“Nail It, Then Scale It”: Relentless Implementation Is the Key to Success | Jon Graboyes (Ep. 228)

Going into COVID, we were coming about $3 million company, and through 2021, which kind of feels like one long year to me, you know, we came out over $6 million. So we grew a ton, and it was chaotic. We sold everything we could. We had too many jobs in the pipeline, and all the manufacturing delays and getting our ass handed to us by our customers who didn't know when their stuff was coming. We had to get really good That's when we learned how important customer communication was.

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. This is Brian Kaskavalciyan, and with me today is John Grayboys from Grayboys Windows and Doors. Hey John. Hey Brian. Thanks for being here.

My pleasure.

As you could tell, both John and I are very excited today. Um, me with, uh, we're just coming off of Thanksgiving and, uh, it was a long week and, uh, lots of good stuff. And, um, we are going to talk today about implementation. So I've been very lucky to be, uh, working with John and around John for the last, uh, couple of years. He's a member of our Success Society and I asked him to come on today because he has really done some incredible stuff over the last year, year and a half. He really embodies the Seven Secrets book and, you know, the, the secrets throughout. And what's interesting about that book is like the first few secrets are just kind of foundational. It's like What do you want? Understand that, hey, if something's going to happen, it's really up to me to make it happen. I'm not going to rely on outside forces to somehow magically make me successful. It's all about me and accepting the good, the bad, and the ugly, which of course, as entrepreneurs, we get to experience all three of those sometimes on a daily basis. Making a commitment, understanding that, you You know, at its core, this really is a sales and marketing-driven business. It's about what you do with your time. It's about how you control what you think about yourself and the world around you. And then finally, what all of that does is it sets you up and gives you the confidence to be able to go out and implement and execute on the things that you learn. And so with that setup, John, I think that's kind of where we're gonna go today. Give everybody your, uh, background because you have a little bit of an unconventional background. So, uh, give us the like 2 or 3 minute version.

Great. Yeah, uh, I'm absolutely thrilled to be here on your show, Brian. Uh, I was introduced to the podcast back in 2019 when I was just getting started in the company, and I was driving all over the Philadelphia area, uh, doing in-home sales and listening listening to the episodes and, you know, I can recall thinking to myself at one point, how cool would it be if someday I'm telling my story on the Wealthy Contractor Podcast? And I'm far from a finished product, but there's a lot more ahead. But this is amazing. So thank you. Great.

Thanks for being here.

So my family's business is Grey Boys Window and Door, and we're located in suburban Philadelphia. My grandfather, Joe Grey Boys, started the company back in 1949. So this is our 75th year in business. Recognized as the longest operating business in our town. And my grandfather and grandmother, they ran the company together for 30 years. My father and mother, they ran the business together for 40 years. So there's obviously a ton of history in 75 years of business. But my story until relatively recently was having a career of my own. I was always told by my parents and my grandparents Don't go into the family business. It's a tough life. Do something better. And so I set out to do that, and I went to college. I studied architecture and urban planning. I spent 4 years in New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina working for a community development corporation rebuilding a neighborhood called Broadmoor. And through a variety of public-private partnerships, we rebuilt hundreds of homes and a school and a library. And I spent 8 years in New York City working in Brooklyn for a developer of affordable housing, and I was the lead project manager for 101-unit, 12-story, $56 million building. And I managed all the financing partners, the city and state groups that were involved. I ran the construction meetings with the GC and the architect, and it was a great experience. And then I had the entrepreneurial awakening or the seizure, as they say in The E-Myth, Michael Gerber. I was doing this exciting work, but I wasn't seeing the path financial success for myself, for my family. I wasn't seeing the path to the lifestyle I wanted. And the fact that my career and my life were in the hands of others really scared the crap out of me. And that's when I knew I needed to change. I wanted to go to work at something that was going to go to work for me. And that eventually brought me to join the family business at 35 years old.

Can you give us a little context, like when you got When you started with the company, what did it look like? How many salespeople? If you want to talk revenue, you can. If you don't want to, that's fine.

Yeah. I mean, so this company for a long time has been the quintessential small family business. It was full of aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings and friends of my parents. I think we probably had 4 or 5 salespeople when I got started. And I'm so lucky. I have amazing family. I owe everything to my grandparents and my parents for the opportunities that they worked to give me. And my mom and dad, they ran this company together for 40 years and nobody worked harder than my father. And the same could be said about my grandfather. He did absolutely everything for this company for 4 decades and he did a damn good job. I mean, it was organized, it was disciplined, but it was all my dad. My dad kept everything and everyone together. Total control, but there's only so much that one man can do. And the fact that he ran a $1 to $2 million company just on brute force for decades, it was superhuman. So because of my career experience, I knew how to collaborate. I'd learned that amazing things can happen when you bring in a group of talented people around a project. And that's where I kind of, I always found myself in my career kind of as that manager, as a project manager. And so, you know, I went to work surrounding myself with, you know, really smart people working together, you know, that we can make incredible things happen with long-term commitments to worthy goals like we did in New Orleans and in New York. And, you know, that's really what I went to work doing first. It was, it was about the people. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember we had this consultant early on when I got here and we snuck him into the office on a Saturday morning. To look at our QuickBooks because we didn't want our employees to know that we had a consultant. And he said, you know, you're going to look around here in a few years, John, and it's going to be a whole different group of people. And sure enough, that's what it's come to be. I guess the last thing I'll say is in terms of what the business was like when I got here, you know, the company was run on a fax machine basically. I mean, the fax machine was more important than our email. All of our factory orders went and came in on the fax machine. Our measure tech would send his measure sheets to us on a fax machine. The telephone was all copper telephone. There was no voiceover IP. Every phone in the office rang every time a customer called our office, and we would all just scream at each other about who's going to pick up the phone and slamming phones and breaking phones. And the contracts were on those tricolor papers. It was like the white the yellow and the pink, and it was like press really hard so it goes all the way through. And so the company was, was run on paper and files and a fax machine, basically.

Yeah, things are a little different today. But let's start with people because you said something very interesting and it scares the hell out of most people and it keeps people from growing. You said that the consultant told you when you look around here in the next few years, it's going to be a totally different group of people. And, you know, it's tough because the people that got you here are not always the people that are going to get you there to the next— wherever you're going next. And it's hard. That's hard for people. That's really hard for people. How did you deal with it, especially in a family business that's been around for so long? Because I would imagine a lot of the people that you're talking about had been with the company, had been with your father for years.

Yeah. And we were stuck for a long time. I mean, when, when I wanted to move on from someone, it was like I had to go get permission from Dad before we could move on from a sales rep who clearly wasn't pulling their weight and didn't need to be here. The sales manager that had been working for us had literally been the sales manager here for 30 years. He was a selling sales manager. He went out, he took all the best appointments for himself. He sold all our stuff for pennies on the dollar for what it should have been. And that guy needed to go. And again, it took a long time to get unstuck from getting my dad comfortable with the big change that had to happen. But it's what has to happen. The main thing for me has always been since I got here is bringing people together to do something great. And it's the who, not how. You have to bring in great people into your organization to grow. And it's what you really have to stay committed to when you're running the company as an owner. And it's the hardest thing because when you're fully staffed and the business is working, it feels like a dream. But as you grow and you have to make these hard decisions and you pull somebody out and you know all the cascading effects the chain reaction that's going to happen when you move on from someone and how tough that is. But it's like once you set that goal for yourself about where you're going and it's a giant goal and it's out there on the horizon and you're committed to getting there, and you should be committed in a short time, 3 years, 5 years, not 15, 20 years. But when you're looking at your business through that telescope, you just can't waste time with the people that aren't going to get you to where you're going. And that's how I've made a lot of decisions over the last year or 2 years. How did you—

because I think a lot of people have this issue where they— and I know I was like this— is where they know they've got somebody like this sales manager, the first one that you were talking about, that had been there forever. It's like, how— what did you have to do internally? I know you, you know, you had a goal you knew where you wanted to go with the business, but how long did it take you to kind of pull the trigger on that? And how did you deal with the internal conflict?

Yeah. So in that case, you know, I knew from day one that that sales manager wasn't going to be our guy in the long term, the guy who'd been here for 30 years. And it took, in this example, it took COVID and the shutdown to get my dad comfortable with, hey, we have to move on from this guy. We don't know how long we're going to be shut down. We don't know what we're coming back to. The future of the company is not this. We have to go digital. We have to get these new systems and processes in place. And so we kind of took that opportunity to move on from him and a few other people in the company at that time. And it was an opportunity. I mean, COVID for me, was my opportunity to really step in as a manager, as a leader. Because to that point, my dad was really still holding on to his role in the company as the head of the company. And it was just at that moment where we knew we had to change for the future. And I remember listening to your podcast and one of the guests you had on, it was, you guys were saying, SADA, SADA, stay active through April. And I remember thinking about that and going home. When the business was shut down, I was like, all right, I need to do something important right now that I wouldn't be doing otherwise. So I got into the digital contracts, the estimating software that we needed to put in place. It was a huge lift. It was a huge project, but stay active, stay active, move forward, implement, change, change the sales manager, change the people. And coming out of COVID is when I really got to take a real leadership role in the company. That's when I got out of the sales role, came in, started managing, um, and, and, and going from there.

Yeah, so it's interesting that you bring that up. I forgot about that. It's, it's bringing up a little bit of PTSD. But basically what I did with the podcast— and people can go back, they're still there— but we came up with this as soon as the shutdown happened. I mean, the first— I, I had a list of people to call. Charlie Gundel was at the top of the list. I called Mark Curry. I, I called quite a few people, and we just talked on the podcast, and that was the whole thing, was, was stay active. And nobody's brought that up to me, so it's, it's kind of cool to hear that that had an impact on, on you. So, okay, so you started to work on that through, through COVID. We had time, you know, to, to do some of these things, uh, but then as we came out of COVID business started to grow for you and you really started to take control of a lot of stuff quickly. So kind of go down the list of things that— I don't know if you've got this list, but what are the things that you— all of the things that you have tackled in the last year, year and a half?

Yeah. So going into COVID, we were, you know, maybe coming about $3 million company and through '20, through 2021, which kind of feels like one long year to me. We came out over $6 million. So we grew a ton and it was chaotic and it was, we sold everything we could. We had too many jobs in the pipeline and all the manufacturing delays and getting our ass handed to us by our customers who didn't know when their stuff was coming. We had to get really good. That's when we learned how important customer communication was. Was the time when we got our systems in place for this is when we call, this is when we send an email, this is when we send a piece of mail thanking them, setting expectations for the job. All of that came out of that experience. And I really wanted to hold the line on that growth. That was the big thing. It's like, let's take this opportunity to be the company that we just became over the last year and a half. And that was tough. But it required the investment. It required the investment in new systems, like eventually a new CRM, leaving the one that we had been on for 10 years and putting a new CRM in place, having estimating software and getting all of our reps on tablets in the home connected to the CRM. It was a whole new marketing world for us as well. I mean, the amount of investment to hold the line of this new company that we had just become was enormous. We had to invest a lot more into our marketing and we were always very good in marketing. But I realized through that growth that, you know, a 75-year-old business with all the repeat and referrals that we'd had, you know, we didn't need to invest that much in marketing to have the type of business, the $3 million business. But to be a $6 million business required much more investment in marketing to be that company. So we had to grow into ourselves. I was also running the business essentially blind in terms of my financials. And I remember early on when you were doing your profit workshop, you had emailed me and a few other guys, hey, someone send me your, your P&L. I'm just, you know, I'm just looking for examples. And I sent you mine. You're like, this one, this, this is going to be what I use to show the group as what a terrible P&L looks like.

Oh, I remember that. Yeah, I remember that.

And here's how not to do it. Here's how not to organize your P&L. And I took that personally, of course, and I went to work on it with the materials that we got out of the profit workshop and designed the P&L to follow Mark Curry's model and started to run the business by the numbers to manage from the P&L. Because basically up to that point, every year, we didn't know if we had made any money until December 31st and just cutting up whatever was left at the end. I mean, I had no idea. And in today's business, every month the financials get reconciled, all the invoicing, job completions happen in the correct month. I know what type of month I had 10 days after the end of the month. And it's a terrific management tool that I, you know, couldn't imagine running the business without today.

Yeah. And you really did. I mean, you just rattled off a bunch of things. So I want to talk about marketing for a minute and I want to— I'll come back to the financials. So let's talk marketing. So yeah, so you guys basically went from, hey, we, we got the majority of our business through our a good name, so repeat referrals, but you knew that that wasn't enough. And so what are some of the things that you went and implemented as it relates to marketing? Maybe not necessarily— well, you could talk specific tactics that you use, but what I'm really more concerned about is, or really more interested in hearing about is how you came up with the strategy and how you managed the strategy. Because it's— you went from— I'll just say this to the listener because I obviously I know a lot about John's business and the ins and outs of it. They went from very, very unsophisticated and just kind of waiting for the phone to ring to like actually having like a real marketing system, which takes some people like forever to put together. And he did it in like a year. So what are some of the things that, that you, you implemented and learned through that process?

So, you know, going back to the time before I was in the company, I mean, marketing was the Yellow Pages. It was like, are you going to buy an eighth of a page, a quarter of a page, a half page, a full page? And my dad would tell stories about, you know, the tax credit days when it was booming and you bought the full page and you commit for a whole year and your marketing spend is allocated regardless of what's happening in the marketplace. And we had a tough year coming out of that tax credit boom where we were just spending way too much in marketing. And to my father's credit, we were early adopters into digital marketing, into the Google world, into the pay-per-click, and we made leads out of Google Dirt cheap for many years. And then again, when COVID happened and all the companies that had on-the-ground canvassing and events and shows came into the digital marketing space, it got really expensive, as we've all experienced. So the first thing in the new company's marketing program was to get really dialed in on the digital marketing in terms of getting exact daily reports by campaign. Where's the money going? What are we spending it on? And making decisions about our spend practically on a daily basis. You know, if we're going into a weekend, let's spend more on Thursday so we can fill up that calendar for Saturday and Sunday appointments when we don't answer the phone on the weekends. but let's fill up that calendar now and spend more on Thursday going into a holiday weekend. Let's back off. Let's spend, you know, we'd make those decisions in real time and get these daily reports of each county by product and where we were spending our marketing dollars and what type of ROI we were getting on our spend. So that was the first thing that we had to get really laser focused with. To manage our digital marketing spend, which we'd always been very good at, but now it required a higher level of sophistication. Yeah. We got very into direct mail over the last year and a half as the digital marketing got so much more expensive and cost prohibitive. Working with—

and competitive.

And competitive.

Yep.

And working with analysts basically to build out these data sets of our ideal customer base within our geography. So, you know, we want to target households within a 30-minute drive time around our office with a household age that most likely needs replacement products with a household income above $100,000 with this age demographic, like building out, these are our ideal customers, 70,000 of them right here. Let's hit them with direct mail and then doing lookbacks into our CRM based on the call center's attribution of where that appointment came from and seeing how successful it was. And that had had less than the 10% cost of marketing for us over the last year, which was, you know, a home run.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah. And as we go forward and we're getting into television in the next year. The idea is that we are going to market to those same households with connected television. So we're basically finding our customers, hitting them with the mail, hitting them with the television, hitting them with the digital marketing, and making sure that we're top of mind.

So you went from very unsophisticated to pretty damn sophisticated. So data, data-driven. The other interesting thing, you know, with marketing, what the mistake that a lot of people make just because it's easy is let's just throw a bunch of shit out there and see what sticks. And as you know, we know as marketers, it's not always the best strategy. If you're in a market of 3,000 people, then yeah, okay, you got to maybe hit everybody. But arguably, even in a market that small, there's only a certain number of them that can even buy your product. And so the more targeted you get and the more you understand who that person is and the message you need to relate to that person, because the, the people that are your demographic will tell you how to communicate with them and how to get them to raise their hand. And a lot of people just don't spend the time to do that. And this is why their marketing goes out of control, spend where they don't get the results that they're looking for. And then they're like, well, direct mail doesn't work for me, or, you know, Google doesn't work for me, or this doesn't work well. Could it be that you just were throwing crap at a wall, hoping something sticks. And that's usually where people will, will go wrong. You took the other approach, which is let's use data, let's understand who our customer is, where they live, what they look like, and how to talk to them. And that's how you make it work. And it's not easy. You know, obviously you spent a lot of time on that. Where are you getting the data from right now?

Yeah, so the, the data analyst who's again, somebody much smarter than me with a skillset much different than a skillset that I possess. You know, he pulls together lots of different lists from lots of different public sources and things that he has access to and puts together basically a list of all of our ideal customers. And it's been working, so it's been working well.

Where are you getting the results data from? How certain things performed?

In the direct mail, it's from the lookback in our CRM. When you're mailing to a list of addresses, you obviously know every address that you sent a piece of mail to. So when your call center is taking these calls and getting web forms, that are coming in and we're getting addresses. We know everywhere we set an appointment and obviously we know every appointment that resulted into a sale. So I'm always looking at how many appointments did we get from the mailing, how many sales did we get? And, you know, quite frankly, there was a period of time when my sales team was underperforming for various reasons, but I could see that the appointments were there. I could see that the marketing was working and it told me I had at that time a bit of an issue with my sales team. And so we went to work on that. Yeah.

So one thing impacts the next thing and you went from thing to thing as you saw, as you got that data, as you got the results back. Now you could see, and this is another thing I'm actually, I'm doing a webinar tomorrow. And, um, the webinar tomorrow is on 4 powerful lessons, um, that we've learned over the last few years, primarily from people on this podcast and speakers from Accelerate. And one of those 4 things is knowing your numbers. If we look at the most successful people in this industry, they know their numbers up, down, sideways, backwards, forwards, left, right, you know, and you've become that. Now, it's not only— so here's the interesting thing. And with Profit Masters now, we see this a lot with people is they are really good at all the analytics for sales and marketing. So they know which sales reps are selling. They know what their close rates are. They know what their demo rates are. They know what their, you know, raw lead to issued is. But then when we talk about financials and we start to talk about gross margin and fully loaded marketing costs, now we start to lose people. So one of the things that you did was you really also went to work on your finances, as you mentioned earlier. And you said something, and this is— we talk about this at Profit Masters all the time. It is managing to what the P&L was telling you. When you organize it properly and you have a plan like you do, you can look at every single month, you get your report and you go and you look at, okay, here was my plan and here is the actual. And when you look at that and you see the differences between the two, this tells you kind of where to go next and what to do next. So talk a little bit about that. What does that look like? So you organize the P&L, you get a report every month. Tell us a little bit more about that because this is critical because— and I'm sorry, I know I keep going because and because, but you don't have to mention what the profit was When you took over, you did say you guys didn't really know, and I know you weren't making very much money. I mean, everybody was kind of making a living, but now you're making like real money and profits. How many times up has it gone in the last 3 years?

Yeah, so the company really operated basically on a breakeven model a lot of years. I mean, we were in the zero 2% to 3% profit range most years and generally breaking even. And we're not a perfect operation yet. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we've come into that 10% profit range where it's the minimum acceptable in today's company that we accept nothing less. The expectation is we are going to get into the 12%, 15% range. Tomorrow. I mean, it's not starting now. And yeah, the P&L is absolutely essential and you have to think of it as your management, a management tool for running your company. And as you were saying, it does tell you where to look. It does tell you where to focus your energy. And the caveat that I've been sharing with other people in the mastermind who who are where I am today or a little bit behind where I am today who are going into that growth mode is that it's easy to invest and spend all this money and kind of lose control of the reins of what's going on in your company. And it's a really dangerous territory. And that's where we found ourselves about a year and a half ago before we were dialed in on our financials where, okay, I'm adding the CRM and I'm adding these new systems and I'm hiring a new person for my call center. And of course all this stuff costs money, so I better raise my prices a little bit. But I didn't understand our pricing model. I didn't understand the margins that we needed. I didn't understand what our break-even point had become. And without doing that deep dive into our financials and understanding how much gross margin we really need to run our company, we could have gone under pretty easily because we were outspending what we were bringing in in terms of gross margin to run the company. And I didn't know it, and I had to take on the project of understanding our financials and redoing our P&L and ultimately raising prices yet again to make sure we were building the right profit model for the company to stay on track. And it was a really precarious place we were in, and I had no idea.

Yeah. Well, look, what you did going from, you know, breakeven essentially to 10 and now next 12, 15 is extraordinary because it's, you know, a lot of people, they, that's the last place they'll go. They'll just say, well, let's just keep selling more. And with you, to your credit, you understood Hey, just selling more is not the answer here, is I got to understand what the hell this document is telling me. I mean, arguably that is, as entrepreneurs, that is our most important scorecard. I mean, we talk about scorecards and accountability. You know, we will hold our salespeople accountable, but do we hold for their sales and for their close rate, for their NSLI? But then will we hold ourselves accountable to our P&L, to what that's telling us? And if it's telling you anything less than 10%, one, I hate to say it, but you're doing it wrong. One, but even worse, all of that work that you're doing, all of that, you know, the stress of the company before, you know, before when you said the phone would ring, but everybody's phone would ring and the chaos that that would create. And it's like, for all of the work that we do, don't you deserve to earn a profit on that? And so many people have a hard time with that. It's like, yes, of course you deserve to make a profit. You're doing right by your customer. That is your, that is your reward. And so you very smartly understood the relationship with pricing and gross margin and the impact gross margin has on your profitability. And yeah, so wow, you did. So again, everybody that's listening, let me just go through some of what we've talked about here. So we started with people upgrading people, and you guys are doing EOS, right? Yeah. How long have you been doing EOS?

So we've been doing EOS since about 2020.

How about seriously? How long have you been doing it seriously?

Yeah, we've been doing it seriously since.

Okay.

It does take some time to ramp up and really get everything dialed in with your scorecards and your people. And having the discipline to do your meetings at the cadence that you agreed to and your quarterlies and your quarterly conversations. But, you know, when I came into the company, I needed some help and I went to work looking for a consultant and someone gave me great advice to go talk to an EOS implementer. And it was the greatest advice I got at that time because, you know, we needed to go do that work for ourselves. And not have someone come down and tell us what we had to do.

So people, through EOS, we learn about accountability. We learn how to put a system in place that holds people accountable. But it's not about finger-pointing. It's not about blaming people. It's about also collaboration. It's about sharing a vision of where the company is going and having all of the the right people in the right seats. The other thing we talked about was we talked about marketing and how you took control of over that and you went from just, you know, throwing stuff out there to actually really using data and numbers and analytics to drive your decision-making and controlling costs, but still being able to invest what you needed to invest in order to hit your numbers. And then you talked about your financials and how you took control over your financials. Now, by the way, for all of you listening, do you notice a pattern here? The pattern is John took control over these things, took control over people. No more excuses. Right people, right seats. If you're not the right person, I'm sorry, you've been here for 30 years, but You're just not the right person for us anymore. Tough decision, but you made it. Marketing, taking control of marketing, taking control of the P&L. I want to close up though, because I've noticed a huge change in you as a person and as a leader. What did you have to do with yourself in order to be able to say, okay, We are at a 0 to 3% net profit, which was nothing to now pretty significant levels of profitability, control over all of these aspects over your business. And now you're sitting in a position where you're ready to take what you've built and grow it. But over the course of the last couple of years, what's changed inside of you? What work have you had to do on yourself?

Yeah, I think something that I've been good at in my career and was important to me when I came into the business was I need to go find the blueprint, I need to go find the best practices, and I need to implement them as quickly as possible. And coming into the mastermind group, And building these relationships with the many business owners that are in the group and seeing them once a quarter, every 90 days, holding each other accountable, being exposed to so many people that have done this and had such amazing success in this business and in a short time. And that's something that really stuck out to me. I've seen these presentations where my business was going along like this for years and years and years. I started doing one-call close, I start, um, and, and financing, and boom, hockey stick. My, my company went up like this. So for me, doing that once a quarter and going to the group and being a follower of these people that have done this and learning from them, and then Taking that information back to my shop, to my people where people follow me, that's been huge for me. And it's part of my quarterly rhythm now that I can't wait to do our quarterly planning. I can't wait to go meet with my mastermind group, see all the progress that everybody else has made, reflect a bit on the progress that I've made, be a follower, and then bring this information back to those that follow me.

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I— we talked about at the beginning, I, I spoke about the Seven Secrets book and how you embody that. And, you know, there were— I think originally when I put the book together, I think there was somewhere around 12, but I culled it down to 7. And that's— I just, I don't know. Just seemed like the right number, 7, but it was a good progression. But there is an 8th and you just mentioned it, and that is the power of network, the power of mastermind. And as you grow and you develop in the group, in the Success Society Wealthy Contractor Mastermind group, now you are serving as an example for the people that are where you were 2 years ago. So you're learning from the people that are a few steps ahead of you, and then the people that are a few steps behind you are now learning from you. And it's really— I think people don't realize the power of that and being in, being in that environment of of accountability and safety where you could talk about anything. You could talk about— I just got a text message this morning, a beautiful text message from someone in our group. And they just got a big check, like a huge check. And he said in the email, I can't really share this with anybody else. Because he knows that by sharing it with me, I'm going to be— I'm thrilled for him. I'm so excited for him. And part of it too with you that I've noticed is your ego has never gotten in the way of you doing what you need to do. Not once. I've never seen your ego pop up. You've always been So open and like, hey, like you said, I'm, I'm a work in progress, you know. Well, I don't remember how you said it, but that's basically what you said. I see myself the same way. I'm not— I haven't gotten there yet. And the day I say I got there, that's the day nobody should listen to this podcast anymore. That's the day nobody should come to my events anymore, because that's the day I let my ego get the better of me, and I started to believe my own bullshit. And that happens with a lot of people, but it hasn't happened with you. And, um, and I won't let it as long as you're around me. I won't. But I can't see it happening with you. I got a new question that I've been asking people lately, and, um, because I'm always curious. So what happens— I know you have little kids at home, but what happens? What's your life like after work?

Yeah, it's, you know, like you said, what am I doing to grow? I mean, it's trying to make some time for myself to work out, to read. And of course I'm home with the family. I got two little girls that I love to death and a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old and a wonderful wife. And so I'm in the thick of young family mode right now and just trying to keep growing, keep taking care of myself in the time that I can carve out for myself.

Yeah. So it's funny, we were talking about Thanksgiving and so 2 and 26, so mine are 22 and 26, and I'll tell you, I look back on those times when they were 2 and 6, because they have the same difference in age, both, both girls. And I will tell you that you are probably in the most amazing, incredible time, uh, with them. And, um, it's funny, especially with girls, and as they mature and as they get older, it's so interesting to see the different stages that the kids go through. And we're all, we're also, you know, developing also ourselves and going into different stages ourselves. But the next, the next, I don't know, 15 or so years for you is going to be really, really interesting and really, really important. You were saying how, you know, our kids, they actually like to hang out with us, which is kind of cool. Um, uh, your kids will want to hang out with you too, as long as you're not, you know, like judging them every 2 minutes. Although we give our kids shit all the time, and then they try and give us shit, and we say, you're going to talk to your mother like that? So it's kind of fun, you know, you still have some control over over them. What are you reading right now? Just like general topics.

Well, I just, I came back with Charlie's recent book, so I've been reading that and Brian Gottlieb's book. So I read a lot of industry stuff and Think and Grow Rich has been a study lately. And I spend a lot of time in the car, so I load up my Audible with lots of books and try to stay busy in that that time in the car.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, good.

Well, John, this has been awesome. Great story. I'm so excited to see kind of where you take things in the next 2 to 3 years because you have built a foundation. And I think very wisely you said, okay, here's who we are now after COVID. And instead of trying to go from 6 to 20, you say, well, wait a minute, let's get our bearings here. Let's create a great business, profitable business here, and then let's go build. And I think that that's the smartest way to do it. I think people, you know, they get so enamored with sales and revenue and they just keep like going and going. But what they don't realize is that all of the issues that I had before are just going to be multiplied. The fact that I'm not making money is now just going to be— I'm not going to make money on even more sales and more work and more risk and more liability. And I think the way you did it is the right way. We're here. Let's figure out how to be profitable here. Let's figure out how to drive leads here. Let's figure out how to make sales. And then we'll use that as a foundation to now go to the next level. And what's interesting is I think what happens with a lot of people— and tell me what you think about this— is I think what happens with a lot of people is they, they think that, well, I don't have time for that. I got to take advantage now and I got to grow and grow and grow. And I would say that that's untrue, that the better way to do it is to slow down start making money where you are because, you know, look, $6 million business making even 10%, that's a pretty healthy bottom line. It's a lot of cash. Now, when you take it to 15, you know, now it's much, much better. But now you have the, the formula for going to $10 million and the difference of $10 million and a 3% net and $10 million And a 15% net is game-changing.

Yeah. I mean, this year we're going to be close to about $7.5 million in revenue. And, you know, I feel very strongly that when we get dialed in, you know, we're already a $9.5, $10 million company. When we really perfect what we do now, we're already there. We already have the framework for that. So what we talk about in our leadership meetings now is, let's nail it and then scale it.

Let's nail it and then let's scale it. That may end up being the title for this episode. Look at that right at the very end. Yeah, that's not bad, right? Let's nail it and then let's scale it. I like that, John. Well, thank you, my friend. Appreciate you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for being here and sharing your story. To all of you listening, you hear me say this quite a bit, but this is another one of those episodes that's worth a second listen, maybe even a third. There's a lot of stuff in here in between the lines that I think would be worth a second pass through. John's done a lot, and we didn't— I mean, there's still other stuff that he did that we didn't even get to talk about here, but I think that that's enough. That's, that's a good people marketing, financials, taking control of those things, using, implementing EOS, sticking with the meetings, leadership team. I mean, there's so much here. So thank you again, my friend. I appreciate it. And let's see, what do I have to promote here? Go to accelerateevent.com and check it out. John will be there. You can go to thewealthycontractor.com if you don't have a copy yet of the Seven Secrets book. I'll buy you the copy of the book. You just pay shipping and handling, and I'll be happy to send you a copy of the Seven Secrets book. And I think that's it. So thank you again, John, and to everybody listening. Until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan, and this is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast.