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 episode number 95 of the Hammer and Grind podcast. Today's episode is the first episode of the year 2023. And so how appropriately timed are we going to talk about how to smash your goals in 2023? Now, this is going to be a pretty short podcast for two reasons. One. I have a head cold and it sucks to talk and you can probably hear it in my voice, but the show must go on. I'm dedicated to giving you value every single week through these podcasts. And I've only missed two recordings in the last two years of doing these podcasts. And I'm determined to never miss another one. So we're going to carry on. The second reason is because I want you to take action. I don't want you to listen to a 45-minute podcast and say, yeah, that sounds great. I think I'll do that maybe someday next week. I'll plan. No, I want you to take action as soon as you possibly can. If you're at the job site, if you're working, if you're driving, that's fine. But if you're at home listening to this, as soon as this podcast is over, I want you to go and take action. All right. So we're going to keep this short and sweet. So how do we crush their goals in 2023? Well, the first thing we have to do is actually set our goals. And if you haven't done that already, which you should have, but let's say you haven't, now it's 2023. It is a new year to actually start new processes in your business, new goals, new habits, whatever you want to call it. Now is the time to take action. So one of the first things that we're going to want to do in our business is we want to set... a profit goal, a gross profit goal for the year. How much gross profit do we want to make? Now, we can also set net profit goals. We can set income goals and revenue goals and sales goals and all that stuff. But I want you to set a gross profit goal. Now, if you've listened to me for more than a second, you know the formula that I suggest is a 50% gross profit, which is your labor. and material and subs or your total cogs times two, which is a 100% markup. So if you're getting a 100% markup on all of your services and products that you sell, then you will end up, if you hit your numbers on those estimates, right? If you hit those numbers, you will end up with a 50% gross profit on your jobs. So for example, let's say, then I want to hit a $300,000 gross profit goal. So that means I'm going to hit, I'm going to make $300,000 minus all my overhead, right? Because all the cogs, all my other expenses came out in the other 50% of the job. So I'm going to end up with $300,000 minus my overhead expenses. And then that will spit out a net profit. But here's the thing. We don't... necessarily set goals on a gross profit goal. This is just the first step in the process. So we're going to set a gross profit goal of, let's say, $300,000. And then because we get a 50% gross profit, we need to double that for our sales goal or revenue goal, whatever you want to call that. But our sales goal to make a $300,000 gross profit with a 50% gross profit percentage That means our sales goal for this year should be $600,000. And if we hit that, if we sell $600,000 and we build and collect that money this year, then we will end up with a $300,000 gross profit result, if that makes sense. Now, I'm not going to get too deep, but you guys understand that you could potentially sell $600,000 of product this year. and only complete $550,000 of it this year. Because you may sell a $50,000 project on December 29th, but you're not going to complete that and collect that money. So we're going to use sales as our goal because that's going to be the easiest thing to track. If we track revenue, actual revenue collected, which is a number that we should know. but not necessarily track on a daily basis. It's a lot easier to track your sales goals than it is to track your revenue goals. Okay? So how do we do that? We write our gross profit goal. What we want to make gross profit double at times two, and that gives us our sales goal. Now, some of you may not know. Some of you may not be doing a 50% gross profit. What you can start with is whatever you've sold, let's say last year, you could add on to that. And maybe that's a 10%, a 15%, a 20%,25%, whatever that is, growth, you would add that onto your total. If you're just starting and you don't even have a year's yet worth of tracking or years yet worth of business, you're just guessing at this point based on what you've done so far. If you've been in business for like four or five years, you should have a track record of what you've sold every year and revenue you've generated every year to be able to look at it. So if you've on average, let's say you've done a 20% increase since you started, then you would just start with a 20% increase as a goal. Your goal should always be higher than where you're at now or what you did last year. it may be a little bit more out of your reach than what you're currently doing. And that's what I suggest. So if on average, you get, let's say, a 15% year-on-year growth in your business, then I would suggest starting with a 20% increase because you want the goal to stretch you a little bit. And if you're listening to my content, if you take my advice, if you get any of my free resources, or if you're in my Facebook group, or maybe if you're even in my coaching group, then more than likely, you're going to be crushing those goals. You're going to be doing much better than the contractors who don't set goals, who don't go through for personal development. They don't take any action. And they just react to what happens to their business on a daily basis. It's just like, I wake up, I go to work, I do my job, I go home, and whatever happens, happens. And if that's you and you're listening to this, stop. Stop doing that. That is not how you crush your goals. You have to be very intentional about what you're doing. And you have to be very proactive about what you're doing. You're never going to crush your goals reacting to the day and just taking life as it happens. You have to be very intentional. And I've done many podcasts and had guests that have talked about this. So be very intentional about what you're doing with your goals. Now, how do we... use our goals to set up a plan for this year. Because that's ultimately what we want to do. We don't just want to set a goal for, oh, I want to do $600,000 in sales this year. And then that's it. I hope we get it. No, no, we're going to use that number as a starting point. And then we're going to work backwards. We're going to reverse engineer this to figure out how much money we need to sell. each week, each month, each day, each quarter, so on and so on. So I have a special treat for you guys that are listening to this. I have a lead slash sales tracker that I created for the Profit Club members, my premium coaching group. And now I'm going to be giving this away for free so you can have access to this. I haven't given it out before, but now I'm going to give access to you guys because I want you to crush your goals in 2023. One of my goals for the Profit Club and for Hammer and Grind is to 10x the amount of help,10x the amount of value that I'm giving to contractors. And so I'm going to start by giving away one of these worksheets that it took a lot to put together. It's got all the formulas factored in there. It does everything for you to make it as easy as possible for you to track your numbers so that you can hit your goals. And I'm going to kind of explain this through the podcast. Obviously, you can't see it, but it's going to make sense once you download this worksheet. And by the way, the worksheet will be available only in my free Facebook group. So if you're not in my free Facebook group, go join my free Facebook group. The links are in the show notes. It's the Contractor Profit Blueprint. You can search for it on Facebook and join the group. And then in there, you can request or get access to this worksheet. On this worksheet, it's only got three things that you have to fill out to start. You put in your total sales goal, which we just established how to do that. You put in your average job size and you put in your closing rate percentage. You may not know those off the top of your head, but they're very easy to figure out. Your average job size, you just take what your total sales were last year and divide it by how many jobs you did. It's going to spit out your average job size. And then you just take your closing rate, how many leads you had versus how many you sold. That's going to spit out a closing rate. If you don't have that number, if you haven't tracked it, that's okay. You should have some type of pulse on what kind of closing rate you have. Like, you know, you're not getting 100% and you know, you're not getting 0%. So, you know, you may know that, well, on average, I close about three out of five. Okay, well, we can use that as a starting point. That may not be accurate because you're going off of thoughts and feelings and emotion, not off of real data, but it's a starting point. The good thing about this worksheet that I have here is that it will, each week that you put in the information, it starts to adjust your closing rate percentage for you. And so it will tell you where you're at. in terms of what you're actually doing. And so the more information that you put in here, the more accurate this information will become for you to be able to see what your business is doing. So you put in your sales goal, which for our example, I said you want to make $300,000 gross profit. We take it times two that gives us a $600,000 sales goal. Our average job size for this example is $15,000. That's our average. And our average closing rate percentage is 35%. So you put those three numbers in there. And then here's the beauty behind all the magic of this worksheet. It spits out all the information you need to know. You're done computing. There's no more computing that has to happen. It tells you your goal. It breaks it down by quarter. And then within the tracking part of it, it breaks it down by month and by week. You can look at this and assuming that we're going to evenly distribute this. So let's say $600,000 a year is our goal. If we break that down by quarter, that's $150,000 a quarter or $50,000 a month. That means we have to produce 50,000 or sell, rather not produce, sell $50,000 a month, every single month, month on end, month, month, month, back to back for the entire year to hit our goal. Now, one little thing that you can adjust in here, because most of us have... Our business is not the same all the way throughout the year. We have busy months and we have slow months. Like right now, it may be your slow month through winter. You can come in here and adjust your average sales numbers per quarter. So if I know the first quarter is the slowest quarter of the year... If I change that 150 down to 100,000, that means I have to add 50,000 somewhere else. So maybe I add 50,000 to my Q2 or Q3, or I spread it out amongst those two months or whatever it is. If you've been in business for several years, you're going to have a trend of when you're busy and when you're not busy. So you can adjust these by quarter before you even start if you have that information. If you don't have that information, leave it as is. So once you start putting in your information, all you have to know is how many leads you got each day, which you're going to report this by the week, how many leads you got each week, how many, the total number of jobs that you sold that week, and the total number of sales. You don't have to know how many sales per job, just the total number of sales. So if you sold three jobs that week and you made... let's say $30,000, it's going to spit out an average job size of $10,000, which is actually lower than our average of 15. And so as you're using this worksheet, it's going to start spitting out information to you. And what I really love about this worksheet is that it breaks it down by the month and quarters for your goals. And if you don't hit those goals, it carries over into the next month. So if your goal for month one is $50,000 and you only hit $45,000, it's going to add that $5,000 that you missed onto the next month as the new goal. In other words, you have to sell an extra $5,000. And as you're going through the year, it will continue to add that up so that you can see what kind of deficits that you have in your business. Or if you oversell, it can actually reduce some of that. But you don't want to really reduce the number of sales, right? You want to keep on going. So it's going to tell you every single week when you put your numbers in there, how you're doing in your business. Are you on track to hit 600,000 or are you off track? And now you can make adjustments in your business. Now, one thing about the leads, this is the beauty when you start to really understand your numbers. With this worksheet, if I have... If my total sales goal is $600,000 and my average job size is $15,000 and I have a closing rate of 35%, it tells me I have to sell 40 jobs. And because of my closing rate, that means that I need 114 leads this year. So I need to get 114 leads in order to close 40 of those people. at an average job size of $15,000 in order to hit $600,000 in sales. So this spits out everything that you need to know in your business so that you have a measurable data collector that you can look at your business at any time and know how you're doing. If you're going to hit your goals or if you're off your goals. This worksheet is really powerful. And like I said, I've kept this as a secret. For my Profit Club members, I'm going to give it to you guys for free. You just got to join the free Facebook group to get access to it. This should help you really set you up for success in 2023. Now, here's the thing about goals. If you don't look at your goals every single day, out of sight, out of mind, I can promise you from experience that... What you think you're doing, in other words, we always overestimate the good and we underestimate the bad when we don't have real data to look at. So if you don't track anything and you just go off a gut feeling and reaction, you're going to think that you're probably doing better than what you actually are. Because again, we always overestimate the good and underestimate the bad. So you have to every single day, or at least at a minimum, once a week, look at your numbers and see how you're doing. Because if you're doing that and you get to the end of the week and you needed to sell, let's say you needed to sell one job that week to hit your numbers, and you haven't sold a job yet that week, you could hustle and start making phone calls. You could start dialing for numbers. You could start calling past customers asking for referrals. You could do a little extra in order to try and generate a sale. So now you have real data in front of you and not just emotions or guesses of what you need to do. This is why it's so powerful. This worksheet is so powerful because it tells you what you need to do. And guys, I don't care if you use my worksheet or not, but you need to be tracking every single day what you're doing in your business. I have tracking in my business. I track how many people I talk to, how many new leads came in, how many new members joined my Facebook group, how many sales calls I were on, how many new members joined. I track that stuff so that I can know what type of output effort I need to do in order to stay on track to hit my goals for the year. And you have to do the same. You can't be reactionary. to your business. You have to be proactive and you have to be intentional. So if you have the numbers in front of you every single day, you can't ignore it. It's like having the bright lights of a car coming down the road at you. You can't ignore it. It's blinding you. You just want to look away because it's like, oh, I can't see. The brights are too bright. That's what you want in your business. So set yourself up to win. by making this blaringly obvious in your face so that you have to look at it. So the second tool that I want to give you for free is just a very basic template. You can also download this off the internet. You can just Google it. It's a thermometer. You've probably seen something like it where campaigns may have it or nonprofits may have it. They're running a fundraiser and it looks like a little thermometer. lines on there and then you color it in as you hit your goal. That may seem like a very kind of cheesy, you know, like I don't need to do that thing. But again, if you have employees or even for yourself, if you have a big thermometer that you can host somewhere on a wall in your office, in the break room, outside the shop, wherever. It allows your team as well as yourself to know if you're on track to hit your goals. And then you can have milestones in there that, hey, if we hit these goals, we're going to do X. If we hit $150,000 at the end of Q1, then we're going to have a, we're going to take a trip to the local amusement park. Everybody's on deck. We're going to go. That's a goal. As long as we hit our goal, we're going to go to the amusement park on a, you know, on a Friday or whatever. or we're going to have a cookout or whatever it is kind of things you want to do to incentivize your team or yourself, you put that on your thermometer that you can print out and then fill it in with a red marker or blue marker, whatever color you want, I don't care, so that you can visually see how you're doing. It's a visual reminder. When you walk in the office every day, it's right there in your face looking at you, mocking you, saying, hey, Yeah, I know you're tired today. You're sick. You have a head cold. It'd be easier not to record a podcast. Nobody would fault you for not recording a podcast when you're sick. Except I would. And I have this blaring in my face. I have goals that I want to accomplish. And so if I have this right in my face kind of mocking me of like, look at you, you little sissy. I'm going to win. I'm going to be like, F that. I'm going to show you what's up. I'm going to get on here and record this podcast. Even if I am sick, I don't care. That's what you need. That's the type of accountability that you need. And that leads us to the last thing I want to talk about, which is accountability. You need to have some type of accountability to make sure that you're doing this. And here's the trick. It can't be your spouse. And it can't be your friends. It can't be those people. It can't be your family. It really can't be anybody. who has a vested interest in you personally. It needs to be somebody else who, to them, doesn't really matter if you like them or not. It doesn't really matter if you hit your goals or not. It doesn't really affect them per se, but that they're going to hold you accountable, meaning they're not going to let you give excuses. Well, Brad, I know I was 5,000 under on my sales this week, but... It was Friday, man. And it was, you know, the sun was out and I was just tired and I wanted to go hit the lake and throw through some fishing. And I'm like, yeah, man, if you think that, you know, it's taking two hours to go fishing so that you have two hours of enjoyment, that's going to rob you of $5,000 or potentially more later. I mean, if that's, if, if you don't want to have a successful business, then go ahead and go fishing. I mean, why not? why even have a business? Why not just go fishing every day and then just live off welfare? Right? Like, I mean, that's kind of how I am. Like, I'm going to hold you accountable. Either you're going to do it and you're going to do it right or don't start giving me excuses about why you can't do it. Right? And this isn't about don't start commenting and giving me hate speech and all that stuff about, well, mental health is so important. Yeah. Get it. Totally understand. If you're stressed out. and you've been working 80 hours that week and you just need a break, take off two hours early, go fishing, that's cool with me. But if you've just been cashing a check, mailing a check in, as they say, not cashing it, mailing it in, where you're just doing the bare minimum to get by and you're only working 35 hours and you want to take off early because it's sunny out, no, that doesn't fly. It's not going to fly with me. I'm going to hold you accountable. So find some type of accountability. It could be another contractor. It could be someone in a group, a Facebook group, like my free group. I mean, I just made a post today that says, post your goals for 2023. Post your revenue goals for 2023. And you know what I'm going to do? At the end of 2023, I'm going to look at that post and I'm going to call people out on it. That's what I'm going to do. They didn't know that when I made that post, but that's what I'm going to do. I may follow up with them halfway through the year. Hey, how are you doing on your goal? How are you doing towards that goal you set back in January? That's what accountability looks like. It's not about somebody who wants to be your friend. It's about somebody who wants you to succeed. That's the type of accountability that you need. So those are the things I want to tell you about. Start reversing your target goals. Start with a gross profit. Double it to get your 50% gross profit. That should give you a total sales goal. figure out what your average job size is and what your closing rate percentage is. And that's going to tell you how many leads you need to get, you need to have that year. Start being intentional about what you do. Track your numbers every day or at least once a week. Submit them into some type of tracking program. If you have one, that's great. Use it. Systems only work if you use it. So if you're not using what you already have, shame on you. If you need a tracking system, join my free Facebook group and look for the lead sales tracker. It's got some other additional tools in there that can help you with actually tracking your leads as well. But I'm not going to get into that right now. But there's some other things in there to help you. And then find some accountability. Okay. Find some accountability, whether it's someone in a group or if you want to get actual coaching, that's fine as well. I'm not trying to push you into joining my program. If there's any other programs or coaches out there that can help you, just get some type of accountability in place. Don't give yourself an easy out. And then if you also want my free thermometer that you can print out and use, you can get that as well in the free Facebook group. So one thing I want to say lastly, guys, if you are struggling with sales, check out my free sales accelerator program that I have. It's at a severely discounted rate for contractors after the first of the year, which you're listening to this now in January, but sometime in the near future. The price will be going up. More than likely, it will be doubling because this is a core component of my group coaching program, the Profit Club. I've taken the sales portion and extracted the sales training out of that group. And now I have a sales-only group for you program that you can sign up for very inexpensively. and learn how to sell those jobs that you need to sell at a 50% gross profit. So check that out. You can go to Contractorsalesaccelerator. com. You can go to the show notes or you can go to my free Facebook group and get information there as well. And you can find me on all the social media platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast. I hope that you have a very... Very profitable 2023. That's my mantra for this year is the profit. We're going to make massive profits in 2023. All right. So I appreciate you tuning in. Thanks for listening. And until next time, guys, you know what to do. Be the best version of you.
