214. ADHD & Running A Business With Skye Waterson

Welcome to another episode of Professional Builder Secrets. In this episode, I interview Sky Waterson from Unconventional Organization. Sky's a former academic who discovered that the system she was using to run her business simply didn't fit her brain. So after a late diagnosis with adhd, she created Unconventional Organization to help business owners and leaders build ADHD friendly systems that actually work. We dive into what ADHD looks like in practice and how these traits show up for building company owners so that you can build good habits and structure into your company that suit the way your brain works. I hope you enjoy the episode. 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 on the APB Rewards Partner Directory.

We actually work with a lot of people who are subclinical, so they haven't been diagnosed, but they struggle with the symptoms. And then bigger in that is an overall struggle with things like time blindness. So saying a job will get done in like three weeks, but it's really three months. It's about persistence and pervasiveness. Is it also happening on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday? Is it happening at work? Is it happening at home? Delegation is a big factor. How do we hire and train people to do a job that feels untrainable? People take too long to get out of the business. It can affect your reputation. Jobs are taking longer to start, longer to do. Hard things are easy and easy things are hard. You stop trying to just try harder. If it hasn't been working for 10 years, the chances are it's not going to work. Now focus on one piece of your business because with adhd, we want to fix it all.

Welcome to Professional Builder 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 Sky Waterson from the unconventional organization. Sky, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah.

I'm very excited to have you on today, Sky. This is a little different, the episode we're doing today because you're coming at things from an entirely different angle than we've ever covered before. COVID you give the listeners a bit of a background on what it is you Do?

Yeah. So I am a former academic who was diagnosed with ADHD at the start of my PhD, and it really threw me into a lot of research. I burned out a ton of times, had a bunch of struggles before that. And so I started researching adhd. Also built a business. I originally built a frozen food business with my now husband, and then Covid shut that down. And so we decided to start unconventional organization because it's kind of what I was doing. It was what I was researching. And now we've grown that into a business that works specifically with, yeah, ADHD business owners.

It's very interesting. Talk to me more about adhd, because from my understanding of what we spoke about before we jumped on the interview, there's certain symptoms that people may be experiencing when they're working or running a business that could be adhd, but they may not be diagnosed as well. So what are some of those symptoms that people with ADHD are working through?

Yeah, 100%. We actually work with a lot of people who are subclinical, so they haven't been diagnosed, but they struggle with the symptoms. And we have two types of adhd. There's primarily inattentive, primarily hyperactive, or combined type, which is me. And then in those, you know, when you look at how it's diagnosed, you have things like, do you feel like you're driven by a motor. Do you struggle with interrupting? Do you struggle with distraction, remembering details? And then bigger in that is an overall struggle with things like time blindness. So saying a job will get done in like three weeks, but it's really three months or working memory, you know, always dropping the ball on the details with. With the guys that you're working with or, you know, forgetting. If somebody says, hey, could you just grab this or write this down? And then you lose that. As well as general dopamine struggles, which can mean that we can either want to blow a few things up in our business when it gets a little bit boring, or that we can do other things that are. Yeah, yeah, but a bit of dopamine seeking, you know, we're like, oh, this is great, but let's. Let's add on another project because things are going well.

Right. So a lot of the symptoms you described just then, I feel like everyone has different levels of those at different times. Maybe not the blowing up the business one, but certainly the distractions and not being able to focus on things or. And that can be attributed to less sleep or just your mood and things like that as well. So how do you differentiate between just Experiencing those things day to day like a human compared to being ADHD diagnosed?

Yeah. It's about persistence and pervasiveness. So we all struggle at Friday afternoons. You know what I mean? We all feel like maybe the is us, but is it also happening on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday? Is it happening at work? Is it happening at home? Has it been happening for years? Was it the same in childhood? Looking across that longer time span in those different areas and seeing that the conversation is still the same.

Okay, okay. I guess we're probably getting slightly ahead of ourselves, but some of the things you teach people on dealing with ADHD symptoms, could they be beneficial to people that don't necessarily have adhd, but maybe experience some of these things just infrequently?

Yeah, 100%. I've had the privilege of working with the government, you know, Australian government, New Zealand government. And one of the things they often say is, oh, this would actually be great for. For the other people, you know, in our teams as well, because it is. It's about flexibility. You know, sometimes you need a different way of working because you just. You don't have the executive functioning to work in the way you usually work that day.

Is there anything in particular that you notice? You work. There's quite a lot of builders that are in your audience, if I'm. If I'm right, is that correct?

Yeah, yeah. So I work with a number of people who are somewhere in the building manufacturing space. So they might work, you know, on like manufacturing or they run their own companies or sometimes they're starting to run their own companies.

Is there anything that plays out for those people that is different to the average business owner that has adhd?

I think the biggest thing that comes up a lot is delegation. Delegation is a big fact. How do we hire and train people to do a job that feels untrainable? I talk to so many business owners in this space who swear up and down that they can't find people. And if they can, they're not going to be good. And even if they're going to be good, they're not going to stay. And so recruitment and training and building a system where everything is working on rails is the biggest struggle that I see in this industry.

How does that struggle relate to adhd? It sounds like a struggle you just have as a business owner.

Well, it is. That's very true. But the business owner, the ADHD part of it is it's a little bit harder to build the systems. So it's like, well, you know, the jobs work out, you Know, they come in and we give them to people and they're. It works out. But in reality, you're not putting these systems on repeatable ways that you can trust, both in terms of the ongoing recruitment that you're probably going to have to do, and also in terms of the, okay, which job, who's going to. Which job? It very quickly gets overwhelming for a lot of ADHD business owners.

I'm going to just take another step back again. I'm intrigued to get your opinion on this. When it comes to adhd, I think the traditional path that I've been exposed to is you go to the doctor, you get diagnosed, you get some sort of medication to try and help with the symptoms. Is there a different way to look at it than that, or is that the most recommended path for someone that is diagnosed with adhd?

If you're somebody who wants to confirm that you have adhd, which is always a good idea, then that diagnosis process is the best way to do it. I've been diagnosed. Whether you take medication or not is completely up to you. I actually recently had an MD who also has ADHD on my podcast to talk about the pros and cons of ADHD medication, which is a conversation I've wanted to have for years because I'm not qualified to talk about it. So, yeah, we can find that ADHD Skills Lab podcast, but in terms of what happens then, a lot of people say it's good to do both. So you want to have, you know, medication. If that's something you want to. To do, that's awesome. It's a journey. It doesn't necessarily work perfectly the first time. You might want to try different things, and obviously your psychiatrist will take you on that journey, but the skills are important as well. It's not just. It's not just one or the other. There's a toolbox of options to support you with adhd.

And so that's what you're talking about more is that toolbox of behavioral techniques and things that can help.

Exactly.

Outside of the Dr. Path.

Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, at the end of the day, it's helpful to have somebody come in and say, hey, so this is how. Why your SOP documentation is never going to work the way that you're doing it, because, because of this is how your brain works. So maybe we should make an adjustment and make it a little bit more of a, of a cadence. And add systems, like, these are the thing conversations you're not going to have in a doctor's office.

So if we dive into it a bit more. How does this play out, like beyond just the behavioral challenges of not having focus, not being able to put systems in place effectively, what impact does that have on the businesses of someone that may have ADHD symptoms and trying to run their building company?

The biggest problem that I see is it means that people take too long to get out of the business. And this is a big problem, especially in this industry. It's a big problem in terms of physical health. It's a big problem in terms of time with family. It can affect your reputation. So we've had, I've worked with guys who are, you know, when they were younger they could just go, go, go, and it would all sort of work itself out. Now they're getting a little bit older, that's not possible anymore. And so their reputation is suffering. Jobs are taking longer to start, longer to do. It's harder than it used to be. And so that is the biggest reason that people come to me. And the biggest problem that people have is they're like, I have to build something that is really going to work without me, that I can trust in a way that's not going to have a physical and emotional effect on me and my family.

Yeah, that's really, I mean, that's a penetrative problem across the whole industry. Builders working too much in the business and not enough on it. Obviously that's what we talk about a lot with our coaching and training, because there's something really hard to detach yourself from the business. I think that's just probably the nature of, you know, people that may have come from a hands on carpentry background, that kind of stuff. And you probably don't trust other people to do the job as well as you can. What are the actual ADHD specific symptoms that might be causing that beyond just, you know, not giving up control, et cetera?

Yeah, usually what I see is there's a struggle to get things out of your head. And on paper for one, you know, we say, oh, do you want to get off the tools and you want to like run a business? And they're like, not really. I actually like being on the job. That's why I started as a carpenter or whatever it was, you know, admin sounds awful and boring. So usually when I'm working with the team on a practical level, it's going okay. How do we get people to help you with the admin as quickly as possible and then build a system that that person is implementing with you? So I work with people, you know, they're implementing it with you to build a cadence that your team can trust. That's going to work. And the biggest problem I see is, is just it's hard to do the simple things. I have had a client who worked for Google who used to say, you know, hard things are easy and easy things are hard. Like, that's how it feels when you have adhd. So yes, I could get on the job site, I could finish that job, I could make it happen, I could push this thing through, I could deal with a customer complaint, all that kind of stuff. But can I actually send out the job ad for the admin person that I need on my team and then can I actually invite them to the software that we're using, that one? That's hard to do without. When you have adhd, that's often where people are getting stuck is those little things and the lack of dopamine and the working memory struggles around these so called simple things that you have to do.

Interesting. I know there's a lot of listeners of this podcast who have probably been through that journey of trying to grow their company because they don't have the systems in place or they're not comfortable with giving up control. And some of these things you're talking about, from a mental perspective, it all becomes too chaotic and too much, so they, they come back again. Yeah, yeah, I want the control. So I'll get back and I'll do the work myself. But to your point, that has a definite lifespan.

Yeah, it really does, especially in this industry, which I think is one of the problems.

Okay, talk to me about some practical solutions that the business owners and builders can put into place to try and handle some of these challenges.

Yeah, there's, there's two things that I teach people, which is how to have a task list that you understand what's truly urgent, what's truly important, and you can do it, you know, in five minutes a day. So I teach people how to do that and then I also teach people how to step into focus. So if you're doing a task you'd rather not do, how do you actually go from I don't want to do this to getting it done? We go through, it's too boring, it's too confusing, and it's emotionally vulnerable kind of work through those things. Those are the key pieces of helping you as a person get things done. But when we're talking about your business, the first thing that I make people do is I actually make them sit down and, and draw out the flow of their business. A lot of people haven't done that. You know, how. What is your acquisition looking like? What is your lead flow, what is your, you know, sales? And how does that work? And then who is responsible for those tasks? Because I can help you do it, but at the end of the day, and I can, you know, that's one of the things we do with ADHD is, you know, helping people take action. But at the end of the day, if every single one of those things says your name on it, we're going to have a problem because you need to start delegating. And that's when we have the conversation about what is the most broken. Is it acquisition, is it delivery, and what do we need to start delegating and how to do that.

So if we take it back to the first thing you said, just that daily checklist. Tactically, from a practical perspective, how does someone that has ADHD symptoms sit down and plan their day knowing how to prioritize things if they've struggled with that before?

So the first thing that you do is we find something that you're going to reuse. So it could be a journal or a document or notes app, whatever it is, we want you to go ahead and brain dump every task that is in your head. So don't look at your old list, don't look at your emails, just everything that's in your head. Once you've done that, have a look at the list and identify the things that have to be done in the next 24 hours or there will be a significant external negative consequence. A way that I like to help people think about this idea is imagine that you ended up in a waiting room for whatever reason. You know, that was your day, you were in a waiting room. What would you still do on your phone? Or what would you message someone and say, look, I'm going to have to postpone because I haven't prepped. I don't have time to prep for this today because of what's happened. That stuff is truly urgent. Everything else is not truly urgent. And your job isn't to do everything on your list, it's to identify what's truly urgent, tick that stuff off, and with the extra time you have, go ahead and work on what I call the 80, 20 tasks, the most important tasks, the 20% that's going to give you that 80% return. And this is a struggle with ADHD, because every single ADHD person that I know that I've worked with wants to work on every single important task in the business. At once. If they're feeling motivated, they're like, that's it, let's go. We're going to sort this, we're going to sort that. We're going to get my diet and exercise, you know, good. While we've done it, we're going to spend more time with the family. Let's go, let's build this house cards. And as long as nothing changes, I'm going to nail this. And inevitably the house cars falls down. We are different, we change. And so what I teach people to do is figure out what is your first domino, what is that? 80, 20. Stack those dominoes and start knocking them down one at a time. And how to do that.

Yeah, it sounds similar to the Eisenhower matrix, which I'm sure you're familiar with. In terms of the top left quadrant is urgent and important, then the top right is not urgent. And then in the bottom four quadrants you've got not important and urgent, not important and not urgent as well. So it sounds like people are spending a lot of time in the not important task quadrant which can waste a whole lot of time and not progress anything forward.

Usually it's the easy to tick off task space that I think of that people spend a lot of time in and it is, it has that sort of Eisenhower flavor. The difference is we do it one at a time. Because usually if you give somebody with ADHD brain, you give them an Eisenhower matrix, they'll start kind of going like, well, I'd like to do that. So let's put it in important. Or I'd like, I think that would be good. So let's put it in urgent. And so we have to get really strict about saying this is the criteria. Does it meet this criteria? And I've worked with so many business owners who come to me and they say I have 200 tasks to do. There's no way you're ever going to break this down. And, and we do this in five minutes. And they never have more than five.

Well, hopefully at some point they can get to a stage where the urgent tasks are no longer. I know that sounds like an impossibility, but if they're focusing on important, not urgent tasks with most of their time. Right. That's, that's where they want to be.

That's what you want to be doing. Yeah.

Which is a journey for anyone, I think. Okay, so that's like the individual day to day stuff. Can you talk to me more about then from a business point of view? You said you kind of looking to map out Every part of their business identify where the biggest brokes are so they can systemize. Those sounds pretty overwhelming for anyone, especially if they maybe don't have the focus or they've struggled with productivity in the past. How do you then help someone with these challenges unpack what's in their brain and get that into a documented system?

Yeah, so this is really where we do things a little bit differently because you're right, it does sound overwhelming because you're thinking documentation and, oh, I'm gonna have to do this. It's gonna take forever. What we do is we draw a picture of your business. So we use something called Miro. There's lots of other systems you can use as well, but we use mirror and we go through and we just say, okay, acquisition. Is it paid ads? Is it earned media? Like, what are we doing? How are we, you know, getting those people okay? Then they call you. Is the phone system working? Sometimes that's not the case. Is your emails going to spam? Sometimes that's happening. You know, just make sure all these things are working and then, okay, cool. So like, you get the quotes, then what happens? You do this, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Who's doing this? And then you do the job and kind of like just take them through that process. Like, what does that look like for them? And then do you do referrals? Do you do, like, do you try and create, you know, recurring revenue, that kind of thing? Once we've done that, and I'll usually do that with a client, It'll take about 15 minutes. So, you know, pretty, pretty simple job we'll go through and we'll say, okay, well, if we count everything here as it's working, it's green. If you're not doing it, someone else is doing it. It's getting you the ROI that you want. And it's documented. Then that's green. Orange is. It's working, but we don't have the documentation for it. And. And it's like, I still have to jump in. And then red is. It's utterly broken. There's nothing coming in. I've been living off referrals for the past three years, and now that's dried up. I don't have any acquisition pipeline, things like that. Then when what we are left with is we're left with a picture that's usually not as big as people think. They think it's going to be massive, but it's actually usually, you know, about an A4 page and it's colored, you know, Red, orange and green. So you can very easily see this is broken, this is working, etc. Etc. Then we want to know, well, who's responsible for that broken stuff? Who's supposed to be doing that? And we want to, as much as possible, start putting people in those spots. And then I have, I actually have an AI GPT that I've. We've created to make this really simple so you can do it, you know, between jobs, in the car, whenever you want to, very quickly give them the task of creating the documentation and linking it to this visual.

Yeah, I expect a lot of business owners say that they're the owner of all of those broken things.

Oh, yeah, 100%. And sometimes that's the problem.

It's kind of a good thing in a way. You want to be able to own the problems. Right. But to your point, if, if you're owning all of them, then it's not going to get anywhere.

No, no. And that's the conversation we have. And usually what we'll see, what we'll do is we'll make a, we'll make a call and that's where it comes back down to the, to the dominoes. Right. We can't fix every single part of your business. So are we fixing acquisition or are we fixing delivery? We're usually fixing one based on what your needs are.

Part of me is kind of scared as a business owner, like, well, I'm pretending at the moment to be a business owner that everything's going to be red. Because then it's like, it puts it like visually going, oh, crap, what is going on in my company?

Yeah, yeah. Well, usually what I'll do is I'll show you. I usually show people my SOP so that they can see. So we show them like, this is how our business runs. And there's stuff in there that's red 100% because you're building. You know, this is not a finished job. This is a ongoing process. You know, you fix acquisition. Well, now you've got a bunch of people coming through. So delivery is broken. You fixed delivery. Now you have capacity. So acquisition is broken. Like it's going to happen. You know, those colors are going to change and that's totally okay. This is an experimentation. This is a growth process.

For anyone listening that may be experiencing similar symptoms to what we've spoken about today, or they've been diagnosed with ADHD and they're trying to run a building company, what would you recommend is a good first step to just start leaning into improving in this Area.

Well, I think, I mean, obviously you could listen to our podcast, the ADHD Skills Lab. I'm sure you'll leave a link to that because we interview a lot of business owners and we talk a lot about this stuff and provide a lot of practical strategies. And in terms of getting yourself clear, I think the biggest thing is I really, really recommend you stop trying to a. Just try harder, because trust me, I did that. We've done, we've all done that. It's about different ways of working. So rather than just kind of, if it hasn't been working for 10 years, the chances are it's not going to work now. And you probably are trying really hard. I have met very few people who are, you know, running their own businesses who are doing this, who are not working very hard. And then the other thing is, don't try and fix everything at the same time. If you get that energy, you know, if you have ADHD, you'll know what I'm talking about. That 7:00am moment where you're like, oh, like 7:00pm moment where you're like, I have the energy, I could, I could fix everything. Focus on one piece of your business, the piece that you know is going to have the biggest return on investment. If you did it, if you fixed it, for example, if. How long are you taking to respond to quotes as a business? This is a common one that we talk about. If you responded to them faster, could you book more jobs? Or if you can't book more jobs, because if you respond to them faster, well, we need more guys. Like, okay, well, have we started applying? You know, do, do we put out job ads for this kind of person on a recurring basis? Like, these are the kind of things like, which piece is going to give you that 80, 20, and then look at going to fix that piece first. Because with adhd, we want to fix it all. Like, I've never met anyone who doesn't want to fix it all. I want to fix it all. And we want to go one at a time.

I think that's a symptom of being a business owner wanting to fix it all.

To be honest, I will say being a business owner and having ADHD go very closely together. When you look at the research, business owners are way more likely to have ADHD symptoms.

Interesting. We could probably have a full podcast episode on response time and follow up in qualification, actually. Oh, yeah, that's for another time. Well, sky, thanks so much for coming on the show today and sharing your expertise about running a business with adhd and some really practical examples of how builders out there can deal with it more effectively. For anyone listening, check out ADHD Skills Lab at the unconventional organization.com sorry, take the off the front of that unconventionalorganization.com the ADHD skills lab. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And go and check out everything Sky's doing on socials as well. But sky, thanks for coming on the show today.

No worries. Thanks for having me.

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