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. All right. Welcome back to another episode of the Hammer and Grind podcast. I'm very blessed that you're here listening with me and having the opportunity to talk to you about different aspects of the construction business. And today's topic is one that I think a lot of us will actually relate to pretty well. And it's what to do when your hair is on fire. So this podcast is actually the idea for this podcast or topic rather is because I had two conversations this week with contractors. And by the way, if you're not in my free Facebook group, you absolutely should be. Because what I did is I threw out a post last week and said, hey, I'm feeling grateful for what I have in this platform. And so I'm giving out free 20-minute coaching sessions with anybody. And I sent it out to the Facebook group and had several people sign up to take advantage of that. And two of the people that I talked to this week took advantage of those free 20-minute coaching sessions. And these conversations that I had really sparked some topics that I see a lot. And I thought, well, why don't we just address them on this podcast? So it took me a minute to come up with the topic because I was trying to figure out. How do these, you know, what's the common thread between these two contractors that I talked to? And that's what it is, really. It's both of them, their hair's on fire. Now, that's a pretty generic term. You know, to what degree is your hair on fire? Is it a one alarm fire, a five alarm fire? I don't know. But I think most of us will resonate with what I want to talk about today. So let's get into it. The first contractor I talked to, and by the way, both of these that I talked to, have fairly successful companies. And by that, I mean, they have multiple employees or multiple crews. This isn't like a one-man show or a guy and a helper. These are people that have teams. So doing much more revenue, much more business. And this is common that I see once you start to scale your business and you haven't done the proper steps before you scale. And so if you think of scaling as the alphabet, you know, A to Z, a lot of times our hair starts catching on fire when we try to go from A, B, C to F to M because we want to scale, right? I'm doing air quotes. Obviously, if you're listening, you can't see that, but people watching the video can. When we want to scale, we think we scale by adding more people to make more money. And yes, Brad, I mean, Come on, duh. When you add more people and you do more jobs and make more money, that's true. But when you're not maxed out on your profit first, and then you try to make more money by simply adding people, you get to this level in your business where you have several people, but everything is always on fire because you didn't put the proper steps in place first before you started hiring the people. So this is very common. I have these conversations a lot. I struggled with it myself in my own business, trying to hire, not knowing what I'm doing. Those guys quit or get fired and start over and hire. It's a process. So I'm hoping that this information will help you. If your hair is currently on fire, this may be helpful for you. Or if you're not quite there yet and you're going to grow, this also will be helpful. So that's a long-winded intro to say. that, yeah, we're talking about your hair on fire. So the first conversation I had with this contractor, he is a lot like me. He's a visionary. And visionaries tend to be big thinkers. And so it's like every day you come in, it's like, oh, what about this? I know we should try this. What about we add these services? What about if we do this? And the bad thing about big thinkers or visionaries is they will wear their team out. I mean, they will literally wear their team out because every day it's something new, right? I had, I'm laughing because I had, when I hired my office manager, my first office manager, and she came from the departments. She was an apartment manager. So she really didn't have a whole lot of experience in construction, but she had a lot of experience dealing with people in the public. And usually seeing like the bad side of people, right? Because I'm talking about apartments and some of those people that live in apartments aren't the greatest people on earth, but you get what I'm saying. So she was a very good people person. She was also very kind of a high, you know, a deep personality, not quite as bad as me, but she was very straightforward, like didn't, you know, had older brothers and put up with crap. So I guess that's a fancy way of saying she wasn't very sensitive to put up with me and my directness. But what she didn't like, was that every day I was changing stuff. And whenever she came on, we were right in the middle of switching over our software that we were using. And the first one that when she came on, we were using Jobber, which I had Jobber for like four or five years. And I got to the point to where it wasn't fulfilling the needs that I needed because I was growing and adding more things and it was getting more complex and more challenging. And so she came on and she... Like the first two months, she was just learning Jobber, learning how to use it. There's a learning curve there. And then I said, you know what? We're going to change. I don't like it. We're going to change. I started looking. I started trying out some different softwares. I was looking at different things. I ended up switching to Service Fusion, which is more service-based than it is a remodel. But it worked for us because we were doing a lot of service work. And I switched over. So then now all of a sudden, she had to learn a whole new software. And we started using that for about two or three months and we just started running all kinds of problems. It wasn't quite what they said. So then we switched again and we ended up switching to Progel. That's what we ended up going with. But during this time, when I hired her because she was the first office manager and it was new to me and we had to work through this, who's responsible for what? I was trying different communication channels so that we could communicate. I was switching phone systems because when we switched from Jobber to Service Fusion, they had their own phone system and they quit and had to get a different phone system. So all of these different software systems were all happening at the same time. And so finally, one day she said, you're not allowed to change any other systems until we figure this out. And for me, that was a breath of fresh air. I wanted that kind of pushback. I didn't want employees that were just like going to do everything I said and not question it. She's like, you're not allowed to change anything. And I mean, she was joking with it, but she was also true. And I was like, you're right. I'm all over the place. Let's try to focus down on what we need to do. And so that's kind of what was happening with his first contractor. Not that he hired office manager or lab, but his, he had too many irons in the fire. He had too many things going on being a visionary. and seeing different things in your business that need to be fixed, it can be overwhelming. You end up with the shiny object syndrome, which is like, oh, look over there, squirrel, shiny object. Oh, that's what I want. And so a lot of times what happens with us is whatever fire is on today, whatever fire we're trying to put out today, we say, man, I got to find a solution to this problem. And so then we go back to the office or wherever. that night and we just start searching for solutions to that problem and let's say for example that day the problem is guys aren't putting their receipts in when they go to the store now this was a problem that i had and this was a problem that he shared as well they just weren't getting put in right away i said this and he laughed when i said this but what happens we go to the we go to home depot we buy our stuff and one of basically three things happen we don't get the receipts We put the receipt in our pocket, which is lost forever. Or the receipt goes in the bag and then the bag gets taken to the job site. All the materials get taken out and the bag with the receipt get thrown away or lost or whatever. And so you lose these receipts. And when I said that, he kind of laughed because that's exactly what happens. And I share with him some ways to fix that. But what happens is, so we have this issue, right? Oh, I got to fix the receipts. So then we go on this quest. We go on this quest to figure out how to put receipts in the system. And so we start searching Google and all and asking questions on groups and all this. And people are like, oh, I use this software and I do this and I do that. And you get 15 different suggestions or you search Google, find 15 different things that may work. And so then you go down the rabbit hole of like looking at each one of these, trying to figure out what's going to be the best solution for that problem. And you never really end up finding one because it's kind of a process. You get overwhelmed with like, man, there's so many options. I don't know which one's the best. I don't want to make the wrong decision because then I got to change it again later if it doesn't work out. And you may spend three, four, five hours trying to solve this problem. And then the next day happens. And the next day, a new problem. There's a new fire to put out. The material supplier didn't deliver the materials on time and your guys are sitting around waiting. And your brain goes, oh, here's a new fire we got to put out. We need to find a solution. So then you start looking around for other suppliers because this one, you know, screwed you on this job, even though it's the first time they've ever done it in five years. Now all of a sudden you got to find a new solution to this problem. And so every single day we're just reacting. to problems in our business instead of picking one problem, solving it, and then moving on to the next one. And so my suggestion for him, and this is what I did in my business, and what I'm suggesting for you, is that you need to create a priority board. Now, I had a little... In my office, I just had a little 3x4 foot dry erase board. It was stuck on the wall next to my desk. My office manager and myself could see it because we were in the same room. And what it is, is you write down the top five priorities in your business that you need a solution for or to fix or to grow or whatever it is. So the first column, you have three columns. The first column is what is it? What do we need? The second column is why do we need it? And the third column is where are we at with this? Basically, we're at in the process. And so you write down the five things. And if you have a team, and typically you may have priorities for your office staff that's different than your production staff. Or you may have company-wide priorities that affect the whole company. It doesn't really matter. But most of the time, it's going to be more office-related, leadership-related type stuff. It could be just you. If you're the only person in the office and you have three guys in the field, this is just for you. But you write down the top five priorities, meaning that when you fix these problems, it's going to move the needle in your business. It's going to solve some headache. It's going to fix some miscommunication. It's going to save you some money. It's going to produce more money. Whatever that may be, you write the five things on this board. And those are the only five things you're allowed to work on. You're not allowed to work on anything else. If a new fire comes up, you don't go and start working on it. You're not allowed to. And so whether it's you doing it or it's someone on your team who's doing it or it's collectively your team's doing it, it does not matter. This is where you would put it in where we are in the process. It could be if you have an employee, Sam. Sam is currently researching this topic. Now, if you want to... You could add a fourth column and put a due date. But usually these priorities are above and beyond their normal daily operation requirements. So if you have an office manager and they're doing everything, talking to people on the phone or sending out bills or whatever, these top five priorities are above and beyond what they're doing. So it's kind of like, hey, you're done with your task. Okay, now work on these five priorities. And it doesn't necessarily have to be one through five, like one being the most priority, you know, the most, uh, has the highest priority. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. It's just, these are the five things we're going to work on and you're not allowed to work on anything else. If you do that, it will focus your attention on those things. And then once you've solved that problem, you erase it off the board and then you put a new problem on there. So there's always going to be five things on this board, no matter what. You're always fixing something in your business or making it better. And some things may be really critical. Some things may be nice to have. So I had some on my board, which at times where when we were going through the finding a software that would work, it was finding a software to do estimates. That was one of the top priorities on my board. I needed to find something that would help me do estimates faster. Some other priorities can be like training. employee training. Why is it important? Why do we need it? Well, because it allows us to be more efficient, allows us to provide better service, better quality. And so you can... Whatever those are, it doesn't matter. You just put them on there and then you're not allowed to do anything else. That will help to focus your attention on these and then your host staff has to be on board with you and you bring them along the journey. By the way, a little side note on this. Anytime you're... making changes or improvements in your business, you should always include your staff. Always. You should get their opinion. You should get their ideas. And you should run it by them. Because there's nothing worse than coming up with a great solution to a problem that you don't deal with. Your production staff have a problem. They want a solution. You come up with this great solution and you give it to them and your guys think, man, this is a terrible solution. It's going to add 20 minutes a day to our already task duties that we're doing. And this is not fun. I don't see the value in it. So what's going to happen? They won't do it. They'll do it sporadically. They don't do it all the time because it wasn't their idea and they don't like the solution. So if it's something that you're not even doing, have your team put their input into it so that you can make sure it's what they want. Now, sometimes... Their idea sucks. Okay. That's just the reality. Sometimes what they want actually sucks. And you know, there's a better ways to do it or their solution actually creates more problems or more time for the office staff. And that may not work out either. It's, you know, it's a back and forth. But if you, if you just create together, create a solution, you show up and you say, Hey guys, this is what we're doing different today. Today, instead of writing down your hours on, paper, because we want to save paper and save the rainforest, we're going to have you start texting us your time each day. Just send us a text to the office with your name and your hours every day. And that may be like, yeah, that saves the paper. Great. But then what happens? Then you get a bunch of texts. Now you got to field these texts. You may think it's a good solution, but in reality, it's not a good solution. And yet, so you try that for a week and then you go, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. This just ain't working. We got to try something different guys. Okay. Now we're going to have you, when you get back to the office, you're going to have to log in. I'm going to put a computer out here in the shop and you're all individually, you're going to have to log in. You're going to get your own username and password to the software. And now you got to log in and do your time sheets. And, and they're like, well, that sucks. I don't want to freaking do that. All you had to do was get them involved in the solution or get others in your team involved in the solution. It's not always about us as the owner having to solve the problem. Sometimes we have an ego because we can fix things, because we can build things. Our pride takes over and we say, I can solve this problem. Don't even factor in the fact that that's just the MO for men. Our wives are like, hey, I got this problem. I can fix it. No, I just want you to listen. What do you mean? Listen, I can fix it. So that's just, you know, we're already struggling with that. We don't have to be the ones that create the solution. So that was, that's the priority board. Top five priority can be, and it needs to be visible so that people can see it. Like insight in mind. Remember out of sight, out of mind. If you get the board in your office behind your door, the only way you can see is when you close the door, nobody else is ever going to know or see that or think about it. It needs to be out in the open where everybody can see it. They have to walk by it. I did a similar board like that. And we're going to talk about that here in a second for your production staff, but it's a little bit different. So use the priority board to stay focused on what you're doing in your business. And here's one last tip on that. Your top five priorities should be the biggest things that are going to move the needle. So finding a solution for putting receipts in, that may be a one-day problem. You may throw that on the board and have a solution by the end of the day. And that's okay. It doesn't have to be this grand, you know, three months long issue that's going to take you to solve this. But also, if you're like not scheduling yet, like say you don't have a good way to schedule jobs, you don't really schedule it. You're always missing days because jobs take longer. And then you have three days of gap time where you're not doing anything for the next job to start because you're not ordering materials, you're not in yet. That's a bigger problem than fixing receipts. Does that make sense? I wouldn't put the receipt problem on the board because it's an easy fix. The bigger problem is that we have to do a better job of scheduling because it's going to have a greater impact on our profits. So that's what I mean by prioritize it based on what's going to have the greatest impact. One thing else that we did to help solve problems, and I talked about this, is with the second contractor, but we're going to get into that here in a second. But we have weekly meetings. And one of the things that we would always do in our weekly meetings is, so here's what we would do. We'd have a week, Monday morning, we had a weekly meeting. We just bought a 15 minute standup meeting. Then we would have all of my production guys would clean out their vehicles at two vans. So we would clean those out and organize it. and then restock it with anything that we would typically carry, like screws and silicone and caulking and all that stuff, things that we would use on a regular basis, we would stock it. And then if we had any time left, we would do a two-second lean, which is we would find something that needs to be fixed. And this is where I fix the receipt problem for us, is on the dashboard of our vehicles, I took a washer. a big fender washer, and I stuck it to the dashboard, glued it or taped it, whatever. And then I had a little magnet, and I took a little two-inch long wooden piece, half-inch by half-inch wooden piece that was a scrap, cut it, glued the magnet onto the end, so the magnet would stick to the fender washer on the dashboard, the wood sticking up, and the receipts would go there. So when you came out of the store, your receipts would get stuck underneath that magnet. And that magnet and that fender washer was on the dashboard right in plain view in front of the passenger. You couldn't miss it. It's right in your eyesight. And that's on purpose. That's a vision control solution, meaning it's within vision. So you have to control this problem. So at the end of the day, when they got back to the job or to the office, they had to put the receipts in for that day. And so they would be able to grab the receipts out from underneath the magnet, put them into our system, and everything was solved. So that was like a two-second lean where it was like, hey, we got a problem. We keep losing receipts. How can we solve this? So we took 15,20 minutes to come up with that solution. And it worked so well that we put it in our other vehicle. And that became the standard for how we dealt with receipts. Even whenever we would change softwares, because we did it during the service fusion time. but then we switched to project time, we still kept that visual control solution because it worked so well. So sometimes you can solve a problem in just a few seconds or a few minutes, but you actually have to be proactively trying to solve that problem. And that's what we would do every Monday. Every single Monday, we would try and solve one little solution that's going to save us two seconds or it's going to help us to get better. Another thing that we did is, even though we stocked the vehicle on every Monday, sometimes you would run out on Wednesday. Say we always have two tubes of clear silicone of different brands and colors and stuff. If they would run out on Wednesday, but then they needed it again for Friday, we put a little dry erase board, like a little sheet-sized dry erase board. stuck it to the door of the vans with a dry erase marker. And whenever they would use a last product in their vehicle, they would write it on the dry erase board. Hey, out of clear silicone. So that way, when they would get back to the shop or in the morning, when they would come in, they'd be able to see that, Hey, we're out of this. We need to grab some extras before we leave. That's another little two second lean solution to the problem. So you can use. micro solutions for things like that, and then use your top five priority board for the bigger problems. I hope that makes sense. So I'm going to grab some coffee here real quick. Give me one second. And Mr. Editor, just leave this in because I think it makes it real. By the way, guys, I don't know if you remember Nathan France that was on the podcast. He was on number 90, how to be a recruiting powerhouse with Nathan France. Nathan is a man of many ventures and he is a business partner in this coffee company here, RPG Coffee. It's really, really good coffee. It's fascinating. And so I partnered up with them because I really like their product. It's actually really good. They have a pretty unique situation where they take some natural supplements and they infuse it into the coffee bean. So whenever you drink the coffee, you're actually taking these supplements. And a lot of it's to help with gut health and some other nutritional aspects. So there's a link in the show notes. You can check them out and see if it's something you're interested in. What's cool about this company, too, is the RPG actually stands for Real People Giving. And so they give 50% of their profits. to veteran and first responder organizations to help them out. And I think that's pretty phenomenal. So if you want to show them some love, go ahead and check out that link in the show notes. Okay. So the second contractor that I talked to, he has a very larger organization. He's got 15 employees and he was struggling with some employee problems. He's struggling with what do you call that? Morale. Guys just not really. You know, putting out the 100%, not really caring about, you know, the product they're doing, making a lot of mistakes, a lot of, you know, easy mistakes and things. And so after I asked him a few questions, he was sharing that his one of his foremen on one of his crew is a guy that's been with him for a long time, since the beginning, kind of rose up through the ranks, been with him five years. And he really good guy. But he was struggling to really lead the teams. And a lot of simple mistakes were being made, which cost you money, right? And what's happening, and the reason I wanted to talk about this is because this is a very common problem. This happens everywhere, corporate America everywhere. A lot of times, people believe, and I'm not suggesting that this contractor believes this, but what we do is we have an employee who may be a rock star. carpenter. He may be a rock star, drywall finisher, painter, landscaper, whatever it is you do. We hire a guy who's really good at the craft part of it. And we're like, man, you're so good at this. I'm going to make you a manager now. I'm going to make you a foreman, a lead guy, a supervisor, project manager, whatever. And what we don't realize is that that is a different skill set. Leading people has nothing to do with how good you do the tasks that you're leading them at. Is it important that you understand how to do the task and how to do it well? It is. It is important. But does that skill of doing that task well translate over to being a good leader? It does not. It does not at all. I see this a lot in the coaching space. People will ask me, Have you ever ran a $10 million company? I'm like, no, I never did $10 million. Well, then you don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, okay, that's fine. I don't know what it's like to run a $10 million company. That doesn't mean by default, I don't know anything. I can't help you with sales or I can't help you with systems. I may not be able to help you grow to $10 million, but that doesn't mean that what I know is not valuable simply because I haven't actually... done that myself. And so you look at coaches in sports, not every single football coach, head football coach that's successful played in the NFL. Not every college coach that's successful played in the higher NFL or professional sports leagues or even was successful at college sports. Maybe they played college sports, but they weren't that successful. So this idea that you have to be Michael Jordan on the field so that you can be Michael Jordan as a coach. And by the way, he tried it and didn't do the greatest job. So just because you're an excellent person doesn't mean you're a good leader. So this whole idea that if someone's really good at their craft, they're going to be a good leader or vice versa does not translate, does not compute. You guys ever seen that movie Short Circuit? It's like, does not compute. No disassemble, Stephanie. Okay, I'm showing my age. It's a great movie, by the way. I think it was in the late 80s. Short circuit, look it up. So why does that matter? Why am I saying all this? Because his guy that he was really good at what he was doing is struggling to be a leader. And one of the things that he's struggling with is he wants to be friends with those people underneath him. And whenever you become friends with people underneath you, they stop to see you as an authority figure and they start to see you as an equal. And so whenever you say, hey, you know, Stephen, I need you to go over and do this. Stephen's like, well, that's dumb. And why are we doing that? That doesn't make any sense. We should be doing this instead. And then your lead guy is like, well, OK, yeah, I mean, that makes sense. Yeah. OK, yeah, let's do that instead. Because he doesn't want to lose him as a friend. He doesn't want to... He's not the authoritative type figure. And so he doesn't want to tell him what to do. And this is where stuff happens. This is what stuff happens. I had a... This reminded me of a story. I hired a new guy. I hired a lead guy one time. And I was kind of desperate because I had lost my lead guy and I was struggling to find a new one. And this guy didn't really have a ton of construction experience, but he was in the service. He was like a Culligan man repair guy. So he would go out and fix a lot of the machines and things that were broken. So he had a lot of repair service experience working on his own, which is good when you hire somebody, self-starter, self-motivated, all that stuff. And so I hired him and he had a little bit of, he had, I shouldn't say a little bit. He had a lot of ego, a lot of ego, like how good he was. And I sent him on some tasks and I could see early that he wasn't up to that level that he thought he was. So I kind of threw him in the deep water right from the get go. And I had him do a job for a client. And it was one of those, this isn't the best way to do the job type things. Like we were putting a door in, we were putting a door in a shed, like a basement kind of shed, walkout shed under. It's hard to explain. There was a cellar underneath an out building. So the building was like a screened-in building, but it had a basement almost underneath it with a walkout door. But the walkout door was like an inch below ground level. So every time it would rain, there would be water sitting there. And this customer that we were working for was actually a friend of mine. I said, listen, this is not the best idea. It will help you. But it's definitely not the best idea. He's like, I understand. But, you know, if we can do it, I'm like, sure. So we put this door in. We had a frame up like 12 inches on both sides of this door. And I told this guy, I said, look, man, when you frame up this door, I want you to put silicone. When you put the two by fours in there, I want you to put a bead of silicone across the front. Then I want you to put the hardy, I think we put hardy plank on there if I remember. Then I want you to put the hardy plank on there. And then I want you to put another bead of silicone in front of that. And then I want you to put a trim board on the bottom. And then I want you to put another bead of silicone on that. So like three layers of silicone so that it would just add a little extra protection for water that's sitting there. And it was maybe like a quarter inch of water, standing water. It wasn't like six inches of standing water, anything crazy. And so he did the job. I didn't check it. We go back later on to do another job for my guy. And I was like, oh, I'm going to go check out his work while I'm here. And I go down there to look at it and he didn't caulk the outside of the trim. And I said, Hey man, I asked you to caulk all three levels. He said, it doesn't need it. I said, what do you mean? It doesn't need it. He said, the other two are caulked. Adding another layer of caulk is not going to do anything. It doesn't need it. And I was like, I get that. Like, I understand what you're saying, but I still want you to do it anyways. I want to go an extra layer. Well, I'm not going to do that. I was like, what do you mean you're not going to do it? I'm not going to do that. It doesn't need it. And so that guy didn't work for me after that day. That's a level of ego and cockiness where he was an employee. I was the boss. And what was funny about that, and I lost my temper that day. I shouldn't have. He goes, I don't have to answer to you. And I just like, that's what made me lose my stuff. I was like, what do you mean? Or no, he said, I don't need your approval. That's what he said. He said, I don't need your approval. I was like, what are you talking about? I own the business. You do need my approval. Right? I digress. So when you have that level of where someone thinks they're equal or better than the owner or the boss or the supervisor, you start to have this clash of your teams where they think they can start bullying around. And so if you have a person in charge who is not capable of... separating them as friends and starting to see that, you know, see them as subordinates in the way of just ranking like their positioning, not that they're better than them, but that's just, that's just a phrase guys. Don't, don't get your panties in a bunch here. Your guys are subordinate to you, right? Cause they're underneath you in terms of ranking in their positioning. So when you have a leader who is not strong enough, To separate that, you'll have those types of problems in your business. And I told him, I said, look, you only got two options with this guy. I realize he's been with you for five years and you're not going to fire him. But you only got two options, really. Either you're going to have to pour into him, invest more time and training and energy to make him a better leader, or you're going to have to replace him. And that's really it. There's not much other options that are out there. He can move to a different position, but then you have to replace him. So when I say replace him, I don't mean fire them. But he's not the right fit for that position. Or you got to do some training with him. And that's going to be like, you're going to have to, what they call grooming. And whenever someone's grooming them to take over a leadership position, you're coming along besides them, putting your arm around them and say, hey, this is how we do things. This is what leadership looks like. This is how you handle the situation. And, you know, sometimes it just takes an outside perspective to tell you that, to be like, oh, yeah, you're right. Like, that makes perfect sense. Even though intuitively, we know that. And this is why it's so important, too, to have outside perspectives, whether it's a mentor, a coach, a community, another contractor, somebody who can look at your situation from a non-biased, non-emotional perspective. stance and say, dude, what are you doing? The answer is simple. You just have to do X. But because we're so emotionally tied to that situation, we can't see through that. And this is also why you should never make a decision when you're emotional about something. When you're angry, if one of your employees does something stupid and you get really pissed off, you should never fire someone when you're mad. You should calm down. Now that guy that I got mad at, I said some cuss words. I was really mad. And he actually quit. He's like, you know what? I quit. And I was like, that's a good idea. But if you're going to fire someone, you need to not be emotionally in an emotional stance. You need to be able to like the next day or later that day, look at it from a factual stance of what needs to happen. And this is where you got to separate yourself. from the business itself, like the personal side of the business, and look at the data. I'm all about looking at data, really understanding what the data says and not what the emotion tied to the data says. And that's why I've also done podcasts on there's no feelings in business because you really can't have feelings as a leadership or business owner or a leadership position about what's happening. What does the data say? That doesn't mean that you can't be You know, that you can't have empathy or sympathy. You can have lots of empathy for your people. But if someone comes in late five minutes every day and you tolerate that because you were high school friends and everybody else who's in your business sees that, that you tolerate it, they will start to feel like he gets special treatment. And then they will start to do that. because he gets away with it. And then when they try it and you get on to them like, hey, man, you can't be late. They're gonna be like, what the hell? John over here comes in late every day and you tolerate it. So you can't do that. Because just because he's your best friend doesn't mean you tolerate it. You have to separate that stuff. And that's kind of some of the things that were happening in his business. The second part of that conversation, I said, man, you just need to start investing in your guys because he has a production manager. who handles all that. So him as the owner is not directly involved in the production activities and talking to those people every single day. He's running the business. I said, you need to start making connections with him, like real genuine connections. Just one a day or one a week. Pull one guy aside in the morning like, Hey, John, man, I'm just curious. I've never asked this before, but what do you like doing on your time off? When you may find out that he likes riding motorcycles and you, maybe you like riding motorcycles and it's like, Oh, we got something in common. And so you can have a connection there. Or maybe you find out that something is going on in his business. I mean, in his life that you didn't know about, maybe you have an employee who's not performing well and he hasn't been performing well for like a week or two weeks. And you're like, man, this he's really sucking bad. Like if he doesn't get us. crap together, I'm going to fire him because I just can't tolerate this. But if you would have just taken a second to find out what's going on in his life, you may have found out that his mom just got diagnosed with cancer and she has six months to live. If you don't think that's going to affect someone's performance at work, you must not be human. Absolutely, it's going to affect somebody's performance. And now you can show empathy. You can say, man, I didn't know that. I'm so sorry to hear that. What can I do to help you in this situation during this time? Do we need to give you some time off? Do we need to give you maybe a different task? What can we do to help you? And just the fact that you're trying to actually provide support to your staff will give them a lot more reason to want to perform. But if you never knew that, if you never actually got involved in your staff and what's going on, You'll never know that. And you might fire a perfectly good person simply because they're going through a rough patch. And then another employee sees that you fired John and they know what's going on. They know John's mom has cancer. You don't know that you fire John and they're going to be like, Whoa, what a heartless bastard. He just fired John. His mom's going through cancer. And that guy doesn't know that you don't know. And so it just looks like, man. He doesn't care about people at all. All he cares about is making the numbers. It seems like a very simple thing to do because it is. It actually is very simple. You just simply care about your people and then ask them questions. When I first got out of the Marines, I went to work for a telecommunications company and I was doing door-to-door sales. I was knocking on doors, selling them cable and stuff. My first sales job like that. And we had the general manager of that, of the office. This was a new build. This was a brand new facility, brand new company. He was like that. He was a, he was a people's person. He would come around every day, walk through the bullpen where the customer sales reps were or whatever. And he would be asking you, Hey, you know, Cindy, how's it going? And just having these one-on-one connections. And I witnessed this at the time. I didn't. fully understand the impact that I do now. But I witnessed him connecting with people on an individual level. And as a result, everyone that worked there respected him. They had a lot of respect for him. And so even when he had to deliver bad news, they still respected him, even though they didn't like the news they got. And so that's what I mean by that's how you build culture. That's how you build teams that stay and last. And those are things that you can implement today. It doesn't require any extra work. You don't have to create a whole new system. You don't have to buy a piece of software or learn something new. Just start connecting with your people. And just because you find out things about them does not mean that you're best friends now and they're going to lose respect for you. Very early when I started, my very first employee was a part-time employee. because he didn't want to work full-time. His wife was like a chemist, made tons of money. And he's like, I just want to work 20 hours a week. But what I found out is that he liked playing video games. And back then, I played a lot of video games. And there was one particular that we played together. So one evening or a couple of evenings, we logged in and played video games together. That's a very simple thing of just connecting with your employees. There's lots of other ways you can do it too. I hope this podcast wasn't too much all over the place. I hope you can see what I'm trying to get across to you that when your hair is on fire, don't just start trying to fix everything different every day. Create some priorities. Create your five priority board. If you want to make it six, is that the end of the world? No. But don't have a 20 priority board. That defeats the purpose. Five things. That's your top five things. Don't fix anything else until you fix those. Do your employees know that you actually care about them? Right? Do they know that you have their best interests at heart? Or are they just a number? And one thing I forgot to actually mention, I'll throw it in real quick here. I have one thing you can do for your production staff is have a board for them. that shows what work is coming up. Because a lot of people want to have security in knowing that they have six months worth of work lined up. If you're the kind of boss that just shows up and says, Hey, okay, guys, today we're going to do this. That's not how you run a business, guys. Just telling your guys each day what they're going to do is not how you run a business. Put a board out there. You don't have to have all the details. Put a board out there that just says, these are the jobs coming up. We got the Smith job. It's a bathroom remodel. We got the Johnson job. It's a kitchen remodel. We got the Miller job. It's another bathroom. Blah, blah, blah. These are the jobs coming up. This is what's on the board. Just so they can come in and visually see, okay, we got lots of work. We got lots of work in the books. I feel comfortable about where I'm at. I'm not scared about running out of work. I don't have to go look for some other job. Just have something very basic that shows your staff that you have work for them and have a conversation with them about that too. They may want more information. They may want to know how much time before we start this other job. Is it two weeks out? Is it a week out? Is it a month out? Ask your staff, include them in your decision making and just connect with them. So that's the end of this podcast, guys. I appreciate you tuning in and hanging out with me. You can find me on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, search for the Hammer and Grind Podcast. Make sure you check out my free Facebook group, The Profit Blueprint, The Contractor Profit Blueprint. If you search for it, I got links in the show notes. Also, if you're wanting to accelerate your sales process, if you want to sell jobs at a 50% or greater gross profit, eliminate tire kickers. Just overall have a better sales process. Consider checking out my sales accelerator program. We do weekly coaching calls. There's training videos and there's a community of other contractors that you can connect with, practice role play with to get better. It's very, very affordably priced. And there's really no reason why everybody shouldn't be in the sales accelerator. It's really underpriced to be honest with you. And the price is going to go up here in the future. Check that out. Show notes has a link or you can go to ContractorsSalesAccelerator. com to find out more information about that. Until next time, guys, you know what to do. Be the best version of you.
