201. Delegation Made Simple With James Russell

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builder Secrets. In this episode, I interview James Russell from Builders Va. We break down three simple things every builder needs to have in place before bringing on a virtual assistant. It's not as complicated as you think, and it's a whole lot more achievable than most builders realize. If you've ever thought about hiring a VA before, listen to this episode to find out the best way. This episode of Professional Builder Secrets is brought to you by Apparatus Contractor Services. Apparatus provides full scope, end to end QuickBooks, Precision Construction accounting and CFO services for residential builders. If you feel like you can't completely trust your weekly and monthly financial reports or you feel like you're flying blind, Apparatus will rebuild and operate your QuickBooks accounting system and give you precision construction accounting capability you can trust. Learn more@apparatusteam.com or or on the APB Rewards Partner Directory.

If you can have someone remotely somewhere else in the world, do that task, do it effectively and make you look better than you would have done it. You win. Most of the stuff I would say will falls in see the customer journey management. Are we pulling people through the pipeline efficiently? And chasing. It's one of the two chasing money, chasing document data, whatever it is that is the foundation, as in there's an internal admin or someone who loves hiding in a corner and doing BS tasks. They will sabotage it from the beginning if there's an internal admin. It's either going to be the best thing the company has because they will be the biggest support because they want to get into something they do best, or it'll be the biggest downside and I need to find out up front. So look for saboteurs.

Welcome to Professional Builders Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. I'm your host, Will Blunt, and today I'm joined by James Russell from Builders Va. James, welcome to the show.

So good to be here, Will. Absolute pleasure.

Do you want to give a bit of a background, James, on Builders Va, what you do and how you serve builders?

Yeah, absolutely. So look, I've been in the game for around about almost 15 years now and when I say that I mean in the game of delegation and getting stuff out of someone's brain and in getting someone else to do it. As Builders va, the whole idea of what we do is, you know, in a nutshell, getting virtual assistants or talent for builders and matching that with some simple systems and back office help, combining the systems with the people, giving them some superpowers and then kind of Getting stuff done really, is the whole bottom line. Yeah. Mixture of systems and VAs and specialists. So. And we obviously only work with builders and contractors.

I love that framing. The art of. Sorry, the business of delegation. I've not heard it framed that way before, but that word delegation is a really powerful one that I think many builders. It's not that they don't understand it, but they don't utilize it enough.

And I think. Well, there's also. In some ways it's a vague statement, right. Like delegating, like, okay, well, what does that actually mean? You know, and sometimes people misunderstand it as being. It's having someone else do something. Right. Which again, it kind of makes sense. But if you're still thinking about it and you're still having to come back to it, and you're still spending time, what's the point? Right. And so I think it's the. That's why it's the combination. It's not just people, you know, you need a lot more than just people to delegate, you know, And I think that's. That's where I. Yeah, we go. That's there. That's the art in it, is the combining those two.

Why do you think more builders aren't outsourcing or offshoring, I guess, which is where you primarily work.

Right, of course, yeah. And that's the thing, is it by. It all stemmed from the fact that delegation, where you're right next to someone, has its own flavor. There's mirror, there's. People can shadow mirror. And it's a totally different vibe when you're right next to someone and you can feel that you're delegating, but potentially they're just kind of copying you really, as you're doing things. Whereas delegating when someone's remote, having something set up so that someone can perform that job without you being there, whether you're on holidays or whatever. That's where the litmus test of having. That's why offshoring is that ultimate litmus test. If you can have someone remotely, somewhere else in the world, do that task, do it effectively, make you look better than you would have done it, you win. But you. Like you said, there is this absolute barrier. And why I had to focus specifically on builders and contractors was in the industry, the barrier wasn't. It used to be, funnily enough, will that. Oh, yeah. Getting someone offshore, getting someone remote. Can't do it. Covid hit. That's not actually the problem. People can. I can get the concept of having someone remote they understand. They actually understand they need help. Where it comes down to is. And what I hear most is I'm not ready. I don't have this I. The stuff. So between my ears, I don't have systems in place. When I get my shit sorted, my. My French, then I can delegate when I get X, I can delegate when I've sorted out my checklist out. And it's this concept that goes, when you get offshore talent, you need to give them everything and micromanage, paint by numbers. And that's the myth, and that's our absolute purpose. And if you go to our website, that's our purpose. Empowering potential effortlessly. It's that effortless part that makes the difference. It's because it's not difficult. It's not obvious, but it's not difficult. And it's. But you hear it all the time. It's. Sometimes it's cash flow. It's cash flow. When it comes to getting someone in house, you know, for the cost of getting talent and what, this. That's irrelevant. The fears are outside of that, and they're always judging themselves. It's all my head. No one else can do it. Not ready to delegate.

Funnily enough, I had a builder on the podcast earlier today, and the question. He was talking about how someone in his team had taken over a lot of the discovery process and the sales process and everything like that. And I asked him, I said, how did you get that all out of your head? I assume at some point it was all in your head. And he spoke about the process of shadowing. And he was almost. He could tell. He's like, oh, I shouldn't have done it this way. I should have documented everything with videos and checklists and stuff. But really, they just shadowed me for, like, weeks on end until they knew what I was doing. To your point, it's not possible to do that.

That's right. And that's what you hear. That's what everybody's used to. And it's so easy when they're in the office. It's the natural thing, and it happens. And then, you know, that person leaves six, nine months later, and guess what? You got to do it all over again. And the worst experiences I see when people have offshore talent is not when they have a bad one, it's when they have a good one and they leave. And they're like, I just can't do that again. And it's interesting that he mentioned it because, yeah, it's. That's it. And everything we do tries to remove that shadowing anything that can be waste. And shadowing is a waste. You do it once, you got to do it again. There's nothing repetitive about that.

I can see the attractiveness of shadowing though, because there's no barrier, right? Like if you hire someone tomorrow and the training is just them, them shadowing you, you don't need to prepare systems, you don't need to prepare training. So I can see why there'd be an attractiveness to that. What's the equivalent offshore?

Well, that's, I love that you said that because that's often the, like I mentioned the barrier, right. They go, I. But I have to prepare the systems. And I truly believe that chefs shouldn't write recipe books as in builders should not be writing their own systems because they'll be shit. And so the idea at least shadowing kind of does that is they kind of just do what they do. But to be honest, they even shadowing you get caught up training. And this is how we would. Which is horsey apples doesn't actually happen like that. It happens like it happens. And so the equivalent of shadowing is what we call asynchronous training. So asynchronous training simply just means that you are doing the work as you do it and that that can then be at a later point translated into a system by the person who's picking it up, not by you. It's a little bit like, you know, the chef bakes the cake, records himself baking the cake. That's all he does. Then someone watches the video of him baking the cake. Maybe you might need to ask some questions like, hey, you threw this thing in there of sugar. You didn't say how much. Oh yeah, it's a teaspoon. Right, great. Get some clarification. And then the person who's going to be copying that cake writes the recipe for them. And then once they've done the recipe, they bake the cake. And what we're trying to compare then is, is the person look like their cake at the end, right. It's battle tested, right. So but you. And this is where the stuff comes off from the builder is what if you could spend the same amount of effort or even less than you would shadowing, but have everything documented while it was happening. That person take ownership and build those systems while they were learning in such a way that if they left, someone else could get up and running in two to three weeks. Again, it's, it's simple, but it's not obvious. And there are a few Things you need to do as, as you go through that, it's not just you're doing it once and hoping for the best. And there is a feedback loop, but it's the 10, 80, 10 principle. I say will, which is 10% of good data in 80% that your talent can do, and then 10% of good checking and feedback loop on the way out. And if you can understand what that can look like at a minimum viable product, like the minimum amount of time, then delegation becomes effortless and that scale becomes effortless because you go, wow, if I only need to spend this amount of time to delegate effectively so that someone can do it, I can go build my team, build it. I can get chippies, I can get supervisors. It spreads out from your starts in your back office and spreads everywhere that you can see. I get a bit passionate about this.

One thing that I'm, I'm hearing, though, which is important, is that, is that 10% checking, because I've seen it fall apart before. Where builders, business owners, they think by hiring someone that it's just off their plate and they don't need to worry about it anymore.

Yeah. And that's. It's funny. People go, oh, you mean the 8020 rule? I'm like, no, I don't mean the 8020 rule, because that's where people stuff up. They do the 20% at the beginning. They spend a whole bunch of time maybe giving these instructions. Maybe too much time, to be honest. Giving instructions at the beginning that the person doesn't need, and then they just palm it off. It's not delegation, it's a hospital pass. Right. And, and, and you know what the funny thing is, is it's not even that it's bad for the person delegating. Can you imagine being the person who's been delegated to. They get it, they do it. They do it 50 times before someone really checks and then they get in trouble. Yeah.

It's like, you're not going. Right?

Yeah. Initiative is just going to go through the floor. Right. And it is that you have to have that feedback loop and it's got to be a positive experience for both parties. And you've got to get it done early, not after both of you have invested huge amounts of time. It's a little bit. And it's the same reason why we say don't write the SOP yourself. Could you then in every bit of time you invest in that, then if something doesn't go right, you get more. Invest five hours doing an SOP that doesn't get delivered on, that doesn't feel wonderful. You're better off spending 20 minutes and doing a 20 minute check, fixing it up iteratively quickly, you know, and you can delegate so much faster if you have that quick feedback loop. Yeah.

The quality of the input or the brief or the SOP or whatever it is directly correlates to the quality of the output. Right. Like you need to be. You need to own the fact that if there's a bad outcome, it's your fault.

And it's interesting that sometimes even with the. That can get misaligned. Right. Because people. That is true. It's 100%, you know, and I don't know whether this stuff gets beeped out. I don't know if the kids are listening, but. In, out.

Yeah, I was going to say that, but then I was like, how do I say this without swearing? I'm just not great.

There we are. But it's not necessarily about the how or the step by steps. To be honest. You can find out most of that stuff on YouTube, you know, and I really find that it's. People think they need X to delegate, but there's really only three things you need to make sure you have to delegate effectively so that the input that I'm talking about, that quality input, the why, is far more important than the how. What is the purpose of this task? What is the objective, the outcome? What does winning look like for this task or whatever it is that's the first thing is if, if that. Because, you know, I remember getting told you can tell someone what or you can tell them how. You can't tell them both. So you want to tell them what it is that you want to achieve at the end. Right. And then they can search, fill in the gaps. That's where the initiative shines. The initiative shines within that framework of objective. And then you can jump in, debrief, hey, did we achieve the objective? Yes. No. Cool, right? It fills in the gaps. It means that the recipe doesn't have to be so defined. Right. And it releases that. And if you can have a clear objective and you know, my clients laugh a little bit when I bring this up because it makes me sound like a business coach. And I bring up values and they're like, really? Values? Why are we talking about values? When you delegate like, this is getting va. I'm like, well, if you can be clear. And so I love working with people like APB is if you can be clear about how you go about everything, what are the defining characteristics of your decision making 3 to 5. 10. We got 10 in our business. Your VA can run on autopilot. So can you team out in the field, by the way, if they know the three to five things that define the way you make decisions, then they can make decisions when there is no sop. You're in marketing, right, Will? So you understand that once you understand the branding guidelines, the voice, the how you go about everything, then someone can do marketing activities. But if you say to someone get a marketing VA and you go just do a, I don't know, brochure or a post, it's going to be rubbish. Even if you try and step by step it. Because they don't understand the context they're working with, you know, And I think if someone can come to me and they know how they make decisions, just how. Just literally three or five things that their values that they live by quality over profit or whatever it happens to be right. That is clear. And they come to me with understanding what their purpose is and the objective. They can articulate that. The house piece, cake. I can suck that out of their brain in a week. You know, to be honest, people talk about trying to make their operations manual for two years. They can have it done in a matter of weeks. But they do need to know that first.

I promise I won't. We won't fall into a trap of talking through metaphors for the rest of the episode. But a metaphor just came to mind, which I heard from a business coach once, many years ago, around the soccer field. So if you set the goalposts around how they win and then some parameters around, you know, the. They can't go outside these lines. You need to let them play within those constraints. You can't control every little element otherwise, when it gets to a point, to your point around, there's a missing step or they don't know how much sugar to put in the cake. Don't know what to do because they don't know the why. They don't know where the goalpost is.

And that's where people freeze and that's where the stigma comes about with offshoring. You hear people say things like, I have to tell them exactly what to do it actually, you having to tell them exactly what to do started with you telling them exactly what to do.

Yeah.

You know, and then they got to the point where there wasn't something to do and what do they do whereas. Exactly. Allow that initiative within a framework. You can go both ways. You can tell them too little or you can tell them too much. There's the 2080, like I said, they can give the brief and then not give any kind of purpose or objective. And that's terrible because that gives them nothing. Or they give them too much and they just try and list out this is exactly what you're going to do. I'm not going to tell you why this is your task. Just do it. It's like, no, they're not doers. They're just part of your team like anybody else. And sometimes when I talk about that, I'm like, this is. Forget that they're a va. This is her name, Cheryl. She's likely be in your office. She just happens to be in the Philippines, Colombia, whatever. Right. Other than that, she's just another part of your team.

100%. You need to treat anyone that works with or for you the same way you would an employee or any person. Like you need to. They've got their own personal objectives and they get motivated by the same things as any human. Right.

So exactly. And that's where you get that clarity over just they know how to win, so they get their motivation. Then it can blossom so quickly and the delegation does become effortless again as long as you stick to some, I guess, guidelines, communication and stuff that we obviously there to help set up. If someone's coming and listening to this and has been telling themselves either I don't have time to train someone, yeah, they need more cash flow. I don't think that's a big problem at the moment, you know, but if you've got one person, maybe, but I need more cash flow or my systems aren't ready or hey, it's just too hard for me to delegate. It's all in my head. Listen to that little voice and do it anyway. Because you are doing $12 an hour tasks when you're a $250 an hour builder. You're listening to this podcast because you want to grow. You're never gonna grow if you keep doing those $12 an hour tasks because that's how much you value yourself. That's your time.

Can you talk me through a couple of really simple task based scenarios that are common for builders to outsource? Because we're talking more generally and no.

No, we're getting nice and specific because I think it is the fact of, well, the first thing is his knowledge. So the tasks that give the builder the knowledge when he goes to sleep and help him sleep at night. So things like auditing the customer journey, where jobs are at the compliance. So compliance based tasks are the Document all the documents up to date. There is everything. Did the hours, materials get registered yesterday? Did the contractor fill out their form? If you've got photos, the checklists of things of in the job at each different stage have they been done? That includes the finances. Right. Compliance and finance very tightly linked. If you know the materials that we use, the hours that were done, you know the costs of a job. So now you've got job profitability, you've got costing, you've got budget and you've got a complete understanding of where a job's up to because you've got all the documents. So that's the first thing that's usually there for talent to do because it provides the best context. Then the other thing that gets delegated from there. Well obviously I mentioned the finance based stuff is around the communications. So now that you know how the job is being done and what's where it's up to, you can now draft client updates, weekly client updates so that they know where things are up to, what's happening when anything changes. At that point they can start drafting the variations, getting them ready for sign off, obviously understanding how the job goes and what kind of jobs they do. Guess what? Now you can do the qualification matrix. You can start qualifying as the leads come through as well and making sure that you're getting the right things through the door. Then there's materials supplier checks. To be honest Will, a lot of the tasks come under one banner, which we always laugh at here, is that half the talent chases, they're chasing someone. The biggest difference between a builder and a, let's say a contractor is as a builder you're babysitting everyone else who does not have good admin. Every one of your, your sparky chippies, if you're contracting them, your everybody, they are worse than you. They have their admins, terrible, they're, they're disorganized. So you now you are their admin. Right. So chasing, chasing engineers, that's hilarious. That's like 100% of the team are doing that. Engineers, contractors, your own internal talent, clients for documents, updates, counsel. So there's so much chasing involved throughout the journey. Most of the stuff I would say will falls in. See the customer journey, management, are we pulling people through the pipeline efficiently? And chasing, it's one of the two chasing money, chasing document data, whatever it is, that is the foundation. Now stepping up from that, like I said, that's let's say 60 or 70% of our talent is that combination finance, compliance, communication, that's the 70% and then you've got about 30% that sit, I would say in the specialist areas. And these are usually not the first hires. When someone comes to me and goes, I need an estimator, I'll usually question that. It's not, it can be the case if they've got all, everything else sorted and it's nailed down great. But usually a second highest can sometimes be either a specialist estimator, architect, designer, and there are some amazing talent offshore to be able to do these things where it becomes worthwhile having it in your own business, where you get to have that asset and you're not outsourcing it to a party and you don't own that system. So that's usually the next step for kind of growing builders who are starting to do more than let's say three, four projects simultaneously. Right. They start to be in that, in that zone.

Why do you want to outsource the low value tasks first compared to those higher value ones like the estimating and stuff.

They support the high value tasks. And also the business can't survive if it's, if it's not consistently profitable and doing its day to day operations consistently. If I look at two jobs and the way they are delivered is not identical. It's. You're not ready for specialists because the specialists now are going to be working in a more ad hoc environment where they're going to be working with incorrect data. Some, let's say they're going to get the data that's going to be a month late. So now they're, they're in a rush. Yeah. You're just working on something that it's not, it's just a band aid. It's not going to actually fix the problem. And it can often be the case that they're doing variations. For example, you're overworked with estimating because you haven't done the initial selections process comprehensively enough that you haven't done those few tasks at the beginning. You haven't qualified well enough. And so now you're stuck chasing these variations. And that's why you've blown out 30, 40 hours of estimating a week. Not because you've got new clients coming out the yin yang that have all paid their preliminary fees. I very rarely see people go, yeah, that's why I need an estimator is because I'm now I've got a 70% conversion rate, but I've just got that many leads and that much capacity that I can afford it.

And don't think there's that many builders that just have too many leads at the moment. But you know what I mean?

Like it's like if they're there, there's usually because also they. I find that they underestimate how much estimating support, for example a VA can do. Like when you actually list out all the tasks you do chasing up rfq, you know, from your suppliers and your contractors and everything else, even doing some of the takeoffs, talent can usually help. Your initial talent can usually help you with 50 to 60% of those tasks without any construction knowledge at all.

How would you get that started? Like would you just take one type of follow up with subcontractors, for example, and then train them on how you do that and then get them to do it? Or like yeah, how does great thing.

About the way we kind of operate is it's a little bit more dynamic if someone's doing a job. Because with building you don't do a same job every day, right? Because you've got these projects going for a long time, but when you do it, you do it. So the idea is as someone is doing that job, that's when they're recording it and we start the offloading flow and then depending on where it sits and when it's going to be done next, depends on that trigger of what it is. But we also look at where people are spending their time. So I said normally it's, you know, things that happen every week, like matching invoices. Like you might have 30, 40, 50 invoices coming in a week. So that's obviously something that can very easily be handed off. First is job profitability tracking. Your contractors are showing up, so therefore and your team are on site so therefore, you know, managing their timesheets, auditing those jobs, checking photos and updates are being recorded, job notes, work diaries, if you've got a work diary that's transparent to a client, client updates, that's the stuff that's. Anything that happens daily or weekly usually is done first and then stuff that's done, we call them definites. The next layer is delivery. The other things that only happen throughout that delivery flow of a project. And then obviously the third phase, which is where it becomes, I guess beautiful is the development tasks. All those things that are stuck in their head, the someday maybes, the projects, the building out new checklists and that kind of stuff. But yeah, the first step, just figure out what it is you're doing and that's the thing to do first.

When you say figure it out, like I'm just Trying to get into the mind of a builder sitting there. This is my day in my office and I'm just going through my email and you know, processing invoices, doing different things. Are you just switching on, we'll actually recording or something like kind of.

I look to be absolutely fair with if they're working with us, we've already got the template and we've done this 150 times. So although I would say we're consultative, sorry, we're I'm not a coach so I'm very rarely going to get the client to come up with the idea. I'll just say this is it, do it. Like most of the time, like there will be questions. I'm not. Businesses are slightly different but to be honest, we've got already got set up templates for what that day looks like. What are the things that need to be done? So there will be a list of tasks that I'll say, I know you're going to be doing this this week. When you do it, I want to make sure you click the button and they go, okay, yes boss, it's there are some of those ones but then there will be the ones that are going to come up, you know, as they do and there'll be a list of those that'll remind them. Things like for example your insurances. You only might check in on registrations for vehicles and insurances once a year for each one. But those little things add up, those little 1 percenters add up. And no one likes a $1,200 unregistered, uninsured, fine. So they're important. Right, but they're not the priority. We'll have a list of those tasks that are, that are the priority and say, hey guys, do this. And so we try and remove as many open ended questions from builders as possible because every open ended question is just a piece of stress, like what do you want to delegate? It's like, oh, I don't know.

So basically you're going to tell them what to delegate to start.

And sometimes it's like is this or this more important? And they go this like it'll be chocolate or strawberry stuff. So you're not Baskin and Robbins. It's not going to be pick your own adventure. Because if we were we'd be a VA agency like anybody else going, here's Harry, meet Sally. Sally meet Harry. Good luck. And that's just stressful. That's what we want to avoid is here's someone get them to do stuff. No one's happy The VA will leave because they're not satisfied and they're frustrated and you'll have a bad experience. We want to roadmap it out, one little task, get it offloaded, checked, pick another one, one at a time and it'll like. It's quick, but it's not everything at once.

You may not have these numbers on hand or you should if you're trying to sell. We're already talking impact wise for a typical builder that you'd work with. Like how much time are they saving, how many tasks they're getting off their plate.

So there's two things that we measure. So because there's two purposes of our program. One is the time saved. So claim back time for either the builder or their key personnel. Because sometimes it's not the builder. It could be a project manager or site supervisor that's spending two or three days in the office and shouldn't be. It could be an in house admin that's not spending enough time in selections and client care. And so we're looking at what tasks that they're doing and claiming back time. The other measurable is consistency. So we'll go through and say which of these tasks in the flow when you get busy do not get done or are inconsistent. So things like response times, time to quote, variation acceptances, so what percentage of their variations actually get sent, accepted and done before work starts. Some people laugh and they go, I can't remember the last time I didn't start work before someone accepted a variation. I just have got good luck so far. But those things matter. Consistencies is what costs the money. Time is obviously where builder can then go and scale and do other things. So from a measurables we're looking at generally speaking it's around about 15. Usually it's 15 to 20 hours of work per week that is transferred from a standard builder plus the 15 to 20 hours of work that is not being done. That creates consistency. So there's the two flavors, right? There's I go, so how many of your jobs after you finish do you go back and check and see how it's going a year later? And they go, I can't even remember a job I did last year. I definitely haven't spoken to them. Sometimes it's adding a task that they're not doing, sometimes it's getting something done that's not being done, like the job auditing is not being done. And sometimes it's saving time.

It's about improving the way they operate as well.

You don't Want to do one without the other. In fact, you know, look, just look at the number of offshoring projects that companies globally have done that have completely ruined that. Telstra, Optus, they go, I'm just going to offshore. And they don't do it with any kind of effectiveness and efficiency. So that they are raising the customer experience. They do it and lower it. You want to delegate in such a way that it increases your customer experience and doesn't lower it. So that's why we have to measure both, not just time and by the way, the easiest way to measure it. I always say, if you want to 100% succeed, and there's one thing you can do, two actually. Either book a holiday or have a baby. They're like, what? It's like, yep, Almost guaranteed to succeed. Because how else are you going to test it? You can't test the effectiveness of offloading unless you're not there. Throating as cat. Right.

Yeah, we love that. We always talk about when one of the managers or leaders from our team goes on a break for a week or a couple of weeks. What breaks when they're away? Sky and Russ always come back from a break. They're like, they're almost excited to find out what broke.

I just went away on three weeks and it was the best thing. Come back and going, all right, let's debrief broke, let's go. You know, because I hate hypotheticals, right. Like, there's so many what ifs, and I just. I've got no time for it. Get stuff off your plate, go on holiday, come back, debrief, get some more of your plate, go on another holiday. You know, life's tough.

Yeah, exactly. This question wasn't in your brief. Well, I'm framing it slightly differently than the one that was in the brief. Is there anything that would stop a builder from being able to outsource tomorrow to an offshore person?

Mindset is going to be your number one thing. When I'm qualifying people to call, they need to have a reason. I joke about the holiday and the baby. Right. But if you don't have something you want to fill that time with, you will fill it with rubbish. So if a builder doesn't have clarity over where they're going and where they'd rather be spending their time, whether it be in the business or out of the business, I don't care. It could be they want to be doing more business development. They know what that looks like. I don't care. They need to understand that that's the one thing that will stop them because they will always come up with a reason not to let go. That's the first thing mindset I would say. The second thing is it's around I guess that willingness to say I'm going to do something different to get a different outcome because the things that we will say work are not the things that builders have done before and if we see that there's. They take a long time to make decisions and make change. It's impossible. And I guess look, the third thing that is the bit of a hidden one is if there's someone in the business that doesn't want to let go as in there's an internal admin or a someone who loves hiding in a corner and doing BS tasks they will sabotage it from the beginning. So and if I will always. If there's an internal admin it's either going to be the best thing the company has because they will be the biggest support because they want to get into something they do best or it'll be the biggest downside and I need to find out upfront. So look for saboteurs.

Have a reality is though with. With AI and offshoring. I mean they, they can't be. You can't. You can't afford to have a business where you're paying like a local person, you know some high wage for doing those low value tasks. It just doesn't make sense anymore.

And that's where this idea of the org chart.

Yeah.

Is so important. Someone should be filling a spot that has a clear purpose. You don't have two ICS anymore and you don't have just admins. They are.

Yeah. That's not to say you should suck them or anything. It's like if their values align high like great person find. Find another high value thing for that.

It's the idea of step up.

Yeah.

Into your genius. But if you don't want to step up into your genius, step out. Right there's you're going to pay 90 grand and that's why people say great yeah go get a project manager. But they should be out there with the team running that thing and not you've just put them there because they are a chippy who got a bung leg and now you're shoving them in the office because you don't know what to do with them. Yeah. That's just. It's not acceptable anymore and in the current climate it's just financial suicide. So. So yeah that. That's the main things that are going to stop them. Does that kind of make sense.

Absolutely. Yeah. And you should. I mean anyone that's listening to this podcast or working with you guys or part of the APB community, they want to run high performing companies. Right. So you shouldn't accept mediocrity in any sense to that.

So. And that's the thing is if. And if someone's clear about what their purpose is and then they're going to love it. The internal admin that knows what they're great at and they're going to treat this person like their own personally, like, yes, take off the crap so I can raise the bar, you know, and that's where things absolutely fly.

As long as you don't get a lot of stuff offloaded and then the other people don't add any additional output.

But I won't if they're stepping up. Right. And that's. I guess that's. Oh, the only time that does that, that works really well is the miss if the partners the one doing it because they, they want to let go.

Yeah.

Like I'm only doing this to help you. So now let's go on holidays together.

Yeah.

So I love that. Working with the wives or partners is just awesome. We want to improve their capacity for their internal team. Got to remember as well, hiring people like it's not just about the money. Hiring the good people locally is hard anyway. You're going to find that right person you want to give them. You want to have a project manager be able to handle 10 jobs at once, not two. So let's increase the capacity of everybody in that business, not just a business owner. Sometimes the builder. That's the way they're thinking is I want to offload my tasks. It could be, let's offload the people you already have so they can help you more. It's scale. Right. Get 10 people to save 30% of the time.

Cool.

Better than one person saving 50.

One piece of advice for builders out there about outsourcing. What would it be?

I think the first thing is just step into it. You don't need to have the entire job description going. This is not a 100, 200 hour commitment. It is not a $90,000 commitment. It is one step in the direction of letting go and just take that one step that the one bit of advice is don't wait to have anything perfect because by the way, it's never going to be there.

No done is better than perfect. One of my favorite quotes, progress over perfection.

Yeah.

I mean obviously you need to have standards still, but.

Well, that's the thing. But standards are different, right?

Yeah.

It's like you can keep raising a standard from something but have a standard even that's a progress of perfection. Have a standard and raise it later. I think you've seen it in whether it be in marketing too. It's the same thing. Just put it in.

Yeah. You got to start. You got to start somewhere. So.

Exactly.

Even if you offload one task which takes you one hour a week to do or something like that, I mean, and it'll.

It'll grow. It grows quickly so people don't have to. I stop thinking about, oh, I don't have enough work for them to do. Because that, by the way, you know, that is a KPI that your talent will never ask you. I've done X. What do you want me to do next? That's a stressful question. There will always be a roadmap of something next. It just doesn't have to all happen today. It's all your head right now anyway. So like tomorrow is a better step.

Than nothing also as well. If you're worried about that and like finding tasks for them to do and training them and all that kind of stuff, then obviously working with someone like Builders VA is going to make a lot of sense because you're not burdening a lot of that. The challenges of finding someone and then onboarding them and doing all that stuff when you guys have done it hundreds of times.

We've got a list of the 50 tasks ready and they've got know they've got a hundred hours of wonderbuild training to do. They got plenty to do. So that's the thing is having the roadmap someone help you that there's three reasons that people don't do it themselves. Either they either it's. They've done it all before. They don't know. They don't know what to do. They're lost. Right. They've tried it all know they can do it but it's going to take them a long time. They want to do it faster or they just want a proven method that's worked to avoid trial and error. That's it. And pick which one everyone you are. And that's why if none of those are a problem, do it yourself.

What is the best next step for people to do to find out more about Builders V. I know for appb members out there you are a rewards partner so they can get a cash rebate by submitting an inquiry through our rewards directory, of course. And you're often at Many of our events as well. So if they want to drop by and see you at our event because.

It'S very consultative, I want to find out more about your business before we decide whether we're a fit or not. That there is a, you can book a time with me or Ed, go to a website, schedule a time. There's a, there's also a link obviously for APB members to do the same thing. That's where we're always going to start. There's not going to be a bounce back. Email this. We're going to have a solid personal chat for half an hour, 45 minutes to figure out and to make sure that you've got a clear idea of what's next.

And I think, I mean what I take from that is like what harm could come from having a 30 minute conversation with one of you like your.

At the end of it, I guarantee you you will get a comprehensive list of exactly what tasks could be the job description. Like we provide a quite comprehensive report to everybody after that call. So regardless of where they go with us or not, they know exactly what that road might, might look like even if it's not now and it's later. And I think that clarity, you just want to get rid of the fog. And I guarantee at the end of that call there will be no fog.

Perfect. Well, yeah, I don't see anyone any reason to not rip the band aid off and start outsourcing. I've been on that journey myself many times before and I've never regretted it. It's really empowering actually when you can realize how much capacity you can have within like just yourself or within your organization.

Right, Exactly. I love it, love seeing it happen. So really looking forward to it and like, thanks very much for having me on today and I love dealing with your clients and you know, builders looking to scale and grow is definitely my favorite clients and they've all, they're the only ones I want to deal with. Awesome.

Awesome. Well, James, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Provided a lot of value about, you know, shifting mindset and just getting started when it comes to outsourcing. I think there's a huge amount of value there for builders looking to grow. So thanks for coming on.

Awesome.

Thanks very much And a big thank you to our listeners wherever you are in the world. If you like the show today, please subscribe to Professional Builder Secrets on your platform of choice. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a review. But until next time, have a great day.