Businesses rarely fail overnight. They fail slowly, then suddenly. Hey, welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Brad, and today we're talking about how to spot a contracting business that's going out of business before they even know it. So we're going to go through, and while we do this, you're going to take a little bit of a scorecard of some of these issues and, and at the end, we'll add them up and see where you're at in your business. Hopefully, if you've been listening to the podcast, you've been implementing like crazy and your business is going gangbusters. But in case you're new here, this might be a good, you know, good test to go through. So this idea that, you know, most contractors wake up one day and they're out of business is not really what happens. It happens at a very slow rate. In the beginning, there's little bitty profit leaks here and there. There's little issues here and there, and they keep building and building and building until suddenly you go out of business. But it's not something that just happens overnight. You're not killing it one day, and then the next day you're out of business. Obviously, that can happen. There are some, you know, exceptions to that. But for the overwhelming majority of businesses that go out of business, that is not the case. It happens very slowly. And, and I've said this before, your business wants to talk to you. Your business will tell you what's going on. It's just one, we're not trained in the language of the business, or two, we just straight up ignore it. We know what's going on. We have this pulse of something's not right, but we choose to ignore it because we just, I gotta get this job done. I just gotta get this job done. We almost barrier ahead and hope that it somehow fixes itself, and it never does. So here we go. Here's the three stages of business failure. Now, they don't necessarily happen in this order, but these are just three different stages that a business can go through. There's financial failure, right? Obviously, just the numbers stop working. You don't, you don't have. Have enough money to stay in business. There's operational failure, where, from a, from the, the operational perspective, the owner is the bottleneck. In other words, you're still on the tools, Everyone still relies on you. And so the business basically crashes into itself because you're the bottleneck. And then mental failure. And that's where, when things get really bad, you let fear start driving your Decisions that you make in your business. It's easy to make tough decisions when you're, when you got lots of money and everything's going great. When things start failing and you have to make tough decisions, that's when fear starts to really amplify the issues and you start making even worse decisions. I had a launch call today with a new client. And you know, this is not, this is very common. This is very common where it's like, you know, I really, I, I know what I need to do. I just, you know, I need to do it. That's usually the case. Like, usually deep down inside, if we would just listen to ourselves, we know what we need to do, but we just, we hope that gut feeling that we have is wrong. We hope it's wrong and somehow it's just going to go away. It doesn't. So here we go. Stage one, financial failure. Here's some warning signs. So you keep track of how many of these you have, and then we'll add them up at the end. Warning signs. You judge your business by your bank account. You do bank account finance or bank account accounting, or you just look at your bank account and see how much money in there and then that's how you decide if you're doing well or not. Usually that's the case. You don't know your gross profit. No. If I told you right now, what's your, what's your average gross profit? Or at least on the last job you did, what was your gross profit on that job? You don't know your net profit. You don't even know how much the business is actually making. Right. You don't know. You don't know that number. You aren't job costing at all. You haven't ever job cost a job. You're always short on cash. Despite being busy, despite selling big jobs, you're still for some reason always short on cash. And every month feels almost like Groundhog Day where you're starting over. You get to the end of the month, you think you had a great month, and then you look at the bank account again. You just look at the bank account and there's hardly any money in there. And you're like, where's all the money going? If you've ever asked yourself, where is all the money going? That's a clear indicator that you don't have any strong graphs of your finances. And you need to start like right away. This is one of the most important things you have to know in your business is the finances. You have to know your Numbers, you have to know your finances. It's. It's critical. This is like a heartbeat. If you don't have a heartbeat, you're dead. If you don't know the heartbeat of your business, you're dead. Right? The business is dead. So you have to know this. So those are the warning signs. You judge your business by the bank account. You don't know your gross profit. You don't know your net profit. You aren't job costing. You're always short on cash despite being busy. And every month feels like you're starting over. All right, so those are the ones that you're. Those are the warning signs. Here's what you need to understand, too, because the contract. This is any business, any industry, any business is. This is a plague of what happens. And that is we all boast about topline revenue. It's all about topline revenue. You know, I built a $10 million business. I built a $200 million business. I did this, this, this, and this. But if you actually dig into the numbers, they're not that impressive. Most of the time, they're not that impressive. So, like, you have to be really careful. The. The revenue is for vanity. Guys, whenever I talk to the contractor, like, oh, we're doing 2 million. We're doing, you know, 800,000. We're doing 8 million. I don't really care. Like, I truly don't care about your revenue. The number that I always ask and want to know the most about is actually gross profit. Now, you would say net profit is probably more important, and it is. But the single biggest number that tells me whether or not you have a healthy business without knowing anything else about your business is what your gross profit percentage is. What's your average gross profit? That gives me more information than anything else. So revenue is for vanity, profit is for sanity, Right? Or we say profit is for reality. And cash flow can lie. It can. Cash flow can actually lie to you. So you have to really be careful and track what your numbers are doing. If you haven't listened to the podcast I did on the5.5 bank accounts, you should have, like, how to manage cash flow. There's a couple good ones. Maybe we can link them and the video, you know, maybe in the video we can put some links here or. Or maybe flash the numbers here. Otherwise we can put them in the show notes. Just the videos that are around the cash flow or having the different bank accounts. Those are good ones to go listen to or watch. So these are three numbers you need to know every month. And by the way, this is like basic. This is know your numbers 101. This isn't advanced. This isn't, you know, advanced calculus or whatever. This is just like math, one on one, one plus one equals two kind of stuff. You need to know your gross profit percentage on all your jobs, your net profit percentage and your what your cash reserves are. How much money do you have in the. In reserve for that month? The cash reserves helps you forecast the next month, right? Or the next quarter. So if you, you know, if you have $30,000 cash reserve, meaning that's, that's true money that you own and you don't have bills going out against that, then you know how you set up for the next month, right? If you have $25,000 in overhead, well, then you're only going. And you, you don't sell anything and you don't collect anything. You're going to make it through the month, but you're only going to have 5k left over, right? So having a cash flow or cash reserves, that's important to know. And healthy businesses are always increasing their cash reserve. So by the way, cash flow and cash reserves are not the same thing. You know, cash reserves is like how much money does the, does the business have? I call it the emergency fund, operating expenses, right? So that's that your cash flow is just like, how much money do we have coming in and going out? So stage two, this is operational failure. Here's the warning signs. Every decision goes through you. Every estimate depends on you. Employees constantly interrupt you. And I mean, like when you're talking, they're just interrupting you throughout the day. Customers only want to deal with you. You can't take a vacation, or at least not an extended one. And if you're gone for two weeks, the business stops. Those are some indicators from an operational failure. Now you could have, you could be making a lot of money. Like financially you're doing well, but operationally you're failing because it relies too much on you. And so you know when you have these things going on and operationally you're failing, you're not building the business. You just built a job for yourself. That's all you did. It's no different than working for your old boss. It's just now, whenever you do something wrong, you make less money, right? Before, when you work for someone else, you made a mistake. Oh well, the boss pays for it. You still get to keep your job. Now when you make a mistake, it costs you big, right? So the stakes are higher. That's another reason why you need to charge more. Like, I can give you a thousand reasons why you need to charge more, but that's just one right there, is that you need to be able to have money. Whenever you make mistakes, it's going to happen. It's definitely going to happen. All right? Freedom doesn't come from working harder, it comes from building systems. Freedom doesn't come from working harder, it comes from building systems. You have to systematize your business. So that includes you have to start documenting things that are going on. You need to document your sales process, your estimating process, your production process, your customer communication process, your office processes, and there's lots of others, but those are kind of the main ones. Systems create the road that freedom walks on. Remember that? Your systems create the freedom. I'm sorry, Create the road that freedom walks on. So if you want to have freedom in your business, the systems are what create that road for you. So if you're stuck on the tools and you don't know how to get off of them, you got to start building that road through systems. Right? This idea, like, I'm going to hire someone that is going to think just like me, that's living in fairy tale land. That's not reality. That's not how it works. You don't just hire someone that knows how to do the job and they do it and you don't have to explain or tell them anything. No. That's why most of you struggle, because you think you're just going to hire someone who thinks the exact same way you do and you just hire them. And then on day one, here's how you onboard them. Hey, tomorrow, the first day, I just want you to show up at this job site and we'll get started. That's your, that should be a warning sign. If that's your onboarding process, you're in big trouble. Right? Like, there is no onboarding process. It's like, hey, just start tomorrow, 8 o', clock, we're going to get you going on the job because I quote, need to make money. And I just really want to get off the job so bad, off the tool so bad. So I'm just going to put someone in there and I can, you know, step away. Funny story, I remember the first, not the first time, but I, I had, I hired a couple different people, like part time or helpers. But the first time I hired someone like as a replacement for me on the tools, he didn't have a whole lot of experience. He had some. And that day we were installing some Doors, interior doors. It wasn't super complicated, you know, I mean, like an entry level carpenter, trim, carpenter could do this. And I said, okay, here's what we got. We got all these doors. I went over there, met with them, you know, that morning we showed up, I said, here's all we're doing, replacing these doors, blah, blah, blah. He's like, cool, no problem. And I went home and watched tv. I watched TV because I thought I was like, man, this is. This is the life right here. This is what it means to have employees that know what they're doing. And I even. I think I watched a movie, actually, like two hours. I just watched a movie. I was like, well, it's getting close in the day, like 3 o' clock or something. Better go check on them. I go over there and check on him. And basically, he had done every door wrong. So that little reprieve of, like, this is what it's. This is what it's like. This is what it must be like to have people. Was actually just shooting myself in the foot because we had to go back and redo most of it and end up taking longer. And I lost, you know, lost money on the job. So just share that story, because I'm not immune to that. This idea, freedom doesn't come from working harder. It comes from building systems. And so systems create the road that freedom walks on. Okay, stage three, moving right along. This is mental failure. And again, you could be doing well in business. I have clients that come to me that are doing extremely well in business that most people would be jealous at, but mentally, they're almost depleted, or even emotionally. I mean, we can put those two together, but emotionally they're depleted. Or mentally they're depleted. I have one client, one time that was a. Did landscaping, and he had a very successful business, meaning he. He was paying himself about $300,000 a year, and he was doing well. However, his sales process was him running out and doing free estimates for every single job that came in. And so he would work 60, 70, 80 hours a week, not on the tools, but on going out and doing free estimates. These estimates that would take six, seven hours to put together. And so all we did for him was just install the profit sales system so that he could actually start selling using a system and then charge for consultations. Right, Charge for estimates. And once he implemented that, I remember we got a text from him and he said, I'll be forever grateful because for, like the first time in whatever it was, two or three, four years, I took Friday off, and I went and got to spend it with my kids. And that for him, that was the victory. That was the freedom that he needed. Well, he didn't need more money. He didn't need, quote, a better business or, you know, a more profitable business. He just wanted time, freedom, so he could spend it with his family that he was missing out on. So everyone's, you know, everyone's needs are different, but still, there's a. From the mental perspective, you know, there's emotional, there's. This just all ties into the mental side of it, right? All of these different things. So warning signs. You avoid raising prices. You stop marketing because you're busy. That should be like, 95 of you. I know. Trust me, I know you guys. I know. I know. If you're listening, as I know you, I know you. You say yes to every job. You're afraid to hire, you're afraid to fire, and you make decisions based on fear instead of facts. Now, this is the mental side of it, the mindset side of it is one of the most important things we do in the profit club, where when contractors come in, usually I have to kind of, like, rewire the way they think about stuff. And, you know, it helps when you have a bunch of other contractors, your peers, that are in agreeance of like, yeah, you need to do this. You should stop doing this. We had one recently where a. One of my clients was like, hey, I had a, you know, a talented, skilled guy that left. He just abruptly left one day. No, two weeks notice, nothing. And then, you know, last night I got this. This text from who? And he was like, hey, I screwed up. You know, this is why I did it. I'm not making excuses. You know, I totally own it. I did you wrong. Like, you know, fully taking responsibility. And he was asking for his job back. And so some people, myself included, would want to be like, nah, screw you, man. Like, no, you did me dirty. I'm not bringing you back. Right? But if you actually peel back some of the onions, the layers of the onions. Not onions. Layers of the onions, you start to get a little bit more information, and then the information starts to change your thoughts or feelings about this. And so ultimately, we advised. I say we, because myself and the rest of the group, because we have group conversations around this. We have chat, you know, Chat. Chat channels around these things, and we advise them that, you know, hire him back, go ahead and give him a chance. I mean, have a conversation first. But if you feel good about it, then go ahead and bring it back on the next part of that question, or the thought was, well, I was thinking about starting them out at a lower rate than what he was. Kind of like, you got to earn your way back. And my response to that was, don't do that. You shouldn't. You're. You're not going to punish him or teach him a lesson by doing that. If he left in the first place because of money and then you're going to charge less money, then that's not going to help the situation any. Right? And yes, we can say, like, money's not everything, but it is, obviously for employees, it's a big deal. You know, getting paid 30 bucks an hour versus 35 bucks an hour is a big deal for a lot of these guys. Hey, just a quick 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 it 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. And so we advise them to, you know, keep them at the same rate. The only exception is, like, if he was a lead guy, he quit and then you hired another lead guy. Well, then he doesn't get to come back and be a lead guy and have his old position back because that position's filled. In this case, it wasn't filled, but there's obviously some circumstances around that. So talk to him today because it's just happened this week. I talked to him today and he said I did, I did bring him back on and I did pay him. When I, when he was getting paid, when he left, he goes, I even, he, he even told me this employee told him, I figured I was probably going, you were going to pay me less and I was going to accept it so, because he got his old payback, do you think as an employee, he's going to be more excited, more wanting to, you know, be loyal now? Because he. He screwed him the first time, and then the boss gave him a second chance. He's going to be. He's going to work 10 times harder because not only did you bring him back, but you actually kept paying him at the same rate. You can't make those kind of decisions when you're living in fear. Well, Brad, you know, money's a little tight right now, and he did me dirty, so I'm going to teach him a lesson and start him out low. No, that's all. That's all emotional response. That's why whenever you. When you make decisions based in fear, not facts, you usually make the wrong decision. So anytime guys will call me. I get, you know, when we get the. The emergency, the shit's falling apart, should hit the fan. Calls, messages from people from my clients, and I got to kind of talk them off the ledge a little bit. I usually ask, say, well, what's the data say? Well, I don't know. I haven't really looked at all the different things I say. Well, just, you know, tell me what you got. What do you know? What do you know to be true about the situation? Well, this, this, this, this, and this. Okay, what do you don't know about the situation? Well, I don't know. This or this or this or this. Okay, so those things that you don't know could have a major impact on your decision. So the first thing you got to do is go find out what those things are. You don't know. You can't make a decision until you get more information. I tell my clients all the time, like, your job is to be a data scientist. As a leader, you have to be a data scientist. Meaning you're just collecting data. Emotional data, financial data, all kinds of data. You're just collecting data in order to make decisions. Sometimes you have to make a decision without having enough data, but you have to collect as much as you can. When we respond on emotions, then usually fear gets the best of us. Fear or anger gets the best of us. So you make decisions based on fear instead of facts. Like, that was a little tangent, but I think it's important to point that out. So your business follows your thinking, right? When you're small, the way you think, the way you act, the way you talk, your business is like a. You know, it carries that way of thinking. That's why culture is so important. But when you're fearful, fear creates. You know, things like underpricing, poor hiring, bad customers, inconsistent marketing, stagnation. These are types of things that fear creates. I don't know if I should make a decision. I had another client who I've talked about before, his lead guy recently was not just like started. I mean, he was doing awesome. Like his lead guys is kicking butt for, you know, over a year or so. And then all of a sudden he just falls apart. And so he ends up leaving, quitting, slash getting fired or whatever. He left. And my client was like, I don't, I was kind of freaking out, right. I guess I'm gonna have to go back on the tools. But in reality, what that, what that, what happened was new opportunities, new doors, new ways of looking at your business were opened. For him right now, the possibility of doing more subs versus in house employees became a real possibility. But when you had in house employees, it was all focused on keeping them busy. He spent a ton of money on, on paying for his, his guys when they were slow because he didn't want to lose them. Right? And so I'm not saying don't do right by your employees, you should. But sometimes losing an employee, having that happen actually is a good thing because it gives you fresh ideas of fresh ways of thinking about it. Right? So that's where some of that stagnation happens, where it's like, well, this is just how we've been doing it. You know, everything's going along great. Everything, you know, everything's trucking. Everything seems to be going down, doing most of the work still, but we have a process. Everything seems to be going, I'm not going to rock the boat, I'm not going to hire someone, I'm not going to fire someone, I'm not going to pay for marketing, blah, blah, blah. That's the stagnation side of it. If you, if you look, everything in the, in nature, I mean, everything that's alive has to, has to be fed. If it's not fed, it dies. Animals, plants, humans, everything, everything that's alive has to be fed something, whether it's sun, water, food, whatever, has to be fed, constantly being be fed to stay alive. Your business is a living organism, so you constantly have to feed it. You can't say, oh, I'm big enough, I don't want to get any bigger now and then, just shut the doors there because eventually you will go out of business. You have to keep growing in some capacity. I'm not saying you got to grow in like how many employees you have. But you can grow by charging more, right? You can grow by investing in systems. You can, there's lots of things you can do. But you can't just say, oh, this is where I want to be at, I want to grow anymore. Because you just cut off the food supply to your business. So that's where the stagnation part of it is. So ask yourself this. Am I making this decision because it's smart based on facts or because I'm scared? Am I making a decision based on fear? Am I making a decision based on fear? Or am I making it because it's the smart decision based on facts? I've told a story about one time I had. It was just like all in one month. I lost a helper and two lead guys in the same month. But the, the second lead guy I actually fired and I knew that like once I fire him, I'm going to have to go back on the tools because I've wiped out my entire, you know, foreman team, production team basically. But the cost of keeping him on was higher than firing them and going through the pain of having to find a new lead guy, find two new lead guys and go through that process. And so I made that tough decision no matter what, even though I didn't want to. I made that decision because that was the right decision based on the data. Yes, it sucked for a short period of time after that, but that was the right decision. You know, some of you like, well, I can't fire my lead guy. This was another conversation I had this week. This week was a week of lots of conversations about people struggling. Another contractor who's in my profit accelerator program which is, you know, 97amonth program. It's a kind of an entry level program, but ton of value. It's. I could charge 300 easily. But anyways, one of the guys in there has an employee who is kind of a helper. But he's, he's like a smart helper, if you know what I mean. Like he, he can figure some things out and he's, he's a good worker, but he doesn't know how to do everything. And because of that, this particular contractor was sending him out on his own jobs of things that he really couldn't do by himself. And then the helper was just calling him like all day and essentially the contractor who would have to like talk him through how to do everything while he's trying to do his own jobs. That's a service type business. And on top of that, on Top of like him having to explain everything. He wouldn't show up to like 9 or 10 o' clock in the morning. He had, he had kids and he had to give him to school and all that. And, you know, this particular owner was just too nice, right? He's like, oh, I got a helper, I need a helper. He's a good guy. He didn't come until later, but I can work with that because I really need help. He was too scared to let him go, right? And I said, well, you need to have a, you know, have a heart to heart with him. Say, hey, look, you're have to start coming in at whatever time, 8 o', clock, 9 o', clock, whatever it was. And the guy's like, okay, I'll try. And like the next day he came in, you know, 30 minutes late. And then a week later when we had this conversation, he's like, well, he's, he's back to coming in at 10 o'. Clock. And so there's data. This is the data. He's not showing up whenever he's supposed to. You told him it's a requirement. He's ignoring that. He doesn't respect you enough to follow that, right? And so he gets fired. Let him go. His response was, yeah, but I got this big job I got to do and I need help. I can't fire him. That's operating out of fear. You can fire him. I said, do you know anybody else in your trade that locally that you know that you could just have them come and help you? Yeah, I may know a couple, one or two people. I said, okay, then there you go. All you do is need help, you know, with the first part of it, and then you can finish it up yourself, right? Yeah, I just need help with the first part. That's it then, man, just call one of your buddies who owns a business, say, hey, I need you for two hours. I'll give you 500 bucks or whatever it takes, come over and help me and then I can finish this job. That right there is not a reason to keep a bad employee. It's not. So living in fear is going to keep you stuck. Being afraid to make a tough decision is what keeps people stuck. And then that becomes a leech in your business and it just sucks the blood out of you. To become a cancer, you have to cut the cancer off before it spreads. I had a. I've told a story before. Whenever. One time I was hiring for a lead guy. I had three guys from the same company apply for this job. Not only were they in the same company, but they were all on the same team. So there was. There's three guys on a team, like, because they had like different teams for what they were doing. And all three of them on the same team applied. Now this team that was working for this company was making the company a crap ton of money because they were in type of business where there's lots of high profit margins. But what happened is the owner had brought in a production manager who thought he was going to help. And this production manager only cared about the numbers, right? Didn't care about his team and started creating ridiculous timelines and metrics to try and match, which were not just what you couldn't do, nobody could do. And all three of these guys went to the owner and complained and said, hey, your new production manager is not, you know, he's causing problems. You know, it's going to be an issue. But the owner didn't listen to them because the production manager was making him more money. He saw an increase in production because of the production manager, right? Which is going to happen because initially people are going to be like, oh crap, I don't want to lose my job, so I'm going to work harder. So yeah, you're getting more production out of them, but you're not getting more production at a. That is, what's the word? At a consistent rate that you can actually do, right? Like you can't just work 12 hours a day, every day, forever. And that's just the normal. Right? That's kind of what was happening. Like they were having to work longer hours and they got paid by the job. They didn't get paid by the hour. He had a pay for performance type of payment system. And so they had to work harder and longer to just maintain where they were before. And it wasn't worth it. That owner didn't want to get all the facts. He got some of the facts and he didn't make it. He made a decision based on emotion, not on real data. Ultimately, after I had interviewed these guys, I didn't hire any of my. I offered a job to, I think two of them maybe, and neither one of them took it. I think they went somewhere else. But all three of those guys moved on to a different job. So this owner lost a whole team because of one person and he didn't collect the right data. So here's the, here's the test. I told you guys to count how many warning signs. I'm going to go through them all real quick just so this is. I want you to count these. Now, if this applies to you, count it. Stage one, financial failure warning sign. You judge your business by your bank account. You don't know your gross profit. You don't know your net profit. You aren't job costing any jobs. You're always short on cash despite being busy. Every month feels like you're starting over. That's the financial warning signs. Stage two, operational warning signs. Every decision goes through you. Every estimate depends on you. Employees constantly interrupt you. Customers only want to deal with you. You can't take a vacation. If you're gone for two weeks, the business stops. Stage three, mental warning signs. You avoid raising prices. You stop marketing because you're busy. You say yes to every job. You're afraid to hire, you're afraid to fire. You make decisions based on fear instead of facts. Those are the warning signs. So count them up. How many do you do? So here we go. Self assessment. If you get 0 to 2 warning signs, you're in good shape. Nothing to worry about. If you got 3 to 5 warning signs, it's time to start making some changes, guys. And if you're over 6, you're on a dangerous path. If nothing changes now, everything can change in a short period of time. But you have to be willing to make changes. And I can tell you right now that as the owner of a business, you will always be the problem and the bottleneck. So if you want to point fingers at other people, that's a. That's like the biggest warning sign of all. You need to take ownership of everything that happens in your business. And if you don't, then you're just ignoring all these warning signs. So that's it? That's your, that's your little self assessment again? Remember, businesses rarely fail overnight. They fail slowly, then suddenly. So during that slow period, whenever the business is trying to give you warning signs and you're ignoring them, then they build. And then one day you do wake up and you're out of business. Right? You can't make payroll one day. You know, client doesn't pay you that $20,000 they owe you, you're out of business. But that's not the reason you went out of business. That's what you tell everybody. All clients screwed me. You won't, you won't tell anybody that you didn't have a good process set up. You didn't have a good payment schedule set up. You didn't even follow your own payment schedule. You won't tell anybody that stuff. You just tell everybody that the, you know, client didn't pay you and you went out of business. That's just a symptom. If client doesn't pay you, that's a symptom. So the good news here, I'm going to leave you on the good news. If you recognize these warning signs and you actually say, oh, crap, I need to make some changes, and then you actually start making changes, you can turn it around. It's not that hard. You can just start implementing some changes. But I tell you right now, why most people won't make changes is because they say they don't have enough time. But I don't have enough time. I'm already working 40 hours a week on the job, 20 hours doing sales and marketing. I just don't have time. It's. That's not true. Right? You have a priority problem because you're not prioritizing things, right? Or you have a control problem, meaning you think you have to do all this work, when in reality you don't actually have to do all that work. And that's a control problem. Right? Perfectionism. It's a you problem. I'm trying to say, ultimately, it's still your problem. So you. Because. Because you're the bottleneck in your business, you can also be the corkscrew, right? I don't know if that makes sense. You can unscrew the cork that's stopping your bottle, right? The bottleneck. Does it make sense? I don't know. I just made it up. You can be the person that saves your own business as long as you recognize that you're the problem person. You're the person causing all the problems. All right, that's all I got, guys. Thanks for hanging out. Remember, I got the new. The new website. You can go get lots of information. Hammer Grind Podcast. You can leave me a voicemail there. Let me know what topics you want to hear about. Let me know your thoughts on stuff. You know any contractors? If you're a contractor, you can also sign up on the website to be a guest. That's another feature added. So if you are interested in being on the podcast, you can go right to the website and sign up to be a guest and we'll reach out to you and see if it's. If it's going to be a good fit, if it makes sense. More than likely it will. But yeah, it's all there. Hammergrain. Podcast.com. and I appreciate you guys hanging out with me. Remember, till next time, profit is not a dirty word.
