A contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Welcome to Hammer and Grind, the podcast built for contractors. Real contractors, true stories, real solutions. My name is Brad Hebner, and I will guide you on your journey to mastery of your construction business. You can find Hammer and Grind on all the social media platforms. Just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast. Now, if you're looking for more help, you can check out our free Facebook group called The Contractor Profit Group. I do free trainings in there and it's a great community to be a part of. Now, if you're serious about making more money, saving more time, and creating a business that supports your lifestyle, check out my paid coaching group called The Profit Club. I've put together a proven system for creating a winning business. Now listen, I'm so confident that you will succeed in my program. I'm now offering a 10x ROI guarantee. That means if you don't make at least a 10x return on your investment within a 12-month period, I will refund you the full amount. You can find out more information about The Profit Club at hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club. All right, so on this podcast, we're going to be talking about why self-evaluation is so underrated. This is such a critical thing of business and personal journey that most people don't do, myself included. I struggle with this to stay consistent with doing this. But self-evaluation or just evaluation in general is such a critical task of your life. and your business. There's so much information that can be learned whenever you take a step back and you reflect and you evaluate where you're going in your life and your business. So I'm going to be talking mostly about your business, but I may throw in some life stuff there too. They kind of go hand in hand and I think it's important that we really look at both areas. So I want to start off with just a little analogy. Whenever you fly on an airplane and you're going to go, say, from New York to L. A., once the pilots get the plane up in the air, they turn on the autopilot, right? Because they're not flying that whole thing from New York to L.A. It would be hard to do, like to keep hold of a plane and keep that much level of concentration and it would be tiring and stressful. So autopilot is a great thing. They get up there, they punch in the coordinates and they hit start, turn it on. And then they can sit back and kind of, you know, have a conversation or do whatever, monitor things and what's happening. And that's what a lot of us think is how it is to run a business. You know, we start a business, we get some marketing in place, we, you know, get our branding in place, we get our website, we get all that stuff, we hire some people, the phone's ringing, and we're just, you know, scheduling jobs. And that's like, that's it. Like it just kind of runs on its own. There's nothing that needs to happen or there's no maintenance or upkeep or anything that has to happen to that process. And that can't be further from the truth. So what happens with your autopilot on an airplane? Well, the autopilot knows that it's going to go to X coordinate. Now, if I was smart enough, I could have figured this stuff out before the podcast and gave you an exact coordinate from New York to LA. However, I didn't do that. But let's say it's... I'm going to make stuff up. Let's say it's 180 degrees is the direction they need to go or the coordinates they have to go towards. The computers on the airplane are constantly evaluating where the airplane is at and where it needs to go. So in other words, it doesn't just hit autopilot and it sets the flaps and the rudder. and the ailerons and all the different things. It doesn't just set it once and then that plane stays on that trajectory forever. It doesn't happen like that because you have turbulence, you have winds, you have jet streams, you have all these altitudes, all these different things that affect the airstream on the airplane, the path the plane is flying through the air. And so if it's flying through the air and a little bit of turbulence knocks it one degree off course, the computer says, wait a minute. Based on this current trajectory that we're going, this current path, we're not going to end up in LA. We're going to end up in Mexico. So we need to make some adjustments. We need to turn the rudder or ailerons or however it is that's controlling the plane. We need to make some adjustments to get back on course. Same thing with altitude. If it hits a pocket of turbulence and it drops 10 feet in altitude, it says, wait a minute, we need to get back up to this current altitude so we don't... running to any other airplanes or any other traffic that may be out here, right? So the computers on the airplane from the time that the autopilot's turned on until it's turned off are constantly evaluating where the plane is currently at and where the plane is going. Non-stop, making adjustments, making micro adjustments, you know, milliseconds, thousands of adjustments. I don't even know. It'd be interesting to find out. how many adjustments are made on a flight from like New York to LA. It's probably in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of micro adjustments are made during that flight. If somebody knows what that is, hit me up and let me know. It'd be interesting statistic to know. But your airplane is doing this, right? It's constantly evaluating where it's at versus where it's going. So what do we need to do in our business? and in our personal life to be able to do this, like to evaluate. Well, on a personal note, one of the best things you can do is journaling. And I know a lot of guys are like, ah, journaling, I don't have a diary. I'm not an eight-year-old girl who keeps a diary about all the things that happens at school. That's not what I'm talking about. Journaling is more about getting your thoughts on paper and about reflecting the day. I knew a guy once, his name was Scott, and he had one of those college-bound, typical, what do they call those things, the notebooks, the typical ones you would see in school. He carried one of those everywhere, in his back pocket. And that dude was constantly journaling. Each day, he would have two full pages of notes. And I would ask, I was like, man, why do you journal so much? He's like, I want to document everything I do. I want to know where I'm at, what I'm doing. It allows me to stay focused on what's important. It allows me to see what I focus on during the day. It's a great tool. And he was a very creative individual, very smart. He was an electrician by trade. That was from like, I don't know, eight years ago. And I still remember that to this day that he would carry that around and journal all the time. At lunchtime, journaling. On a break, journaling. I mean, just journal, journal, journal all day long. I'm not suggesting you have to do it that much, although it wouldn't be a bad thing. But I am suggesting that you should take up the habit of journaling once a day, if not twice a day. So when you wake up in the morning, you write your thoughts on paper. When you go to bed at night, you can write your thoughts on paper. And really, the morning one could be more like, these are my thoughts for the day going into the day. This is what I expect to happen. And not so much like goal setting, but like this is kind of... how I expect the day to go, what I need to get done, things that I'm worried about today, things that I'm excited about today. And then at the end of the day, you're reflecting on the day. And so you're putting in there like things that happen. Did the day go as expected? Did you have a good day like you were hoping? Did the thing that you were stressed out about actually come to fruition or was it just where you stressed out for no reason? That's a super important tool there because if you realize that the thing you were stressing out about for two days actually wasn't nowhere near as bad as you thought it was, that's a lesson of, okay, maybe I shouldn't get stressed out as much because in reality, it didn't happen the way I thought it was. It wasn't as bad as I thought it was. And so you reflect back on that. You evaluate that emotion and you realize that, okay, it didn't serve me any purpose. It didn't help me at all. Being stressed out for two days literally didn't help me at all. But if you're not writing that down, if you're not reflecting on that, if you're not evaluating that, you'll never know that. You'll be stressed out for two days. It doesn't happen. You never realized it didn't happen the way you thought it was. And so the next time something comes up, you'll be stressed out for two days and you'll repeat this process because you never evaluated whether or not that was worth it. Right? So journaling is a great personal way to get your thoughts on paper. It's also been proven that journaling actually helps to increase your IQ and it helps to clear your mind because your brains are supercomputers and the subconscious is constantly running like an autopilot. Your brain is constantly running, right? And so a lot of the junk that we put into our mind, a lot of the junk coordinates that we put into our mind, our brain, the supercomputer autopilot is saying, okay, here's the things we got to do to stay on course. You think that your customers aren't going to pay you for a consultation? Great. I'm going to create a course to prove that. I'm going to keep you on course because you set the course as my customers won't pay for a consultation. So now my subconscious is going to say, okay, let's create the course. We'll figure out ways to make that happen. We'll figure out how to, how you to sabotage the conversation so that it doesn't happen. And so you can say, see, I told you, I told you people don't charge for consultations or they don't pay for consultations. They'll never work in my town. And your brain will say, yep, let's figure it out. Let's make it happen. Let's stay on course. So that's a small impact of what happens. Our brain's going to be on autopilot whether you want to or not. Our subconscious is constantly on autopilot. It's constantly auto-correcting. And so if we're not controlling the data, that is controlling the autopilot, in other words, where we want to go, then it's going to be putting us on the wrong path all the time. This is why a lot of people struggle, myself included. When you have the wrong mindset, the autopilot will keep you in that mindset. So I don't want to go down the path of mindset. I just wanted to touch on that briefly about the importance of journaling and how that helps you with your self-evaluation. So let's talk about business. Well, we don't really journal per se in business, although I'm not saying it would be a bad thing if you did that. But really what we do in terms of journaling in business is our KPIs, like how we track things in our business, the KPIs that we track, our sales that we get, our leads that we get, our closing rate, all these things, job costing, which I harp on a lot. All of these things are evaluation tools in your business. It's to help you stay on the course that you plotted. But before we can actually evaluate where we're at, we kind of need to set some goals. This isn't about goal setting either. It's about evaluation. But one thing about goal setting is that whenever you set goals, you want to make sure you're reviewing it constantly, right? This is your brain and your computer. This is your business. You're reviewing it constantly. So if I set the goal of New York to LA, I'm constantly reviewing that to make sure I'm on the right path. And so when you set some goals, a couple of quick tips on goal setting. One, they need to be realistic. Like you need to be able to realistically achieve that example. If you want to lose 100 pounds and you want to do it in one month, that's not a realistic goal, right? Unless you have surgery. You're not going to be able to healthily lose 100 pounds in one month. Now, if you said 100 pounds in 12 months, that's potentially realistic. But you need to have a realistic goal, but it needs to be a little bit beyond what you're comfortable with. If it doesn't make you squirm in your seat, it's not a big enough goal, right? We don't want to make it super easy like, oh, I want to lose one pound in a month. Well, you could do that in one day. It's too easy. So it needs to be realistic, but it needs to be just beyond your reach. And then you also need to set BHAGs. It's B-H-A-G, Big Hairy Audacious Go. Those are like shoot for the moon goals. You know, if realistically you can do $300,000 a year in revenue, your BHAG might be $500,000, right? It's just something to like shoot out past. That way, if you do hit $300,000. you still have a target past of that to reach towards. So set some BHAGs and set some realistic goals. So let's say you set those goals and now you have to evaluate them. Well, how often do you evaluate them? Well, it depends. How much do you want to stay on track? If the computers on the plane only evaluated every 15 minutes, you could still end up in Mexico because one degree off, you know what I mean, over 15 minutes. However many miles that is, if it's traveling 500 miles an hour, that could be a lot and you could be off. And what's going to happen is that it will course correct, sure, but you're traveling further because you're traveling one direction, then course correct, then coming back another direction. You kind of have this zigzag thing going on if you're fixing it and making those adjustments. If you evaluate on a plane, if it evaluated every hour, it would be even worse, right? You might fly into Canada. And then have to turn around and come back to LA. And then if it does an hour later, you might be down by Texas and you got to come back the other way. And I do realize that those aren't realistic locations or where you would be in an hour, but just bear with me on this podcast. All right, go with me. So you're going to be way off and you're going to end up traveling a further distance. It's going to take you longer and it's going to be more frustrating. So when you're evaluating your goals, then you need to evaluate depending on what the goal is and how often you need to look at it. Like your leads, that should be a daily thing, a weekly. You should be writing down your leads every day, how many leads you got each day and where they came from. And then by the end of the week, you're looking at it and seeing, okay, so I had three leads from vehicles. I had five coming through the internet for organic search. I had two referrals. Cool. So this week, the internet beat out everything. Next week, I had 10 referrals and one internet. Well, cool. Next week, the referrals won out. So you can look at it and over time, you can actually start to plot timeframes. And you can see over the course of a year in January, my leads drop off by 20%. And most of the leads I get in January. are from the direct mails that we send out. You can see this information. And then the next year, you can course correct. You know that in January, last year, all of your leads came from direct mailers. And that was it. You didn't get any leads from any other source. It was all direct mail. And if it comes up to January and you don't send out any direct mail pieces, you're probably not going to get any leads because you have this information now to go off of. So the frequency of how often you want to check these things totally depends on what it is and how on course you want to stay, right? You don't have to check them every day or every week or every month or whatever it is. But you do need to set some kind of schedule of how often you're going to check these. And guys, all of the successful business owners in any industry, it doesn't matter what it is, they all do this. It's not the fun part. It's not the sexy part. Unless you're a numbers nerd and you just love looking at spreadsheets and data, it's not going to be sexy. This is my least favorite thing about having a business is checking the data, running the numbers. I hate that part of it. But you have to do it and you have to do it consistently to know where you're at. I've talked about this many, many times on job costing, which we'll get into next. But if you don't know. like where you're at, if I dropped you in the middle of the desert and told you to find your way out, if you don't know which way you came from, how are you going to know where to go? Right? It doesn't matter if you have a compass. It ain't going to tell you where to go because you don't know where you're at. So setting goals is important in that aspect, but then really checking along the way, you know, where you're going. I apologize if my... Thoughts are kind of all over the place. I've had to stop a couple times and hack up along in the middle of recording this. So I've kind of lost my train of thoughts partially through. So bear with me a second with that. So as far as like the job costing, this is one of the most important things that you can do as an evaluation tool. In the military, they have what they call after action reports. And it's simply after an action has happened, they do a report. One of the most famous... Instances of this is the Navy SEALs do this. And if you read the book, Extreme Ownership and Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Bavin, then they talk about this in the book about doing after action reports. And one of the most important things about doing an after action report is you have to leave your ego at the door. You can't bring your emotions into the room, the war room or whatever they want to call it. when they're doing this because it's not about how you feel it went. It's not about what made you mad or any of this stuff. And so the way that you be the most productive when you're doing after action reports is you strictly look at the data. Now, this piggybacks on other podcasts I've done about your feelings don't matter and it's all your fault and leave ego suppression. All of those tie in here that you need to look at data. As a business owner, you look at data. You take the emotion out of it and you look strictly at the data. A good way of looking at this is if you were a consultant to another business, meaning a friend of yours said, hey, look at this data and tell me what you think. You would give them an unbiased opinion because you're simply looking at the data and you have no emotions tied into that. That's how you have to look at this and how you have to approach these conversations. We also, a lot of times in the military, when I was in... our platoon sergeant, he would have what they call bitch sessions. And that was simply once a month, once a quarter, whatever, whenever he felt like the morale was going off course, it was the opportunity where you as a subordinate, as a lower ranking, you know, private Lance Corporal, whatever, you could voice your opinions to the higher ranking and not getting trouble for it. And you could even tell them. If your platoon sergeant was the one leading the bitch session, you could be telling him what you don't like about him. Now, obviously, you got to have some tact here, right? You don't just tell someone, hey, Staff Sergeant, you're a piece of crap and I don't like you. Like that obviously wouldn't go over very well because I'm insulting him. That's emotion involved, right? But I could say, hey, Staff Sergeant, one of the things that, you know, I think we could do better is you could give us... a 20-minute heads up before we have to do this. And that would allow us time to get ready. So that's a way of giving feedback about that person. And the rule is that as a leader, in that specific scenario, the bitch session, the leader really is not there to give excuses or even solve the problem. It's just to get feedback. And so you as a owner, you can implement this as well. Now back to the AAR, the after action report. They go in there and they say, okay, here was our mission. We were supposed to go in here and save this hostage, eliminate all of the enemy threats, and get back out alive. And we do that without trying to fire a single round. Or, well, I guess you couldn't do that if you're trying to eliminate enemy threats. Let's say you're trying to retrieve a hostage without shooting a round. That's your goal. And in the middle of this mission, rounds start flying, people start getting shot and dying. So they go back and they go, okay, what happened? And then one guy can say, well, our plan was to enter through the second floor bedroom window. And as soon as we walked through their window, there was a dude standing there looking at us. I guess he had got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom or something. And so we got caught off guard and we had to neutralize the threat. Okay. So maybe now we need to know, maybe now we need to do a little bit of pre, retail or recon before we go into that window. Maybe we need to throw a camera up there and see if somebody's awake or not next time. Like you're just taking data and you're collecting it. And everybody has an opportunity to pitch in as to what they think is happening, what they think would be better, what went wrong, right? So whenever you're doing your job costing, this is part of your job costing, your AAR. After the job is over, you run the numbers and you see, okay, we came in at 42% gross profit. Our target was 50%. So what happened? And this is up to you. But you get either your foreman together, production manager, your lead guy, or maybe you get your whole team. It just depends. If you use all subs and you have a production manager, you're just really going to be talking to the production manager. You're not going to be talking to the subs per se. If you have employees, you may want to bring your whole team in because the more the merrier. If you have an apprentice who really doesn't have anything to do with any of it, he may not need to be involved in that process, right? So you just determine who needs to be involved. But you go and you have a meeting, whether it's once a week, once a day, after every job, whatever. Again, you determine how often you need to do this. You can't do it once a month. If you do 15 jobs a month, you can't wait till the end of the month and then do all 15 jobs because people aren't going to remember what happened on the first 12. They're only going to remember the last two or three. So it's better to do this fresh. And this isn't an hour long conversation. This is like a five,10 minute conversation that could be had in the morning before your guys leave or at the end of the day before they leave. I would say in the morning, because if you do it at the end of the day, if guys are coming back and they're tired and they want to go home, they're just going to tell you crap or they're not going to tell you anything because they want to leave. They don't want to stay there. But if you do it in the morning. they'll love to tell you because they can stand around the shop and talk to you for 20 minutes before they have to actually go to work. So use some common sense with this. But you say, what happened? We're at 42% gross profit. I looked at the hours. We were 15 hours over on man hours. I look at the foreman and I say, what happened on the job? And he says, well, this, this, and this. I say, okay, what about you, journeyman? Well, this happened here and this and this. Okay, what about you, apprentice? Well, I just started last week, so I don't really know much, but it seems like it's a little crazy. We waste a lot of time in the mornings here doing these after-action reports, these job costing reports, so it seems like we're just wasting time doing these. Okay, good to know. Maybe he's telling the truth. Maybe it's a good information. Maybe it's not. You take that information and you dissect it and you put it down on paper. So the next time... You do that same job, you know to take these things into account and you can course correct. If you're over 15 hours, that could be because you underbid it. It could be because the materials didn't come in on time because someone in the process didn't order the materials early enough. Well, if you have someone who orders materials, you know, procures the materials for you and they waited, I'm going to go talk to that person. Hey, what happened? Why didn't this material get ordered on time? Well, because of this. And you just figure it out. You go through and you evaluate the whole process and start to finish. And you figure out where the problems are in the whole process. This is why evaluation is so important. If you don't do the evaluation and you're over 15 hours on labor, the next time you sell that job, you're over 15 hours on labor. The next time you sell that job, you're over 15 hours on labor. And you don't realize this. How much money and time are you losing? over the course of a month, six months, a year, years. This is one of the things that I've lost tons of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, because I didn't job cost and I didn't realize. I've said this before in a podcast. I looked at one job one time and I had 25 receipts from Lowe's and the job was like 30 minutes away. That's an hour, you know, two ways, just in travel time, plus there, so it's more like an hour and a half times 25. That was like, whatever that is,30,40 hours extra on one job was wasted going to the store 25 times. So that's a lot of money. That's a lot of wasted time. So could I have looked at that and evaluated and said, okay, there's got to be a better process. And that's what I did. I said, we have to be better at figuring out materials ahead of time. Or instead of us doing some of this little stuff, we get a subcontractor to do it. That's how you can look at it and evaluate. So AARs, after action reports, job costing, these are critical to your business. I would say job costing is one of the most critical things you can do in your business, if not the most critical thing in your business. If you don't look at your leads, if you don't know where your marketing is coming from, that's important, but it's not as critical as figuring out why you're doing something right or why you're doing something wrong. And one of the things you can do to help you with your job costing meetings is don't ask why questions. Why is a, when someone asks why, it gives a negative reaction. Because when we were kids, we were asked why a lot. Why did you do that? Why did you punch the boy in the face? Why did you steal that? Why, why, why, why, why? A lot of us have a negative connotation attached to why. We get on the defensive. So don't ask your employees, why were we over 10 hours on labor? Don't ask the foreman, why were we over 10 hours? Ask him, what happened to put us over 10 hours? How can we save the 10 hours? How can we do a better job? Use how and what questions. What's a better way to do this? How can we make this process more efficient? Don't say, why did it take so long? what was the reason it took so long? Even just saying it differently, what was the reason why it took so long? Why did it take so long? Just me saying that, it sounds negative one way. How can we do this better? And ask for their feedback. Again, remove emotion, remove ego, make sure your team does the same thing. You say, look, I don't care if somebody screwed up. I don't care if Johnny dropped a brand new cabinet and broke it. I'm not mad at that. I just want to know how we can prevent it from happening again in the future. What can we do to prevent that from happening? I'm just collecting data. Your team needs to know this. You need to make it very clear. And if you react emotionally to what they tell you, guess what? They're not going to tell you next time. So you have to suppress your ego. You have to remove your feelings and just collect the data. Use the data to course correct. And you will be on your way to hitting the goals that you set both personally and in your business. So I hope that podcast was helpful. You know where to find me on all the social platforms, Hammer and Grind Podcast. Look us up. You can find me everywhere, all over the place. I'm pretty active on all the platforms. Leave me a comment. Let me know what you think about this podcast. And until next time, guys, you know what to do. Be the best you.
