December 17, 2024 • 31 mins
Discover the top strategies to scale your business in 2025. From building a strong team and refining processes to leveraging marketing budgets and managing cash flow, this episode dives into practical tips for growing your revenue and staying ahead of the competition. Learn how to evolve your services, master delegation, and implement systems that reduce chaos and drive success. Make 2025 your breakthrough year!
[00:00] Introduction to the episode
[00:45] The mindset shift needed to empower your team and grow
[01:58] Key milestones in revenue growth and the adjustments required
[03:33] Overcoming fear of delegation and avoiding burnout
[05:02] Identifying when to delegate and how it builds a business
[08:21] Using marketing budgets strategically during peak demand
[09:14] Maximizing ROI through gratitude and client engagement
[12:07] Importance of measuring KPIs and refining processes
[14:16] Building systems to reduce chaos and improve team efficiency
[16:24] Evolving service offerings to meet client demand
[20:07] Managing cash flow and structured debt for growth
[24:50] Importance of having an in-house bookkeeper for scaling
[26:30] Daily habits to stay focused on long-term business goals
[28:37] Pipeline activities for consistent prospecting and growth
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
There's a saying youcan't grow if you say.
No, but I like that.
Welcome to Masters of Home Service,
a podcast for home servicepros by home service. Pros,
as we look ahead togrowing in the new year,
this is the perfect time to focus onreaching big business goals like hitting a
million dollars in revenue.In this special episode,
(00:20):
we're sharing some of the best tips fromguests who've successfully grown their
businesses. These ideaswill help you scale up.
Let's dive into the strategy toskyrocket your growth in 2025.
How did you change eachstep along the way?
You hit a hundred thousand when youfirst start, 250,000, 500,000, a million.
How did you have to change at eachof those levels? Generally speaking,
(00:42):
what did you have to do onyourselves to get to there?
I break this down backwards a little bit.
So there's two levels of mentor for myselfand that first level is don't get too
big. People suck. They're going to takeadvantage of you. Clients won't pay,
you're never going to have anypersonal time. More negative. Yeah,
work-life balance kind of thing.And the second level of mentor,
which is a huge shift, but it was sopowerful when I got there and I found it.
(01:05):
It was people. People areeverything. Our team is great,
our leadership is awesome. I'm notthe smartest person in the room.
You have to talk to this person in ourbusiness to get that answer because
they're the expert, they're smarterthan me. And as soon as I shifted that,
the business just exploded, which was what
(01:25):
my purpose is in our business,
is creating opportunities for others sothey don't need to leave our business.
And by doing that and empowering them,
it it's exploded and thenyou start getting refining and actually have the time
to work on how to make the profitwhen you're over a million bucks.
Because.
You're not worried aboutdoing all the work,
you're not worried aboutgoing to all the job sites.
(01:46):
You're empowering your team todo it because just like you said,
that $4,500 a day, youcan't do that by yourself.
So what does that mean? Well, it's asimple answer. You have to empower people.
Yeah, I mean I think for me,getting over a hundred grand,
you got to get off the truck, right?
You can just work and make ahundred grand to get over two 50.
(02:07):
You probably got to start buildingup your office admin side of things,
getting over half a million.Got to start developing a team.
It's not just husband andwife combination, right?
You might can probably get up to maybehalf a million or something like that
with just wife in the office or husbandin the office and the other person.
You kind of divide thoseroles, but over half a million,
I think you got to startactually building a business.
That's not just going to happen.
I've have people just make a hundredgrand or 200 grand without really
(02:33):
growing the business side of thebusiness over a million bucks.
That's a tough barrier. You got to getpast what I would say is that middle of
the road size business, and even thoughI've done over a million revenue,
I feel like I'm still kind of stuck therebecause there's some things that I'm
still lacking. I think toreally sail past a million,
you need to have maybegood core company culture,
(02:57):
so you got to have some corevalues. Some company culture,
I got a lot of room forimproving on that one.
I think maybe you need to have some salesteam or sales staff and then you got
to have people who are integrators.If you're not integrators,
you're not going to get over a millionbucks by doing what you already
did. You're going to have to say, okay,
(03:18):
I am not good at showing up on time.
So you got to hire peoplewho are showing up on time.
You're not just going to sail past amillion bucks or your business is going to
go up and down, up and down, up and down.
If it's relying on you too much likeyou're saying, you got to empower people.
Where entrepreneurs can get stuck.
It's just trying to keep all theballs in the air and then realizing
(03:40):
that things are droppingand not wanting to let go.
They want to have this amazingservice and this amazing business,
and they're worried that if they let go,
someone else can't do it as well as them.
So they kind of get in their own wayand trap themselves where your business
feels more like a ball and chain thanthe freedom that you originally wanted
when you started your business. It's.
Tricky. It's totally tricky and ifit was easy, everybody would do it.
(04:03):
I would add to what you said earlier,
they think they can do itbetter than everyone else.
That's a third point I would say isthey think that they can cut the grass
better than anyone else.
They can answer the phone andtalk to clients and put out fires.
It's just not true. It's just nottrue at all. What do you think?
I think that everyone has a unique genius.
Harvard did a study and they found thatif you don't like doing something as
(04:27):
much, it usually means you'renot the best person at it.
So when you think about all the thingson your plate, the ones that you dread,
there's someone out there who's goingto do it better than you because if you
have passion, you'regoing to do it better.
Again in the book who not how they talkabout procrastination is always seen as
this negative thing,
but it actually can be a very positivething because it can show you which parts
(04:48):
of your business you need to delegatebecause if you're procrastinating it,
then that means you're not the rightwho for it. So yeah, entrepreneurs,
you can do it all andyou're amazing at it,
but there are pieces that someone canactually do better if you find the person
who that's their greatest passion.
I want to touch on this a little bit morebecause I think there's two listeners
right now,
and I think one listener should stayin the truck because they freaking
(05:10):
love what they do and they'remagicians at it. They're awesome at it,
they're awesome cabinetmakers, whatever they do,
they do their craft literallybetter than anyone else,
and I think they really should stayin the field doing what they love.
The worst thing is taking someone intoputting that person in a place where they
(05:30):
can't be magical anymore. A lotof our listeners are the opposite,
where they're pretty good at it,
but they also aspire to have abusiness that's bigger than themselves.
They're both equal. Andso I think you're right.
If someone has just a magical touchversus someone who's like, you know what?
There's a lot of things here I don'tlike to do. I should delegate those,
(05:51):
and that's how you build a businessby delegating those things.
What are some key indicatorsthat it is time for a
person to start getting off the truck,so to speak, to start delegating,
start building a business? What are someof those indicators that you've seen?
It's when you're filling overload.
I had a client who explained it once.
(06:12):
He called in right after he had signedup to help get help with his phone,
so he's trying to outsource some partsof his business so he didn't have so much
on his plate and he said, Michelle,
I'm at Tetris level 60right now and immediately,
I mean you can fill it rightimmediately. My heart rate rose.
I mean I loved Tetris as a kid and youknow that the blocks are coming down and
the higher the level, the fast,
the faster they're coming down and yougot to figure out how to fit it where and
(06:35):
to change the shape andthe higher level you get,
the harder it is to do it until you'regame over. It is expanded, blown up.
And so that's how it felt in his businessthat everything is coming down at once
in all these different directions.You got employee fires to put out,
you got phones to answeryou, you got marketing,
got to do in sales and allthese different pieces.
And so when you get to that level,
it's time to offloadbecause you don't want to,
(06:57):
you're not going to performwell at Tetris level 60.
You need to be more level 10 or 20 orsomething like that where business is
coming in, you're busy,
but where you're not to this level thatyou can't keep all the balls in the air.
And so the secret is you got toactually become really good at firing
yourself. That's one of the number oneskills an entrepreneur needs to learn.
(07:18):
And you can't just do it once.You need to continually do it.
By way of an example, if you lookat someone like Warren Buffett,
so she's about to be a trillion,billion dollar business,
has over 400,000 employees. And do youknow what he spends all his time doing
mostly is reading books and figuringout the next investment opportunity.
But the way he got there is actuallythrough learning how to fire himself.
(07:41):
I mean he started out on sales andthen he built his career there and then
he learned there were differentpieces that he needed to offload,
so he found another goodperson to delegate that to and then fired himself from
that role and then movedup to another role.
And that's really what the entrepreneurneeds to do is you might not be building
a trillion dollar business.
You might be going from a hundred thousandto 300,000 or maybe you're trying to
(08:03):
go from 800,000 to amillion or whatever it is,
but the pathway to get there is tolearn to do a skill really well and
then find another who to let it go tocreate a system and then fire yourself
from that role so that you can move onto something else that brings other value
to your business.
The lesson I learned many years agois we were spending like 80% of our
(08:24):
marketing budget and my painting companygoing into the slow season when demand
was taken a hitAnd we flipped that. We're like,
we need to be spending itwhen demand's the highest.
That's not so little tweaks likethat. You talked about the lagging.
I think another big area that peopleblow it in marketing is you work really
hard to get your phone to ring howmany people you have in your database.
(08:45):
If somebody's given you money,
they're like 85% more likely to do itagain if they had a good experience.
And yet most contractorsthat we work with,
most that I talk to aren't doinga thing with their database.
We have about 22 unique customersper year and it grows every
year. Okay, 1,801 year. Last year,
2023 was around 22 2300 unique customers,
(09:09):
and I'm talking like somebody vias asales training course to everyone that
comes to our events or whatever.There's this app that I use at anytime.
Somebody purchases something fromour company, it could be a hat,
I don't care what it is,
drops into our Slack channel and thengoes to this other software that I use
to send videos and I record anindividual thank you to every
(09:31):
buyer.
Wow.
Okay. Adam,
thanks so much for grabbing the contractor
fight swag, really appreciate you.
Keep slugging away. Have agreat day, whatever, or hey,
thanks for grabbing an event ticket.We can't wait to see you in September.
I know it takes a lot to get away fromthe family and to bring your team and
(09:53):
this and that. I just want to know weappreciate you guys. If you did that,
you would see an increase, like acrazy increase in profit, right?
I see the value.
Where does the ROI come from orpeople tell me more about that.
Gratitude man, right out of the gate.It's gratitude. So take a painter,
(10:14):
I was a painting contractor,I'll just go painter right now.
We have a painter that we use,they're awesome. I love them.
Last time they were at myhouse was two years ago.
I do multiple pieces of contenta week throughout the year
and I have frequently talked about,
so we have these things we call 'emprofit touches or unintentional or
(10:35):
unexpected intentional touches,whatever you want to call.
So it's basically I painted your houselast year. I'm going to call you up.
Hey Adam, it's Tom with Tom's paintingpainted your downstairs last year.
I just wanted to check in withyou, see how it's looking. I care.
Just care. The ROI of thatis more repeat business,
(10:56):
more referrals, more goodwill.
Most contractors you can't find likethey do the work and they disappear.
And what we found with the ROIis about 5% of these touches.
If you do three of thesea day to your database,
about 5% annually convertto another project.
So three a day times the working days,
(11:18):
it's around 800 of thesea year when 5% of that
is 40 projects. I mean, think aboutit. If you do a $10,000 project,
it's free money sitting there.
And so this is where I think alot of people don't understand.
You worked hard to get the phone toring, you worked hard for the lead,
worked hard to build this relationship,
(11:38):
and then you're not goingto do anything with it,
but you're fanatical about adspend to get new customers.
So I think all these things just kindof work together to help you sell at the
higher rates and it's easier to, I mean,
they say it's around five to20 chance of getting a new
customer versus an 80 or 90%chance to reengage a past
(11:59):
customer.
So much. I tell people all thetime, if you're not emailing.
Your.
Clients on a regularbasis, you're losing money.
Yeah. Well listen, you have to be thekind of company that counts things.
You have to measure things.Jobber is great for that.
We can measure all of the thingsthere. The KPIs just come out of it.
As long as we put the good informationin there, Just take the very top of the
(12:20):
software, the CRM, how manyinbound leads did we get?
What was our conversion rate, howmany deals? Those are all important.
Once I start to measure those,
I can manage them and I don't want tosound like I'm quoting another book,
but I can't manage what I can't measure.
And so measurementbecomes really important.
One of the measurement things that a lotof us overlook is thinking that we need
(12:41):
a 100% conversion rate. Everycustomer I talk to buys for me,
that is not good. You do not wanta hundred percent conversion rate.
The only people who have a hundredpercent conversion rate are doing illegal
things, right? Yeah. Oneof them is selling drugs.
You can guess what thesecond one is, right?
So we don't want a hundredpercent conversion rate.
We actually want some people fallingoff and that's why it's called a funnel.
(13:02):
So.
Just measuring things really allows youto find the nuggets in your business.
Yeah, this is a big one. Processes. Ifyou want to go from 400,000 to 2 million,
if you're sloppy small, you'll besloppy big. If you're sloppy at 400,000.
That's a good way.
To say just wait until you're 2million and you're still sloppy,
so you have to have areally strong foundation.
Standard operating procedures manual,this is how we do it here kind of things.
(13:24):
What do you think about that?
I a hundred percent agree, andactually you said it really well,
so I'm going to say it in reverseso it sounds like I did it first.
Let's say that you're running a business,and let's just use for an example.
Your business is doing amillion dollars a year,
but I call it fluttering around the edges.
You just can't keep control of things.You or you're stuck in a million,
last year you were a millionthis year, you're 1.1.
(13:45):
You'd figure this year you're goingto do 1.2. You're really not growing.
The problem there is most likely yoursystems because you're running that $1
million business on $750,000 systems.
So you've maxed out thosesystems. You actually need,
and this is the crazy part, this isthe business coaching part, folks,
you don't need to go tomillion dollar systems anymore.
(14:07):
You need to take that $750,000 systemand imagine it as a $3 million business
so you can pull yourselfthrough that next bottleneck.
And those systems do so much, obviously,
they reduce chaos and bring order to yourorganization. They also make it better
for your employees.
Your team doesn't want towork in a crazy zone. Nobody.
(14:29):
One wants care. No one wants that. Theydon't want to show up to work and Hey,
boss, where are we going to today?They don't want that kind of stuff.
They want to have a plan.
They want to have an app like Jobberthat allows 'em to see what the job is to
today. They want to haveapps that are professional,
they want to have a nicefan and good uniforms.
All those kinds of things go intobuilding a company that it's not sloppy.
It has order.
Just runs well.
(14:49):
Yeah, it just runs well. As abusiness owner, that's what you want.
And so in order to do that,
you have to have some systemsin place and processes and gosh,
we throw that word around so much,right? Processes and systems.
But give me a really concreteexample of just a system in place,
in a business.
A very simple system.
So imagine though that everybusiness is a little bit sloppy,
(15:10):
and so we're always working on systems.
Right?
So the very first thing I'd encourageevery business owner to understand is
you're always going to bechasing the next bottleneck.
You're always going to bechasing a system that's broken.
So let's understand that first.That's a change in mindset,
but a simple system is let's startwith a script for any inbound lead.
Great.
This is how we answer the phone. Thisis how we take the initial information.
(15:32):
This is what we say, this is whatwe get, this is what we enter.
If you're using the software,there's a simple system, right?
Yeah.
You might also have a dispatch system.You might have how a job ends system.
Here's another one that'sgreat for marketing.
Here's the system for the foreman to gotalk to the neighbors on the first day
of the job. If you've gota great system for that,
(15:52):
your customer service complaints are goingto go down and your referrals in that
neighborhood are going to go up becausethe foreman came, gave them a card,
said something very simple like this,Hey, we're going to be working next door.
We're only doing the gutters,
but this seems like a veryclose knit neighborhood.
You're probably wondering if yousee trucks you don't recognize.
So that's myself and my crew workingnext door. If you have any questions,
(16:14):
here's my card. Give me a call,and the person will say, well,
thank you for letting me know and you dogutters. Can you just maybe, and boom,
your system is making you money.
Have you ever changedyour service offerings?
How does your service change and evolveover time in a competitive market?
Have you asked services?Have you added new services?
(16:35):
I know you guys do a lot morecommercial now, Christine,
a little chandelier cleaning as well,so that's a good example of that.
Maybe you can elaborate more on that,
but I'm just curious how you guysevolve your company to stay relevant.
We offer services basedon the client demand.
So Clearview 20 years ago startedas a window washing company.
(16:56):
That's all they did, and people whoare getting their windows cleaned,
we're asking for, do you do power washing?
Once you get enough of thosequestions, you're like,
I really need to go intopower washing. Well,
now you're doing power washingand window washing. Hey,
do you guys clean gutters? My guttersare clogged. And we always say,
we say yes before we say no.
So of course we clean gutters.Let's do it. Do you clean roofs?
(17:20):
Of course, we clean roofs,so we go based on demand.
We have a lot of high-endluxury residential clients who are asking if we shrink
wrap patio furniture. That's become abig thing in New Jersey, and we did not.
And then three years ago wewere like, of course we do,
and we bought the shrink wrapstuff and we learned how to do it,
and now we shrink wrap patio furniturebecause enough people asked for it.
(17:43):
So there was enough of a demand,and you have to price accordingly.
You can't just add on a service whereyou're going to break even or lose money.
So you have to makesure that you learn it,
you're efficient and it makessense for your gross and your net
profits.
And we axed one service in the past to get
specific,
it was gutter whitening because wedidn't want our crews using the whatever
(18:06):
chemical is needed, chemical, chemical,
and we didn't do it for any reason otherthan the safety of our technicians.
That's not a recommendationfor anyone who does it.
It's just we didn't want todeal with it. We add services.
We've been asked like a handful oftimes, do we do air duct cleaning?
And we don't feel like that compliments,
so you have to make sure it alsocompliments the services that you offer.
(18:29):
And we didn't feel like it complimentedour power washing services.
We just keep saying no to that.
But if there's something thatreally compliments your services,
I would say to give it ashot and see if it works out.
Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree with that.
There's a saying youcan't grow if you say no,
but I like that you also don'twant to get too crazy going
(18:49):
way off the wall and doing allthese random tasks and stuff.
One thing that I would tell businessesto look at is your current process or the
current service that you'reoffering, are they scalable?
Because a lot of times business owners,
they get so caught up in pricing everysingle job down to this and that.
Is there a way that you can standardizeyour pricing in some instances to help
streamline the processes?
What we found a lot of the big companiesis that they're making it so tight so
(19:10):
that a high school student can sellthis service or a college student and
getting that process so dialed inthat this is our specific Clearview
washing program. It's so tight that it'snot hard to sell over and over again.
And that's what we've seen tohelp scale the process for sure.
Yeah, I would say a final thought on this.
I think Christine's key point isyou've been around for 20 years.
(19:34):
You did not start doing all thesedifferent sources the first year,
and so I think our listeners would bebetter off making sure that they want to
dominate, they have to dominateone thing really, really well.
And once they've completelymaximized in terms of a tier,
once they max out a tier,then they can branch off.
There's a book called Good to Great,and there's a hedgehog mindset in there,
(19:54):
which he says,
you got to focus on this one thing andbe so great at this one thing up until
around a million dollars. If you're sogood at this, no one else can touch you,
and everyone's else going to bechasing all this stuff all around you,
and you're just staying true to yourself.
Yeah. Let's talk about cashflow.
So what kind of capital funding do yourecommend for companies that want to go
to a million dollars or more?
(20:14):
What kind of cashflow management do youneed to have in place that doesn't dry
up on you? Any tips on that?
Don't take on unnecessary debt.I mean, start the process,
but I should have started gettingcredit for my business sooner. Didn't.
I've only done that for the last maybethree years or something like that,
but I went over 10 years withjust cash, right? So yeah,
(20:37):
we grew to a couple millionbucks with no debt, with no,
when I bought a vehicle, Adam,again, when we met, I was driving,
I had a thousand dollars truck.
I literally paid a thousand bucks forthis truck, and it was earning two,
three grand a day. And so I thinkthat if you're going to grow your
company, I don't think that you need totake on an unreasonable amount of debt.
Now with that, start theprocess. Go ahead and get an LLC,
(21:00):
go ahead and get yourcredit. Start building that.
But when you get a credit card,don't use it like a credit card.
Use it like a debit card,pay it off twice a month.
Don't go out and buy a hundred thousanddollars truck if you don't have the
money in the bank. If you're like,I can't afford to buy this tool,
but I need it to complete a job,maybe you shouldn't take on that job.
I think again,
(21:21):
everything that you do should beprofitable and in the back of your mind,
you should always say,if this goes sideways,
is it going to be detrimental to thecompany as a whole? Because keep in mind,
if your company goes under, then everybodythat works for you is going under,
right?
You got how many peoplein your organization that literally you're putting food
on their table. And I think thatmost business owners, at least me,
(21:43):
sometimes I stay up at night andI'm like, if I make a bad decision,
this is going to affect a lot of people.And I think that debt is one of those
things that you can veryquickly get out of hand.
If you know how to leverage it, awesome.
But I think that you should be able togrow without it and use it like a bank
account, like a debit cardwhere you can get by without it,
but you're building it.
(22:04):
I would say if we take it back towhen you're starting your business,
make sure you can get personallending. Before in Canada,
the banks don't really recognize youas a business for the first two years.
So if you're not.
Interesting.
So if you're not successful,you don't have a track record.
They want to see that.
So I would say get a good accountant tounderstand your cashflow because you're
(22:25):
not going to know what it means orhow to understand it if you don't have
someone explaining yours behind you.
But then also understanding that yourbanking partners. Some of the best advice,
as I said,
it's like when you go to your mortgagebroker and they don't have a mortgage,
so when you go to your banker, butthey don't have a business, right? Yes,
maybe they've seen some businesses,
but as you start in thesmall business world,
(22:47):
understand the other side of the desk,
that person is in an entrylevel business banking position.
They're in small business banking.
A lot of the times that is just a steppingstone into commercial banking. A lot
of times that's just a steppingstone in a private wealth management.
So understanding that you're notdealing with the expert all the time,
but you're dealing withsomebody that has guidelines.
(23:07):
And so if you can reverse engineeryour needs from the bank's guidelines,
it's the best advice I ever got.And once I kind of understood that,
and it's not manipulating, it's playingby the rules and playing by their rules.
So going to the bank and saying, listen,we've got this new job coming up.
There's 60 day terms on thepayment. It's legally binding.
(23:29):
I just need to take on the joband have the cashflow to do it.
It's a profitable opportunity.
And then you can come in with the rightamount of paperwork and say, okay,
listen, that's how we're going to takethis job on. Or kind of like you said,
with that tool, we're going tobe able to take this job on,
and this job's going to pay for that tool,
and then we've got that tool for therest of our business's lifecycle.
You don't want to do it. And Ithink we're agreeing on that.
(23:51):
You don't want to do it to thepoint of it's not really risk,
it's just like you're justshooting from the hip all the time.
Yeah.
Structured.
Debt, the difference between structureddebt and just racking up a credit,
you maxing out your credit card. Right?
Exactly.
And you also need to understand there'sdifferent types of credit. Exactly.
To your point, you got to understandwhat do banks want to lend to you? Well,
(24:12):
they want to return on their money,so that's what they're looking for.
It is similar in the states. They wanttwo, three years worth of history.
And so that's why I'm sayingstart out small, right?
Start out with a 500 creditcard if that's all you can
qualify for or something like that,
but start building that out andthen do other things. I mean,
there's lines of credit,there's invoice factoring,
which is what you were kind of referringto, I believe, where you say, Hey,
(24:35):
we got a big job. It's under contract.We just want to upfront on our money,
and if that job is going to be a 20%profit and the debt only costs you
3%, 5% all day every day.Yeah, let's go for that.
But you got to be a little financialliterate so you don't get in over your
head.
Yeah, I think the best,
we're talking about scale and overthat million dollar threshold.
(24:55):
The best thing you can do is havean in-house bookkeeper By far.
I highly recommend it. A lot of thetimes they will do part-time work,
but in-house is the criticalthing there. In-house bookkeeping,
you want to know your numbersas quickly as you can.
Outsource bookkeeping, itis going to be every month,
(25:16):
so maybe get 'em at the 15th ofevery month. That's not effective.
That's reactive decision making when youcan say, Hey, how was this week doing?
Okay, there we go. Let's makea decision based on that. Well,
how are we looking this month?Listen, there's some extra cashflow.
Let's buy that tool.
That tool's really going to pay us offand it's going to set us up for next
month. You know what? Thetrucks need some oil changes,
(25:38):
that thousand truck needs, newtires. But also if things are tight,
you know what, man, let's workSaturday or Sunday, right?
Let's.
Get it going.
And being able to scaleit back or scale it up.
You're saying the in-house bookkeeper,
a guy had a hundred thousanddollars cannot afford to pay. You know what I mean?
You can't afford to pay a fulltimein-house bookkeeper at four or 5 million.
(25:58):
It's a necessity.So I think hanging around people,
it goes back to your advice atthe beginning of the episode.
Hang around people who areat where you want to be,
get advice from them and thenhave that plan at X amount,
at 1,000,005, we're goinghire an in-house bookkeeper,
and this is going to be atypical salary for our area,
and this is how many hours and X, Y,Z. So you have that plan in place,
(26:20):
so when your business reachesthat threshold, you can quickly pull the trigger.
And again, it's aboutthat opportunity cost,
not missed opportunity cost andcapitalizing and reducing those missed
opportunities.
Just put your eyes on your goals once aday. I don't care where you look at 'em,
how you do 'em, how many minutes?Doesn't matter. That's on you, right?
I'm not mandating how much timeanybody does any of this stuff,
(26:42):
but just the habit of I take care ofme and I look at where I want to go.
We spend so much time focused on wherewe're not or the problems that we
have or the issues or the circumstancesthat are hitting us in the business.
And sadly, well, the reality iswe get more of what we focus on,
and if we're not intentionallyfocusing on where we want to go,
(27:03):
we're going to have a hard time gettingthere because we're consumed with the
guys didn't show up, wedidn't hit our sales goal,
we ran on this issue on this project.I'm trying to get the phone to ring.
It's easy to see all the thingsthat we want to make better.
And.
We give. Those things are attention,
and I've just personally found themore that I look at where I want to go,
the faster I get there.
(27:24):
And those could be quarterlygoals. It could be yearly goals.
You don't care as long as they havegoals for the time period that they're
looking.
Yeah, if you want to build adream house somewhere, right,
with five acres overlooking themountains and read that every day.
I have a thing on my phone Icall it. I call it my standard,
how I put my focus every day.
I have some affirmations on there.
(27:44):
I have a little reminder to remindmyself who I am and what I'm here
to do. And it's a personal typephrase for me. That means something.
I have a list of all the things that I'mshooting for that I want to accomplish.
I have a never do it again. List that'son there that my coach taught me.
He's like, everyone has a, I want todo this. How about a never do it again?
(28:07):
And then I revisit thatevery morning as well.
So I'm just starting my daywith reading some good stuff,
putting some good things in my head,getting the oxygen and moving my body,
whatever you want to call it.
So that's the first activity is a personal
activity of the FW day.
(28:27):
The second we call a pipeline activity,
which is a prospectingor a hunting activity.
Do something to build your pipeline.Pet peeve.
Mine is that listen, if you'rea salesperson, and by the way,
if you own a business,you're a salesperson.
So it blows my mind how little focus,
(28:51):
intensity, consistency,
whatever you want to call it that theaverage contractor has when it comes to
filling their own pipeline. They hirethe marketing agency, which is great.
I'm all for running ads and doing things,billboards, truck signs, whatever.
But you can't just rely on thosethings. What do you have control over?
Can you call a past customer? Can you dowhat we call a warranty call? Hey Bill,
(29:13):
it's Tom. We restainedyour deck last year.
Your warranty is up in a month. I'dlike to set up your warranty call.
What's that, Tom? Well,
we come out and we put eyes on it andmake sure that everything's looking good.
So nothing becomes your problem. Itremains our problem. Nobody walks it.
Nobody seeks out warranty work.We do because it's uncommon.
(29:36):
You got to be uncommon. Sothat's a pipeline activity.
Now I'm standing back in the yard havinga conversation 99 of a hundred times.
Nothing's wrong. Sometimes I'd tellour guys to find something, right?
Just find something like, oh,
this window sill looks like it's goingto start peeling in a couple of months or
something, so I'll sand itdown and repaint it. Right now,
the law reciprocity kicks in,okay? You're standing there,
(29:58):
they're reminded of why theylike you, why they hired you.
You're not running from warranty work.
You're uncommon.And what we found in my companies is about
38% of the warranty callsthat we physically did,
38% of those, you would hear,Hey, Adam, while you're here,
we were thinking aboutthis, and it's more work.
(30:21):
So that pipeline activity doesn't haveto be prospecting for cold business,
cold traffic, cold people. It can,
pipeline activity could be somethingalong the lines of creating content to get
more eyeballs on your brand.
There's so many things that we havecontrol over that we're not relying
on our marketing agencies and the Googlegods and all those other things to
(30:45):
fill our pipeline.
So every day our listeners should bedoing something to get new clients or
get more work, I should say,from potentially existing clients every day. Yeah.
Thank you for tuning in as we enterthis new year filled with growth and
opportunity.
We hope these insights help you takeyour business to the next level.
Here's to making 2025 your best year ever.
(31:09):
I.
There's a saying youcan't grow if you say.
No, but I like that.
Welcome to Masters of Home Service,
a podcast for home servicepros by home service. Pros,
as we look ahead togrowing in the new year,
this is the perfect time to focus onreaching big business goals like hitting a
million dollars in revenue.In this special episode,
(00:20):
we're sharing some of the best tips fromguests who've successfully grown their
businesses. These ideaswill help you scale up.
Let's dive into the strategy toskyrocket your growth in 2025.
How did you change eachstep along the way?
You hit a hundred thousand when youfirst start, 250,000, 500,000, a million.
How did you have to change at eachof those levels? Generally speaking,
(00:42):
what did you have to do onyourselves to get to there?
I break this down backwards a little bit.
So there's two levels of mentor for myselfand that first level is don't get too
big. People suck. They're going to takeadvantage of you. Clients won't pay,
you're never going to have anypersonal time. More negative. Yeah,
work-life balance kind of thing.And the second level of mentor,
which is a huge shift, but it was sopowerful when I got there and I found it.
(01:05):
It was people. People areeverything. Our team is great,
our leadership is awesome. I'm notthe smartest person in the room.
You have to talk to this person in ourbusiness to get that answer because
they're the expert, they're smarterthan me. And as soon as I shifted that,
the business just exploded, which was what
(01:25):
my purpose is in our business,
is creating opportunities for others sothey don't need to leave our business.
And by doing that and empowering them,
it it's exploded and thenyou start getting refining and actually have the time
to work on how to make the profitwhen you're over a million bucks.
Because.
You're not worried aboutdoing all the work,
you're not worried aboutgoing to all the job sites.
(01:46):
You're empowering your team todo it because just like you said,
that $4,500 a day, youcan't do that by yourself.
So what does that mean? Well, it's asimple answer. You have to empower people.
Yeah, I mean I think for me,getting over a hundred grand,
you got to get off the truck, right?
You can just work and make ahundred grand to get over two 50.
(02:07):
You probably got to start buildingup your office admin side of things,
getting over half a million.Got to start developing a team.
It's not just husband andwife combination, right?
You might can probably get up to maybehalf a million or something like that
with just wife in the office or husbandin the office and the other person.
You kind of divide thoseroles, but over half a million,
I think you got to startactually building a business.
That's not just going to happen.
I've have people just make a hundredgrand or 200 grand without really
(02:33):
growing the business side of thebusiness over a million bucks.
That's a tough barrier. You got to getpast what I would say is that middle of
the road size business, and even thoughI've done over a million revenue,
I feel like I'm still kind of stuck therebecause there's some things that I'm
still lacking. I think toreally sail past a million,
you need to have maybegood core company culture,
(02:57):
so you got to have some corevalues. Some company culture,
I got a lot of room forimproving on that one.
I think maybe you need to have some salesteam or sales staff and then you got
to have people who are integrators.If you're not integrators,
you're not going to get over a millionbucks by doing what you already
did. You're going to have to say, okay,
(03:18):
I am not good at showing up on time.
So you got to hire peoplewho are showing up on time.
You're not just going to sail past amillion bucks or your business is going to
go up and down, up and down, up and down.
If it's relying on you too much likeyou're saying, you got to empower people.
Where entrepreneurs can get stuck.
It's just trying to keep all theballs in the air and then realizing
(03:40):
that things are droppingand not wanting to let go.
They want to have this amazingservice and this amazing business,
and they're worried that if they let go,
someone else can't do it as well as them.
So they kind of get in their own wayand trap themselves where your business
feels more like a ball and chain thanthe freedom that you originally wanted
when you started your business. It's.
Tricky. It's totally tricky and ifit was easy, everybody would do it.
(04:03):
I would add to what you said earlier,
they think they can do itbetter than everyone else.
That's a third point I would say isthey think that they can cut the grass
better than anyone else.
They can answer the phone andtalk to clients and put out fires.
It's just not true. It's just nottrue at all. What do you think?
I think that everyone has a unique genius.
Harvard did a study and they found thatif you don't like doing something as
(04:27):
much, it usually means you'renot the best person at it.
So when you think about all the thingson your plate, the ones that you dread,
there's someone out there who's goingto do it better than you because if you
have passion, you'regoing to do it better.
Again in the book who not how they talkabout procrastination is always seen as
this negative thing,
but it actually can be a very positivething because it can show you which parts
(04:48):
of your business you need to delegatebecause if you're procrastinating it,
then that means you're not the rightwho for it. So yeah, entrepreneurs,
you can do it all andyou're amazing at it,
but there are pieces that someone canactually do better if you find the person
who that's their greatest passion.
I want to touch on this a little bit morebecause I think there's two listeners
right now,
and I think one listener should stayin the truck because they freaking
(05:10):
love what they do and they'remagicians at it. They're awesome at it,
they're awesome cabinetmakers, whatever they do,
they do their craft literallybetter than anyone else,
and I think they really should stayin the field doing what they love.
The worst thing is taking someone intoputting that person in a place where they
(05:30):
can't be magical anymore. A lotof our listeners are the opposite,
where they're pretty good at it,
but they also aspire to have abusiness that's bigger than themselves.
They're both equal. Andso I think you're right.
If someone has just a magical touchversus someone who's like, you know what?
There's a lot of things here I don'tlike to do. I should delegate those,
(05:51):
and that's how you build a businessby delegating those things.
What are some key indicatorsthat it is time for a
person to start getting off the truck,so to speak, to start delegating,
start building a business? What are someof those indicators that you've seen?
It's when you're filling overload.
I had a client who explained it once.
(06:12):
He called in right after he had signedup to help get help with his phone,
so he's trying to outsource some partsof his business so he didn't have so much
on his plate and he said, Michelle,
I'm at Tetris level 60right now and immediately,
I mean you can fill it rightimmediately. My heart rate rose.
I mean I loved Tetris as a kid and youknow that the blocks are coming down and
the higher the level, the fast,
the faster they're coming down and yougot to figure out how to fit it where and
(06:35):
to change the shape andthe higher level you get,
the harder it is to do it until you'regame over. It is expanded, blown up.
And so that's how it felt in his businessthat everything is coming down at once
in all these different directions.You got employee fires to put out,
you got phones to answeryou, you got marketing,
got to do in sales and allthese different pieces.
And so when you get to that level,
it's time to offloadbecause you don't want to,
(06:57):
you're not going to performwell at Tetris level 60.
You need to be more level 10 or 20 orsomething like that where business is
coming in, you're busy,
but where you're not to this level thatyou can't keep all the balls in the air.
And so the secret is you got toactually become really good at firing
yourself. That's one of the number oneskills an entrepreneur needs to learn.
(07:18):
And you can't just do it once.You need to continually do it.
By way of an example, if you lookat someone like Warren Buffett,
so she's about to be a trillion,billion dollar business,
has over 400,000 employees. And do youknow what he spends all his time doing
mostly is reading books and figuringout the next investment opportunity.
But the way he got there is actuallythrough learning how to fire himself.
(07:41):
I mean he started out on sales andthen he built his career there and then
he learned there were differentpieces that he needed to offload,
so he found another goodperson to delegate that to and then fired himself from
that role and then movedup to another role.
And that's really what the entrepreneurneeds to do is you might not be building
a trillion dollar business.
You might be going from a hundred thousandto 300,000 or maybe you're trying to
(08:03):
go from 800,000 to amillion or whatever it is,
but the pathway to get there is tolearn to do a skill really well and
then find another who to let it go tocreate a system and then fire yourself
from that role so that you can move onto something else that brings other value
to your business.
The lesson I learned many years agois we were spending like 80% of our
(08:24):
marketing budget and my painting companygoing into the slow season when demand
was taken a hitAnd we flipped that. We're like,
we need to be spending itwhen demand's the highest.
That's not so little tweaks likethat. You talked about the lagging.
I think another big area that peopleblow it in marketing is you work really
hard to get your phone to ring howmany people you have in your database.
(08:45):
If somebody's given you money,
they're like 85% more likely to do itagain if they had a good experience.
And yet most contractorsthat we work with,
most that I talk to aren't doinga thing with their database.
We have about 22 unique customersper year and it grows every
year. Okay, 1,801 year. Last year,
2023 was around 22 2300 unique customers,
(09:09):
and I'm talking like somebody vias asales training course to everyone that
comes to our events or whatever.There's this app that I use at anytime.
Somebody purchases something fromour company, it could be a hat,
I don't care what it is,
drops into our Slack channel and thengoes to this other software that I use
to send videos and I record anindividual thank you to every
(09:31):
buyer.
Wow.
Okay. Adam,
thanks so much for grabbing the contractor
fight swag, really appreciate you.
Keep slugging away. Have agreat day, whatever, or hey,
thanks for grabbing an event ticket.We can't wait to see you in September.
I know it takes a lot to get away fromthe family and to bring your team and
(09:53):
this and that. I just want to know weappreciate you guys. If you did that,
you would see an increase, like acrazy increase in profit, right?
I see the value.
Where does the ROI come from orpeople tell me more about that.
Gratitude man, right out of the gate.It's gratitude. So take a painter,
(10:14):
I was a painting contractor,I'll just go painter right now.
We have a painter that we use,they're awesome. I love them.
Last time they were at myhouse was two years ago.
I do multiple pieces of contenta week throughout the year
and I have frequently talked about,
so we have these things we call 'emprofit touches or unintentional or
(10:35):
unexpected intentional touches,whatever you want to call.
So it's basically I painted your houselast year. I'm going to call you up.
Hey Adam, it's Tom with Tom's paintingpainted your downstairs last year.
I just wanted to check in withyou, see how it's looking. I care.
Just care. The ROI of thatis more repeat business,
(10:56):
more referrals, more goodwill.
Most contractors you can't find likethey do the work and they disappear.
And what we found with the ROIis about 5% of these touches.
If you do three of thesea day to your database,
about 5% annually convertto another project.
So three a day times the working days,
(11:18):
it's around 800 of thesea year when 5% of that
is 40 projects. I mean, think aboutit. If you do a $10,000 project,
it's free money sitting there.
And so this is where I think alot of people don't understand.
You worked hard to get the phone toring, you worked hard for the lead,
worked hard to build this relationship,
(11:38):
and then you're not goingto do anything with it,
but you're fanatical about adspend to get new customers.
So I think all these things just kindof work together to help you sell at the
higher rates and it's easier to, I mean,
they say it's around five to20 chance of getting a new
customer versus an 80 or 90%chance to reengage a past
(11:59):
customer.
So much. I tell people all thetime, if you're not emailing.
Your.
Clients on a regularbasis, you're losing money.
Yeah. Well listen, you have to be thekind of company that counts things.
You have to measure things.Jobber is great for that.
We can measure all of the thingsthere. The KPIs just come out of it.
As long as we put the good informationin there, Just take the very top of the
(12:20):
software, the CRM, how manyinbound leads did we get?
What was our conversion rate, howmany deals? Those are all important.
Once I start to measure those,
I can manage them and I don't want tosound like I'm quoting another book,
but I can't manage what I can't measure.
And so measurementbecomes really important.
One of the measurement things that a lotof us overlook is thinking that we need
(12:41):
a 100% conversion rate. Everycustomer I talk to buys for me,
that is not good. You do not wanta hundred percent conversion rate.
The only people who have a hundredpercent conversion rate are doing illegal
things, right? Yeah. Oneof them is selling drugs.
You can guess what thesecond one is, right?
So we don't want a hundredpercent conversion rate.
We actually want some people fallingoff and that's why it's called a funnel.
(13:02):
So.
Just measuring things really allows youto find the nuggets in your business.
Yeah, this is a big one. Processes. Ifyou want to go from 400,000 to 2 million,
if you're sloppy small, you'll besloppy big. If you're sloppy at 400,000.
That's a good way.
To say just wait until you're 2million and you're still sloppy,
so you have to have areally strong foundation.
Standard operating procedures manual,this is how we do it here kind of things.
(13:24):
What do you think about that?
I a hundred percent agree, andactually you said it really well,
so I'm going to say it in reverseso it sounds like I did it first.
Let's say that you're running a business,and let's just use for an example.
Your business is doing amillion dollars a year,
but I call it fluttering around the edges.
You just can't keep control of things.You or you're stuck in a million,
last year you were a millionthis year, you're 1.1.
(13:45):
You'd figure this year you're goingto do 1.2. You're really not growing.
The problem there is most likely yoursystems because you're running that $1
million business on $750,000 systems.
So you've maxed out thosesystems. You actually need,
and this is the crazy part, this isthe business coaching part, folks,
you don't need to go tomillion dollar systems anymore.
(14:07):
You need to take that $750,000 systemand imagine it as a $3 million business
so you can pull yourselfthrough that next bottleneck.
And those systems do so much, obviously,
they reduce chaos and bring order to yourorganization. They also make it better
for your employees.
Your team doesn't want towork in a crazy zone. Nobody.
(14:29):
One wants care. No one wants that. Theydon't want to show up to work and Hey,
boss, where are we going to today?They don't want that kind of stuff.
They want to have a plan.
They want to have an app like Jobberthat allows 'em to see what the job is to
today. They want to haveapps that are professional,
they want to have a nicefan and good uniforms.
All those kinds of things go intobuilding a company that it's not sloppy.
It has order.
Just runs well.
(14:49):
Yeah, it just runs well. As abusiness owner, that's what you want.
And so in order to do that,
you have to have some systemsin place and processes and gosh,
we throw that word around so much,right? Processes and systems.
But give me a really concreteexample of just a system in place,
in a business.
A very simple system.
So imagine though that everybusiness is a little bit sloppy,
(15:10):
and so we're always working on systems.
Right?
So the very first thing I'd encourageevery business owner to understand is
you're always going to bechasing the next bottleneck.
You're always going to bechasing a system that's broken.
So let's understand that first.That's a change in mindset,
but a simple system is let's startwith a script for any inbound lead.
Great.
This is how we answer the phone. Thisis how we take the initial information.
(15:32):
This is what we say, this is whatwe get, this is what we enter.
If you're using the software,there's a simple system, right?
Yeah.
You might also have a dispatch system.You might have how a job ends system.
Here's another one that'sgreat for marketing.
Here's the system for the foreman to gotalk to the neighbors on the first day
of the job. If you've gota great system for that,
(15:52):
your customer service complaints are goingto go down and your referrals in that
neighborhood are going to go up becausethe foreman came, gave them a card,
said something very simple like this,Hey, we're going to be working next door.
We're only doing the gutters,
but this seems like a veryclose knit neighborhood.
You're probably wondering if yousee trucks you don't recognize.
So that's myself and my crew workingnext door. If you have any questions,
(16:14):
here's my card. Give me a call,and the person will say, well,
thank you for letting me know and you dogutters. Can you just maybe, and boom,
your system is making you money.
Have you ever changedyour service offerings?
How does your service change and evolveover time in a competitive market?
Have you asked services?Have you added new services?
(16:35):
I know you guys do a lot morecommercial now, Christine,
a little chandelier cleaning as well,so that's a good example of that.
Maybe you can elaborate more on that,
but I'm just curious how you guysevolve your company to stay relevant.
We offer services basedon the client demand.
So Clearview 20 years ago startedas a window washing company.
(16:56):
That's all they did, and people whoare getting their windows cleaned,
we're asking for, do you do power washing?
Once you get enough of thosequestions, you're like,
I really need to go intopower washing. Well,
now you're doing power washingand window washing. Hey,
do you guys clean gutters? My guttersare clogged. And we always say,
we say yes before we say no.
So of course we clean gutters.Let's do it. Do you clean roofs?
(17:20):
Of course, we clean roofs,so we go based on demand.
We have a lot of high-endluxury residential clients who are asking if we shrink
wrap patio furniture. That's become abig thing in New Jersey, and we did not.
And then three years ago wewere like, of course we do,
and we bought the shrink wrapstuff and we learned how to do it,
and now we shrink wrap patio furniturebecause enough people asked for it.
(17:43):
So there was enough of a demand,and you have to price accordingly.
You can't just add on a service whereyou're going to break even or lose money.
So you have to makesure that you learn it,
you're efficient and it makessense for your gross and your net
profits.
And we axed one service in the past to get
specific,
it was gutter whitening because wedidn't want our crews using the whatever
(18:06):
chemical is needed, chemical, chemical,
and we didn't do it for any reason otherthan the safety of our technicians.
That's not a recommendationfor anyone who does it.
It's just we didn't want todeal with it. We add services.
We've been asked like a handful oftimes, do we do air duct cleaning?
And we don't feel like that compliments,
so you have to make sure it alsocompliments the services that you offer.
(18:29):
And we didn't feel like it complimentedour power washing services.
We just keep saying no to that.
But if there's something thatreally compliments your services,
I would say to give it ashot and see if it works out.
Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree with that.
There's a saying youcan't grow if you say no,
but I like that you also don'twant to get too crazy going
(18:49):
way off the wall and doing allthese random tasks and stuff.
One thing that I would tell businessesto look at is your current process or the
current service that you'reoffering, are they scalable?
Because a lot of times business owners,
they get so caught up in pricing everysingle job down to this and that.
Is there a way that you can standardizeyour pricing in some instances to help
streamline the processes?
What we found a lot of the big companiesis that they're making it so tight so
(19:10):
that a high school student can sellthis service or a college student and
getting that process so dialed inthat this is our specific Clearview
washing program. It's so tight that it'snot hard to sell over and over again.
And that's what we've seen tohelp scale the process for sure.
Yeah, I would say a final thought on this.
I think Christine's key point isyou've been around for 20 years.
(19:34):
You did not start doing all thesedifferent sources the first year,
and so I think our listeners would bebetter off making sure that they want to
dominate, they have to dominateone thing really, really well.
And once they've completelymaximized in terms of a tier,
once they max out a tier,then they can branch off.
There's a book called Good to Great,and there's a hedgehog mindset in there,
(19:54):
which he says,
you got to focus on this one thing andbe so great at this one thing up until
around a million dollars. If you're sogood at this, no one else can touch you,
and everyone's else going to bechasing all this stuff all around you,
and you're just staying true to yourself.
Yeah. Let's talk about cashflow.
So what kind of capital funding do yourecommend for companies that want to go
to a million dollars or more?
(20:14):
What kind of cashflow management do youneed to have in place that doesn't dry
up on you? Any tips on that?
Don't take on unnecessary debt.I mean, start the process,
but I should have started gettingcredit for my business sooner. Didn't.
I've only done that for the last maybethree years or something like that,
but I went over 10 years withjust cash, right? So yeah,
(20:37):
we grew to a couple millionbucks with no debt, with no,
when I bought a vehicle, Adam,again, when we met, I was driving,
I had a thousand dollars truck.
I literally paid a thousand bucks forthis truck, and it was earning two,
three grand a day. And so I thinkthat if you're going to grow your
company, I don't think that you need totake on an unreasonable amount of debt.
Now with that, start theprocess. Go ahead and get an LLC,
(21:00):
go ahead and get yourcredit. Start building that.
But when you get a credit card,don't use it like a credit card.
Use it like a debit card,pay it off twice a month.
Don't go out and buy a hundred thousanddollars truck if you don't have the
money in the bank. If you're like,I can't afford to buy this tool,
but I need it to complete a job,maybe you shouldn't take on that job.
I think again,
(21:21):
everything that you do should beprofitable and in the back of your mind,
you should always say,if this goes sideways,
is it going to be detrimental to thecompany as a whole? Because keep in mind,
if your company goes under, then everybodythat works for you is going under,
right?
You got how many peoplein your organization that literally you're putting food
on their table. And I think thatmost business owners, at least me,
(21:43):
sometimes I stay up at night andI'm like, if I make a bad decision,
this is going to affect a lot of people.And I think that debt is one of those
things that you can veryquickly get out of hand.
If you know how to leverage it, awesome.
But I think that you should be able togrow without it and use it like a bank
account, like a debit cardwhere you can get by without it,
but you're building it.
(22:04):
I would say if we take it back towhen you're starting your business,
make sure you can get personallending. Before in Canada,
the banks don't really recognize youas a business for the first two years.
So if you're not.
Interesting.
So if you're not successful,you don't have a track record.
They want to see that.
So I would say get a good accountant tounderstand your cashflow because you're
(22:25):
not going to know what it means orhow to understand it if you don't have
someone explaining yours behind you.
But then also understanding that yourbanking partners. Some of the best advice,
as I said,
it's like when you go to your mortgagebroker and they don't have a mortgage,
so when you go to your banker, butthey don't have a business, right? Yes,
maybe they've seen some businesses,
but as you start in thesmall business world,
(22:47):
understand the other side of the desk,
that person is in an entrylevel business banking position.
They're in small business banking.
A lot of the times that is just a steppingstone into commercial banking. A lot
of times that's just a steppingstone in a private wealth management.
So understanding that you're notdealing with the expert all the time,
but you're dealing withsomebody that has guidelines.
(23:07):
And so if you can reverse engineeryour needs from the bank's guidelines,
it's the best advice I ever got.And once I kind of understood that,
and it's not manipulating, it's playingby the rules and playing by their rules.
So going to the bank and saying, listen,we've got this new job coming up.
There's 60 day terms on thepayment. It's legally binding.
(23:29):
I just need to take on the joband have the cashflow to do it.
It's a profitable opportunity.
And then you can come in with the rightamount of paperwork and say, okay,
listen, that's how we're going to takethis job on. Or kind of like you said,
with that tool, we're going tobe able to take this job on,
and this job's going to pay for that tool,
and then we've got that tool for therest of our business's lifecycle.
You don't want to do it. And Ithink we're agreeing on that.
(23:51):
You don't want to do it to thepoint of it's not really risk,
it's just like you're justshooting from the hip all the time.
Yeah.
Structured.
Debt, the difference between structureddebt and just racking up a credit,
you maxing out your credit card. Right?
Exactly.
And you also need to understand there'sdifferent types of credit. Exactly.
To your point, you got to understandwhat do banks want to lend to you? Well,
(24:12):
they want to return on their money,so that's what they're looking for.
It is similar in the states. They wanttwo, three years worth of history.
And so that's why I'm sayingstart out small, right?
Start out with a 500 creditcard if that's all you can
qualify for or something like that,
but start building that out andthen do other things. I mean,
there's lines of credit,there's invoice factoring,
which is what you were kind of referringto, I believe, where you say, Hey,
(24:35):
we got a big job. It's under contract.We just want to upfront on our money,
and if that job is going to be a 20%profit and the debt only costs you
3%, 5% all day every day.Yeah, let's go for that.
But you got to be a little financialliterate so you don't get in over your
head.
Yeah, I think the best,
we're talking about scale and overthat million dollar threshold.
(24:55):
The best thing you can do is havean in-house bookkeeper By far.
I highly recommend it. A lot of thetimes they will do part-time work,
but in-house is the criticalthing there. In-house bookkeeping,
you want to know your numbersas quickly as you can.
Outsource bookkeeping, itis going to be every month,
(25:16):
so maybe get 'em at the 15th ofevery month. That's not effective.
That's reactive decision making when youcan say, Hey, how was this week doing?
Okay, there we go. Let's makea decision based on that. Well,
how are we looking this month?Listen, there's some extra cashflow.
Let's buy that tool.
That tool's really going to pay us offand it's going to set us up for next
month. You know what? Thetrucks need some oil changes,
(25:38):
that thousand truck needs, newtires. But also if things are tight,
you know what, man, let's workSaturday or Sunday, right?
Let's.
Get it going.
And being able to scaleit back or scale it up.
You're saying the in-house bookkeeper,
a guy had a hundred thousanddollars cannot afford to pay. You know what I mean?
You can't afford to pay a fulltimein-house bookkeeper at four or 5 million.
(25:58):
It's a necessity.So I think hanging around people,
it goes back to your advice atthe beginning of the episode.
Hang around people who areat where you want to be,
get advice from them and thenhave that plan at X amount,
at 1,000,005, we're goinghire an in-house bookkeeper,
and this is going to be atypical salary for our area,
and this is how many hours and X, Y,Z. So you have that plan in place,
(26:20):
so when your business reachesthat threshold, you can quickly pull the trigger.
And again, it's aboutthat opportunity cost,
not missed opportunity cost andcapitalizing and reducing those missed
opportunities.
Just put your eyes on your goals once aday. I don't care where you look at 'em,
how you do 'em, how many minutes?Doesn't matter. That's on you, right?
I'm not mandating how much timeanybody does any of this stuff,
(26:42):
but just the habit of I take care ofme and I look at where I want to go.
We spend so much time focused on wherewe're not or the problems that we
have or the issues or the circumstancesthat are hitting us in the business.
And sadly, well, the reality iswe get more of what we focus on,
and if we're not intentionallyfocusing on where we want to go,
(27:03):
we're going to have a hard time gettingthere because we're consumed with the
guys didn't show up, wedidn't hit our sales goal,
we ran on this issue on this project.I'm trying to get the phone to ring.
It's easy to see all the thingsthat we want to make better.
And.
We give. Those things are attention,
and I've just personally found themore that I look at where I want to go,
the faster I get there.
(27:24):
And those could be quarterlygoals. It could be yearly goals.
You don't care as long as they havegoals for the time period that they're
looking.
Yeah, if you want to build adream house somewhere, right,
with five acres overlooking themountains and read that every day.
I have a thing on my phone Icall it. I call it my standard,
how I put my focus every day.
I have some affirmations on there.
(27:44):
I have a little reminder to remindmyself who I am and what I'm here
to do. And it's a personal typephrase for me. That means something.
I have a list of all the things that I'mshooting for that I want to accomplish.
I have a never do it again. List that'son there that my coach taught me.
He's like, everyone has a, I want todo this. How about a never do it again?
(28:07):
And then I revisit thatevery morning as well.
So I'm just starting my daywith reading some good stuff,
putting some good things in my head,getting the oxygen and moving my body,
whatever you want to call it.
So that's the first activity is a personal
activity of the FW day.
(28:27):
The second we call a pipeline activity,
which is a prospectingor a hunting activity.
Do something to build your pipeline.Pet peeve.
Mine is that listen, if you'rea salesperson, and by the way,
if you own a business,you're a salesperson.
So it blows my mind how little focus,
(28:51):
intensity, consistency,
whatever you want to call it that theaverage contractor has when it comes to
filling their own pipeline. They hirethe marketing agency, which is great.
I'm all for running ads and doing things,billboards, truck signs, whatever.
But you can't just rely on thosethings. What do you have control over?
Can you call a past customer? Can you dowhat we call a warranty call? Hey Bill,
(29:13):
it's Tom. We restainedyour deck last year.
Your warranty is up in a month. I'dlike to set up your warranty call.
What's that, Tom? Well,
we come out and we put eyes on it andmake sure that everything's looking good.
So nothing becomes your problem. Itremains our problem. Nobody walks it.
Nobody seeks out warranty work.We do because it's uncommon.
(29:36):
You got to be uncommon. Sothat's a pipeline activity.
Now I'm standing back in the yard havinga conversation 99 of a hundred times.
Nothing's wrong. Sometimes I'd tellour guys to find something, right?
Just find something like, oh,
this window sill looks like it's goingto start peeling in a couple of months or
something, so I'll sand itdown and repaint it. Right now,
the law reciprocity kicks in,okay? You're standing there,
(29:58):
they're reminded of why theylike you, why they hired you.
You're not running from warranty work.
You're uncommon.And what we found in my companies is about
38% of the warranty callsthat we physically did,
38% of those, you would hear,Hey, Adam, while you're here,
we were thinking aboutthis, and it's more work.
(30:21):
So that pipeline activity doesn't haveto be prospecting for cold business,
cold traffic, cold people. It can,
pipeline activity could be somethingalong the lines of creating content to get
more eyeballs on your brand.
There's so many things that we havecontrol over that we're not relying
on our marketing agencies and the Googlegods and all those other things to
(30:45):
fill our pipeline.
So every day our listeners should bedoing something to get new clients or
get more work, I should say,from potentially existing clients every day. Yeah.
Thank you for tuning in as we enterthis new year filled with growth and
opportunity.
We hope these insights help you takeyour business to the next level.
Here's to making 2025 your best year ever.
(31:09):
I.
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