hard to walk in. That's what you're doing. You're basically taking your employees, putting big fat clown shoes on them and say, go out there and work. See how effective that is. You wear big fat clown shoes for a day and see how effective that is for you. It's not. That's what you're doing to your employees when you have no systems for them. Let me just give you one example. Now, I was going to print this out and I totally forgot before I started this, but I had a worksheet. It's a one-page sheet that I made in Google Excel or Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, whatever. And all it was was an inventory sheet. Because of the nature of our business, we would stock certain things on our vehicles, on our vans. Normal stuff, like different types of caulking, you know, clear silicone interior or, you know, clear or white exterior or clear, you know, interior plumbing, white interior plumbing. Like we would stock like six different types of, you know, caulking and adhesives, you know, on our trucks. And so. And we would use those on a regular basis. Obviously, screws, fasteners. We would use a crap ton of fasteners and anchors on a weekly basis. I would stock all of those things in our warehouse. Okay? Every Monday morning, every single Monday morning, first thing, we would have a meeting for the week of what's going on. Just a quick little, here's what's going on this week. And then we would clean out. And restock our vans. Does it cost money to do that? Yes, it costs a lot of money. And then we would eventually we started adding training onto that as well. Like we would actually do training on something. But every week on a Monday morning, first thing, we would clean out our vans and stock them. I mean, like sweep them out, get the vacuum, vacuum the vans out, remove all the trash. That was every Monday. We would restock all of our, you know, normal restock. Again, I had a piece of paper that had all the items that we would restock. And there was about, I don't know, there was maybe 50 items on there. I'm talking about shims, different types of fasteners, you know, the caulking, adhesives, tape, you know, things like that. Things that we would use on a regular basis, saw blades, drill bits. And we would go through those every Monday. And then the beginning of the month, the first Monday of the month, was a full-blown, like, go through everything. We would PM the vehicles. We would check the air tire pressure or the tire pressure. We would check the oil in the vehicles. We would do a full PM on that. But then we would also take our drill bit box and go through all the drill bit box because you always end up with extra drill bits. You lose drill bits. We would go through and restock the drill bits. If you use like GRK screws or you use screws that had a star bit, a torque bit, whatever you want to call it. You know, you got to have a T25, you got to have a T15 or a T30. There's different sizes depending on what screws. Well, those bits break. I had, I don't know, freaking dozens and dozens of GRK bits in the warehouse. So if you're using trim screws, everybody knows if you use GRK trim screws, you use the gold bit, right? It's T15 bit and those things would break and strip very easily. I had dozens and dozens of those bits. So once a month, we would go through and go through all the bits. And if we ended up with like three, you know, T15 bits and no T25 bits, then we would take the T15 bits out that we don't need and then put in some T25s. Every month we would do this. We would make sure our vehicles were organized and stocked. Why? Because it eliminated all of those stupid visits to the store. when you run out of screws in the middle of a job. So every Monday, every week, we would restock for the week. We would have, you know, different types of screws. We systematize it so that we only carry like five different types of framing screws. We would have, you know, a three and a half, a three and an eighth inch screw. We would have a two and a half inch screw and we would have like a one inch or one and a quarter inch framing screw. Those were the only three types of screws that we would carry. And then we would have cabinet screws. We would have a three and a half inch cabinet screw and a two and a half inch cabinet screw and a one and a half inch cabinet screw. We would carry like three different cabinet screws. Now we would have a bunch of other screws too, but I'm just using it as an example. We standardized how many and what kind of screw that we kept on the vehicle. Now, you may be listening to this and saying, that's stupid. I just go to the store and buy a box of screws. That's fine. You keep ending up buying boxes and boxes of screws and half of them get thrown away or lost. And then you have 35 different types of framing screws because you're just buying different ones every time you go to the store and you end up with chaos. And all it takes is the one time that you're supposed to be grabbing a two and a half inch framing screw. And you grab a two and three quarter inch framing screw because you had multiple sizes and you run that two and three quarter inch screw through a piece of wood and out the front side of a laminate countertop or the side of a cabinet. And you just cost yourself hundreds or thousands of dollars. Ask me how I know this. I'm raising my hand because I did that stupid crap. That's the reason why I standardized the sizes is because I had an employee run a screw right through the middle of a, A laminate counter, huge laminate counter, a big L shape. Like that stuff happens because it wasn't standardized. Hey, just a quick

25:01

timeout from the show. If you're a frustrated contractor who's dealing with low profit margins, stuck working on the tools every day, or doing free estimates for people who are never going to hire you in the first place. I invite you to my private contractor community, The Profit Club, where contractors just like you are adding two to three times more profit each year without producing any more jobs and finally getting completely off the tools to never do another free estimate again. So if you're ready to increase your profits, stop doing free estimates and get off the tools, then all you have to do is click the link in the show notes to learn more about The Profit Club. and see how I can easily two to three times the cash in your pocket, give you a proven sales process that will convert more jobs with ease and get you off the tools once and for all. And the best part is you can do all of this without having to produce more jobs than you currently are. Click the link to learn more. Now let's get back to the show.

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So I said, screw this, we're going to standardize. All it is is a piece of paper with check boxes. And all they had to do was they go through their vehicle, they go down the list and they say, do we have two tubes of clear, you know, plumbing, silicone? Yes. Check it off. It's good. Or no. And then they go get what they want. They go get one tube. They put it in their inventory and then they check it off as it's done. If we were out of them in the warehouse, they would check a different box that would say, you know, need to reorder. And that piece of paper that every vehicle would turn in, my office manager can now look at that and be like, oh, we're out of the Red Devil clear interior plumbing silicone that we would use. Kitchen and bath, you know, clear silicone. And so that way she could go and order a new case or two cases of that silicone. And again, we standardize which caulking and silicone that we would use. Why? Because I don't want to have five different types of clear silicone. I didn't want to have, you know, three different types of white silicone or white latex. Guys, this is the level of detail in your systems that you need to create if you ever want to get off the tools and have a business that can run without you. You're thinking like, I just need to hire John and John's going to fix everything for me. John can deal with the inventory. John can deal with the, you know, the systems and all that. Never going to happen. It's never going to happen for you. I promise. This is, I mean, this is, again, this is just one tiny, tiny, tiny little aspect of your business. At the end of each day, my crew had to remove all the trash out of their vehicle before they could go home. They didn't have to like organize everything. They just had to remove all the trash. Why? Because I don't want to start my morning the next day having to finish the job before, having to finish something from the day before. And I had a timeline, you know, your next question is like, well, what if they work until seven o 'clock at night, one night late? I had a system for that very easy solution. If you got back to the shop and it was before 5 p. m., you had to clean out your van. If it was after 5 p. m., because we would work till 4.30, essentially it was our quit time. And maybe it was 5.30. I honestly don't remember the exact times. But let's just say it was 5. If it was after 5 p. m. when they got back to the shop, then they could leave it, get in their vehicle and go. Now, they still had to turn in their receipts for the day. That had to be done regardless. And they had to make sure that any paperwork they had was turned in. Those had to be done. But if they had a bunch of crap in their van, a bunch of trash, you know, it was going to take 10,15 minutes to get it out. If it was after 5 p. m., they could go home and do it in the morning. But they basically had to come in a few minutes early in the morning. Most of the time they were done, you know, they got back before 5 p. m. and they were able to remove all the trash. But I was still considerate of like, hey, maybe your son has a baseball game at 5.30 and you're trying to get out. I get it. Do it. Go. No problem. But we're not going to get back to the shop at 427 and then turn the paperwork and leave. You are going to take all the trash out of your van. That's not an option. Because I don't want to start the morning in a negative. That's a system, guys. That is how you organize your business. It's not just, hey, guys, make sure you keep everything organized and turn in the paperwork whenever you get a chance. That's not a system. That's a circus. And you're the ringleader of that. Most chaos is in communication because you're not communicating effectively. You got to, you know, you got to kick off the meetings. You got to have the daily huddles. You got to have the end of day reports if you need that. You know, you got to have scope recap. Yeah, you got to do that. You know, if you need scripts for the customers, for your guys to follow, whatever, whatever it is, like you just have to put those things together for your people. You need to have job scope clarity. I cannot stress how important this is most of the time because you're doing free estimates. and you're stressed out, and you're running 100 miles an hour, you're not putting together a full-blown detailed scope of work. You've had the benefit of seeing the job in person, putting it together in your head. Oh, okay, we're going to take out this bathtub. We're going to expand the shower, make it a big walk-in shower. We're going to have to move this plumbing over here. We're going da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. All these things, it makes perfect sense in my head. I can see it clear as day because I'm a, you know, I have a, photographic memory, and I can see all this stuff. That's what makes me so great. I take that. I put on a piece of paper. We're going to remodel full bathroom gut remodel, demo the bathtub, make the shower bigger, and relocate the plumbing. That's your full detailed scope of work. And then you're just going to fill in the gaps whenever you get to the job site the day of. So you show up to the job site and you're like, hey, John, Chris, come over here. I'm going to go over to this job. So what we're going to do here is we're going to demo everything out. We're going to move this. We're going to take this tub demoing out. We're going to move this shower. We're going to make it three feet bigger. We're going to come out six inches. We're going to relocate the plumbing over here. We're going to do this, this, this, and this. We're going to drywall. We're going to do it. And you're going through an entire brain dump of what's going to happen in this job. And you know what your employees are thinking? They're still on removing the bathtub. Yeah, man, how are we going to remove that bathtub? It's a cast iron. We got to get it down the steps. I'm going to have to get, we're going to have to get a dolly up here. We got to cut that out. Probably going to have to, you know, do some framing in there. Yeah, that's going to be a pain in the butt. I don't know how he expects us to do this and blah, blah, blah. And that they're on the bathtub. The first thing you told them and you're on step 34. They didn't hear anything else you said. Nowhere do you have detailed scope. of everything you just said. It's in your brain. It came out of your mouth. Now you think it's their job to remember everything you just told them. And then you come back the next day or two days later to check on them. Because, you know, I'm not going to babysit them, Brad. They're professionals. You come in two days later, and the shower is, like, not even framed where it's supposed to be. And you're like, what are you guys doing? I told you we were going to move that shower over three feet. You only moved it over two and a half feet. Oh, well, it didn't make sense because of this. So we just thought it was going to be two and a half feet. Or we thought you said this. I know that I'm describing in great detail what you're doing right now in your business. I know this for a fact. I did the exact same thing. That's what makes me the subject matter expert. That's what makes me available. And it gives me the opportunity to help businesses get out of this craziness. Because I've been there. I've done it. I lived it. Overcame it. This is not unique. I promise you,99% of you out there are having this problem in your business. But Brad, my problem's special. I'm special. Because I live in a rural area, and you just can't find good help. And people out here are all buddy system, and they won't pay more money, and this, and this, and this. And here's why I'm so unique in my problems because of this. No, you're not, guys. You're not unique. There's nothing unique about your business. Nothing. You're in the same circus that everyone else is in. That's why it's so easy to help coach people. You're not unique. There's like maybe six different scenarios that you could be in. And that's, you're going to be in one of those six scenarios. And I don't care what you do. I don't care what industry, what location. I don't care. It doesn't matter. Whatever excuse you give me does not matter. You're just like everyone else. But you're unique. You're a unique little snowflake, you know. Your situation's such... It's just so difficult. That may work in the big city. It doesn't work in, you know, rural America. Next guy says, that may work in rural America. It doesn't work in the big city. Same problem. Both of you saying the exact opposite. I digress. All right. So, you know, miscommunication triggers, domino effect whenever things are disorganized in your business. We get the wrong materials. Whose fault's that? Right. Who's followed if the wrong material show up? Well, it's easy to say, well, they delivered the wrong materials. OK, that's that's fair. But did you have the materials delivered a week in advance? And then did you go out there and inspect them to make sure they were accurate? And then did you have the client sign off on colors and designs whenever you were doing the planning, initial planning stage? And then did you confirm that with them once the materials came in? No, you didn't. Whose fault's that? It's yours. It's your fault. That is not the, you know, the moron at the material department or the cabinet department that shipped out the wrong stuff. That's not his fault. No, that may be true that he shipped the wrong thing out. It's your fault you didn't catch it before it was installed. It's your fault you didn't double check it before it was installed. I had this problem with my own parents. Parents' bathroom. I remodeled their bathroom one time. And, you know, I had my supplier that was like the lumberyard slash kitchen, you know, supplier, vendor, if you will. The sales lady there was working with my mom. And my mom had two different types of, she was looking at two different types of culture marble tops. Just, you know, basic culture marble, like one gray and different things and a couple different bowl shapes. And they were doing that on their own. Like that, they, you know, I was out of that loop. So we order them stuff. The day comes, get home, install the vanity. We install the countertop. Everything looks beautiful. Everything is great. My mom wasn't home. She didn't get home from work till after 530. We were already gone. I got a call from my mom. Hey, this isn't the right countertop. I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, this isn't the right color. I wanted a different color. And so what happened is that she had originally picked this color and then she changed her mind. And that information was not updated, right? Now, whether it was a salesperson's fault or it was my fault, we can point fingers all day. At the end of the day, the buck stops with me. It's my responsibility. How hard would it have been for me to take a picture of that countertop and the color and send it to my mom as a text message and said, hey, I just want to make sure, is this the right countertop that you picked out? And she could have said, that doesn't look right. And that would have been prevented. Now, you know, a mom being gracious, she's like, no, it's fine. It's okay. I'll live with it. And we didn't change it. But if it was anybody else, any other customer probably would have changed it. We would have ate the labor costs. You know, the vendor may have paid for the countertop or at least return the old one, you know, citing, okay, yeah, that was my fault. But at the very least, we're still paying for the labor. Those things are all avoidable if and only if you have systems in your business. Delayed starts. How many of you have read? Delayed starts. Hey, we're going to start your job next week. Mrs. Smith, we're going to be there Monday morning,730, and we're going to get this thing started. Oh, I can't wait, Brad. I'm so excited. We've been waiting for so long. We're so excited. I know we are too. What happens Friday afternoon? Tell me. What happens Friday afternoon? I'm going to sip my coffee while you tell me. You know what happens. Don't lie. You become a frantic finisher because that job you were going to finish on Friday. is not quite finished. And so you're working till five and then six and then 7 p. m. on Friday evening because we got to get this job done so we can start on Monday, this other job. Right. And then you ruin the whole experience for your clients. They're pissed off. But hey, you got the job done. Let's move on to the next one. Or you're like, well, we can't get it done today. There's no way we got to come back on Monday and finish or Saturday or whatever. But we got to come back on Monday. And so we got to push Mrs. Smith off. Hey, Ms. Smith, we got to finish up a job. No big deal. Take us two hours. We'll be at your house by 10 o 'clock. No problem. We'll be there by 10 to get started. Okay, I understand things happen, Brad. Yeah, no problem. 10 o 'clock, you're still on the job. It's not done yet. You got to call Ms. Smith. Hey, Ms. Smith, we're still running a little bit over. It's probably going to be after lunch. Okay, yeah. One o 'clock comes. Still not quite done. 2.30, you show up to the job site. What do you do? How do you, I mean, what's the point of starting at 2.30? This is all domino effects of you not being organized. You're not planning properly. You're not estimating properly. You're not charging enough. These are all symptoms, right? These are the side effects, if you will, of what's happening. I know I'm speaking directly into you. I know you hear what I say and you're agreeing because, again, I was there. This is where you get the angry customers. You know, you told me you're going to start at 730 and it's 830 and I hear you. Job stacking issues. You got multiple jobs going on, you know, trying to juggle that. I got to send Frank over here. Frank's the only guy that can do drywall and he's got to be at two places at once. And John's the only one that can do tile. And I need to have him on both jobs. That's stuff that happens out of chaos. Lost referrals, bad reviews, stress at home, you know, keeps going. All from one clown balloon. If you're, if the identity that you have is that if I'm not involved in everything, it falls apart, then that's, that is the most clear like sign that you're the problem in your business. If you have to do everything, you are the problem in your business, right? You trained all your people, you hired them, you, you know, you have the processes or lack of, that's you, that's all you. Let me help you with a couple simple systems right here just to get some tactical wins. Just put together a very simple, you know, a weekly truck audit where you just once a week you go through your vehicles and do whatever. If you shoot me a message, email me or text me or whatever, I'll send you my vehicle inventory worksheet. It's very simple. There's nothing complex about it. But I know everybody thinks that, you know, the sheets are going to make everything easier. I will send it to you as an example. Just shoot it to me and I'll send it to you. I'm not going to go through the process of putting up an entire, you know, workflow. And unless you just, if you're interested, send me a message. I will send it to you. Material bins, you know, have, have jobs for, or have bins for jobs. Depending on what you do, obviously you can't have a bin for entire kitchen, right? But if you're doing say gutters, one of my client is a gutter, does gutter installation. They have like vertical racks, you know, where they can take pieces of gutter or if they're, if they're doing like a, Obviously, most of the time they're doing seamless gutters. They have coils. But let's say this job, you know, needs white. They would have a white box or a couple boxes of white coil there and all the elbows and all the components they need. They would pre-stage their jobs in like bins. And each job had its own bin. And so the crews came in the morning. They go to the bin. They grab the job. They grab the paperwork. They got everything they need right there. And they go out. Right. You can systematize that. Communication channels. Like just. You need to have separate communication channels, you know, for production, one for sales, one for client communication. You know, those are the things to work on. Like just identify and figure out these are the channels we're going to use. Some of you, you know, you're using a combination of text, email, Slack, and, you know, company cam to communicate with your team. Like just pick one and then use that. If all you're going to, if you're going to use text, fine, then use text. I used, one thing I used in our business was Marco Polo, which was just like a video recording, you know, messaging service because you can record video. And so if the guys were like, hey, we got a major problem, we can't solve it. They could record a video, I could see it. It also would show receipts, read receipts. So if I send a video to guys like, hey guys, make sure, you know, when you're at the store to pick up this and this and this or whatever, you know, whatever it was, that I could see that they watched the video. They couldn't say, oh, we didn't get the message. I know you got the message because it tells me you got it. So like that was just a simple thing we use. It was called Marco Polo. There's lots of other things. I don't care what it is, but don't have the information spread across multiple channels. Consolidate it into one that works for you. You know, like even using company cam, you can do videos, like do scope videos, walk around, just like you're doing with, you know, in the morning when you're giving them the walkthrough while you're doing the estimate with the customer. and you find out everything they want and you're like, okay, it's going to give me a few minutes. I'm going to, and I got no problem. Let us know when you're done. You go in there, you open your phone, you hit record on your video and you walk through and you say, okay, here's that we're going to take out this tub right here and we're going to make the shower bigger. It's going to be about three feet. Now I don't know the exact dimension. We won't know until we get the wall open, but roughly where this window edge is, is where the wall is going to go. So we need to make sure we figure that out whenever we lay it out. The plumbing is going to be moved over here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can walk through with a video and now your team can just watch the video. They can back it up. What do you say about the wall? Back it up. Oh, he said it needs to be right around here. So we need to take in consideration the trim on the window. Okay, cool. That's pretty simple. That's a system, by the way. And that's all you got to do. Like it doesn't have to be super complex. So here's, again, I know we're running on time, but. Here's some things you can eliminate to help solve some chaos, chaos in your business. One, verbal only instructions. That is a huge, huge no-no. If you can say it, it should be on paper. Or another way I like to say it is if it's not written down, it didn't happen. If it's not documented somewhere, it did not happen. If I tell you we're going to take out this tub and move this wall open verbally and I don't have it written down anywhere else, that conversation did not happen. That's my fault. It's not my employee's fault. It needs to be written down or documented somewhere. Okay. So remove verbal only instructions. Unlimited customer access. This is a big one. Like you can't be open 24 seven for your clients. You have to actually set boundaries. You can state them in the, in the beginning. Hey, so here's, here's a couple of things. A lot of times clients will come home and you know, our clients will come home from work and they see some work and they have questions or they don't understand what's going on. And so it's fresh on their mind. They want to call us or text us right then to figure it out. You know, we respect our employees and we respect our family. So if it's after 5 p. m., we're not going to respond until the next day. But feel free to message and reach out. We're just not going to respond until the next day. If it's a true emergency, as in here's what an emergency is. Your house is flooding right now because a pipe had burst and it's spraying water everywhere. Or your house is on fire currently. Those are emergencies. Please call me. I don't care what time of day it is. Now, if it's at night, I'm probably not going to answer because I'll be sleeping. But if it's a true emergency, please call me. The contractor didn't sweep the floor at the end of the day. That's not an emergency. They left some trash out in the driveway when you got home. That's not an emergency. You tell them this is what an emergency is. These are not emergencies. And then you tell them how you're going to communicate. You're not there to answer their phone and text 24-7. No, screw that. The other thing is letting employees make scope decisions. If you want something done a certain way, you better freaking document it. You better put it in the scope so that there's no decision being made by the employees. Now, if you've trained them and you give them certain latitudes, that's fine. You can do that. But don't let them make decisions because you didn't put enough information in the scope. And then say, don't call me for everything. Brad says, I got to train my employees not to rely on me for everything. Well, if you don't give them enough information, then what do you expect them to do? You're basically setting them up to fail. You can't say, don't call me and then not give them all of the information they need. That doesn't work. And then mental to-do list. Guys, write it down. For God's sake, write it down. Stop trying to operate on memory. When you go to the store and you have a checklist of things you need and then you get back to the job site, you're like, oh, crap. Totally forgot. I needed to grab an extra tub of drywall mud. Don't do that. Write it down. So stupid. I mean, it's really stupid that I have to say that. But again, I did it. I did all of these. Guys, when you fix these things in your business, your jobs will run smoother, your employees stay longer. You get weekends back. Your clients trust you. Your profit increases. And you can finally scale your business. Who doesn't want to do that? If you love chaos, then just keep doing what you're doing. Because you'll find it. Chaos will find you. 100% guarantee. If you don't want that, if you're tired of that, that is what I help contractors do. That's what the Profit Club is all about. That's what we do. We help you figure out, identify what systems to build, fix the communication. We teach effective communication, help you create some clarity in what you want to do. A lot of guys have rebranded. They've niched down. They figured out what they want to do. Now their businesses are blowing up because they did that. We help eliminate the chaos and we help you scale your profits. So if that's something you're interested in, you can always reach out to us. We'll schedule a call, see if you're a good fit for the Profit Club. I'd love to help you. But even if you don't, like just start looking at your business. And here's a very, I'll leave you with this. It's a very simple test. I just actually just heard this today. I think it's a great idea. Turn your phone off for a day during the week. So like tomorrow, you know, maybe you get your jobs out the door and then turn your phone off, like off, and then go fishing or, you know, whatever you do, right? Derb bikes, I don't care. Go shoot guns, watch TV. Whatever it is for the whole day, just turn your phone off. And then the next day when you go in the office, turn on your phone and your computer and whatever is coming at you. That's exactly what's broken in your business. It will be screaming at you. These are the things you need to fix in your business. Guys are calling you. They don't know where the materials are at. Guys are calling you. They don't know, you know, they can't get into the job or they don't have the right address. This is happening and this is happening and this and this and this and this and this and all these things and chaos is created in just one day. It will show you exactly what's broken in your business. Now, most of you won't do that because you're scared shitless because you know that you're everything's going to fall apart. And if that's you, you got some serious work to do and you need to start sooner than later or you're going to be so consumed and overwhelmed that you're either going to have a stroke. You're going to start. becoming an alcoholic, you're going to get divorced, or you're going to do something even worse that's permanent. That's where that leads to. It does not get better on its own. It only gets worse. It only gets worse. You have to stop and do this now. That's the end of the show, guys. I hope this was a wake-up call. I hope there's some value here. I mean, I really truly do. I've lived this. This was, you know, for many, many years of my business, I lived through all of this. And it took hiring a business coach for myself. to finally see what's going on. And now that's why I do that for others because it changed my business completely. And I wish that for you as well. So even if it's not me, go get help somewhere. You can't do this on your own. It's not going to solve itself on its own, I promise you. And you're going to wake up one day and you're just going to hate life. And if you're already hating life, then you need to make decisions extremely quick, like in the next week kind of quick. I'm here to help you. All you got to do is reach out. All right. You know where you find me on the socials, guys? Just search for the Hammer Grind Podcast. Go to the show notes. You can get links there. And yeah, like always, until next time, remember, profit is not a dirty word.