Trick Yourself Into Thinking You’re Better Than You Are | Chris Hermes

I was brought up that money was the root of all evil. So subconsciously that was planted in my brain. And when I was getting close to success, I was actually self-sabotaging because my subconscious was saying, hey, you make money, you're going to have a problem.

One of the things I say in this book is that quote, money is the root of all evil. What they conveniently leave out are the first 4 words. Of that line in the Bible. For the love of. So for the love of money is the root of all evil. Have you ever felt like there's a secret club of successful contractors and you're left outside? Want in? Well, you just found the entry door. Welcome to the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. Each episode, we pull back the curtain revealing the stories, strategies, and secrets that top leaders use to grow their home improvement business and enjoy more more success, more wealth, and more freedom. Discover more at thewealthycontractor.com. Now let's get into today's episode. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of The Wealthy Contractor Podcast. Brian Kaskavalciyan here with The Wealthy Contractor, and I have got a great guest today, Chris Hermes from USA Showers out of Arizona. Welcome, Chris. Happy to have you here.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

But don't be too excited. You sound very excited there.

I am excited, man.

I'm kidding. So Chris comes to— so about a month ago, we were having a meeting. I called in some of my buddies in the industry and I said, hey, help me put together Accelerate Live. Usually around this time of year, I, you know, lock myself away, bang my head against the wall for hours and hours trying to figure out, you know, what does Accelerate Live look like in February? And this year I thought, well, wait a minute, I got a lot of friends in the business that are a lot smarter than I am. And so why don't I ask some of them to come and join me on a, in a meeting and help me design Accelerate? For 2025. And, uh, my good friend Brian Gottlieb was on that call. He'll be a speaker at Accelerate. And, uh, he suggested I talk to this guy named Chris Hermes, who, uh, used to be with Tundra Land. And, um, so I reached out to Chris, and he's a super nice guy. Runs a hell of a business, had a great teacher. But of course, you actually implemented the things that you learned. It's one thing to have a great teacher, a great mentor, but it's a whole another thing to actually listen to them and do what they suggest. And here's a guy that did that. So I know— and, and for all the listeners, I know only a little bit about Chris's story on purpose because I wanted to hear it from you, you know, just like with you guys, fresh. So Chris, with that, send up— or set up, I should say— welcome to the podcast and, um, give everybody your, your background because you, you have a great background in the business. And then we'll talk about USA Showers and what you're doing over there.

Yeah, thank you for having me, Brian. I really appreciate it. Yeah, we, uh, Brian Kaskavalciyan's name blows around frequently in this industry, and I happened to be at the right place at the right time. And I actually started out with him, gosh, it's got to be 10 years ago, 9, 10 years ago. And I started out as a designer with him. I was working for a restoration company chasing hailstorms. We did roofing, siding, and gutters. Had a great company there, but we ended up having our second got pregnant with our second daughter and realized we're not able to run around the country with 2 kids, 2 dogs, and a cat. So, we decided to move back to Wisconsin where I'm originally from. And, my cousin knew a guy that knew a guy and I got in front of Brian. And, when I met Brian, it was interesting because his energy is, in fact, just so powerful. And, I'm like, "Is this guy for real?" Because one thing he said to me, he said, You know, what do you want to do? I said, well, I want to do this, this, and this. He's like, let me help pull out your true full potential. And I was like, all right, I'm in. So I did. I started working with him and sold that first year, second year sold. And right after that, he came to me and he said, hey, we're looking for some sales leaders. Really love to have a chat with you. And I said, yeah, love it. So I ended up being a sales manager for, it was short, 3 months, I believe it was. And then he came to me and, you know, traditional Brian, we met in a cigar lounge and he said, hey, I really love your leadership style. I'm looking to add somebody to the back end of the business. And I understand that you've been in construction your whole life, but your leadership is, you know, pretty awesome. I said, well, I appreciate that. And we're sitting there and, you know, he offered me basically to help be the CEO for the backend of Tundra Land. And I'm sitting there, I'm going, wow, this is a big business. I mean, at that time, it was only $25 million-ish, $20 to $30 million. And I looked at him, I said, Brian, I've never ran a $25 million backend before. He said, neither have I. We'll figure it out. I was like, all right, I'm in.

Define what you mean by backend.

So production, all the production side, customer care, just really taking on all that and helping the leadership team on the production side of the business and creating processes and procedures and all that. And so then from there, we did that. We were, it was a hot mess. It was great, you know, having sales and production so I could speak sales and production, which was really nice. And then from there, he asked me to be the general manager of the Kohler department when they were with Kohler with the walk-in tub. And so I was helping them with their walls and stuff on the production side. And then I became the general manager. So then I took over sales and production. And then we had the opportunity to come out to Arizona and have Wisconsin and Arizona. So I was flying back and forth. We started a business out here. It was, it's crazy. And then from there, when we were going back and forth, I'm like, Brian, there is nobody doing what we're doing for a one-day bath. And so like, tubs and showers in Arizona. So he came out and did some market research and realized like, there's nobody doing it. So we decided to— he said, hey, let's partner up, you go out there. And let's go build a business. And that was July of 2019. And we did, we came out here and we actually moved away from the Kohler and moved into the Jacuzzi bathroom model. And we built the business. We did $11 million net good business in that first year, first full year. So January 2020 to the end of 2020, we did $11 million. And then Jacuzzi came along and said, hey, we want to be in corporate stores. Let us buy that from you guys. Brian's like, I do it. I was like, yeah, let's go. And then they offered me a pretty sweet position to go help them start other corporate stores across the country. So in 18 months, we did 6 other stores. And went to $60 million quickly in just 18 months. And then I realized that I just don't fit inside of that corporate box. And I decided to move on and start my own bath business. And total transparency with Jacuzzi, they were great with it. We had a great exit together. And so, I started USA Showers. We ran our first lead last year, June. And here we are in our first full year.

Do you mind sharing your results? Because they're pretty extraordinary. How many salespeople?

We're up to 7 right now.

7. Okay.

We just brought on 3 more because we're ramping up. This is our busy time of the year in Arizona. All the snowbirds come back. So far this year, we're at close to $6 million and we should do close to Right around $8 to $9 million at, at a decent net profit as well for our first full year. We're, we're pretty excited about it.

Yeah. And we don't have to necessarily go into the exact net profit, but you and I talked about that and it's better than decent. Let's just say that. And it's very smart. One of the things we've been talking about a lot is, and, and Mark Curry and I, my partner at the Profit Masters, we're gonna do a presentation at Top 500 in a couple of weeks. We're gonna talk about profit assassins, the 5 silent killers of profit in a business. And, and as we're putting that together, Mark said something really interesting. He said, you know, he goes, what are the most successful companies in the business that have grown and scaled all have in common? What is the number 1 thing that they have in common? And he said, it's cash. They know how to produce cash because you can't grow without cash. And you, and you, I don't know if you even know this or not, just because you're brought up by Gottlieb, who was also a guy that was about the cash, you know, he didn't take on debt to grow a $150 million business. He did it with cash flow. Which means that he was very, very— the businesses were very, very profitable. That's the only way you have enough cash in order to really grow and scale. And a lot of people don't realize, they think that, well, if I just start to sell a whole bunch, at some point I'm going to make some money. Is that your philosophy?

No, very disciplined.

Talk a little bit more about that discipline because I mean, I just, it's awesome to me that you've built so quickly. It's not surprising because you already did it. So it's not surprising to me, but when you say discipline, what do you mean by that?

When I went to the production side at Tundra Land, you know, coming from the sales and then going to the production side, the misalignment between sales and production, it was like two magnets that couldn't connect because sales just always just, we're going to do it, we're going to do it, we're going to do it. When I stepped into the backend, the general manager, we butted heads a little bit. I'm like, we're not going to do this, but I always explained the why. Here's why, and this is what it's causing. So as I grew those processes, and then when we came out here and implemented those processes, it's the discipline of the alignment calls every morning between sales, production, marketing, everybody. Hey, where we're at. It's the disciplines of the numbers. So every night the team has to report their numbers, right? So they report their numbers so we know where we're at. I have a, it's on my screen over here. It's called our PDCA. Like it's a high level of the numbers and it goes red or green. So I know which levers to pull throughout the day. So if production's challenged, okay, where am I going to focus today? I'm going to go see what they need to help their side of the business. And then Brian created a huge KPI doc, key performance indicators, and all those numbers are very disciplined. If we're not hitting those numbers, okay, why? And then we'll dissect it as a team, as a leadership team and say, where do we fail and what do we need to do to be better? So it's the disciplines of the daily stuff every single day because it's a hair on fire business. If we're not selling, We're not installing, we don't make any money in between in our business. And so to your point is how do you keep those disciplines so we can keep just enough sales, install enough, and keep that lead time to that 3 to 5 weeks? Because if we can keep that, that's where the profit becomes massive.

That's awesome. And by the way, this is what you are going to be talking about at Accelerate. We have never— so one of the things that came up in that conversation, you and I talked about this. Uh, but just for the listener, one of the things that came up, um, last year particularly was, hey Brian, I had a number of people come up to me and say, hey, look, Accelerate's great, but we never talk about production. We talk about everything else— sales, marketing, leadership, culture, people development. We talk about mindset. We talk about everything except production. And a number of people came up to me and said, hey, can we start to talk a little bit about production and how production contributes to the whole pie? And so that's where, uh, you came in. That's where Brian said, I got the perfect guy. And so you're here, and that's going to be the topic of your talk at Accelerate in February. And, um, I'm excited about that. I think that, um, it is a topic that's not covered very much. I always— to me, it, it always was like, well, production's kind of the easy part of the business. Um, to me, the core of the business really is sales. Sales is really kind of the core. You got to have a good system for converting leads into sales at the right price. And then you got production, which is kind of like, that's the easy one, kind of. It should be, at least. I mean, you should know how to install the product you're selling, and you should know how to deliver a good customer experience. Some do, some don't, I guess. Um, but then the hardest part of the business is generating leads profitably, and enough leads every day to keep your salespeople You know, in the game, you know, and hitting the numbers that you need to hit every month. When you, when you started the business last June, um, going into this year, 2024, how did you think about, because I know you came out of the gate strong, but how did you, because we're in, you know, we're in, this is gonna go out probably in November, but you and I are recording this in the middle of October. Have you started planning for 2025?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, I have my KPI doc and I keep looking at my computer over here, but I have '25, '26, '27, and '28 already planned out.

Oh, wow. Okay. So when you were planning for 2024, what was your kind of your thinking around that? How did you kind of forecast where, where you were going to be in 2024?

I just always refer back to our KPI doc, and that's what we did when we built all those other businesses with a previous company is, okay, it always comes down to, okay, what can we generate for leads? Right? So it's the time of the year. How do we, what can we generate for leads? And it's a big conversation with my chief marketing officer, my CEO, and myself. And and my accounting team, but okay, if we can do this, okay, what should my net close rate be? Net to net. Okay, if that's the case, how much are we going to sell? And it works itself backwards. It's actually, okay, we want to sell a million and we're going to close out this percentage. And then it kicks out the net issue number. That net issue number is where marketing feels that we can be at. Okay, let's do that. And then it's just gradually just adding 1 or 2 more, you know, a few. On average, we average like 7 to 8 net issued appointments per month from there because it's only a couple contracts at that point in time. So we can scale, but the compound effect can make it go really quickly. And then in the same thing in that KPI doc, we have set up for production. And our ultimate goal is to be install 85% of what we sold. So it's just math, right? Everything is what I learned from Brian. It's just the— it's a numbers game. And if you're disciplined to the numbers, it will— it in the end, boom, it's like, hey, it worked. Yeah. And that's all I've done. And just make sure, even in that, in that KPI doc, we go, we need this many installers, this many designers, this many face-to-face people, this many call center people, and it's all laid out. So for me, it's just plug in a number and it spits out all the numbers is what we've created over the last I guess 7, 8 years now.

Yeah, the business is very formulaic. I say it here all the time. We talk about it at Accelerate and in our Success Society meetings and anywhere where we gather together and talk with people in this business. It is very formulaic, but I think that people make it— I mean, look, I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not an easy business. It's got a lot of moving parts. Is not an easy business, but there are formulas for it. And you have a formula and you're running the playbook, essentially, is what you're doing. You have a playbook and you're running your playbook. What about people that don't necessarily— I mean, look, uh, the majority of people don't have mentorship from a guy like Brian Gottlieb. And so what are the things that you think How do I say this? Like, what did you learn from Brian? I mean, obviously, you know, the discipline, the KPIs and all of that, but what did you learn about being a leader, about who you have to be every day in order for you to build, you know, a, a, a, I mean, you're gonna be 10 next year. If this year's 8, 9 million, next year will be what, 10? It'll be like 12, 13, 15.

15, 15 is the target.

Yeah. And you can grow at 50% because of the foundation that you've put in. But, but what did you like? You've already done it, so that makes it easier. But if we step back to people that have not done it yet, have not built, let's say, a $10 million business with a 15 to 20% net profit, Who do you have to become in order to pull that off?

I've been studying personal development since I was 20 years old. I'm 44. I've been in the books. My very first book was How to Think and Grow Rich. Like I had a mentor. I always tell people I was dumb enough to listen to these people and they changed my life and they just keep feeding me these books and I'm like, oh my gosh. And I would implement just one thing out of the book every time. But it was again, and Brian will tell everybody, and I am, even my license plate says I'm disciplined. For anybody that wants to be successful, you have to have the discipline to get up every morning and do the things that you need to do to achieve the results that you want to achieve. Is it easy? Absolutely not. But it's, I always talk, and I do this in my sales training and production. You know, it's positive affirmations every morning to trick yourself that you're better than you really are, because truly you have the potential to be better than you are.

Oh my God, I love that.

And so I always tell people, when I was in that spot and I was trying to become— I was a serial entrepreneur and I couldn't make any money, but it was my conditioning from my parents and yada yada. But once I recognized that it was my conditioning, I wrote on my mirror, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, I'm successful. And why I brush my teeth every morning. That's all I said. I'm brushing my teeth and I'm saying it. Remember, remember, remember, right? And then at night when I'm brushing my teeth, I did it and I put it on my phone as a screensaver. And I just was reconditioning, reconditioning. And then I was reading the books and I'm like, discipline. Okay. I'm going to plan out my day. What is my biggest challenge? What am I going to focus on today? And because we can only take little bites and everybody tries to do so much and then they do nothing. And so that, if I step back and I look at my journey, I got, I said, like I said, I was dumb enough to listen to the people that recommended all the books. I read all the books and then Audible came around. That was a game changer. So now I could triple my, my intake and, and just every day it's, I have my book and we have our notes. We have our daily targets. We have our monthly targets. We have our yearly targets and it's just Are we on track? If not, what levers do we have to pull? Yeah. And I truly believe that anybody can do it if they choose to.

So what I would say, I could stop right here and I could tell people, go back 3 minutes-ish and re-listen to it a few times. That'll be worth the whole like time you spend here. You said, I love this. I think I'm going to call this episode Trick Yourself into Thinking You're Better Than You Are. That is the name of the game. I, I, that's what I had to do. I tell the story all the time about how I got sick and tired of making a living, good living, but sick and tired of making a living. And I finally was like, I have wanted to be rich my entire life, and I— it hasn't happened yet. And I'm— I know I'm doing the right things, but what I didn't do, what I didn't do was convince myself that it's going to happen. And then I went to work on my belief And that's exactly what you're saying here. Trick yourself in thinking you're better than you are. What a great way to put it. Uh, uh, for me, it's like the game is all about convincing yourself that you can do this and whatever it takes, whether it's affirmations, it, it's, I, I, I mean, I did, I made a list of 14 things that I did. Affirmations was, was one of them. It, there was writing that I did. There was, you know, vision boards, there was therapy, there was mentors, and, and I mean, like, and more therapy. And, you know, it's like you gotta do whatever you have to do to trick yourself into thinking you're better than you really are, because that's the only way you're gonna get to that next level. So if you're not making whatever, you want to make a million dollars a year, well, you gotta convince yourself that it's on its way, that you are going to be making $1 million a year, and some funny crap starts to happen along the way. Opportunities show up that you're like, whoa, wait a minute, where did this come from? And then you find out, wait a minute, this has been around me the whole time.

You weren't ready to receive it because you weren't conscious of it.

That's right. Wow, I didn't know this part about you.

Oh, very.

So it doesn't surprise me at all. But man, when I meet another one of you, I love it, man. Because to me, that— this to me, and I've said this here so many times, and I think you might be living proof of this, but I see it over and over again in my life, is that 90— it's 80 to 90%. I'm being generous here with the thing, but I really think it's more like 90% mindset, 10% skill set. And yeah, with any of this, because, you know, look, you know, okay, I need to be able to sell, I need to produce leads, and I need to get the work installed and make happy customers. And oh, by the way, I need to do it at a, you know, a good clip, at a good profit. But the hard part is the discipline, the mindset, the believing enough in yourself, even on those days that you don't believe in yourself. That's where the affirmations come in. You may not have been wealthy on those days, but you're putting that in your head. And pretty soon what happens is that becomes the new conversation happening in your head. And then all kinds of stuff starts to open up.

To that point, and I know you had Brian and Kathy on your podcast and Kathy and I, all three of us, we click on that same level, but I always tell people, To your point is how do people start? Well, when I started, I was brought up that money was the root of all evil. So, subconsciously, that was planted in my brain. And when I was getting close to success, I was actually self-sabotaging because in my subconscious was saying, "Hey, you make money, you're going to have a problem." Yeah. When I recognized that and I changed that, that's when I started doing those positive affirmations. That's when, to your point, doors just started opening. But I was ready to receive and I started recognizing, I'm like, there's so much opportunity. And that was, that's so to your point is how do, how does somebody get into this and be successful? It's exactly that. It's, it's just being conscious of what you say and what you do and, and, and just write it down, write down your goals, write down your affirmations and believe you are good enough.

Yeah. Um, it's funny that you bring up that quote because this, I, I wrote this book 10, 12 years ago. And one of the things I say in this book is that quote is that people will say money is the root of all evil. What they conveniently leave out are the first 4 words of that line in the Bible. And those 4 words are, for the love of. So, for the love of money is the root of all evil. And so it's like we, we pro— we got programmed with stuff that we believed when we were little and small and impressionable, and we didn't even get the real quote. The love of money is the root of all evil. And you're not in love with money. I mean, money's great. You like it. It's a tool. It's great. But your whole world is not driven by the love of money. And that could be evil. It could. But just anyway. Yeah. So that's, that's very cool. Well, look, Chris, I'm going to, I'm going to keep this short. I want to have you back for sure. But what I want everybody to do now is, uh, Chris is going to do an amazing presentation. He's going to tie all of these things together— production, discipline, and making money, profit, how you make money in the— what'd you call it? The back— what was— what do you— what'd you call it at the beginning? The production— the back end of the business. Yeah, so we're going to talk about the ugly warehouse in the back of the— in the back of the beautiful showroom. Chris is going to be the ugly warehouse guy that's going to talk to us about production at Accelerate Live. And I'm super, super excited. So if I can, Chris, I'm going to do a quick pitch right now for it. You probably heard a commercial or two in here too, in between us talking for Accelerate. But February 11th and 12th, let me say this. On the 10th, we're doing a little golf tournament So we're going to be at Amelia Island, the Omni Resort, which is amazing. They have this cool little golf course. It's 10 holes. The holes are between 30 yards and 120 yards, and they give you clubs. I think they give you like 3 clubs. I, I forgot what it is, but it's probably like an 8-iron or, or a 9-iron, a wedge, and a putter. That's basically all you need. So we're going to do a little, uh, golf tournament on the 10th to raise money for Tunnel to Towers. The main event is the 11th and 12th. And so if you join us somewhere in there, you will hear from Chris probably twice, probably main stage by himself, and then probably on a panel. And then on the 13th, we've got bonus days. Uh, you've got one option with Gottlieb and one option with me. And, uh, probably everybody's going to take Gottlieb, but We'll see what happens. I'm gonna talk all about this stuff, wealth attraction. How do you prepare yourself to make a whole lot of money in the business? How do you look at profitability? And so hopefully people will join us for the whole week. But that's February 11th and 12th. There's probably a link somewhere here to go and get your tickets, but it's accelerateevent.com. And you can use promo code PODCAST24 to, um, save, uh, an additional— you get an additional discount on that. So that is my pitch there. And, uh, thank you for being here again. I want to have you back probably early part of next year, learn a little bit more about how business has been going for you What are some of the things that you've learned? Hey, let me ask you, I got a new question I'm asking people and it's more for my curiosity, I think, than anything else. But tell me what you do after work. What is it? What does your life look like after work?

So right now, just because we're still in our first 18 months, I have a pretty solid team, but after work, well, I get up at 3 o'clock in the morning and I work out. So I work out, I get up at 3, I go work out. I'm here to the office around 5:30 with, with the production team just to love on them because again, they're the ones that produce the income, bring in the money on them. Yep. And so we have our daily huddle. I'm usually leaving the office about 5 o'clock. I get home about 5:30 and I may take a couple sales calls if, if, if need be, but I got two lovely kids and and wife at home. And so we just hang out, and I'm in bed by about 8 o'clock, and I just hang out with them between 5:30 and 8.

Wow, 8 o'clock and up at 3.

Discipline. That's what I do.

Yeah, good for you, man. Good for you. I'm not even going to tell you what time I go to bed and what time I get up because you've already had a day by the time I get up. Good for you.

That's what I do.

Yeah.

Awesome, man.

All right. Well, thank you so much. Appreciate you being here. And I'm really excited to have you at Accelerate in February. And to everybody listening, I hope you got a lot out of this. Go back and listen to what he said. Particularly, it was right around 20 minutes, I think, was when he started to talk about this trick yourself into thinking. I think that was gold. I think that that is like one of the keys to making this work, this whole thing work, business and life. And so really powerful stuff. Thank you, Chris. And hopefully I'll see you all at Accelerate, everybody listening. But until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan and this is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this week's episode. For insights on skyrocketing your improvement business and accelerating your journey to the success, wealth, and freedom you've always dreamed about, be sure to get your free copy of my bestselling book, The 7 Secrets to Becoming a Wealthy Contractor, at www.thewealthycontractor.com. And don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. See you next time.