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 in this podcast today, I'm going to be talking about how to create systems in your business. I get asked this question. all the time. Brad, I need help creating systems in my business. And I always ask this question, what does that mean? What type of systems? Well, I need help getting organized. Okay. Organizing what? Well, I'm just all over the place and I need help getting things in line so I'm not running around. Okay. Run around for what? And I asked this question like five levels deep and I could never get a straight answer from a contractor. who says, I need help creating a system so that I can estimate jobs more efficiently and stop wasting time doing these estimates. I almost never get a response like that. I just get the general, I need systems in my business. I need help getting organized. And guys, listen, I can help you get organized in your business. I can help you create systems. But if you don't even have a clue of what the hell you need help with, how am I supposed to help you get organized? How am I supposed to help you create systems in your business? The truth of the matter is, is that there are millions and millions and millions of systems that can be applied or created in your business. One little subcontracting or one little contracting business could potentially have 50,000 different systems. micro systems built into your business. A lot of contractors, a lot of you listening to this are looking for this system solution in a box that you can just pay $10,000 and here's this box comes in the mail like an Amazon delivery and you open it up and there's the perfect system for your business and you just plug it into your business and everything runs smoothly. And that's fantasy land, guys. That does not exist. You have to create the systems in your business. Now, yes, there are templates. There's worksheets. I even have free worksheets, job costing worksheets, labor burden worksheets, all of these things that I've created to help with certain parts of your business. But at the end of the day, you still have to create it because every single business has a different way of doing things. And me being from an IT background and always, I've always loved software and I have shiny object syndrome. And every time a new software comes out, I want to implement it in my business. I've had my office manager literally tell me, Brad, you're not allowed to implement any new softwares in our business, at least for the next six months. Because I overwhelmed them with like, hey, here's a new software. It's going to save us an hour or a week of execution. Yeah, that may be true, but it may take 100 hours of setting that up in order to save an hour of execution. And I'm telling you this about softwares. Anytime you add a software or add a system to your business, it actually creates more problems that have to be solved. So here is the foundation for creating systems in your business. Number one, you have to start with a rough draft. This idea that you're going to sit down for one day or for a week and write out or create this perfect system for your business. And when you're done, you don't have to do anything and you just plug it in and everything is great. Again, that's fantasy land. That does not exist. You have to start with a rough draft first. You implement it into your business. You use it. See where the leaks are in your business. Make changes, okay? Re-implement it. See where the holdups and the leaks and the problems are. Make some changes and rinse and repeat over and over and over until you've done that so much that the system has now been perfected. That can take six months. It can take years. This idea of creating a system is going to solve your problems. Once again, It's fantasy land. Okay? You have to be intentional. You have to be purposeful with your intentions of what you're trying to achieve in your business. And contractors get so hung up on this idea of creating systems, yet they refuse to take the time required to actually create and implement the system. And then three years goes by. And I asked the question again, hey, what do you guys need help with? And the same people commenting or responding and saying, I need help with systems. I'm like, bro, you asked this question a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. Why haven't you changed it? What have you done in order to start implementing this in your business? And the reason is, I just don't have time. I just don't have time. No, that's BS. You do have time. You have the same 24 hours that billionaires have that made money, self-made. You have the same hours that professional athletes have. You have the same number of hours that everyone on earth has. The only difference, and this is the only difference, is that those people have prioritized what's important to them in their life or their business. That's it. They've prioritized it. You prioritize putting out fires over taking the time to create a system that will prevent you from having to put out fires. And so what you do is you spend three years in your business putting out fires, saying, I don't have time to implement systems because I'm too busy. When in reality, if you just took two weeks, you know, an hour a day for two weeks or three days straight and you laid out the foundation and then you implemented it and then you tweaked it as you went along, within those, you know, two months or six months, a year, you would have that problem solved completely. And then you would no longer be putting out fires. So you would actually save yourself. But the problem is you think that... Oh, let's just come up with a fake example here. Let's say you have a problem in your business that you want solved. Okay? Let's say estimating is what you're trying to solve, which is a very common, and it's also one of the hardest things to actually create systems for. Let's say that you spend, on average... Three hours on every estimate. I mean, actually creating the estimate. Maybe you do bathroom remodels or kitchen remodels or room additions where there's lots of things that have to be figured out into the estimate. And so you spend three hours using Excel or even on paper with a pen and you spend three hours coming up with this. Okay? Every estimate. And if you're doing, let's just say conservatively, you're doing two estimates a week. That's six hours every week that you spend doing estimates. Okay? Now, let's say the end result of putting together an estimating system now allows you to do an estimate in 30 minutes. So you went from three hours to 30 minutes. And if you're doing two a week, that means now you're spending one hour a week doing estimates comparative to six hours per week. So now you're saving five hours per week by putting together an estimating system. But let's say it takes 20 hours of your time to create the estimating system. Because when you set up systems, it takes time. It requires your time or energy or money if you pay someone else to do it for you. But it still takes a combination of all of those. or one of them or whatever. If you're doing it for yourself, it takes a lot of time. So you look at this task of, oh, it's 20 hours, man. I don't have 20 hours. There's no way I can spend 20 hours coming up with this system that's going to save me five hours a week. And so you go for an entire year not doing that because you look at 20 hours as a large chunk of time. and that you'll never have 20 hours available to do that. And so you go through the whole year wasting potentially five hours a week, which in reality, you would make your time, you would break even in one month, right? But you don't look at it that way. You look at it as a single time investment of 20 hours and you just don't have that time. And so you go for years and never put the time and energy into that. to be able to create a system that saves you that time. And that is how most contractors look at systems. They look at it as, I don't have time and therefore, I just have to put it on the back burner. Man, if I could just get this job done, I'll have time. No, you won't. You'll never have time. Guys, not having enough time is a product of you and your problems. The reason why you don't have enough time is your fault. It is. It's 100% your fault. Well, my guy screwed up and we got to go back and we got to fix this shower. We got to fix the shower because they didn't do it right. Okay. Yeah, your guy screwed up. You hired him. It's your fault. Yeah, but I didn't know they were going to... Yeah, no, it's your fault. You hired him. You didn't have a good interviewing process. You didn't have a system in place to be able to hire people that are going to help you in your business. You see what I'm saying here? It's a system. Do you have your interview questions written out on a piece of paper? Do you have your phone questions? When someone wants to apply for a job, do you have your phone interview questions? Do you do a phone interview first to see if they're even remotely close? Or do you just have them come into your office and waste an hour of your time only to find out that they're not even qualified? See, that's a system. And it's a very basic system, but it is a system. So do you have that system in place? I did. I had two different sets of questions. I had my phone interview questions, and then I had my in-person interview questions, depending on if they made it to that level. The first level was a phone interview. The second level was an in-person interview, and so on and so on. But it's a system that's created. A lot of you are just, hey, you got a truck, you got tools, you're not a felon. You're not an alcoholic. Yeah, come on board. Come on board. I need help. And then three weeks later, hey, John, where are you at, man? Where are you at? Oh, I'm not coming in today. What do you mean? I don't feel like it. What? I need your help. And then you're like, oh, I can't find good help anywhere. No. No, that's your fault. That's 100% your fault. You didn't put systems in place to be able to hire the right people. You didn't put systems in place to remove emotions. Or remove your temptation to hire because you're desperate. Those are all checks and balances you can put into the process to make sure that you're hiring the right person. So I can talk for days. Literally, this podcast could go for 24 hours straight about systems. But the reality of it is, it comes down to you and making it a priority. Okay? So now that we understand that you're the only reason why... you don't have enough time in your business, let's jump into how to create an actual system. The very first thing you're going to do in your system that you're going to create is you're going to sit down and write out the outline of what you're wanting to accomplish, like the steps and the end goal. So start with the problem first. Like at the top of the piece of paper, write down what's the problem you're trying to solve. So let's say your problem is a checklist for... doing a bathroom model. Okay. You want to, you want to create a checklist for final punch, like the final punch list of your bathroom model, because guys are missing things. They're forgetting to putty nail, nail holes, or they're forgetting to do this or whatever. And you have to go back and make a separate trip to do another final punch list because the guys are missing stuff. So you want to create a checklist for the final punch list of your jobs. Okay. That is a, that's, by the way, that's an example of a, a system within a larger system. Okay. So you have to have, sometimes you, a system is made up of dozens or hundreds of little systems. And by the way, I didn't mention this earlier. And this is funny, a little side note. My, my son, my six-year-old son has got on the kick of starting every sentence with, by the way, by the way, did you know that giraffes have tall necks? By the way, I was going to tell you, so it's just funny. I just caught myself saying, by the way, because my son's been saying it and it's annoying my wife and I because every sentence starts with, by the way. Okay, so back, I digress. So when you create systems, a lot of times you guys don't want to create system because you get overwhelmed. You look at this estimating of it's going to take 20 hours and you're like, I don't have it. So it's too overwhelming. I'm never going to be able to do it. The reality is you have to start somewhere and then build on it. So a lot of times if you're trying to create a system for your entire bathroom remodel or deck build or roofing installation or room addition or kitchen remodels or painting or whatever you're doing, create a micro system within that. So I'm using this as an example in the bathroom remodel. I had many, many checklists throughout the process. I had a pre-drywall installation checklist. I had a pre-demo checklist. I had a material receiving checklist. I had all these different checklists that are in place. But you don't sit down and write every single checklist in the entire process at one time. I made it a goal of mine that each day, I picked like a two-week time frame and I said, okay, each day. I'm just going to write one checklist to solve one little problem of the remodeling process. And that's it. I'm not going to do anything else. It's like 15 minutes and that's it. So you take and you break it up into little chunks and then you do that. That's how you create a very large system. Okay, so back to how you do it. You start with the problem you want to solve. In my case, I want to solve not missing punch list items. I want to have a checklist so that when we do a final punch list knockout, we're there and we're finishing everything and we don't have to go back and do anything else. So you write the problem at the top. Final punch list checklist or the problem you want to solve is complete all items on one trip or in one trip. Maybe that's the problem you're trying to solve. Then you write down all of the major topics. that you know need to be fixed. So in this case, maybe you would have it written down like electrical, plumbing, painting, drywall, you know, carpentry, whatever, however you want to break it out. You just start outlining the major things you want fixed. Then you go back and you start with plumbing. Okay, what are the common things that we miss on plumbing? Well, one of the things we need to do is we need to check The last thing before we leave, we want to check under the cabinets and make sure that the plumbing, the P-traps are not leaking. It's fairly common that P-traps don't get sealed tight and they leak a little bit. And so you may put it on, it's not leaking. The next day you go back and you check it and there's a little puddle underneath there. So one of the things we always do is check and make sure that the P-traps aren't leaking. And then I would put even detailed steps in there. You know, run a clean rag or run your hands over all of the exposed pipes underneath to make sure there's no wet areas. That's how you get super detailed. If I just put on there, check plumbing to make sure it's not leaking, that could be anything. I could open the door to the vanity, pop my head in there, not see any water on the cabinet, close the door, say, good, check off. But maybe the top of the P-trap where the tailpiece comes down into it is not sealed and there's water sitting on top of there. And only whenever you put the stopper down and fill the water up and then you open the stopper and you have a large flow of water, does it leak. If you don't check that stuff, and again, this should be your plumber. If you're using a plumber, this is on them. But if you're doing it yourself, either way, you still want to double check your plumber. But you would never know that. And then guess what? You get a call a week later. Hey, Brad, we noticed there's some water in the bottom of the cabinet the other day because you didn't check it. You didn't put it on your checklist to check that specific thing. Run your hand from the bottom of the sink all the way to where it goes into the wall or into the floor or take a rag, whatever, and you will feel wet spots or you will see wet spots. That's how you get laser specific on solving problems. Because if you have that checklist that says, run your hands across the whole pipe, and your team signs off on it, and then you get a call a week later, hey, it's leaking. I look at that piece of paper, or if it's digital, I look on there and say, well, who did this? Oh, John did it. Hey, John, this says you checked it. I just got a call that it's leaking. Did you actually check it? Well, I mean, I looked in there and it wasn't leaking. Okay, but did you actually run your hand over it like it says? No, I didn't. Okay, this is why it's on there, John. So, you know, this is your warning. Next time you need to actually run your hand on it or if we get another callback, that callback's coming out of your bonus. And that's how you hold people accountable. That same scenario without a checklist goes like this. Hey, Brad, we got a leak in our cabinet. Oh, okay. I'll come by there and take a look at it. You go by there. Yep, it's got a leak. You fix it. Hey, guys, did you guys check the plumbing to see if it was leaking? No. The plumber's supposed to do that. I know, but you didn't check in there and look? Well, no, but why would we? You're putting out a fire that could have been solved by having a checklist to prevent that fire from starting. This is how you create systems, guys. And that is just one tiny little piece. of an entire organizational system that you have to create for your business. That's one little piece of a bathroom model. So the micro system is the single line that says, run your hand over the pipes and make sure there's no wet spots. That is the very basic and micro level system. Because I could have just a single piece of paper and on that paper, it just has one checkbox and it says, run your hand across the pipes. That would be the initial checklist. Now I take that little bitty piece and I add others to it. Make sure that the stopper works. Close the stopper, run water in it, let it sit for 30 minutes and make sure it doesn't leak out. That's another piece of the system. So on and so on. Whatever you need to check. I don't know. I'm just throwing out examples. And you create it one by one. And then you spend some time creating this system. And there's two ways you can do this. I'll share with you both ways. The first way is you do this, you create the system. And then you take that system and you go to your team and say, hey, team, what do you think about this system? What do you think about this checklist? Give me your thoughts. And your team looks at it and they say, yeah, it looks pretty good. I would add on there, you know, make sure vacuum out the underneath the drawers. You know, people don't think that you got to pull the drawers out and then vacuum underneath there. They just vacuum the main area. Good idea. Or maybe you need to put in there vacuum inside the drawers or whatever it is. That's a good idea. And you add that to your checklist and you have your team basically give you insight into what they think needs to be on there. That's one way of doing it. The other way of doing it, which is a much better way. But I already know you're going to complain about it because it will take more time. And that is to actually bring your team in to a meeting and sit down and create this checklist together. Now, why is it better? One, because you're going to get buy-in from them. They're creating the system for you, essentially. You could even have, you could even task your, if you have a foreman or a lead guy, you could even task them with creating the system and the team. So I could go to my lead guy and say, hey, Chris, listen, I want you to sit down with the team this morning for 30 minutes, no more, and write down all of the tasks that we need to complete on a punch list so that we can create a checklist. And then he creates it. The team gets their input and then they can either share that with you or give it to you or you can come together and give your input, whatever. But if your team creates it, now they take ownership over it because if they're suggesting that something needs to be done, and then you create that checklist, and then they don't implement what they said, now they look like the hypocrite. They feel bad because they're the one that suggested it in the first place. Right? This is how you get team buy-in. If I just show up one day and like, all right, guys, here's what we're doing. I have created 25 checklists for a bathroom remodels that you guys all have to follow from now on. you're going to hear all this grumbling, oh my God, this is going to take forever. Are you serious? This guy's crazy. He hasn't been on the tools in five years. What's he know about this? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you can get pushback if you just show up with all the answers with this checklist without getting any kind of input whatsoever from your team. So the first solution is to have your team create it. The second one is to create it with your team. And the third would be, for you to create the outline and then go to your team and get their input. But all three of those requires your team's input. If you're a one-man show and you're starting to grow, you can still create the system now so that whenever you do add people to your staff and you start to grow, now you already have something in place and now they can give feedback along the way. Now, one little bonus tip here. Sometimes... Your team are going to make suggestions of what needs to be done. And you know 100% that either A, it doesn't need to be in there. Two, it's a stupid thing to add to it. Or three, it's not going to work. But you need to let them do it. You need to actually let them put that in there and try it and fail at it. And the reason why you need to do this is so that's how they learn. you can teach them the process of how to create systems themselves. See, we as business owners, we want to have control over everything in our business. But if you want to get ultimately to the point to where you really don't even have to work in your business, you have to give up 100% control of everything that goes on in your business. The only way that you'll ever be an owner... and not have a single thing in your... And I'm not saying that you have to do this. And this may not be a goal of yours. But the only way you'll ever get to that level is by giving up 100% control of your business. And you do that by getting your team to take ownership of certain things. So sometimes you have to let them fail. And I was terrible at this. Absolutely terrible. I'm a very quick thinker, very critical thinker. A lot of times when I'm brainstorming with teams about solving a problem on a job, they'll start throwing out ideas. What about if we do this? How about this? And I've already thought about these ideas like milliseconds into the problem. I've already went through 50 different potential solutions, ran through that in my head. What's the outcome? What percentage of that would be good? Blah, blah, blah. I've already done this in a matter of seconds. And they may say, what about this? And I would just be like, no, that won't work. And I didn't give them a reason why. I'd be like, that won't work. And they would get, they kind of get butthurt because I didn't even hear what they had to say because I'd already ran that through my head. So you have to, you have to let them have input, even if you know it's not going to work. Because if you shut them down, then they won't give you input into the future. You have to let your team be heard and give input into these types of things. Now, that doesn't mean that the input they give you, you have to implement it. Sometimes they do have bad ideas and you know it's not going to work. Or maybe it's just something you just simply don't want to do. It's your business. You can do whatever you want. But you still need to hear what they have to say. You still need to listen to them and let them say what they have to say. Because there's been plenty of times where I've listened to my team and they've come up with great ideas that we implemented that saved us time and money that I didn't create. I didn't come up with. So I'm going to recap here. Start with the problem you're trying to solve. Write down the main components of it. Go back and start writing out details of each component. Take that into a rough draft. That's still a rough draft at this point. And then implement it in your business some way. Now, there's lots of ways you can do this. You can just put it on a piece of paper and then do it manually. You can have it into some kind of fancy Excel document and try to do it digitally. You can have a program that has this included in there, whatever, however you want to do it. But I would recommend for rough drafts to just start with a piece of paper because that's going to be the hardest thing to do. And if they won't even do... a simple paper checklist, then they're probably not going to do anything else that you implement. The other thing is that you have to make sure your team understands that this is a requirement. And if they don't do it, you have to make them go back and do it. So I would have on my checklist, I would have, you know, check boxes next to each item. And then at the very bottom, I would have a team lead sign off. So I didn't care who did the work and who checked off on it. let's say you have a foreman and you have three guys underneath him. I wouldn't care who of the three guys, you know, the three guys may have done all the work, but the foreman is going to sign off on the paper, meaning that he's double checked everything that they're saying. So if Billy Bob checked under the sink to see if there was a water leak and checked it off, and my foreman, Chris, said it, signed off that everything was great, and then it leaks, I'm going to go back and I'm going to say, who did this? you know, Chris, why is this leaking? I don't know. You know, Billy Bob said he checked it. But did you check him? No, I just assume he did it. Okay. This is on you. You have to take ownership. It's your job as the supervisor to double check your team. You don't have to do the work, but you have to make sure your team's doing the work. So this is on you. So this is going to come out of your bonus or however you have it, you know, whatever you have structured. When you don't have this stuff in writing, you cannot have any accountability. Me simply telling Chris, hey, man, why didn't you check this? I just didn't do it. Well, you need to check it in the future. Okay. And nothing's on paper. There's no checklist. It's going to happen again. It may not happen for six months, but it's going to happen again. And you have no way of checking this. When you have paper or digital, when you have sign-offs and you have accountability, you also have a tracking history of what's happening. So if you implement this punch list checklist and there's something on the checklist that happens, the next five jobs you do, there's something that gets missed on the very next five jobs. You have to go back and additional visit the next five jobs. You need to go back and look and say, what's going on here? Well, the first two times Chris forgot to do something. The last three times Tony didn't do something. And the last three times was the exact same thing. The last three times was the... the plumbing was leaking and Tony checked off that he checked it. And I go back and I'm like, Tony, dude, the last three times you checked off on the plumbing and the last three times it's leaked. What is going on here? How are you missing this? I can see one time, the first time or occasionally, but the last three jobs you checked off on this. So either you're one not doing it. Or two, you're not doing it correctly. And if that's the case, I need to give you training on how to do it correctly so we don't have this problem again. But if you don't have anything in place to track that, how will you ever know how many times it happened, who did what or anything? Because you're not going to remember. You're not going to remember that, oh, the last three times, you know, Billy Bob did this or whatever. Tony did that or Chris did that. You're not going to remember that and nor should you. But if you have paperwork and then you can throw that into a folder or some kind of digital organizer, then you know and you have record of such. This is how you create systems, guys, and why it's so critical in your business. Now, there is a software that I use that is super easy, extremely easy to use, and it's free. unless you want to get the paid version. And the paid version really just gives you more modules, more checklists, if you will. But it's called Workflowy. W-O-R-K-F-L-O-W-Y. com. Workflowy. com. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to go and catch that, or you can just go get it. But Workflowy is a very basic, very simple tool that allows you to put things kind of in a... outline format, and then you can just drag and drop the order in which you want these items. So you don't have to worry about when you're creating your checklist, you don't have to worry about putting everything in order from the get-go. You can just go through brainstorm, list everything out, then go back and just drag and drop these into the order and category or sections that you want them in. It makes it very efficient to create checklists. I mean, I have like I'm looking at right here. I have like maybe 30 different checklist modules in this because I use it for everything. I have one that's just for recorded podcast. So every week when I record the podcast, I clip the link to the show and I drop it in there. So I am looking at it right now. I have links of the 74 podcast. This is the 74th. I have links of the 73 podcast. So if someone's like, hey, Brad, I need some help with questions to ask for sales, I can just go here and click on that link and then email it or text it or message it over to somebody and say, hey, listen to this podcast. It's got all the answers to the question. So that's just one simple way I'm using it. But you can use it to outline anything. You can use it for outlining your sales process. You can use it for outlining your... brainstorm, like just ideas. Like it doesn't have to be an outline. It can just be a list of ideas. So go check it out. Workflowy. com. I highly recommend it if you need something to help organize your thoughts and then use that for your business. Now, the one thing I'll tell you that is not very good is they don't have a very good export feature. So if you wanted to take that and export it like into a Word document, it's not that user friendly. But for organizing your thoughts and getting it there together, it's very useful. And you can share that with other team members. Other people on your team can have access to it, add their thoughts, whatever. So check that out. So we're coming near the end of the podcast. The thing about systems, there's multiple types of systems. There's manual systems in your business. And then there's digital systems, right? Your digital systems can be like a project management software. It can be a phone system. It can be an email system or a marketing system, a CRM. Those are all like digital systems. And a lot of those will get you very close to solving the problem for you. But even if you use a system like Progel, which is the one I recommend, Progel, you still have to go in and set it up. So even though it will save you hundreds of hours of execution in your business, you still have to go in and set it up. And that type of system is going to require a lot of hours. Like you may have 40 man hours invested into setting up a system like that. But again, you have to realize this is a long-term play. You have to invest the money up front to save you 10 times the amount of time on the back end. And you have to look at it like that. And if it's going to be a large task like a 20-hour investment, break it up into chunks. And every day you just spend one hour working on it. And after 10 days, you have 10 hours. And after 20 days, you're done, right? The other thing is that usually, this is a mind trick. Usually, if you set aside an hour of your time to work on this and you start working on it, a lot of times you'll want to keep working on it and then you'll end up working an extra hour. You might work two hours. Or if you have time, if it's in the evening or a weekend, you're working on it, you may end up working three or four hours because your mind starts working and you start getting into the flow. And then before you know it, you've knocked out five hours of this thing when you've really only planned on working on it for an hour. So a lot of times scheduling, just scheduling the time on your calendar of like every day from four to five or seven to eight or whatever time, I'm going to spend one hour to work on my, system I'm trying to solve and then execute it. Okay. Now, the last piece of advice I want to give you on creating systems is what system do you need to start with first? Well, here's what I would tell you. Whatever system is costing you the most money or by implementing this system is going to actually increase your profit. Those are the ones I would start with. the ones that are costing you the most money or is going to increase your profits first. Okay? And because when you increase your profits, it actually gives you more money. Duh. Gives you more money to invest back into other things. But also, if it's costing you money, usually that equates into costing you time because you're actually losing money by losing time. An example of that would be some of you guys show up in the morning and you go, okay, what tools do I need for this job? Maybe you work out of your garage or your house, you go downstairs, or maybe you go to a shop, whatever. You open the door and say, what tools do I need for this job? Do I need a chop saw? I need a table saw. I need the nail guns. I need the air compressor and the hoses, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You throw everything in the truck and you go to the job site. And three hours in, you realize you forgot. X. And then you got to go back and get it. Sometimes you might be an hour away from the shop, but you got to go back and get this tool because you forgot it. Right? That is a time waster, money waster activity in your business that if you created a simple checklist, and I've done this too, and I would create checklists depending on the job that I was doing. So let's, for example, if I was installing cabinets, right? Not, not, the kitchen remodel checklist, cabinet installs. When it's time to start installing cabinets in the kitchen, I would have a checklist of all of the tools and materials that I needed to properly install the kitchen cabinets. Now, you can create a system within a system. So if that's the case, maybe you have a toolbox that's solely designed for kitchen cabinet installs. and all of the specialty tools that you use just on kitchen cabin installs are in this box, and the box is labeled cabinet installation tools or whatever, then all you have to do is grab that box and throw it in the truck. And that may solve your problem. Or you may need to have a checklist of whenever we do kitchen cabinets, we got to make sure we have the kitchen cabinet toolbox. We also need to make sure we have a two-foot stepladder. We want to make sure we have the laser. We want to have a third hand to hold the cabinets, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And before you leave, you simply go down the checklist. And here's the best thing about having a checklist. You don't have to be the one that fills it out. You don't have to get all the tools. You don't have to be the one that's sitting there thinking, let's see. Okay, we need to have the laser. No, you have a checklist. I go, hey, Chris. Go through this checklist. Make sure everything's loaded up. All right, cool. He has a piece of paper or digital, whatever. He loads the level. Check. Loads the third hand. Check. Load the laser. Check. Load the toolbox. Check. And then you just double check. All right, go down the list. You got everything. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Okay, good. Let's go. Now you just solved a problem that most of you have, which is not having the right equipment. And then you can create different checklists for different jobs you're doing. And I can go, like I told you guys earlier, I could spend, I could talk for two days straight on systems. But this is what you need to do in your business. You cannot grow your business. You will never be able to get off the tools unless you create systems in your business. So take this as the kick in the butt that you need to start creating systems in your business. Now, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to one of my social media platforms. and comment and tell me what system you're going to implement next in your business. So go to Instagram, go to TikTok, go to Facebook, whatever, Discord and comment, hashtag system, okay? Hashtag system and then comment what you're going to implement in your business. So if you want to go to Instagram, just find one of my posts, it doesn't matter. And I might even make a post too. But it doesn't matter. Find any of my posts and just comment hashtag system or send me a DM hashtag system what you're going to implement. I want to hear from you what system you're going to implement because I may have some resources for you that will help you implement this. All right. So guys, that's all I have for today. I hope you listen to this whole thing. Go back and listen to it again because you need to implement systems in your business if you want to be successful in your business and get off the tools and scale. and have a worry-free type of business where you're not putting out fires all the time. All right. So you know where to find me. Go to the Instagram, Discord, Facebook, Hammer and Grind Podcast, TikTok, all of them, Hammer and Grind Podcast. Search for that. And then you know what to do, guys. Until next time, be the best version of you.
