Episode•October 12, 2026•36 min

EP292: Why Contractors Keep Facing the Same Problems and How to Fix it Once

Why do contractors keep facing the same problems, even after they've tried to fix them? Brad breaks down why so many contractors become trapped in a cycle of constant firefighting, trying to run their businesses out of their heads, and struggling to get their teams to work independently. Without documented processes, clear standards, and repeatable systems, business growth can create even more chaos. In this episode, Brad talks about: Why contractors keep solving the same business problems The difference between fixing symptoms and solving root causes How job costing reveals problems that hurt profitability When to create SOPs, checklists, rules, and automated processes How poor communication and handoffs create recurring mistakes Why contractors need to stop being the solution to everything How to empower employees to think critically and solve problems Why you should prioritize major problems before smaller ones How to build a process-driven construction business How solving one recurring problem each week can transform your business If you're tired of constantly putting out fires, working long hours, and answering every question your team brings to you, this episode will help you start building a business that runs on systems instead of depending on you for every solution. Links to resources Join our new community on Skool: https://www.contractorprofitblueprint.skool.com Get your free ebook and labor burden worksheet for the first 100 sign-ups! Grab my free job costing worksheet and start job costing every job right away. https://go.hammercrm.com/widget/form/4Bws6E9GGX0RZPoED1bn Want to go deeper? Check out the Contractor Profit Blueprint: https://www.thecontractorprofitblueprint.com/ Book a strategy call with Brad: https://hammerandgrind.com/qualification-website Enjoying the podcast? Visit our website at https://www.hammerandgrindpodcast.com for the latest episodes, resources, and more. Have a question, story, or topic you'd like us to cover? Leave us a message here: https://www.hammerandgrindpodcast.com/voicemail. We'd love to hear from you, and your message could be featured on a future episode! 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

0:02

If you solve a problem today and then next week you have to solve the exact same problem, you didn't actually solve the problem. All you did was fix the symptom. As business owners, we get really good at putting out fires, but eventually we have to figure out why the damn thing keeps catching on fire. Today we're going to talk about how to stop solving the same problems over and over and start fixing them for good. Hey, welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Brad Hebner. I'm a licensed general contractor, author of the Contract Your Profit Blueprint, and business coach to overwhelmed and stuck contractors who want to boost their profits and regain their freedoms by showing them how to charge what they're worth. So you've had the same problem over and over again in your business, and you become that firefighter. And I've talked again, I've talked before about, you know, you're not only the firefighter, but you're also the arsonist. Sometimes we don't know what we're actually setting on fire in our business. And sometimes things don't happen all the time frequently. So we have a problem that happens today, we solve it, and then maybe that problem doesn't happen again for two weeks, two months, maybe even two years, but it's a problem that comes back up. And we never really solved it the first time. We just solved the symptoms. So the first thing we have to do is we have to make sure that we're not just fixing symptoms of bigger problems in our business, right? Owners are great firefighters, but uh the fires keep coming back. And so we just constantly are doing that over and over and over again. And if you scale your business under this chaotic business model that you have now, it's only going to get worse. Like if you have three employees and you're like stressed out all the time, if you grow that, it's going to be exponentially worse, right? Because what happens is as business owners, we typically grow our business to the scalability or to the size of what we're capable of running out of our head. We don't actually develop systems, we don't develop processes, we don't have uh repeatable things that we can do in our business. We don't have standards, we have preferences, right? And so what happens is we're just on a regular basis trying to run our business out of our head. We try to hire people that can read our mind, then we get frustrated because they can't read our mind, and then we're stressed out all the time. You should be nodding your head right now because I know that's a lot of you, right? And I've recently just done two different on-site audits for two different, completely different types of contracting businesses. And it's the same situation in both businesses. And this is the same common thread amongst almost every contracting business that I work with, every contractor that I work with, this is a recurring theme. And that is you're not going to just hire people that's going to work on common sense. You have to document, you have to have a process. It's a non-negotiable. Your business will not work without it. And that's why most of you are stressed out because you haven't taken the time to do that. Well, but I don't have time because I'm putting out fires all the time. I get it. You're going to have to make either some sacrifices of personal time, or you're going to have to take an income cut, meaning not be able to work and fix the things in your business. It's far better for you to stop work for a week and build out 90% of your processes in one week than to keep working and trying to fix these problems within a 10-minute window that you have free time between leaving the job site and driving to the next job site. You're never going to fix your business that way. So if you're not going to stop and take time to implement, that means you have to do it on off time. You have to do it on your owner time, which means you're going to have to make some sacrifices. That's just how it is, guys. You either, if you didn't do it in the beginning when you were slow and you had time, now you have to pay for it with interest by losing money, stopping your business, or taking time away from your free time and your family. That's the only way. That's it. Or pay somebody an absorbent amount to come in and do it all for you. And most people that I talk to can't afford that, right? And I'm talking like $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 to have someone come in and basically document your business for you. Uh most people that I know don't have that kind of money available to do that. Because most of these problems happen from uh owner operators who don't understand how to how to build a process-driven business. And so they're small, which means they have lower revenue or lower profit margins, so they can't afford to reinvest in their business. And the people that do have good profit margins got there because they built the processes, so they really don't need to hire someone. It's a catch-22. You're the only one who can solve this. You have to put on your big boy pants and actually invest the time in your business. All right. Why does this happen? This is the question you should be asking. By the way, if you simply job cost, I've I've said this, I've probably said the word job costing over 500,000 times now. If you simply job cost, it will tell you what you need to fix in your business. That's it. It's the simplest thing you can possibly do. Just job costs. Why people don't do it, I don't know. All you got to do is job costs, and literally it will tell you what's wrong in your business. I don't have time, Brad. Yes, you do. You absolutely have time. You know how I know you have time? Because you wasted an hour going and picking up materials yourself when you shouldn't have been doing it. That's one hour of time you had to job cost. When people say they don't have time, that's a complete bullshit lie. They don't know how to prioritize their business. Everyone has time. Everyone. We use it loosely. Oh, I don't have time to do it. Yes, you do. You you don't have a you have a priority problem. You don't have a time problem, you have a priority problem. All right, I digress. Whenever something happens, you you just ask, why does this happen? What's causing this to happen? Right? Now, here's an important, here's here's something really, really important. One of the uh onslaught audits I did, there were things that were happening at like different levels of the business, right? There was miscommunication, there was uh problems that were happening. When you're trying to fix your business, quote, fix your business, you can't come at it as a dictator and you're going to from the rooftops, you know, tell everyone what to do and and and just like crack the whip. You have to approach this from a crowdsourcing mentality, meaning the the guy that just started last week, who's a laborer and the owner or the highest paid position are equal in terms of intellectually uh capable of adding to the problem solving. So when you pr when you approach it from what are you doing wrong, you know, what did you do wrong? Why did you do this? Why did you let it happen? Two, what caused this to happen? You're you're removing the blaming of a person who may or may not be responsible. It could be one person causing the problem. But if you approach it from a let's crowdsource this problem or the solution for the problem, instead of what did you do wrong? I need to fix you, right? It's gonna change the environment. Now, sometimes if you have a, if you've let a toxic environment, your business grow, you're gonna have to like control that first. It's gonna take a little bit of time. People are maybe not gonna believe you on at face value the first time you say, hey, let's solve this together, everyone's here to, you know, do better. If in the past you've been condescending and like, you know, yelling at them and getting pissed off for no reason, you're gonna have to like backtrack and solve and maybe even repair some of those relationships before they take you serious. Just letting you know that. Once you get everyone on board in your business to approach all problems as the problem itself, whatever that is, is the bad guy, and no one person is the bad guy, it's gonna make solving the problem much, much easier. And if there is, you know, key people that are causing the problems, they will on their own realize they're the ones causing the problem. Most people know when they're doing things wrong. Most people know when they're slacking, right? Most people know when they made mistakes. You don't need to call them out in order to like, you know, give them a come to Jesus moment. Like you don't need to do that. They already know. So if you blame the situation, they will a lot of times uh align themselves privately. Like they will take care of it themselves. You kind of give them a little bit of a breadcrumb of like, hey, you know, I'm not gonna call you out, but they know, and probably everyone else around them knows who made the problem or who's causing the problem. You don't have to call them out, is what I'm saying. So blame the problem as the villain, villain. Don't make a person the villain you're in your situation. So here's some examples. You know, materials are missing, there's uh late estimates, getting estimates out, callbacks, missed follow-ups. You know, find the root cause. And the root cause, you could have a production problem, and the root cause is actually a salesman, like a sales problem. It's very easy to say, like, oh, it's a production problem. That means the production team is sucking. Not necessarily. The sales team could be sucking, could be causing the problem. You have distinct handoffs, you know, depending on the size of your company and who you have. You may have a salesperson who hands off to a designer who hands off to a project manager who hands off to a uh lead guy or production, right? If you're the owner and then you you're the project manager, salesman estimator, and you have uh uh you know people that are working, it may just be the owner handing off to the field, the lead guy. There may only be one handoff. And what you have to understand is as your company grows, and the more handoffs that you have in that process, it's like the game telephone, where you start and you say something, and by the end of 10 people, they're they're repeating something completely different. That happens in bigger organizations. That means that in the very first handoff, you almost have to over-communicate. You have to have too much information because some information is going to dwindle as the handoffs happen, right? So you have to make sure that key information is there on the first handoff so that it stays there at the end. If you put very basic, very generalized information at the first handoff, then it's going to get way worse by the time it gets to production. So you got to figure out what's the root cause behind the actual problem. That's number one, right? We've got to fix the problem behind the problem because it's almost never face value. I did this audit with the company. And, you know, a lot of times I'm talking to the owner ahead of time and I get there. I have some preconceived notions of what may be causing it, but I never let that, you know, uh cloud my judgment. I always go in completely open-minded. I always want to talk to every single person that I can, maybe not one-on-one, but I want to talk to salespeople, I want to talk to designers, I want to talk to the owner, I want to talk to GMs, I want to talk to project managers, I want to talk to production, whoever, I want to talk to these different people groups, uh, or people, if you know, depending on how many there are, and get everyone's take. And what's interesting is that as we do this, as I'm like tracking down where the, you know, where the problems are originating or where there is a fall-off in the understanding, it's interesting that it always shows up in different places than what I initially may have thought. Now, again, I don't, I don't go in there and like use that to, you know, have bias towards anyone in the company, but I do formulate like an initial impression. A lot of times as I go through and interview people, that changes. I'm like, well, I got that wrong. I thought so-and-so was just not a good employee. Turns out he didn't have the right tools he needed, or he didn't have the right information, or the right training, or whatever it might be, so-and-so didn't have the right thing, right? And so it's very can it's very deceiving when you're at the top and you're looking down at your business to be able to like point fingers at where it stops, not realizing that you're the one at the top of the hill that pushed the little rock, right? You had a little boulder, you push it over the edge, and as it went down, it got bigger and bigger and bigger. Maybe a snowball. Maybe a snowball is a better term. You had a little snowball, you push it over. Maybe accidentally you kicked it with your foot, and as it starts going down, the hill gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It's easy to blame the bottom of the hill production to say they're screwing stuff up. That's not to say that they're not screwing stuff up. I'm just saying problems can refer in different locations. I learned this concept from my wife, who's a physical therapist. And when I remember like the first time I would go to her and like, hey dear, my back hurts. Like, and you know, shoulder blade hurts, whatever, or this hurts, or this hurts. And she'd be like, Yeah, that's your um, it's this, right? Like my neck was hurting. She's like, Oh, yeah, that's your shoulder blade. I'm like, what are you talking about? It's my neck. She's like, No, that's that's referral pain. I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, well, not all parts of your body can actually produce pain. So sometimes you may actually have a different muscle or a different part of your body that hurts, that's actually hurt. It refers that pain to a different part of your body. I never knew that. Didn't know that different parts of your body don't even have nerve endings. Right? I'm not that smart. It's the same thing in your business. Sometimes you have a pain, it's actually being referred, meaning it's hidden and it's being caused by somewhere else in your business. And you have to find that. So the first thing is stop fixing the symptoms. Let's fix the problem behind the problem. Okay. Second thing. The second time it happens, I mean you have a problem. Okay, maybe it's a one-off, maybe the situation happens, could be a fluke. I don't necessarily need to create an entire process for something, some weird fluke thing that happened, right? Uh sometimes this is the opposite. I we have guys in the profit club, they're like, hey, I had this situation, um, you know, and now I'm gonna I want a clause to put in my contract. I'm like, wait a minute. How often does this happen? That's never happened. This is the first time. You've been in business for 20 years, yeah. And this is the first time it's ever happened, yeah. You don't need a clause in your contract just because something happened one time in 20 years, right? You don't need to fix that process. Sometimes there's just fluke things that happen that don't need a process or doesn't need correction or doesn't need a clause or an SOP. It's just a fluke. You just it's just a one-off thing. You don't have to create, you know, all of these things. Some of you are like SOP Nazis, like you want to create an SOP for everything. No, you have to make sure that this isn't just a fluke. So it's the first time it could be a fluke. We can still look at it, but we're not gonna go out there and start creating all kinds of processes, right?

15:35

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 gonna 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 profit, 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 to 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.

16:29

Uh second time it happens, now we gotta pay attention. And now we gotta look at maybe creating a process. Now, again, if it happened two times over a 10-year period, probably don't need a process. It's not happening enough. However, if it every time it happens, it's like a $50,000 mistake. It's a big enough mistake that maybe we want to make sure it doesn't happen again, right? So, like, there's there's you have to do a little bit of like, I hate to use the word common sense because you heard me preach about it, but you have to lose use a little bit of common sense in the sense of if it's happening a lot, it needs to be fixed. If it's happening very, very, very infrequently, it doesn't need to be fixed. But if it's infrequently and it's a high cost, maybe it does need to be prevented from happening. Right? So, like there you you can use that judgment. I can tell you more times than not, though, you need to have a process if it's happening more than a couple times, right? I've been bit by a dog twice in my life. Uh one the first time was way, way, way back when I was a cable uh technician. This was, I don't know, 25 years ago, something like that. Um, it happened, right? And then it happened when I had my construction business like 12 years later, I got bit by a dog. Now it's only happened twice in the 29 years I've been out of the military. It's only happened twice. I don't need to have a process or you know, uh an SOP or a clause in my contract because I got bit by a dog twice in 2029 years. It just doesn't need to happen, right? So that's what I mean by like you gotta look at what the what the how serious of a problem it is. So the second time, pay attention, create a process, checklist, automations, so ps, reminders, rules, or clear responsibility, right? It could just be a rule of like, hey, don't go into a fenced-in area if there's a dog running around. That could just be a simple rule. Don't do that, right? Only make sure the the owner's there, blah, blah, blah. The third time it happens, now that's on you. Now, what happens sometimes, like I was saying, is that when it's infrequent, meaning it only happens once every three weeks, you tend to forget about it. And so it doesn't, there's not a consistent pain point there. So if it's a if there is a long time in between these problems happening, we're less likely to identify it as a repeating problem and kind of treat it like each instance as a one-off problem. If it's happening every day, it's pretty obvious, right? You can see it. So again, looking at this, like I said, if you drop cost, it will show up. Here's a perfect example. I used to have problems whenever we would install doors. You know, usually I would have a door installed or have a door delivered the morning of. It takes us an hour or two to prep the area. You know, so in the beginning, we would show up and um tear the door out and get it prepped. The new door would show up and then we would install it. Until one time the new door showed up and it was the wrong size. Now that was me because I ordered the wrong size. So what did we have to do? We had to put the old door back in temporarily until we ordered a new door. So how what did I fix on that problem? I said we're not going to take out the old door until we have the new door on site and we can verify measurements, right? Because that was the first problem I didn't want to have again. Then what started happening is we would have the door delivered the morning of, and we had like two or three hours that we could play with, potentially, depending on you know what kind of a door situation was going on. But what was happening was the door wasn't showing up for two or three hours like after we needed it. And that got frustrating. Well, the first time it happened, it's like, oh, it's just a scheduling error. It won't happen again. And then it happens again. And then it's like, okay, well, this is frustrating because now I have one or two guys standing around waiting for, you know, one or two or three hours waiting on a door. You know, that that kind of sucks. I'm losing money. And then it happens again, right? I don't remember like how many times it happened, but it got to the point where I was like, okay, new new SOP, new standard, new procedure. We're going to have the door delivered the day before instead of the morning of. I can solve the delivery problem by having it done the day before. I can't control the delivery schedule. Even when I said I go in there and say, hey, I need this door first thing out in the morning. They say, No problem, Brad. We have you down as the first delivery. It's already on the truck. It's ready to go. You're the first out. Awesome. The next day, nobody shows up till noon. I call, hey, where's my delivery? Oh, sorry, you know, we had a big builder. He needed a package rust out, right, you know, rushed out right away. You got kicked, you know, to the second delivery. They're leaving the yard now. They'll be there within the hour. Like, I cannot control what the supplier or the delivery people do. I have zero control over that. So, how do I solve that problem? I solve it by removing when the door needs to be installed. And this can be anything, it's not just doors. You have the materials delivered ahead of time, like a day before or a week before. And depending on what you're doing, it can be delivered to your warehouse where you st where you pre-stage it. It can be delivered to the job site ahead of time, whatever. But you eliminate the problem of the materials not showing up on time by having it done earlier. So then we just I just started having doors delivered the day before. And I would go out there and you know meet with the uh meet the install or the delivery people, right? So they can so I could receive the door because I wanted to check it. And then I backed off a little bit and realized like, well, I don't need to be there. They can just deliver it and like, you know, set it somewhere. As long as we had a dedicated place they could put it, we could just set it there. So then I kind of backed off and like, well, I don't need to be there every single time to receive it. All I gotta do is first thing in the morning when I get there, I check it and make sure it's right. Right. So like sometimes you have to like you set a process, but then you might back off of it because you you made the process too restrictive. What I didn't want to do is have it rely on me to go out now and check every single delivery of everything the day before, because that would waste a bunch of my time. So then you change that process. So second time, build a process. Checklist and automation, SOP, reminder, rule, whatever. Responsibility, um, you know, who's who's the accountability, whatever. Build something. Don't wait six months after it happens 37 times. Well, I guess we need to do something now. No, do it on the second and third time it happens. Like spend some time solving that problem. Number three, you have to stop being the solution, guys. I mean, you you have to stop being the solution to everything, right? If every problem comes back to you, you become the system. This is why most of you are working all the time and you quote, have incompetent people working for you. It's because you train them to become incompetent. I've seen plenty of instances where you have fully capable people reverted to an incapable person because of how they were treated and how the process was set up, right? You have to let you have to let people learn on their own. You have to let them make some mistakes, right? And you have to get them thinking critically about how to do stuff. And then you have to empower them and you have to trust them. You can't empower someone one day and the next day criticize them and and tell them you don't trust them. It doesn't work like that. You have to take this perfectionist ideal, you know, of you know, this, I don't even know what you call it. Like you have you, some of you guys are perfectionists and you have this perfect vision of what your business should look like, how everything works. And if one person makes one tiny mistake, then they're incompetent and they suck and you got to get rid of them or whatever. Guys, that's not what you do as a business owner. You paint the vision and then you train and lead your team to do it for you so you don't have to. Some of you treat your business like it's an extension of you. It's not. Your business is not an extension of you. The reason why you perfectionists are so stuck is because you think that if something in your business happens wrong, if somebody makes a mistake, then everybody in the world is going to think that you're a piece of crap or that you suck at running a business or that you're a con artist or whatever it is. Like you instantly think that there's a direct correlation between one of your employees doing something wrong on accident or on purpose, right? That that means that you as a human being are a crappy person. That's not what happens. That's not what happens. That's that lives rent-free in your head. Nobody does that, right? Now, if you if you are a bad person and then you hire bad people, and then as a company whole, the company does bad things, then yeah, you get a bad rap. But because one person did one thing one bad one time, people aren't automatically saying, Oh, you're a piece of crap of a human being because you own the company. That's not what happens. You know I can prove it, I can prove it right now. How many times have you gone to a restaurant where you got crappy service, the food was bad, or the server, the wait staff was terrible or rude, and you instantly thought, who owns this place? They must be a terrible person. You've never done that. You've never instantly thought, who owns this place? They must be terrible. Most of you may have said, man, management here is terrible, but you've never actually thought who is the owner of this company, who owns this restaurant. Apply it to any scenario. I know there's gonna be one of you, like, I instantly think it's the owner. Great. Go ahead and troll me on social. You got nothing better to do. Guys, you don't do that in real world with anyone else. Why do you think someone's gonna do that to you? They're not. It's not gonna happen. I promise you. And if it does, you you go to the company, you go to the customer and say, Man, that's it. This is unacceptable. I'm not sure what John was doing, but this is unacceptable, and we're gonna fix it. And they're gonna be like, Great, you're an awesome person. I appreciate the integrity. And then they move on. If anything, it makes you look better when you're pr when your team screws up. Because you get to you get to come in and uh show the customer that you have integrity and you're gonna fix it. Stuff happens, guys. Stuff people break things. I've broken things. I mean, it's just it's crazy how whenever you do something in your business, you give yourself an excuse. But when an employee in your business does the exact same thing, you want to rail them. You want to hold them to the fire. Go home and complain to your wife about how bad they are. You give yourself way too much leeway, and you don't give your your employees enough leeway. Anyways, that's a little rip. I'm sorry to go off there, but sometimes that's some of the best information content. So stop being a solution. Uh, if every problem comes back to you, you become the system. Every solution trapped in your head guarantees you'll get to solve it again. Congratulations, you gave yourself a permanent full-time job. Vacation, nah, who cares about that? You got to stay around and solve all the problems, right? Ask how do we handle this next time without me? I've said this before. If a if an employee calls you and says, uh, hey boss, I got a problem, I don't know what to do. Okay, well, uh, pretend like I'm not here, pretend like I'm on vacation, not didn't answer the phone. How would you handle it? I don't know, that's why I'm calling you. I know, but just pretend for a second. If you had to solve this problem and nobody else could tell you how to do it, what would you do? Uh, I guess, I don't know. I guess I would uh maybe, you know, repaint this wall. Okay, that's an option. What's wrong with that? I don't know. I just thought it was gonna cost too much money and you get mad at me for that. Well, I mean, how much is it gonna cost? Well, it's gonna cost, you know, it'll probably take me two hours to repaint this wall. Okay, well, that's not that bad. Are there any other options you can do? What else can you do? I don't know, maybe maybe we can just scrape this or we can do this. All right. Well, if we have to repaint the wall anyways, would it hurt anything to try that other thing first? Because if we try the other thing first and it saves and it works and the customer's happy, then we don't have to repaint the wall, right? Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Well, why don't we do that? Okay, I like it. Any other, you know, is that you think that's gonna work? Yeah, I think it's gonna work. You know what? Now that I'm thinking about it though, uh, we could just do this, and that might that actually would save even more time. Great. I love that idea. Let's try that. That's it. That's how you walk your team through it. How do we handle this without me? And all you gotta do is say, what would you do if I wasn't here? Pretend like you own the company, what would you do? Right? You just get them in the framework of thinking of like making a choice. If they make the wrong choice, you guide them. Okay, yeah, that's one way we could do it. Is there any other ways you can think of? Nope, I can't think of any other ways. Nothing at all. Nope. All I can think of is repainting the whole wall. Well, have you tried using any cleaner to get the mess off the wall? No, I haven't tried any cleaner. I mean, I can try that. Well, do you think that'll work? It might work. Okay. Well, do you think that might be an easier option than repainting the whole wall? Yeah, it'd definitely be a lot easier. All right, well, let's try that then. Like, that's all you do is you just guide them, right? Instead, here's what happens. Hey, boss, uh, we got a problem over here. Yeah, what's up? Oh, this thing wall's got stuff on it, it's got you know chemicals splatter on it. We're gonna have to repaint the wall. No, don't repaint the wall. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go and find some acetone, you're gonna try and clean that off. And if it doesn't work, then we'll repaint the wall, blah, blah, blah. And you just spit out the you know, the complete uh answer for them and like, okay, yeah, I'll do that. Did they learn anything? No. And you know what you you know the excuse that you use as to why you do that? You tell me. Interactive time. You tell me what the excuse is. I'll give you three seconds. Brad I don't have time I was air quoting that for those listening I don't have time to teach them I don't have that extra 30 seconds because I'm so busy bullshit some of you actually do this on purpose because you want to make yourself feel feel valuable right you want to feel like you you want to feel needed like you literally manufacture a problem subconsciously because you want to feel needed that's a totally different problem you need to go seek some counseling for that so how do we handle this next time without me document it delegate it automate it or eliminate it right you can document it you can delegate it to someone else you can automate the process or you can eliminate it altogether those are some of your options right so last thing here is uh we got to build systems for problems not for symptoms so don't disappear for a week trying to write a hundred SOPs even though I just told you earlier like you could you know you could do that you're not gonna be able to write a hundred SOPs in one week anyways but you can take some time off and like focus on solving some major problems. By the way when you're trying to solve problems in your business you don't start with the easiest simplest problem you start with the hardest problem because if you solve that one problem that big problem and you pull that lever it may un unscrew I was going to say a different word it may unscrew a couple of different problems by solving this major problem it fixes three or four little problems that were a result of the big problem that was happening. If you start with the little problem and you solve that one and then you go to the next problem and solve that and you go to the next problem solve that and then you go to the big one and solve it, you're doing four times the work when the big problem would have just solved the other three. So you always solve the big problems first, right? So if you just get into a tempo of fix one recurring problem every single week you will be absolutely amazed at the end of the year what your company will look like. If you just you just commit to solving one problem every week and I mean fully solve it if you fully solve that problem you will be surprised at what your company will look like in one year. But you have to commit to it like you it's you have to be dedicated to solving that problem right it's not about solving all of the problems at one time you're not you don't have enough time and power and resources to do that guys. Find you fix what bugs you figure out what's costing you a lot of money right like if if it's taking you four hours to do an estimate every time you do an estimate and you're doing it by hand, then solve that problem. Get a software get a job tread get QuickBooks get whatever it takes create Excel spreadsheets. I don't care but sit down and do that and fix the estimating problem and get it down from four hours to 10 minutes and that problem that solution to that problem right there will change your life because now you have an extra you know three and a half hours for every estimate that you do. So solve the big ones first and then work your way down to the little bitty ones. So here's the closing become a great problem solver that helps your business not helps the symptom so be a problem solver in your business not for your business. That makes don't be the guy that has to fix everything in your business. Be the guy that fixes things in the business so that you don't have to fix anything else. That's that's the that's that's the biggest takeaway I can give you is like become a full-time problem solver in your business. Every week tackle a new problem right if you're solving the same problems over and over again you're not actually solving them you're just kicking the can down the road and uh don't just put out one fire or put out the fire figure out why the damn thing keeps catching fire. You know when there's a big warehouse fire they got the fire out the fire trucks stay there for like an extra eight hours. Why? Because you can have flash fires. The fire can be completely out and then after they leave the flash fire comes in and all of a sudden the structure catches on fire again. So they stick around and make sure for the period of time it's not going to do that. This is what happens in your business right this is why you're putting out the same fire over and over because you keep having flash fires and you haven't actually completely put the fire out aka solved it so you're having to put it out again next week and next month. Become the perfect the perfect problem solver for your business not in your business. All right guys that's the end of the episode thanks for hanging out with me um I got some good I got some uh cool stuff coming out I got some assessments coming out make sure you or if you're not on school yet go join school it's in the the links in the show notes go set up on school we got some live um I'm gonna be going live in there we got some cool things that were uh that are already in there you can get my book for free you can get a bunch of other stuff for free but I'm also gonna be uh dropping some new um some new tools that are gonna really really help your business grow and uh I'm gonna be dropping those in school so make sure you get there so you can get first access to that but other than that uh keep hanging out with me leave a review someone left a review the other day I appreciate you uh if you listen to this podcast more than once and you've never left a review that's the that's the best that way that's the best way you can pay me back is just leave a review. And I don't care if it's a bad review just leave a review uh it helps the podcast get out there helps to motivate me to create more content do more episodes and always if you have a suggestion for a topic or a different episode you can always go to the website hammer and grindpodcast dot com and just leave a review there or you can leave suggestions you can leave a voicemail uh you can sign up for the list so that you get emailed every week the new uh the episodes so lots of stuff there go check it out if there's everything I can do for you if you want to schedule an on-site consult if you want to look at getting coaching for your business all you got to do is reach out happy to have a conversation show you what that looks like guys thanks for hanging out until we meet again remember profit is not a dirty word