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. Now, 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 onto the show. And welcome to another episode of the Hammer and Grind podcast. I want to start off by saying thank you so much for paying attention, listening and downloading these podcasts. It means a lot to me and for the feedback that I get from you guys, I really appreciate it. That's what keeps me going as well as the successes that you guys are having. So thank you. for all of that support. Now in this podcast, we're going to be talking about how to get off the tools. And there's a lot that we can cover here. It would be like a four hour podcast if I was going to cover every single detail. But what I want to do is cover three main points that you need to have in order before you're ready to get off of the tools. Now some of you may already be off of the tools, but you're struggling in your business. And as you listen to this, it might make sense as to why you're struggling currently because you didn't have these things in place before you made that transition. Now, before I get into this, I want to set the tone here because this is important. According to the Labor Bureau of Statistics,96% of contractors will have failed in their business within the first 10 years. Now, the numbers are different. compared to the first year, the fifth year, and the 10th year. But after 10 years,96% of contractors will have closed the doors on their business. And there's really two main reasons why this happens. The first one is simply burnouts. We get completely burnt out of doing everything. We're working 70,80,100 hours a week. We're on the tools. And we never quite figure out how to get off the tools. We just, quite frankly, burn out. Like we just get sick and tired of it. It's too hard on our bodies. You know, when you're 22 years old, you think you can work forever. But when you're 52 years old, you don't think that anymore. Now it's like, holy crap, this hurts. Every day I wake up, my body hurts. I'm 45 years old and my body hurts. So it doesn't take long to realize how... burnout can affect your business. The second reason is bankruptcy. They just simply run out of money, right? You got to close the door. Customer doesn't pay you. You overextend yourself with expenses. The list goes on and on. You don't manage your cash flow, blah, blah, blah. Like those are the two main things that cause you to go out of business. And what I'm going to talk about today actually will help prevent those two things from happening. And it'll make more sense as we get deeper into it. The three things that we're going to cover on this call today are what kind of shifts need to happen mentally. You got to have some mental shifts. What is required financially to be able to get off the tools and what systems need to be in place before you're ready to get off the tools. Okay, so let's dive in. Mental shifts. Now, this is important. So listen right here. Listen, this is very important. are not owners and owners are not craftsmen. Those are two different people. And if you truly want to get off the tools for good, you have to become a completely different person than you are right now. Yeah, you have to basically make a mental shift in your brain to become an owner of a business and not a craftsman. And for some of you, that's going to be really, really hard to do because your identity is tied up in what you do. I am a tile setter. I am a carpenter. I am a painter. I'm a landscaper. Whatever it is, I'm a roofer. You tie your identity to what you do and simply moving from, you know, swinging a hammer to pushing paper, which is basically what you do when you're an owner is you become a paper pusher. It requires a mental shift. And that's what we're going to get into here in just a second. So what does being a craftsman even mean? Let's start at what it means to even be a craftsman. Well, one, you have to take pride in your work, right? The actual term of being a craftsman, not a tradesman, a craftsman is someone who actually takes pride in what they do. Everything about their craft is important to them. They also basically have to be an artist. You're pretty much an artist in your trade. It doesn't matter if you finish drywall. Guys that are really, really good at finishing drywall, and that's what they do every day, it's an art to them, right? They have perfected the method of finishing drywall. And you have to be really good with your hands. Now, you guys can tell me, I don't know of any, let me know if you do, but I don't know of any trades where you can just do it with your feet. Like you can just sit down and use your feet. So you have to be good with your hands, right? Because that is the act of being on the tools, using your hands. Now, let's conversely compare that to what an owner, what it means to be an owner. By the way, owner can be leader. It doesn't matter the title. Don't get hung up on the title of owner, the leader of the business, right? General manager, whatever you want to call it, CEO, I don't care. To be an owner, you have to take pride in building teams, not pride in the work you're doing because you're no longer doing the work. Now you take pride in the teams that you're building, the employees that you're hiring, or the subcontractors that you're using. You take pride in that. Not so much the subs, but definitely with your employees, you take pride in the people that you're hiring and training and grooming and becoming the people that they are. You take pride in that, building teams. You have to become an artist of communication, not an artist of being on the tools. not the craft itself, but of communication. You have to understand how to effectively communicate with your team because most problems in business that are non-task related, task being, you know, the guy's hammering something, misses this nail and it hits the drywall, pokes a hole in the drywall. Now you got to patch it. That's a task related error. Most non-related or non-task-related problems that happen in business are due to communication or lack of or not clear communication. So you need to become an effective communicator. You need to learn how to be, and there's different names for it, executive communication, effective communication, but basically you got to become an artist at communicating. This single thing right here, like just learning how to communicate effectively will make a huge difference in your business. And I've talked about it before on a podcast, number 79, effective communication. Like I deep dive into what that means. And so that's definitely a part of being able to build a team. The last thing is, and some of you won't like this. The last thing is you have to be good at serving others. You have to become a servant leader. Like your job. Once you bring on employees, your job now becomes make sure they have everything they need. Make sure they have all the tools, the systems, the support. Your job is to support them so that they can do the job effectively. It's no longer you're the one telling them so much what to do. Put a frame of wall over there, put a plan over there, whatever it is. You're not doing that anymore. Now you are supporting them with systems that allow them to do that without you. So you have to be good at serving others. Your employees don't work for you, by the way. You work for your employees. Once you understand that concept, it will start to change everything. Now, here's the big thing. This is super important. I'm going to probably say it several times because this whole podcast, this whole episode is very important stuff. Are you being the boss? that you would want to work for. So when you start recruiting people and you're starting to hire out a lead guy, a foreman, or a project manager, the key positions that you need to hire in order to get you off the tools, are you being the type of boss that you would want to work for? More importantly, are you being the boss that A players would want to work for? A players meaning top of the line, the very best. If you think A, B, C, D, A players are the top. So if you're trying to attract A players, you have to be an A boss. A players don't go to work for B bosses. So if you're a B boss right now, you're not going to do a very good job of attracting A players. So you have to become an A boss. And if you listen to the podcast with Nathan, he was on, which one was that? That was number 90, episode 90 with Nathan France. He had some really, really good recruiting tips. And he said, when you are an owner or a leader in your business, what are you doing in your own life? Like, how are you running the business and your personal life? If your employees, if you're telling them, hey, make sure your trucks and your vehicles are squared away, cleaned up, and no trash on there, but then they see your truck and you got trash all over the dashboard, that's not you. being the type of person that you want your employees to be, right? They see that. They can see right through all that. So if you're showing up late for work at your own business, and then you're yelling at your employees for showing up late, that's not going to work. And A players will definitely not tolerate that. You know, if someone were to come and work for you, let's say you were able to attract an A player. They come in day one and they look at your operation. And you're like, hey, welcome the new employee, A player, and he's going to be helping us out. All right, man, have at it. Get to work. And that's like how you start to say, like there's no process whatsoever in place. Your A player is going to be like, what in the crap did I get myself into? This happened to me many, many years ago. As I've mentioned before, I talked about I was in the Marines for four years. And after I got out. this was several years later, like four or five years later after I got out, I decided for whatever reason to join the National Guard or local National Guard, really just for some money and some, you know, kind of get back to some of that brotherhood, if you will, in the military. So they had a, let's call it a try one where you can try it out for a year. If you're prior military, you can go on the National Guard on just a one year enlistment. Normally it's like four or six or 10 years, whatever. And so I did a try one. And I still remember day one of going to my first drill and it was complete chaos. I had nobody handling me, telling me where to go, what to do next, go and get your gear, get your stuff issued, blah, blah, blah. It was just like, hey, wear one of your old uniforms if you can, and then we'll get you squared away with new stuff. And I remember thinking on day one, and a matter of fact, my recruiter, who was stationed at the National Guard Armory, I was going somewhere down the hallway and I was supposed to go talk to somebody who wasn't there and it was just complete chaos. And I was walking back and I saw him and I was like, this is my exact words. I was like, what in the hell did you get me into? Because it was complete chaos. And so on that very first day, I realized it was a mistake to just come back even for a year. So this is what happens whenever you don't have a business that is set up to start bringing on A players. Those A players, one, they're going to recognize it from the very get-go. Like they're not even going to apply for the job or they're not even going to accept the job. And two, if they happen to do, they're not going to stick around very long because they're going to say, what in the hell did I get myself into? You have no idea what you're doing. So you have to start becoming an A player. And that's what some of the things we're going to talk about here is that you have to start training yourself now to be that person. It's not an overnight thing. You're not going to wake up tomorrow and then just be an A player and have the right mental shift. It's a process. So you guys need to start now, if you haven't already, to start preparing for this because getting off the tools doesn't just happen. It's not just you wake up one day and you hire someone and you're off the tools. You actually have to plan. You have to have a plan in place to get there. And a lot of you are just winging it each day, thinking that, oh, once I get enough work, then I just hire someone. That's how you set yourself up for failure. Just tell you that right now. So you have to be an A boss if you want to attract A talent. And here's the thing too, is that A's don't work for B's and below. So if you're a B, or maybe even a C boss, the best you're going to be able to hire is going to be a C player because Bs don't want to work for Cs and so on and so on. So you have to become the type of boss that someone would want to work for. So my question to you is, which one are you? Are A, B, C, or maybe even a D? And take an honest reflection at this. And if you're a D, good. Now you know where you're at. Now you can start making steps towards becoming a boss because that's going to be a requirement. So what did I do in my business to make the shift? And this is what you should be doing as well. And you're already doing one of these because you're listening to this podcast. But for me, the very first thing I started doing is reading books. And I like listening to audible books. I actually don't like reading. I like it more now than I used to, but I still don't like reading books that much. I'll listen to audible books all the time. And when you're driving, drive time is classroom time. Get that mantra in your head. Drive time is classroom time. If you're doing anything but listening to podcasts or listening to audiobooks while you're driving, you're wasting valuable learning opportunities. And you shouldn't be calling customers when you're driving. That's a no-no. When you call customers, that should happen in your designated spot. should not be happening while you're driving. I understand you may need to call a subcontractor or you may need to call a supplier and do some of that stuff while you're driving. I get it. But if you're driving around listening to the radio, listening to the 80s, listening to Queens or whatever, because that's your favorite band from high school, don't. It's a waste. It's a complete waste. So I started reading books. I started listening to business podcasts. Although I don't listen to that many podcasts to be Frank with you, I started watching a ton of YouTube videos on how to do different things in business. I hired business coaches and I joined communities of people that I wanted to be like, you know, I wanted to be around other people that are similar or where I, where I wanted to be. And so it's super important that whenever you do surround yourself with other people, here's a little tip for you. You want to be the dumbest person in the room. You do not want to be the smartest person in the circle of influence or the room that you're in. Why is that? Because you're not going to learn anything. Everyone else, if you're the smartest person in the room, everyone's going to be looking up to you to give them answers. Now, because I do coaching in that capacity, I kind of have to be smarter at least than what my clients are. In other words, I have to know more things than my clients do. But I personally join other coaching programs and other communities where I'm the dumbest person in the room so that I can continue to learn more and learn more and learn more. And the longer you're in a room, the more stuff you will learn. So basically, you start to go up the ladder of becoming smarter and smarter. And at some point, if you're the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave. It's time to leave that room. And we've had people in the Profit Club that have come in. learned everything they needed to learn, got the most value that they needed, implemented it, had success and said, great, this was great. Thank you. I'm leaving to go on to another room. And I am perfectly okay with that because that means that they're getting better, right? For me, it was just one rung on the ladder, if you will, to get them to the next level. So join communities that are going to help you get better. And that's what I've been doing. And I still do it to this day. Let's look at, and that's really the end of the mental part of it. There's way more mental stuff you can get into. There's lots of books on different topics that I could recommend for different things that you need to get into that mental space. So hit me up and I can share some of those with you. So let's look at number two, the financial requirement. And this might do some of you in. You might get sideswiped here upside the face. You have to make a lot of money to start getting off the tools, like a crap ton of money, like a really, really big ton of crap. I guess there's not really, I mean, a ton is a ton, right? I guess you can't, there's not a big ton and a really big ton. It's still a ton, but I think you get the point here. You have to make more money. So how are you going to pay for them? Let's look at the obvious. If you're going to hire somebody, you got to pay their salary, right? You got to pay their, you got to make payroll. Well, if you're a one man show working on a job and you're charging, you know, let's say you make, you pay yourself 75,000 a year. And if you're on the tools doing that by yourself, that's great. But as soon as you transition off the tools, if you're hiring more people, I mean, you're probably going to have to hire more than one person to get off the tools, but. If you're hiring people and then you get out the tools, you now transfer from being a income producing role in your business to a non-income producing role. So in other words, your salary now becomes a straight expense. And you're not, I mean, there are things, obviously, if you're selling jobs, that's important. But in terms of billable hours, you're no longer billing hours, right? You're not doing that anymore. So now you have to make more money to pay for that. If you're making $75,000 a year and you hire someone at, let's say, $50,000 to replace you, you have to make an extra $50,000 a year to replace your person or to pay that person, right? So it's not just, oh, I make some money and then I hire someone and I get to do more work. It doesn't always work out like that. Yes, obviously, the more people you have, the more jobs you can do. the more profit you can make. But you still have to be able to afford to hire those people in the first place. And so that's why I always recommend you have at least one month of whatever that salary is going to be. If you're hiring a guy at a 50K a year, whatever his one month salary is, you need to have that saved up in a separate account. That's not being touched. You just have one month of payroll, your total payroll, including yourself and all your employees. You should always have at least one month of payroll in reserves. Really? Then that's a minimum. Really, you should have two to three months. The more, the merrier. Because if you have slow times, it's not so much a big deal. Like, oh man, I got to, we got to do some work. I got to sell some equipment. We got to do this so that I can make payroll. No, it's like, okay, we're going to, yeah, it sucks. We're losing money, but I got enough money to pay for three months. Like, even if we're sitting here, you know, sweeping the floor every day for eight hours, I have the money. to pay my guys to keep them busy because you're smart about it. So you have to start saving up now, even just for that future. Who's going to pay for the tools, right? Are they providing tools or are you going to pay for them? What about vehicles? Are they providing vehicles or are you providing vehicles? Uniforms, training, cell phones, all these different things that go into that. Who's paying for that? Now, I am of the belief that the owner should pay for all of that because I think that's the professional thing to do. I think that's how you control the narrative of your business, be professional, all of that stuff whenever you do it. I'm not a fan of employers who require their employees to drive their own personal vehicle and use their own personal tools to go do work for me. I'm just not a fan of that. I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm not saying that people don't do that. I'm just telling you, I'm not a fan of it. And I don't know a single company that's extremely successful. And if I'm measuring success by revenue, like in the millions of dollars, I don't know a single company that's generating millions of dollars in revenue that doesn't have company trucks and company provided tools and all of that. I just don't know. It may exist. I don't know them. I've never met them yet. Okay, so somebody's got to pay for that. Whenever I bought my second van, I was going to outfit it for another crew. I was adding a second crew. I bought a used van. I didn't buy it brand new, and it was used. It was a few years old. It was a Transit 250. I bought that. I bought all the tools, like all new tools that outfit the entire van. You know, hand tools and... chop saw and circular saw. And I set that van up as a completely cordless van. So everything in there was DeWalt brand new, all cordless. And I set that up and then I built shelves in there, custom shelves so that we had the right layout that we wanted. And then I had it wrapped. I had that van wrapped and panel vans are pretty big space. So it's a lot bigger wrap, which means more cost. So Toto invested in bringing that vehicle online. Just the vehicle and the tools and everything included in that cost me $25,000. Now, do you have to spend that much money? No. But I'm just giving you an example of what it takes to bring on a company vehicle that's fully ready to go. It's about $20,000 to $25,000. If you buy a new vehicle, it could be even more. If you buy a really, really cheap vehicle and you don't put a wrap on there. You might get lucky enough to get into a vehicle and tools for about $10,000. But regardless, you have to have that money. Like, where is it coming from? If you get a loan, that's fine. But now you just increase your cash flow, you know, the debt to your cash flow. So your cash flow is now lower. So you have to make sure that you have money to be able to bring new people on if they're going to require driving a new vehicle. Basically, more money that you make. the more freedom that you will have. Because if you make more money, then you can start to offload responsibilities and jobs that you're doing now yourself to other people. And every step you make, it gives you a little more freedom in what you're doing. So making more money. Yeah, that's great, Brad. That's great in theory. You just make more money. Well, I can't do that. I can't make more money unless I have more people. Well, that's just not true. I've heard them all. I'm not trying to rip people off, Brad. I just need to make enough money to pay my bills and be happy, and I'm not trying to rip people off. I already get 50% gross profit on my jobs, but really what they actually are getting is a 50% markup. They don't even know the difference. They don't realize they're actually screwing themselves out of 50%. Or I can't compete with the low ballers in town. There's too many of them. Or nobody will pay that much money. I'm already getting people complaining I'm charging too much. And all the excuses that you could possibly think of. I've heard them all. Pick which one you want. I've heard them. That's not true. None of them are true. It's just mine. It's mine crap. Bull crap. Head trash. Whatever you want to call it. Mine poop. I don't care. It's not true. It's not true. I have. Two examples here just to share with you of how knowing what to charge and how to do it can change your entire situation. The first one here is Travis. He's one of my clients that joined the Profit Club, and he sold a job for $100,000 more than he would have sold the exact same job for just months prior to joining. Let me say that again. He sold a job for $100,000 more. This isn't a job where it's like, you know, I'll do it for $80,000 and then I add an extra $10,000. No, he would have sold the job for like $80,000 and then he sold it for $180,000. You see the difference there? Same job. He didn't add more stuff to it. He was just so cheap on his prices that he didn't understand what he was doing. How much money he was losing. And he was able to get to being able to do that. And that's life-changing profit, guys. That's getting off the tools kind of profit. So I want to point that out. That's getting off the tools kind of profit. The other one here I want to share is somebody posted in our group shortly after he had joined. He said, I sold my first job at over 60% estimated gross profit today. ask me a couple months ago and I would have said it isn't possible. The only thing that changed is the mindset and the skills, in other words, the training. He changed his mindset, got the training, and then was able to change how he runs his business. And by the way, the person I'm talking about, after being in for about a year, added just under $500,000. of additional profit. He's no longer on the tools and he's been able to build a team underneath him. That's the kind of crap ton of money I'm talking about. So making more money is possible. You just have to know how to do it. And if you're telling me it's not possible, it's because you actually don't know how to do it. And that's it. There's no other reason. You don't know how to make more money. Now, let's talk about systems. The third and final part of this equation that we really need to understand in order to get off the tools. So it's really, there's lots of systems in business. There's like dozens and dozens of different types of systems. But in terms of getting off the tools, I want to talk about three types of systems. There's people systems, there's evaluation systems, and then there's production systems. So people systems, when I say that, what I mean is, recruiting, HR stuff, you know, training, orientation, all these different things. That's what I'm talking about. So if you look at people systems, do you have an org chart? Some of you don't even know what an org chart is. Do you have an onboarding template? Do you have a process for onboarding people? How are you going to train them if you have software? Like if you use a software like Projo or Buildertran or anything like that. Are you going to train them on how to use that software once you hire them? What's orientation look like for them? What's the first week working for you look like? What's the first month or the first year even? What does that look like? That should all be documented and put in a, you know, some type of system that whenever you hire someone, all you have to do is start that system and then that system does everything else for them. Now, I don't mean like, a computer system per se. It can be all paper. It can be all digital. It can be nothing but videos they watch. You know, a lot of times when you start a business, they have orientation. And sometimes it's just sitting in a room watching videos for eight hours on different things. That could be an orientation system, but you have to have something set up. If you're just going to have OJT, A player, here's what we're doing. Go ahead and get started. and I'll check in on you in two weeks. Well, they're going to walk out the door. Well, dude, I don't even know how to clock in. Like, who's going to teach you how to clock in? So the app, or what paperwork are you going to use to clock in? How are you going to track time? Like, all of these things should already be figured out before you hire someone. So what's an org chart? An org chart is just a simple blueprint, if you will. of what your business looks like, all the different positions in your business. Maybe you have a foreman, you have a couple of journeymen, and you have an apprentice. Maybe you have an estimator, maybe you have a salesman, maybe you have a marketing person or an office manager, or you have a service department. Maybe you have service and install. You know, I mean, there's different things and you have different positions in your business. So you need to have an org chart so you can see. where you need to go, the blueprint, if you will, in your business. And when you first start, if you're a one-man show, you should have an org chart that's going to have all the positions on there. And your name is in every one of those boxes. So I have a little, a very basic temporary one here I'm looking at. And at the top you have owner, which that's me. And then you have two branches. One is on the construction side and one is on more of the sales side. So you have foreman, that's one job. You have journeyman, that's a second job. And you have apprentice, that's a third job. Those are three jobs under the production side. And then you have an office manager, a salesman, and an estimator. Now, don't get too caught up on like, well, that business model isn't going to produce enough income. Don't worry about that. It's just an example. But each one of those boxes, if you will, because they look like little boxes, and you can just go online and search for org chart. and see exactly what I'm talking about. But each one of those boxes is a position in your business and your name is on each one of those. And so if you're looking at that and your name is on the former position, the journeyman position, and the apprentice position, your name is on all three of those, then that means you're a one-man show basically. And so if you want to get off the tools, you want to start at the bottom and then work yourself off. You work yourself out of a job basically. So you're going to hire an apprentice maybe, or maybe you hire a journeyman, it just depends. But once you hire them, you take your name off that position and you put their name on there. And every time you hire someone, you replace yourself. You're removing yourself from those positions and you'll slowly start to see yourself being replaced in your own business. And that's what you want to do. Underneath each one of these jobs, you should have a job responsibility, like what that position is responsible for. So that way people know, like, oh, the foreman is responsible for scheduling jobs, getting materials, and running the job. That's his responsibility. The apprentice may be responsible for keeping the vehicles and trailers organized, swept out, clean, you know, and do the PMs, whatever that might be, put on there what their job responsibilities are. It helps to also show new potential hires where, you know, where they can go in your business. Like it's like, hey, this is my business. I'm trying to grow it and trying to get it really big. You would be a key player in the business if we plug you in here. Here are all the other positions you can get to. So it's not just I'm just getting a job for now and I don't know what I want to do in the future. It's like, oh, I can see myself rising through the ladders, you know, the different positions in this company to eventually be, you know, different things. So you can show potential hires that or new hires. So create an org chart and put the job responsibilities on there. Evaluation systems. The evaluation systems don't get enough credit. Everything in your business that you do should be evaluated. And I mean everything. You should be evaluating your employees. You should be doing job costing. You should be checking inventories. If you have inventory, you should be doing PMs on your vehicles. make sure they're running good, doing old changes and all that stuff. You should be evaluating everything in your business. And so you can create tools and processes and systems to do the evaluation. I had one in my business. It was just a quality checklist. That's all it was, quality checklist. And all it said, it had, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven boxes, seven areas that we checked. So it was professionalism, job site cleanliness, quality of work, efficiency of work, punctuality, accuracy of the scope of work, and overall score. Those are the things that we checked. And I just made a simple little worksheet on Excel. Guys, it don't have to be that hard. And I had a 1 through 10 for each section. Just numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. All they had to do was circle it. So one being bad,10 being the best, they would circle it. After we do a job, I would give one to my lead guy, my foreman, and then I would take one and I would evaluate the job they did and they would self-evaluate the job. And what's interesting is what I learned when I started doing this. My lead guy at the time, his name was Eric, he was very hard on himself. Like he was almost always his self-evaluation was worse than my evaluation. Some things he would get right. Like they were very professional. They almost always professional. They were always punctual. Didn't have a problem with that. Their quality of work sometimes would change and the efficiency of work would sometimes change. And then the job cleanliness usually was up pretty high. But sometimes he would give. under efficiency of work, he would put like a four and I'd have him down for like a nine. And I'd be like, Hey, what's up? Like, why'd you score yourself so low? Well, I just took too long on this one task. You know, I had to, I cut some boards wrong and I had to redo it three times and I just felt like it was taking so long. And so, you know, I didn't get done as fast as I had hoped it would. Regardless if like, if I had a job bid for, you know, say 20 hours and he still did it in 20 hours. He could potentially be giving himself a four. And so what that does is let me know that, okay, maybe his efficiency suffered because he made some mistakes, but that means that he could actually be even more efficient on the time. So maybe if he didn't make any mistakes, maybe he would have done that job in, say,18 hours instead of 20 hours. So just doing an evaluation like this is super important. It can also share with you things that you didn't even know were happening. maybe he puts on their job site cleanliness is a six and you say it's a 10 because usually it's clean. You stop by the job site four or five times and it was clean every time. You're like, I don't understand. I went by there and it was clean. He said, well, there was one time when we first started doing demo and we didn't realize that the door, the magnetic door to the dust barrier was open. It got left open and we were doing all the demo. And so a bunch of dust got out in the bedroom and the customer came home. They saw it. They weren't really happy. You know, I mean, they weren't upset, but they were a little frustrated with it. We cleaned it all up and we took care of it. But, you know, that was why I put it on there is because it got messy. And I didn't, you know, maybe I didn't know that because I wasn't at the job site when that happened. And they didn't tell me at that time because it wasn't that important. Just that right there, that evaluation is like, okay, well, how can we fix that? What can we do to fix that? And so you can create these evaluation processes before you hire them and even after you hire them. And let me share with this why this is important as well, guys, because when you hire someone and if they come in and there's no systems in place, it's kind of like the Wild West, right? Just do whatever you want and we'll figure it out. But if you start adding a bunch of things to their list every day, every week, every month, hey, before. all you got to do is write your hours down on a piece of paper. Now I want you to write your check-in on a job site. Every job you do, you got to check it on your phone. And oh, now I want you to do a week, you know, an evaluation. And now I want you to do this. And you start adding all of these systems and processes and things later on, they will start to get frustrated because it feels like they have more responsibilities without more pay. Even though really, They should have been doing it anyways. But if you hire someone on and you have all of these things in place, that is the baseline. And so from there going forward, they're not really doing more work. They're doing what's required of them. I hope that makes sense. Like, I'm not saying if you add one little checklist, it's going to make people want more money or quit. If you go from nothing to adding, you know,20 different checklists and processes, people can start getting frustrated because they don't like change. We don't like change. And so you're changing a bunch of stuff. Whenever they come in, if it's already in place, that is the baseline. You're not changing a bunch of stuff. So I hope that makes sense. The last one is production systems. So I want to get through this here. Production systems. Talking about SOPs, checklists, or what I call step list, which is like a list of steps to do, you know, job information, those types of things. And there's, again, there's many different types of systems that can go into production, but these are just kind of the ones I'm wanting to point out so you understand. Most of us, I laugh because I'm laughing at myself here. Most of us, we want to hire someone who already knows the system. So if we're a one-man show right now, or if we're the lead guy, We have a system in our head. We have an operating system. The way of which we work, right? Think of your computer. You got, you know, whether it's a Mac or Windows, you got an operating system on there. If you buy a computer, if you buy a Windows computer, it has Windows 10. And then you buy another computer, it has Windows 10. Those two systems are going to work exactly the same, right? Because it's programmed into each computer with that. We believe that other people we hire are programmed with our operating system that we have in our head. And that is not true. When we hire people, we think they have the operating system and then basically they're creating our system for us by being the system themselves. So it's like we're just substituting our brain operating system. with their brain operating system, and now their brain operating system is going to take over and we don't have to do anything. That's what's called a unicorn. In other words, that doesn't exist. There aren't people out there that know and think and process information the exact same way you do. You can't clone yourself, right? One, it's not legal, and as far as I know, they haven't been able to do clone humans yet. But even if you could, like I wouldn't want to clone myself. That would be a nightmare. My wife, she probably wouldn't be able to handle two of us, let alone one. Or she can barely handle one, let alone two. That's not what creating a system is about, right? If they have a lot of experience, maybe they've been in construction for 15 years or 20 years or whatever. Maybe they work for the same company for 10 years. and they did drywall a specific way. They finished drywall. They hung and finished it a specific way. His experience of how he does it may not necessarily be the exact same way you do it. So there's no such thing as common sense. I've done podcasts and videos on this. There's common experiences, but there's not common sense. It's not common sense that the way you think about things is how everyone else thinks about it. So yes, you can have common experiences, but just because you hire someone that says they have 10 years experience finishing drywall, that does not mean that they're going to do it the exact same way that you want it done. And so there's going to have to be some training there. So you have to understand that you have to create the systems and then you plug people into the systems. You don't hire people as the system. You create the system and the people run the system. That's what you have to do in order to make this a repeatable and accurate process. So you need to create systems that produce, in parentheses, force outcomes. If you create a system well enough and then the people follow the system, it will produce, i. e. force, the outcome that you want because the system produces the outcome, not the people that are running the system. Does that make sense? I hope it does. I had in my business what I created called the perfect service call. There's 22 steps of what if we went and did a service call, these are the 22 steps that they needed to follow. And only one of those steps is the actual doing the work. The other 21 steps was what to do before the work, during the work, and after the work. So I had things like, number one, you text or you call the customer before you leave, letting them know you're on your way. It's a simple little thing. Number two is you had to arrive five minutes before scheduled time. So this is how the system, which is this document, if you will, is creating outcomes that I expect. The outcome I expect is that you arrive five minutes before time. So I'm documenting what I expect. That's the outcome I expect. And it goes on and on. There's different things. But the checklist, if you will, this SOP of what I call the perfect service call is that if you did everything on here like you were supposed to, then you just completed the perfect service call. And if I handed this paper to you, short of the actual task that's being performed, you could follow this task, you know, this list. to the T and then have the same results of anybody else. And that is how you create a system for your business. So let's recap what all we talked about. Number one, you have to start changing your mindset. Start changing your mindset from becoming a craftsman to an owner. You have to get really good at building teams. You have to get good at communication. You have to get good at serving others. Number two, you need to start preparing financially for this transition. You need to make a crap ton of money. You need to make a list of everything you need to hire. I didn't get too much into this, but like when you hire vehicles and tool, I mean, when you're buying vehicles and tools and all that stuff, there's a list of things that you need, right? Maybe some softwares that you use, you have to pay extra for each user. A company cam is one that they're not a sponsor. But you, you know, you pay per user with company cam. Progel is a software that I used. And depending on how many people, like they have packages of like one to five people is X amount and six to 10 is X amount. So if you have different things like that, you may have those expenses. You have to factor all that in. And so you need to know exactly what your quote true labor burden is for your employees. And by the way, if you need help with your labor burden. I do have a worksheet that you can purchase. It's $39. It's a program that I created that will lay out all of your expenses, not expenses, your burden expenses for your employees. It's not overhead expenses. It's just your COGS, your true labor burden for each one of your employees. A lot of contractors have found it to be extremely helpful in figuring out their true labor costs. But you have to... Make a list of all those things that you need to buy in order to hire someone. And then lastly, you need to save up at least one month of payroll, if not three. And then on systems, create an org chart, start documenting outcomes that you want, and then that will eventually create SOPs. With systems, guys, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. A lot of guys don't create systems because they get overwhelmed. They see it as... you know,50 different things that make up this one big system. And it's like, holy crap, I don't have time to do that. That's not how you create systems. Start today. You can take as little as 15 minutes today and just write out one simple process that you do. Just write out one process, like how leads come in. Write out one process of how you order materials or one thing of... of tasks that you do, like how to install a door, the steps to install on a door or whatever it is that you're doing, just take 15 minutes and create one little checklist. You know, it can be five,10,20 steps and then just create that checklist. And now you have one done and then you do it again tomorrow or you set aside an hour per week or whatever it is. And you just start creating systems every time. And then eventually over a period of time, you will have an SOP written. But start today so that whenever in six months or a year you're ready to hire, it's already done. That's the plan is start today so that it's ready when you're ready. All right, so create those SOPs. Now, here's the question. Are you starting to see what all needs to be done before you can get off the tools? Now, if some of you are already off the tools, and you're like running around your business is on fire every day. The reason why it's on fire is because you hired before you had these things in place, before you had systems in place. Maybe you didn't have quite enough money in place. You don't have the right mindset of how to run, manage your people. So if you're, if you have employees now and you even have four minutes stuff and you're off the tools and your business is on fire every day. It's because you're not doing one or all of these three things. So start making those changes right now as soon as you can. Now, this is pretty much the end of the what to do to get off the tools of three steps. But I do want to share with you, and I haven't shared this before. To be completely honest with you, I haven't shared it because I'm not trying to be salesy. I'm not trying to be super salesy. I don't like that. I really don't. But I realize that some people need help and they don't know what that looks like or how it can help. So I'm just going to share with you a few things here real quick and then you can determine if it's the right thing for you, if it makes sense. So the Profit Club, which you should know by now, this is the first podcast you ever listened to, the first episode. The podcast is my coaching group. It's my premium coaching group. It's a group coaching plan. that involves all the contractors together and helps them out. But I want to share with you how it can help you with this process of getting off the tools. So if you were to join the program, you will learn what the mindset of an owner is and surround yourself with other owners inside of our community. These are not craftsmen. These are owners or people that are on their way to becoming owners. We don't talk about things like What's the best type of thinset to use in the shower? Or, you know, how much do you guys charge per square foot to lay flooring? Like, we don't talk about that stuff at all. And we talk about some pricing things, but not like that. You know what I'm talking about if you've been in any Facebook groups. You will be given the tools you need to charge premium prices. This is really the one thing that we do really well at, is teach contractors how to be able to charge premium prices. This will allow you to build your war chest quicker and easier than before. You will become an effective communicator with your clients, your employees, and everyone else in your circle of influence. Becoming an effective communicator is super important. And that's one thing that we do really well inside the Profit Club. You will understand what KPIs you need to track and given the tools to track them. You will get extreme clarity on your client avatar. So you can create targeted marketing campaigns that attract the right people. And by the way, this is the exact same process that you use to attract talent, hires. Use the exact same process for finding clients to find your potential employees. You will get training on creating systems, but most importantly, you will be supported through the whole process with our weekly group coaching calls. And listen, you're not going to be thrown to the wolves, right? It's not one of those situations where you join the program and then you're on your own. I want you to succeed. And if I have not made it abundantly clear yet with all of the free content, my free TikToks, my now episode number 95 podcast, that's 95 podcast episodes I've created, my free Facebook group, all of the free content, everything that I'm putting out there. If I haven't made it abundantly clear, that I want you to succeed, then tell me, I don't even know what else to do. Like, I really don't know what else to do to make that clear. But I want you to succeed beyond your wildest dreams. And so if there's any time you ever need additional support, I'm always available to help. Like, I will make time to make sure that you get the help you need. And that is all within the Profit Club. So if you want more information about that, you can hit me up. There's a link in the show notes. You can schedule a call with me or you can watch some additional content that shares that. You can go to the website, hammerandgrind. com, and there's information on there, how you can get a hold of me. But I hope that this information on how to get off the tools was helpful. And I do have an accompanying worksheet that will help you create a plan to get off the tools. If you want that worksheet, The only way you can get that is by joining my free Facebook group. That's the only way. So go to the show notes, click on the Facebook group or reach out to me and I will share with you the link. You can, or you can go on Facebook and just search for the Contractor Profit Blueprint. But join the free Facebook group, hit me up, tell me you want that worksheet and I will send it your way. And that is the end of this episode. I appreciate you all so much. I hope you have a great and wonderful holiday season as we near Christmas at the time of this recording. And I appreciate each and every one of you. So thank you. And until next time, guys, you know what to do. Be the best version of you.
