A contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. And welcome to the Hammer and Grind podcast, the podcast built for contractors to help maximize profits and get you off the tools before burnout or bankruptcy happens. I'm your host, Brad Hebner. And I'm here to help you on your journey to self-mastery. Make sure you check us out on our social media platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast and you'll be able to find me there. Consider joining my free Facebook group called the Contract Your Profit Blueprint. I created this free group to give you as much information as possible to help you in your business. I go live in there once a week, tons of content to help you in your business. If you want to accelerate the success, consider joining my paid coaching group called The Profit Club. In there is a great community of contractors all willing to share information and help each other succeed, as well as hundreds of hours of training, coaching calls, everything you need to accelerate your business. If you want to learn more about that, you can find out more information on hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club. or just send me a message and I'll be happy to share that with you. Now, let's get on to the show. Welcome to the podcast. This podcast is about the five biggest mistakes that I made in my construction business. I'm all about learning from mistakes and even better if you can learn from someone else's mistakes. That's probably the best way to go about it. So these are the five biggest mistakes that I've made in over 11 years of owning a construction business. Number one. which is probably collectively the biggest mistake I've made. And that was I simply picked the wrong business model. What does that mean? Well, when I first started my business, I had a pickup truck and I had some tools, not a full set of tools, but I mean, I had the basics, right? All your hand tools, drills, saws. I had the basic stuff down and that was about it. And I had, I think, $1,000 in the bank. I had been working for a contractor. And he had a job that was doing, it was an insurance job that came in and it was demoing some brick off of a house, the front of a house. A car had crashed into the house. Insurance was paying for it. We just needed to remove all of the brick off the front of the house. And the quote he got from a company was way high. And he asked me and another guy if we wanted to do it on the side. And we're like, sure. And so we did this work and we, you know, I made like $1,500. cash basically from doing this job. And that was my launching point. A truck, some tools and $1,500 cash. So I really didn't have the capital investment to do like a full-blown remodeling company or something on a larger scale. So I picked the easiest to get into the one that I could do myself. And that was the handyman business. And so I picked the handyman business model. Now, this is not a dig on handyman business model. If you want to be a one-man show and you want to work by yourself, maybe have a helper and you're perfectly content with that, you can make a lot of money. And I mean a lot of money in the handyman business. However, if you don't want to be on the tools your whole life, if you want to be able to scale, if you want to be able to do other things later on with your business, the handyman business model is not the right one. it's very, very difficult to scale a handyman business model. Okay, so I picked the handyman business model. That dictated all of my branding, my logo, the name, all that stuff was dictated specifically around the handyman business model. And so once I got started, later on, as I started going more into remodel, it actually kind of hurt my efforts because I was branded as a handyman business. and not a remodeling business. And so a lot of my remodel stuff later on came from existing clients who I brought in through the handyman business model. Now, I don't want to go off on a tangent here, but in terms of getting leads, remodeling leads, having a service business like a handyman business is phenomenal because it's like having your own internal lead generator. Somebody would go online and search for gutter cleaning. or, you know, door repair or something like that, some kind of handyman stuff. And then you go out there and you say, clean their gutters. And then they go, Oh, Hey, do you do any other, you do other work too? Like, yeah, we do remodel and everything. Oh, wow. We actually have a bathroom. We were wanting to get, you know, work done on. And so it basically fed the remodeling side. Now, as I had more years in and started establishing myself, my reputation, for doing remodels that started to open up to outside leads that were coming directly in, right? As well as referrals. So the handyman business model wasn't the best model to start. If you don't, if you plan on being on the tools forever, go for it. You can make a lot of money. I mean, you could be a one-man show, do it for 10 years. If you're priced right, know what you're doing. You could make... a lot of money and potentially retire if that's what you want to do. So it's not a knock on the handyman business. It's also a recession-proof business model, by the way. So if you're in the middle of a recession, people still need repairs done. That's where that can be. The handyman business model is a perfect model for a one-man show. The problem is I've always considered myself a businessman first. and a handyman or remodeler or carpenter second, right? A tradesman. I always consider myself a businessman first, a tradesman second. And so with that mindset, the handyman business model is not the right model. Also with the branding, because it hurt me, because the name of my business was Team Handy, which was great for handyman, but it's not for remodeling. Branding-wise, phenomenal. Had my branding on point, killed it. Killed it in the branding and marketing. I mean, absolutely destroyed the competition. But it's not remodeling. It's not high-end remodeling. So I had to spend a massive amount of effort to educate my demographic, to educate my customers because of the stigma around handyman. A lot of people believe handyman or unlicensed. uninsured, you know, a 65-year-old guy who's retired, and now he does it on the side for 20 bucks an hour. That's the stigma of the handyman business. They're our professional handyman. That's what we were, very professional. The level of professionalism that I had in my business would outweigh 90% of the competition in any construction industry. We were extremely professional. And so that helped to offset some of that stigma. But from the outside in, you know, you got somebody who needs some work done. They call you, hey, I need this work done. Yeah, we can do it. It's a hundred bucks an hour. Holy crap. That's way too much. I'm not paying that much. Right. So there was a lot of that stuff going on. That was mistake number one. I pick the wrong business model. Number two, I did not. This was the one that cost me the most financially. This was the biggest mistake I made that had the largest financial costs associated. Number two is I did not job cost my jobs. If you don't know what job costing is, job costing is when the job is done, just simply going back and looking at all the information about the job. How much was the actual versus the estimate? How many hours? Do we end up spending versus the estimate, the materials versus the estimate? And also looking at it, dissecting it, doing an after-action report, whatever you want to call it. I don't care what you call it. I call it job costing. And looking at everything line by line and seeing what happened on that job because that is where you get all your gold. That is where you know what happened, where you need to make changes. All of the military units in the world. especially the operators, you know, the special operators, special forces and SEALs and all of them, they always do after-action reports. They get a mission, they go out, they execute the mission, they come back. The very first thing they do, like they're pulling in on the trucks, they get off the trucks, they go right into the building, the talk or wherever they're at, and they do a debrief immediately while the information is still fresh. Because you need to know what happened. And they go, okay, what happened? What went right? What went wrong? They debrief the whole thing. And now they know, like, hey, we went out here and the radios got hit right off the bat and we lost communication. Okay, what can we do differently? Well, maybe we need to have a backup radio. Perfect. Well, I will take two radios instead of one. Like, it can be that simple, right? So in your business... What went wrong? You go to your team or if it's you by yourself, you look at it and say, what went wrong? We had this job bid for 40 man hours and we had 60 man hours. What went wrong? Well, you bid these doors for three hours each. And on average, it takes us six hours or five hours or whatever. And there were 10 doors. So that was like an extra 10 hours or whatever, you know, whatever, whatever it is. Like you figure that out, right? And so that's where you have to actually dissect that to find out what's going on in the job and in your business. And then you can make changes that will have lifelong effects or long-term effects on your business. If you job cost it and you realize you didn't make any money, like you only made $500 when you should have made $2,500, and then you realize you simply just didn't bid it enough. you didn't bid enough hours, then you know the next time you do that job, you need to bid it for more hours. I didn't do this. I didn't do any of this. And some of you are like, well, what do you mean you didn't do it? That's common knowledge. Everybody's job costs. Well,11,12 years ago, there wasn't Facebook. There wasn't internet. There wasn't YouTube that you could go and find all this information out. It was not common knowledge. And so I just didn't do it. Right. Very few people like understood what you had to do with business. Back then, I wasn't doing it. Now, today, it's common knowledge. You can go anywhere and find this information out. I simply wasn't doing it. Now, some of you know what job costing is. Some of you sort of kind of do job costing, meaning you don't really look at all of the information. You just look at the hours and the material costs. See if they're close. Okay, yeah, we're three man hours over. No big deal. And then you don't use that information and process it and find out. You need to go to your team, if you have one, and talk to them after every job. Every single job. Not one out of 10. Not every other one. Every single job. I don't care if you do the exact same thing every time. You should job cost and you should get with your team. your team should know what your numbers are. Your team should know, like, this is our gross profit. We were shooting for a 50% gross profit. We came in at 47. We need to figure out how to get that extra 3%. Or we came in at 55%. Awesome job, guys. What went right? What did we do? Everything just hit. Everything just hit perfect, and it was a very easy job. Okay, so that was a one-off. Like, yeah, we hit 55%, but that doesn't mean we're going to do it on every job because... That was one of those unicorn jobs where everything just went right. And usually they don't. That's not a normal, right? That's the outlier. But job costing, knowing where you're... And it also helps you with your production losses because you can start checking your team. If you have certain men that are doing better than others, you know, Johnny over here, it's taken him five hours to do one task. And Steve over here is doing the exact same task and he's doing it in three hours. Why is there a two-hour difference on the same task? You can find that information out. You start tracking their production rates and their production times. And you can start to see trends. You can start to figure out what's going on. You start to see where people do really well and some of your people don't do well. And so if Johnny doesn't do a very good job with, let's say, finishing drywall, because he's not very good at it. But Steve over here does really, really good at finishing drywall. Then that gives me insight to know that if I have the option, I always want Steve to finish drywall and then Johnny can do something else. But again, if you're not tracking this information, you're not going to know what to execute on. So job costing was huge. And it really helped me to see how much money I was actually losing or not making, for that matter. Like not making. job costing would have allowed me to see that I really wasn't making that much money. Some of you sell a job, you think you're going to make $5,000 profit. You never job cost it. And you don't realize that you only made $1,500 profit because stuff took longer than you thought. And you never knew that because you never went back and checked it. And so you sell that same job over and over and over thinking that you're making a $5,000 profit. You're only making $1,500 every time you do it because the job just simply takes longer than you think. And you're losing $3,500 every time you bid that job simply because you didn't job cost it. That's why it's super critical to do job costing. I remember the very first time, and I've mentioned this before, this was like a major, major epiphany for me. I had done this basement remodel and... I had bid it right. I had charged more. I knew I wasn't making as much money. I charged a higher gross profit on this job. I thought it was going to be a really, really good job. We get done. And I was like 50 man hours over. Like 50. And I'm like, what in the hell? What's going on here? And then I looked at the receipts from Lowe's. I had 25 receipts from Lowe's. 25 receipts. from Lowe's for one job. And this job was like 30,35 minutes one way from Lowe's. It was a little on the outside of the city. So an hour and a half, roughly, you go round trip. So, you know,30 minutes there,15,20 minutes in the store,30 minutes back. I mean, hour, hour and a half round trip times 25, right? That was like 30 hours easily of the time. was simply spent driving to the store and getting materials. And this was the big epiphany. I was like, what in the hell is going on? And what was happening was we just weren't using foresight. We weren't using enough brain power. And I say we, myself, my lead guy, everyone included, we just weren't factoring in. We weren't using foresight. We would get to a point in the project where we needed something, and then we would run to the store and get it, come back. get another three, four hours into the project or a day into the project, needed something else, run to the store and get it, come back. And you just don't pay attention to that. You don't pay attention to how much time you spend on these things. And it will eat your production and your profit alive. But if you don't job cost it, you'd never know that. So job costing was big. Number two. Number three. This kind of goes hand in hand with the handyman business, but it goes with any business. I see this all the freaking time with contractors. And that's trying to do too many different services. It's trying to throw a wide net so that you can, quote unquote, stay busy and you're doing too many things. You're trying to do roof repairs, build decks, build fences, do remodeling, do concrete. Do painting, do gutters, do siding, do windows and doors. You're trying to do everything because you think, and this is not true, but you think it's getting you more business, right? Oh, I can get more things. If all I do is seamless gutters, I won't be able to get enough business. That's not true. There's lots of, I mean, there's probably six. at least six seamless gutter companies in my town. And that's all I do is seamless gutters. The ones who do it very good and the ones who market and brand very well are the ones that are on top. The reason why this is a mistake is because every new service that you offer requires a new set of tools and it requires new skill sets. And when you're trying to scale your business, if you're doing an employee model, It's very difficult to find one employee who can do drywall, trim, paint, tile, carpentry, minor electrical, minor plumbing, and all these different things. It's very difficult to find someone who can do all of these things. It's getting more and more and more difficult. If you're just a painter, you only have to find someone who can paint. If you're just a drywall finisher, you only have to find someone who can drywall finish. And when you do one simple task, it's much easier to train someone who doesn't know how to do that. See, one of the bad things about doing handyman and or remodeling is it requires so many different trades. And so what happens is when you hire someone, even if you're going to train them in, it takes a long time. It can take up to a year for someone to have enough experience to just be average. And if they don't stay... They don't stay long enough. Then they leave and then you start over, which was the case for me. People would stay for a year, year and a half, two years, and then leave and have to start over. And part of the reason is because a lot of people, they don't want to do different things every day. They want to be able to go to one job site every day for six weeks and then get done with that job and then go to a different job site. Some people, they want to have different things every day because they have ADD and it helps them to not get bored. And we're going to talk more about that in a little bit. But you don't want to do too many things. I always told people when I hired them, the best thing about what we do is that we don't do the same thing every day. And the worst thing about what we do is we don't do the same thing every day. And what I mean by that is, like Dex, for example. Man, I hate building decks. Freaking hate building decks. I hate it. Have I mentioned that I hate it? I hate building decks partly because of the curse that we had. I had a curse. I don't know who'd put it on me, how I got the curse. But the curse that I had with decks was that no matter what time of the year, does not matter, whenever I built a deck, it was the hottest week of the entire year. And that's not an exaggeration. That's legit. Last time I built a deck, I told him I'm not doing it until like October, right? Because I'm like, I'm not doing the middle of summer. It's too hot. I'll do it in October when it's cool. Maybe even November. I don't even remember what it was like late in the year, very late in the year, end of October, beginning of November. We go build this deck. We're going to be there for three or four days. I kid you not. There was a heat wave that came in the three days that we were there. It went up into the 90s. The average temperature was 70 degrees. Those three days that we were on that deck, it went up to 90 degrees. That is not a joke. That's the curse. That's one of the reasons I hate decks. However, beyond that, I digress from my curse. The other reason why I hated doing decks was because I didn't do enough of them. I didn't do a lot of them. And so I would only do maybe two or three decks a year. And when you don't do something frequently or you don't do as many repetitions, You tend to forget things. You tend to forget some of the production hacks that you do. You almost have to relearn information whenever you're starting. Now, it doesn't take too long to get back into the swing of it, but you may lose easily four to five hours of production when you start this job because you're trying to remember, man, it's been a year since I built my last deck. How do I lay this thing out? And you have to get yourself back into it. But if you're building decks every single day, and that's all you do, there's no thinking about it. It's a process. You get a process down, you go. The second part of going too wide is because every time you do that, you have a whole new set of processes. You have a whole new set of systems, a whole new set of tools, like I mentioned. And so now you have to deal with this stuff. What happens is, For example, we did tile. I did all the tile work in my business. I'm pretty good at tile, although I don't consider myself to be a professional. And so I had all the tile stuff you need. Super nice tile saws, IQ power saw out there, hand saw, everything you would possibly need to do tile. But 10 months out of the year, that stuff sits in my shop. Because I only did tile if I was doing the bathroom or if I was doing like a backsplash. I didn't do like regular floor. Somebody wanted a new tile floor. I didn't do that because that's more production. And, you know, I wasn't going to be competitive at all. And I didn't want to do that stuff. So I would only do tile if it was part of a larger project, like a kitchen or bathroom remodel. And so I, you know, I have five, six, $7,000 worth of tile equipment that sits in my shop that only gets used two months out of the year. So you have to buy these things. Yes, you can rent them. You can rent stuff, but I just, I hate renting things. So, and I always have to have the best. So I always go out and spend money on the best, even though I may only use it a few times a year. But those are just some of the things that you run into when you try to do too many services. If all you did was drywall finishing, like every tool that you own would fit in a van and that's it. You just drive your van, you're done. I have a 2,500 square foot warehouse. Just to keep all the crap in, all the different ladders. At some point, we were doing roof repairs, so I had to buy ladder jacks and sponges for the roof and all these different roofing materials and safety harness and all the crap that you need. We were cleaning gutters, too. I had to buy ladders. I got 18 different types of ladders, and I needed scaffolding because we were doing work on the front of a gable one time, and I needed scaffolding. I just bought it instead of renting it. Again, every time you do a different service, new tools, new equipment, new training, right? Niche down. Get super niche with what you do. It's 10 times easier to do that. The thing that you need to understand about successful businesses, the money is in the boring stuff. A lot of us, we have ADD now and it's like, oh, I don't want to do the same thing every day. It's boring. I don't want to put seamless gutters up every day because that's boring. It's the same thing. It's like being in a warehouse or production. I might as well go work for Toyota and be on a production line if I'm going to do the same thing every day. Well, guess what? That's how you make money. And you don't have to be the one that does it because as soon as you can systematize that, you start hiring, you put people in place, you're off the tools. And all you're doing now is selling and managing the business. That's how you can scale a profitable business quickly. But when you want to do different things because you're quote unquote bored, you get bored, that's the death spike. That's what puts you into the death spiral of wasting money is trying to do too many different things. Niche it down and be very specific on what you do. Scale that if you want. get off the tools. It's easier to create processes for one thing than it is to create processes for 15 things. So that was number three. Number four, I didn't value my employees enough. Now, this may sound shocking because I'm such a personable and nice guy. I mean, everybody loves me and everybody thinks I'm just a super nice guy and very kind-hearted and that's just who I am. So it's kind of shocking that people would think you would think that I wasn't a very good boss to my employees. Well, let's get a little more serious here. Okay. Prior Marine, for me, it's mission accomplishment and then troop welfare. That's the order. You got a mission, you accomplish the mission, then you worry about your troops and how they're doing. You don't try to attack a hill or attack an object or a target. And in the middle of attacking a target, worry about, you know, Oh, Johnny, are you feeling okay today? Did that hurt your feelings when I said to get the F out of here and attack? Did that hurt your feelings? I'm so sorry. Why don't you go take a timeout and we'll talk about it. No, you attack the hill first and then you worry about what your troops are doing. That was my mentality when I first started. Because that's just how I was trained that way. That's how I was trained. Your feelings don't matter. Right? We're here to do a job. Put your big boy pants on. Let's go. Place your boots up. You have your tool belt. Let's get on this. Let's go. I don't care if your wife yelled at you this morning. It's your problem. Let's get on these tools. Come on. We got to get this stuff done. We got a deadline to meet. That was kind of my mentality when I first started. Now, I wasn't a dick to my guys. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't like yelling and screaming at them and talking down to them and telling them that they're pieces of crap and all that. But I just didn't really. consider them as a person. In other words, consider them as a valuable part of my team. To me, they were just a tool to accomplish the goal of getting this job done. And so I had to learn through a long time, like losing employees and stuff, really learned that I wasn't valuing them enough. One of the things I wasn't doing is I wasn't training them. If you have employees, you should constantly be training them. At the end of my business, I was training every week. We had a weekly training every single week for about an hour. I picked one specific task. One time I did on how to use a table saw. And that may seem so basic to some of you. That's common sense, Brad. Everybody should know how to use a table saw. No, it's not common sense, right? There's lots of ways you can use table saws. There's the correct way. There's the wrong way. There's creative ways. There's things you can do with a table saw that most of you probably never even thought was possible. I've seen people spin bowls on table saws, like all kinds of stuff. And we just have a little training on how to use a table saw. That's just one week, one training on table saw usage. The reason I started doing that is because I had a guy cut his finger on a table saw. He almost cut it off. Luckily, it wasn't that bad, but he went about a quarter of an inch deep into his fingertip, took a big chunk out. Right? It was just stupidity. He wasn't paying attention. So we did training every week. I started doing that towards the end of my business. The other thing is I didn't set them up for success. I just assumed if I hired you, you'd figure it out on your own. I didn't set them up for success, meaning I didn't give them the training. I didn't give them the education. I didn't tell them how to do stuff. I didn't show them where things were in the trailer. You just figure that out on your own because that's how I was. Prior to going into construction, when I got out of the Marines, I worked for the cable company. I was a cable technician. service tech. And I had a van. I drove around. I took it home at night. I cleaned it out. Everything was organized. I knew exactly where every single fitting, everything. I knew where every single thing in my van was. I could be up on a ladder and somebody come to help. And I say, hey, go on my van on the left side, first drawer bank, third drawer down, pull a drawer out, first right bin there. There's some fittings. Can you grab me some? I knew where all that stuff was. Out of like 25,30 technicians, I probably had the cleanest van there on a regular basis, the most organized, let's put it that way. The reason is because that's just me. That's prior military. That's my personality. That is not everyone else. And so I just assumed that everyone was like me and actually cared about having an organized van. The reality of it is some people don't give a crap about having an organized van. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not. good at their trade. It just means that that's not a priority to them. And so things like that, I just took for granted. I just assumed that everyone was like me and they're obviously not. Not everybody can be as good looking as me. That's just a reality I had to accept. So it was a hard lesson to learn. The other things is I didn't give them enough praise. I didn't give enough attaboys. This is something that is passed on from For my parents, my parents are very critical of what I did. The military is also very critical of what you do. That can be a good thing. It's also a bad thing. So I was very critical of stuff they would do. They would do a job. I'd show up, check on them. I'd say, whoever was working, I'd say, Eric, what happened here? Why didn't you nail this down? Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you put cock on this? Why'd you cut corners on that? You know, why, why, why, why, why? You didn't do this right. You didn't do that right. You need to do better with this. This isn't right. We got to redo it. It was a lot of that stuff and none, like literally none of, hey, I like the way you put this on. This looks really nice. Hey, this turned out really great. Great job on this. You know, it was none of that. I remember I hired a guy. He was an older gentleman and he used, he was a former stepdad of my employee, my lead guy. You know, they got divorced and so no longer a step stepdad, but he still talked to him and I hired him. So he was like in his fifties and I hired him the very first day on the job that he went, that he started out on the job. We were doing a bathroom remodel and I don't remember exactly what, what I said, but I was like getting, I was critiquing the guys. I was like, come on guys, you got to do better than this. You know, better. We got to make sure we do this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was leaving, walking out the door, and he followed me out. He's like, hey, can I talk to you for a second? I said, sure. He said, don't you think you're being a little hard on the guys? Now, granted, he was the former stepdad, so it was like he had a different opinion of the people. He was protecting them, which that's fine. He was like, don't you think you're being a little hard on them? And I was like, that's interesting. And so that, I mean, that was just the first day. Now that guy only lasted like two months. Long story short, but he only lasted about two months. So, but it was still an eye-opening experience of like, don't you think you're being a little hard on them? And I was being too hard on them. The other thing is, yeah, I didn't give him enough praise and attaboys. Those are the main things. I didn't train them, didn't give them enough training, and I didn't set them up for success, whether that was having the right tools, which I... That's not true. I've spent a lot of money on tools. A lot of times guys would say, hey, can we get this tool and make our job easier? I say, sure. I go buy it. They never use it. I get pissed. Why did you have me buy this tool if you're never going to use it? But I did set them up for success, meaning making sure they have what they need, the information, the training, the tools to make sure that they're able to do their job. So I just didn't value my employees enough early on. I didn't do that. And the last thing, that I didn't do, which I think would have eliminated a lot of these problems had I done it much, much, much earlier. And that is I didn't get help. I didn't hire the right coach soon enough. I had a business coach when I first started. A year in, I hired a business coach. He was $125 an hour, but he was a corporate business coach. So everything that he knew was about looking at your P &L and looking at things from a numbers... perspective. He didn't know anything about construction. He didn't know anything about marketing. It was just all from the business side, the numbers side. And he did help me. He helped me understand some of that stuff better, but it wasn't a big of enough help, really, to make the needle move. I take it back too. I need to step back. When I first started, I went through SCORE. I don't know if you guys know what SCORE is. SCORE is a nonprofit. organization that helps new businesses get started. So I had a couple mentors that helped me when I first got started. And when I went and met with them, they go, oh, you got to write a business plan. And I was like, why? Why don't you write a business plan? I'm just doing handyman stuff. Oh, because you got to have a business plan so you know what you're doing. I was like, okay, whatever. So I wrote a business plan and they helped a little bit. It was free. These guys were retired businessmen. Not saying anything bad about them. It just wasn't the information that I needed at that time. They did help some and they were nice people, but it just wasn't enough. It wasn't what I was looking for. It wasn't what I needed. And so I hired the other business coach. Then several years went by, didn't have any help whatsoever. And then I hired another business coach and he was $500 an hour. No, I'm sorry, $250 an hour. It was two hours we would do for two hours. And so it's $500. every other week, $1,000 a month. And then eventually we moved that to a one call a month kind of thing. And I just wasn't... He was very helpful. But again, it was all about KPIs. It was all about tracking numbers, looking at the numbers, looking at the numbers, the numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. That's all it was really about. It wasn't about the nuts and bolts of a construction business and understanding the nuances that are there. He was very helpful. But it just wasn't financially, it didn't make sense because a lot of times I'd show up to a call and really nothing had changed. And partly because I still wasn't charging enough at this point. I didn't know I needed to charge more. And so I couldn't fund any changes that I needed to make. I didn't have the money to really be able to make an impact on what I was doing. And so I'd show up to a call and it was the same thing. What did you do this week? Well, same thing I did last week. Nothing. Nothing changed. There was no progress being made. Eventually, after about three or four months, I canceled that because it just wasn't benefiting me in my construction business. I don't even remember when that was. Four or five years in, six years in, maybe. Something like that. Seven years. Then I didn't have a coach again. And so I tried it myself, my own way. I kept trying and trying and trying and doing it wrong. And finally, after nine years and finally fed up and sick and tired and working my butt off, I finally searched out some other coaches. And then I started finding coaches who specifically helped contractors. They were a contractor. Now they helped contractors. And what they were saying made sense. The stuff that they were saying actually made sense to me. because it was contractor specific. And so I hired them and I've hired a couple of different coaches in the construction space and they helped me with all the different areas of my business that I needed help with. And it changed everything. It shortcutted everything else. The amount of growth I had from one year to nine years was the same growth I had from nine years to 11 years. So in two years, I had increased my growth that matched what I had done the first nine years simply because I had the right information. I had the right knowledge. And so that's what catapulted everything in my business. And through that process is when I fell in love with the coaching process. Now, just something about me. I've always planned on doing business coaching way into the future. Like when I was going to retire at 65 and I couldn't work anymore, I would become a consultant or whatever. So that was always something that I wanted to do. However, through the process of getting help in the coaching space, specifically with contractor coaches, I fell in love with this. And that is what transitioned me into this space. What transitioned me into creating the Hammer and Grind podcast, creating my coaching group, the Profit Club. And that is what is where I'm at today because I love doing this way more than I love remodeling bathrooms or kitchens or anything else. Being able to help contractors and legitimately change the trajectory of their lives and their family's lives is a hundred times more fulfilling to me. Then a really nice, beautiful bathroom that I post on Facebook and everybody goes, ooh and ah, and that lasts for about two weeks and then it's over. No one else says anything about it. The customers, they love it. Maybe I see them three months later out in town like, oh yeah, we love our bathroom. It's great. But that's really it, right? It wasn't for me, at least. This is for me. It wasn't as fulfilling. And so that's why I transitioned into doing coaching. is because the coaching that I had received made a fundamental impact on my business, so much so that it changed what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And so that is where we're at today. However, I would not be here if I had not got coaching. And one of the mistakes that I made was not getting the right coaching earlier in my business. Had I had found the contractor coaches, You know, year three, maybe two or three, who knows where I would be at today. Like it would be mind boggling to me because the information that you receive from someone who's in the fight with you, who's in the trenches, who's next to you battling and understands all of the nuances of what happens. Those are the ones that are going to be able to tell you, yeah, don't do that. Yeah, I know you want to do that, but don't because it's not going to work out. Right. I've been there. I've been, I've made that mistake. This is why I'm telling you, this is why I'm sharing this podcast, the five biggest mistakes I've made. It's also why I'm able to, this is episode number 85. It's why I've been able to create 85 episodes of things that I've learned the hard way and also learned how to do the correct way. And so now I'm sharing that with you. And so hopefully you will understand why that was a big mistake, not getting help sooner. So those are the five biggest mistakes I made. I picked the wrong business model. I didn't job cost my jobs. I tried to do too many services, tried to go too wide with my services. I didn't value my employees enough. And I didn't hire a coach soon enough. I didn't hire the right coach soon enough in my business. If I had to go back and do it all over again, if I was starting a new construction business today, no doubt within two years, I would be... at least where I was after 11 years in business. I could do that in two years because now I have the right information. So I hope this was helpful to you guys. As always, check out my other social media information. Check out TikTok. I do a ton of videos on TikTok. I got Instagram and my free Facebook group, The Contractor Profit Blueprint. I go live in there once a week, provide tons of value. Got lots of new exciting things that I'm going to be dropping in that group. So you're going to want to check it out. The link is in the show notes. Until next time, guys, you know what to do. Be the best version of you.
