Cameron’s Live Coaching Call with Benny Fisher, CEO Big Fish Contracting

Your wife really knows that you love her, correct?

Yeah.

So do you tell her once a year that you love her?

No.

Once a quarter?

No.

Once a month?

No.

Like multiple times a day, right? Yeah.

If you want to stay in a happy relationship. Yep.

So you're communicating and over communicating to someone who already knows that you love her and you're still over communicating how much you love her. So we have to figure out how do we simply over communicate our vision to our employees and our customers and our shareholders and our suppliers. So, Benn, Benny Fisher from Big Fish Contracting and Benny Fisher, the emerging brand as a business leader. This is a live coaching call. You're going deep and vulnerable and opening up and showing people what business coaching is and why CEOs turn to other people just for advice and, and guidance and sometimes a look in the mirror. Thank you for doing this.

I'm a little nervous, a little scared, which is weird for me to say that because I am not normally like that. It's like a therapy session going to be shown to the rest of the world.

That's a normal feeling. It's normal when you talk to a counselor or a therapist or a psych psychologist or a doctor, we have that weird nervous feeling. And then, yeah, we're also going to share this with the world. So thank you for doing it. I think it's really important and I hope you get a lot of value out of today. So the way that I normally start all my coaching calls is I get this CEO to give me what I call a five minute update. And I want you to tell me what's going well with your business, what's not going well with your business, what you're working on over the next month and where you're stuck. And then from that I'm going to take some notes and we're going to dive in and go deep.

I just hired a sales director for my roofing company and that feels really good because now I have a full blown leadership team where I have an integrator slash president. I have a marketing manager, sales director, operations manager, and someone in the finance seat to basically have fun with on a leadership team. Now before I was in, we were all kind of sharing some seats, but now that is, that is good. Another growth year, even in a recession. You know, we're up 17% from last year, so that's awesome. But personal brand, I just got, I just launched actually today a podcast with Gary Vee, which that was really cool. So I got the. I got to do that. That's episode I think 78. I have an opportunity with my friend Joseph Hughes, a Contractor Dynamics, a marketing training firm in the roofing industry. I've been doing a lot of workshops with him and speaking on stages across the country, trying to help entrepreneurs learn how to brand and market their roofing company. And so that's going really well. I'm really excited about that. My family's healthy, you know, my wife's good. My two kids, they're. They're doing good. Those are the highlights, I think. And I feel good.

Great energy, for sure. That feels very natural, too.

It feels good. I've been at places in my life where I haven't felt good, and I noticed that too, so that's good. What's not going so well, I sometimes think, because I'm starting to, like, branch off into, like, more the consulting, the brand, the podcast, you know, doing those things. In addition to still being the CEO of Big Fish Contracting, sometimes I still just struggle with, am I not doing enough for my main company? Am I starting to, like, veer off? Am I doing it for the right reasons? So some of those doubts of, like, insecurities of, like, am I where I'm supposed to be? That's not going so well. I think some right now, while I'm in this, like, new startup mode of benny fisher.com and everything that the brand is incorporated, I think I'm working a little bit more than I was living, you know, my EOS life, if you will, because I'm starting this new thing right. I'm starting to do my podcast better. I'm trying to expand and do this business development with Contractor Dynamics. And so I am working a lot more, which, you know, I'm a little bit nervous that my wife and my baby and my kid is going to start to feel that. Right. Well, I'm really trying to. I really think we have a good thing going with this Contractor Dynamics thing. And I think that I really compliment Joseph Hughes, who's the founder and CEO of that company, really well, because, you know, I have obviously sales ability, business development, especially in the roofing world. I'm a contractor. Still to this day, I'm not. I did not sell on my company. So when we go and talk to contractors, it's not just some other consultant getting up there, right where you see a lot of gurus in the room and. And people that are just coaches and consultants that never actually did it. I'm one of these guys that are doing it, and I'm trying to help him grow his company because I Think it's really cool what he's doing. So. Because I never had that. I never had that roadmap. I listened to some clips of Gary Vee on social media and then went out and learned about the school of hard knocks of how to build a brand and how to grow marketing. So I didn't have all the nuts and bolts in the inside. So I'm really excited about helping him develop that company over the next year. I'm excited about really finding better podcast guests. Not when I say better, I don't mean better.

You interviewed Gary Vee.

Yeah, I know. That's one. I mean, all right, well, like that was.

Who do you want next? Jesus Christ or God?

Like you. You're already on my podcast, so that was good. I don't know, there's interesting people that are doing different things, right. And I don't want to talk about business necessarily. I want to talk about energy. And if you listen to the podcast I just did with Gary, we talked about intuition and impact and things like that that, you know, you don't normally hear from business guys. Right? The stuff I know that you're into. So I'm. Those are the things I'm. Things where I'm stuck. I've never built an email list, so I'm just now starting to build an email list. You gotta remember I was a contractor, head down man, just like blue collar Pittsburgh, right. And so I've never really built an email list. I was always just on Facebook. And so I'm trying to build my email list. That feels a little clunky. My executive assistant's helping me as much as possible with that. I'm trying to manage the podcast with the video guys and the editing. You know, I have a media team, which I have a couple contracts with other people to bring in a little bit of money, but I think I still spend more on my own media than I actually make doing it for other people. So I'm trying to manage that side of the business and then also being able to be there for Big Fish Contracting and then be there for Contractor Dynamics, be there for my family. I really need to get that marketing engine going for Benny Fisher.com and I've never built a personal brand before. I am building a personal brand. Let me say that I just never did it the way the digital way, the way that like, you know, with your emails and the funnels and all the cool stuff that I know is possible.

Where are you stuck?

I know all these things I want to do because I watch guys like you and watch guys like Gary Vee. And I know that that stuff's possible when you have organization and you have flow. I just am trying to figure out how to build that out because I don't know how to build it out.

So you're classic entrepreneur. You and I are wired. So similarly, I'm going to guess that you are. If I was to read you the list of 11 traits of bipolar disorder, you would be yes to 11 of the 11, as am I. And I'm also going to say that you're probably very high on attention deficit disorder, both of which, by the way, are not diseases. They're superpowers for entrepreneurs. The mania of bipolar is why people will invest in you, buy from you. It's why you're a perpetual emotion machine. It's why you can get more done in an hour than most people can do in a week. The stress and depression and burnout is just simply a lot of the pressure that you can't tell your employees, your team, your spouse. You don't really have that group around you that you can kind of unleash with. And we keep it all inside of us and that hits burnout at times. Is that partially true with you?

Yeah. I feel like I've let a lot of people down sometimes when I'm. When I got a bunch of balls in the air.

And that's just us being honest with ourselves. And it's really a tough space to be a CEO. It's why mastermind communities are so important for CEOs. It's why the community you're building for roofers is important for them. It's why coaching is good or just. And it's also why having outlets for ourselves physically, like getting to the gym and meditation and ice baths and like disconnecting every once in a while to allow our kind of take the throttle off. It's like a racehorse. Racehorses don't run 120 hours a week. They run for like a few minutes and then they're in the stable in the pasture for the rest of the week. We need to have that on the ADD side. We were told by our teachers, stay focused and pay attention and sit still.

What the.

We can't. There's 74 other things happening. You're boring. There's no reason for me to learn all this. And I'm trying to run a small business and I know I'm only in grade three. Right. You've probably always had that going on. But all of that attention disbursement is what Allows us as entrepreneurs to see what's happening with the market, the economy, our suppliers, our website, the data points, what's really happening inside of our industry and our competition. We notice opportunities and then it gets so overwhelming, we have to delegate it to somebody because our brains fall. Then we can keep, keep going. That's actually. That perpetual motion machine is what makes us successful as entrepreneurs. If we were so focused and so linear and so much more thoughtful, we'd be an engineer or a teacher and a doctor, but we wouldn't be successful as an entrepreneur. Those trades, we need to rewire them in our own mind that they're not negatives. Your bipolar is actually one of your superpowers, and your ADD is one of your superpowers. But we need to recognize those, what they are. And then we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.

I've heard of the ADD man. Like that's. That's definitely. I was diagnosed when I was 7 or 8. No one's ever told me I was bipolar. Are you saying that I'm bipolar?

Let me read you a list I want you to keep.

If my mom watches this, she's going to be like, oh, he's bipolar too.

It's not a negative. I want you to keep count. I'm going to give. Read 11 traits. I want you to count on your fingers or with a pen, and then we'll add up how many you've got. Are you often filled with energy?

Yes.

Does your mind get flooded with ideas?

Yes.

Are you driven?

Yes.

Are you restless?

Yes.

Are you unable to keep still?

Not now.

Okay. Do you often work on little sleep?

Yes.

Do you get euphoric?

Yes.

You get easily irritated by minor obstacles?

No.

I'm like. Only by idiots.

You said that, not me.

Do you burn out periodically? Just exhausted. Can't do it anymore. I need to take.

I can go forever. I'm like the energizer body.

Do you act out sexually, which is like flirting?

No.

And then do you feel persecuted by those who do not accept your vision?

I used to. I don't anymore. So I don't know.

So you're seven of the 11.

But listen, I will tell you now that I heard all those. I used to be me three years ago, before I started to transform my life and go deeper on my. And do the inner work like that.

I'm at about 10 or the 11 or 11 of the 11. But here's what. It's interesting. If you're five or more, a medical community doctor would consider you on the spectrum for bipolar Disorder. Most accountants, lawyers, engineers, doctors are 3 or less. If you're 7, 8, you're definitely on the spectrum. If you're 9, 10, or 11, you would often be medicated for either depression or the mania. Those aren't bad traits. No one invests in doctors and lawyers and engineers because they're just not that interesting and exciting. No one's going to quit their job to go work for them. Nobody's going to, like, go jump off a cliff to go work for a teacher. Nobody's going to invest in it. Like, we need to have that crazy infectious energy for people to buy into us, but we need to do the inner work to slow ourselves down. What is interesting right now, though, is saying things like, I worry that I might be X, Y, Z with my wife and my kids. Right? I'm worried that I might be spreading myself too thin. You're cognizant that your energy and your mania and your ADD could also be impacting your personal lives. So you're actually being careful with that, and you need to stay careful with that. There's not a single successful entrepreneur out there. Maybe the only one I can think of is Elon, who actually can put so much of that at risk. What's really intriguing about Elon, and I've known him since 1995, is how heavily invested he is in his family. He actually has kids. He's got his kids in tow, often with him at business meetings and events. He so wants to have that as a part of his life that he brings that in. But just be cautious that you don't put your marriage and yourself and your health at risk as you continue to scale, because that's when we do often implode.

Seven years ago or six years ago, I almost died of a fentanyl overdose. I was using drugs to escape my problems. I got divorced. Since then, it was. It was tough. But that's kind of also my rock bottoms.

Been there. I used to use alcohol as an escape. I've definitely used drugs at times in his escape. Not as much with drugs as an escape, but definitely used alcohol as an escape. I'm now six months and two days without having a drink, which has been huge for me. I weighed 40 pounds heavier than I do today. Ten years ago, I weighed in at 222 pounds. Now I'm at 182. I certainly wasn't that happy. Definitely wasn't opening up to counselors or therapists or coaches, but those are important for us to do. There's a balance between being able to do that with our team as well. Like, how open and vulnerable are you with your management team?

Pretty open and vulnerable. Pretty much show my. I wear my. I cry, I get mad sometimes. I get open. Sometimes I wonder if I'm too open.

Now there's a balance because we need to tell them where we don't know something or where we aren't sure on something. What we can't do with our management team is tell them we're scared. You need to be able to tell. Do you have a second in command?

Yes.

You need to be able to tell your COO or your second in command privately, one on one, that you're scared that you don't know, and they need to be able to do the same with you. But the rest of the management team needs to always feel the underpinning of confidence. They can realize you can say, hey, I don't know how to do this. I want your thoughts, or I'm not sure where we're going. What do you think? But never I'm scared.

I've never done that. I was always that tough guy, alpha male that would never be scared of anything. Now I do share that with Rob, my CEO, and we're. And we're pretty open and I. And I will. And sometimes I worry that if I tell him that, is that going to, like, you know, he's the one that he wrote a check to come work here. He's like, he's got a lot of investment in this company. Like, does that make him scared? When I say I'm scared, like, I.

Always worry that discussion is what you want to have with him and say, hey, Rob, I need you to be the one person I can say I'm scared with. How do you feel about that? How does that work? Have that open discussion and dialogue with him and with your spouse. You need to be able to tell her at times you're scared, but then you also. Right. Because then you also need to show up with confidence to go, hey, babe, I'm not putting our entire life and family at risk here. So she needs to see the balance, but she also needs to have some coaching about the life of an entrepreneur. Did she grow up in an entrepreneurial family at all?

No.

So this is all new for her. Right? She's strapped to your back. You're riding the roller coaster. And she didn't realize she was signing up for that. But she wants to know that you've got it and that you're nervous. She wants to know that you've got it and that you're scared, but you have a support group, so it's like, hey, honestly, I'm scared right now. I'm nervous right now, but I'm talking to my entrepreneur mastermind. I'm talking to my coach. I'm in this group coaching program. I'm talking to these peers. So I got it, but I'm kind of nervous. She goes, okay, it's kind of like you're going to drop off the ledge on a skateboard. It's like, I'm nervous about this, but I got it because I've been practicing. She goes, yeah, I'm nervous for you, too, but I know you've got it. It's important that you have that level of dialogue with your spouse, because it gives you almost like a valve to kind of unleash a little bit of the steam so you don't explode. You don't want to do that with your employees. You also don't want to do that with your investors or your banker or your board. You can't tell your investors, your banker or your board you're scared. You can tell your investors, banker, board, you're unsure. You're working through stuff, but you always need to balance with them to keep showing them the confidence. That's a delicate act for a CEO. What you're also worrying about and thinking about now is your business, kind of the roofing business and the consulting business and then your brand and your podcast and everything else. The key is to make sure that you have the plans and the budgets in place for each of those and that you don't manage it out of your head. Where are you with each of those business units in terms of having goals and a budget and plans in place? And in writing through this year has.

Been run under the same P and L as Big Fish Contracting. So, like, when I get consulting income, you know, we bill that out. But he's created. So Rob is a specialist. He's a CFO at a $50 million mechanical contracting company, so he knows how to chart, kind of carve some of this stuff up. He did recommend that I start my own consulting company, so then that way we can keep it really clean. Because my podcast, you know, and the expenses of my podcast, is that really like a. A Big Fish contracting expense, or is that a Benny Fisher the brand expense? Yes. Does it benefit Big Fish Contracting? A little bit?

Sure.

But, like, if you're going to buy my roofing company, it's not like my podcast is directly affecting that. And so we're really trying to start to Separate some of these things and try to get, you know, because the lines get a little blurry. I'm only one human, but I got my toes and everything, and it's all.

Kind of conn. And here's here. He's right. And this is why you need to work on this this year. This is your big 2024 project, is to separate them out. At least logically separate them out. Where they each have their vivid vision, they each have their goals, they each have their budget. Because at the end of the day, you only have three resources. You have your people, which is your employees, your management team, and you. You have time, like days, weeks, and months in front of you, and then you have money. And your job is to get the highest return on investment of each of those three things. Highest return on your people, highest return on your time, highest return on your money. What's happening with blurring the lines is you're also. We lie to ourselves. We're like, oh, yeah, everything's good with my podcast business. Like, no, your podcast business is sucking wind right now. Like, if it was its own company, you're spending too much. It doesn't have any grand a year.

I already know the number. It's 40 grand a year cost.

Right?

Because I don't have sponsors and I don't make no money off YouTube. So.

Right. So what's happening is you're taking money from your. It's like you're the Robin Hood. You're taking money from your contracting, pay for all this stuff, which is okay as long as you don't tell yourself the lie that everything's good.

I'll tell my lie that.

But once you start to put it in place, you'll then say, okay, what are the goals of the podcasting? What are the goals of the brand? What are the goals of the con? And then you'll say, okay, based on that, what are my inputs going to be? And then you'll. You'll decide. Because a person can only sit on one toilet at a time. You try to sit on three toilets, it gets pretty messy. And now I'm there too, right? I've got my coaching business, my group coaching, my COO alliance. I launched another community called the Op Spot. I have my second in command podcast. I've got my six books and I've got my invest in your leaders course. Like, holy, what do I talk about online? Because it gets kind of messy and it gets kind of confusing for people. There's a danger that we can overcomplicate our marketing because we got too many things being communicated. We've got a danger that we don't have enough time and we spread ourselves too thin. Like today I've got eight media interviews and podcast interviews I'm doing and no time to catch up on the business of my business. I have the danger that my employees don't get enough time for me because I'm spreading myselves. So for you, it comes down to deciding what are the core kind of businesses you're running, what are the goals for each of those businesses, who's doing what by when? And then it's also us deciding, well, what are the kind of core initiatives that we have to actually stay focused on. And if we don't stay focused on those things, they're going to put us in danger. That's important for you to actually plan that stuff out. Where are you with those plans right now?

Well, the contracting business is pretty simple because, you know, Rob does most of the planning for that. You know, I give him a little like, what do we think we can do? And stuff like that. But because we have such a eight, you know, we have an eight year history now, like we can kind of makes it a little simpler breaking off and separating them. I'd say I'm like 60% of the way there. I still need, I think, the clarity break to really get some of those things that you talked about in line to figure out. Like, yes, the podcast is a marketing expense for Benny Fisher. Right. It's to get more people to, to know who Benny Fisher is. It's a little bit of a passion project. I'm not gonna lie. It's good business development. It's fun for me to like go out and interview people. And so I kind of like it. That's what actually keeps me excited about working all the other jobs that I have.

Yeah. So, so here's what you want to do for each one. Think about each one as their own little mini businesses and put a at least a one page vivid vision in place for each. So what's the vivid vision for the podcast? What's the vivid vision for the contracting? What's the vivid vision for the roofing company, et cetera? Second, what are the goals for 2024? Right. What's your employee net promoter score? Customer net promoter score? Profit revenue. What is strategically, what are the goals for it? And then what is the plan that you're going to execute on for each that will keep you honest? Because the big opportunity you have on the consulting or on the contracting side, your business is you have a management team in place now for the first time that can actually oversee stuff. If you set them up with the vision and the goals and the budget and plan, right? If you focus on your job with them is just to grow them and align them and keep them focused on that, that frees up your time as one of the three inputs to focus on the other things. And if you explain to them, hey, the reason I'm doing this, like, I coached a guy years ago, Bob Glazier, who runs Acceleration Partners. He's got an email called Friday Forward that goes out. He goes out to like 650,000 people. It's unbelievable. His list. He's now written four books. When he was writing his first book, I was like, don't do it, don't do it. And then he's like, no, here's why I'm writing the book. Here's the goals, here's how much time is going to be involved. I'm like, oh, that makes sense. Write the book. Explain that to your team. Because your team has to understand why you're doing the podcast and how it fits and how much time you're going to spend on each and what the budget's going to. And as soon as they understand that, they can kind of check that box. Same with your branding and marketing. Everything else that you're doing, right?

And I did this early on in my career, even in my roofing company is like, I had all these awesome ideas in my head and I had this like, great grandiose vision that I knew about, right? I could see the movie on the front of my forehead. And I. And I've learned that, you know, the more I communicate that, the better off things are. But I still find the struggle of, like, man, I'm not communicating enough. Because sometimes in my head I'm like, man, I already said that once. Like, I don't need to say it again, but I know, I know. It's like, say, listen, I have a nine year old and a one year old. It's like, you know, I got to keep repeating things to them. It's no, I'm not comparing my dollar humans to that. But it's the same thing. It's like market, right? Someone's got to hear it seven, eight times before they even decide to even maybe look at, look at picking up the phone or clicking the website. I got to stay more accountable to that. That would be a big thing for.

Me, is like, let me give you the best analogy in the world to remind us to keep doing this. Your wife really knows that you love her, correct?

Yeah.

So do you tell her once a year that you love her?

No.

Once a quarter?

No.

Once a month? No. Like multiple times a day, right? Yeah.

If you want to stay in a happy relationship. Yep.

So you're communicating and over communicating to someone who already knows that you love her and you're still over communicating how much you love her. So we have to figure out, how do we simply over communicate our vision to our employees and our customers and our shareholders and our suppliers? How do we continually communicate our vision to them and in multiple ways? Visually, Auditory, kinesthetic. How do we keep until they're making fun of us? Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, talks about communicating to the point that your team starts to mock you so that all of a sudden they're like, yeah, we know the vision is blah, blah, blah. Then you're like, okay. And then you're going to keep communicating it, because the CEO's job is to communicate vision and culture and alignment so that the team can figure out how to make that happen. Do you have a vivid vision in writing for what your business looks like or what your businesses combined all look like together?

Yeah. It's not. It's not as good as it should be. I will be honest with you because I've read your book a couple different times. Anytime I try to go do the whole, like, go deep and, like, go be very descriptive about, like, the future and about the departments and about how I want everything to look like for some reason. And it's probably the fact that it's hard for me sometimes to focus when sometimes hard for me to focus. Even if I'm taking a clarity break and I know I'm on a clarity break, it's almost like pressure to then, like, all right, go ahead and like, just get this thing done. Because then something else will pop up into my head that's really beautiful. And then I want to go, like, think about that for a little while. And then I get. It's almost like having a bunch of windows open, like on your browser, like, they're in my brain.

Here's the other part. The other reason why it's hard for us to get the vivid vision written is we don't often understand how powerful it actually is. And once we understand how powerful it is, then it's like, okay, I get it. It's now more important than almost any other window that's open on my browser. Here's the buy in, and here's why it works. You've already realized that your employees can't see the movie that you can see. They're coming to work every day, trying as hard as they all going in the directions they can see. Wouldn't it be better if they can see what you can see?

I'd like to make a movie too. See me, I want to go extreme. I want to call Steven Spielberg up and I want to like get him to sit down. So here's a full length feature film.

So here's the vivid vision is the starting point. Like the four or five page. Now you don't have to write it all yourself. You have to get it written in rough bullet points. As long as you can take 10 or 12 areas of your business and have three or four bullet points per area, ChatGPT can write it, a copywriter can polish it. That's a good starting point. You can then take that four or five page written description and you can actually get a video or a draw shop video created. Or you could create a vision board where you take different sentences and you take cutouts from magazines and create a vision board for you. And they create vision boards for themselves. You could have every employee create a vision board of your vivid vision so that it inspires them. You could have them reread it every quarter. You could have them reread it every month. You could have them sit down over zoom and reread it together every single month so that it becomes this powerful, built in, ingrained thing. You could share the vivid vision with your customers, your suppliers, your potential employees on a quarterly basis. So they are rereading your vivid vision. Like imagine if your accountant could see the movie you could see. Imagine if your business partner could see the movie you could see. Like, it's almost like what movie have you watched so many times it's crazy.

Forrest Gump.

Imagine if they could see your business as clearly as you could see. Forrest Gump. Here's what I want you to do is just sit down. This is the rough exercise and it's only two hours worth of work. Get out of your office, out of your home. No laptop, no iPad. It's a notebook and a pen. And I want you to take 10 or 12 quick areas that I'll give you right now. And I want you to write three or four bullet points for each area. I want you to talk about your company culture, your meeting rhythms. I want you to talk about marketing, operations, IT customers, sales, finance. I want you to talk about your company's core values and how you interview for them, how you Hire people based on them. How you fire people based on them. I want you to talk about your relationship with your suppliers. I want you to describe what your customers are writing about you online for reviews. What your employees are writing on. Indeed. And Glassdoor for reviews. I want you to talk about how all of the different products and services all fit together and help each other. And for each of those sections, write down the top three or four things that come to mind that describe those sections. But don't worry about how it happens and how it comes true.

I'm also. Because, you know. And again, this is common for a lot of us. Because I know this like I know it. I've always been the guy that I try to dream it and do it right.

Because that was because you had a smaller company before. Now you have a management team that can figure out how to make every sentence come true. So here's a good example. How many homes have you put roofing shingles on?

So I don't know exactly how many homes we've replaced roofs, but we've had 6,600 clients, whether they're repair jobs or full replacements in the last eight years.

Right. It's a lot of houses. You know how to roof and put shingles on a home?

Well, I don't. My roofers do, but.

Yes, but you know better than I do. Now I know what I want the roof to look like. I can show you a photo of a home and go, I want my roof to look like this with these kinds of shingles. That's the vivid vision of what I want my home to look like. I don't know how to roof it. I don't know how to take my old shingles off. I don't know how to find the people to do it. I don't know where to find the people to do it. If I can share my vision to you of what I want my roof to look like, you can make it happen, can't you? That's the power of a vivid vision for the entrepreneur, is you describe what your company looks like three years from now in such vivid detail. Your management team can figure out how to make that come true. They can figure out which projects have to happen to make every sentence come true. They figure out the budget to make each project happen. They figure out the order in which project. Like, I know for sure that if I'm going to build a new roof, I'm not going to put all the new shingles on until I take all the old shingles off. So you have to prep the area before you start prepping the second stage, before you start putting the finish coat on. And then you got to clean up the site. So the customer comes in and goes, hey, my roof looks good, but my ground around it looks good. Because you cleaned up all this too. Like you have an order of operations to do stuff. The cool thing is me as the homeowner is I don't have to worry about how to do that as long as I hire the right management team. I hire a Benny Fishy contract, I hire Big Fish contracting because you know how to do what I want done. The cool thing is you have the management team for the first time right now, which means you don't have to know how to do everything. You have to grow their skills and confidence so they can do what you. And the key is to align them. That's why you need the vivid vision.

Now makes me excited because we have a Christmas party December 8, and our annual leadership meeting, I think is in January this year. So like I'm going to get this done for the Christmas party. So that way I can tell it to all the employees and all the management team and then we then can then, you know, work on that in the annual, in the annual planning session. So.

And the key is to remind them. It's almost like build. Have you done any, any roofs for brand new homes?

No, because there's no money in that.

But, well, people do put roofs on new homes. If I was building a brand new dream home, I decide I'm going to take this piece of land and I'm going to build my brand new dream home. Do I do the roof in the first week of building the home?

I hope not.

Do I do it in the second week, third week, fourth? Probably. Probably like month four or five. I'm putting the roof on.

It's actually as soon as it gets framed in. But yeah, whatever. I know, I know, I know. Because it's, it's got to protect like the guys doing the kitchen, the bath and everything. Correct.

So you do the foundation, then you put up the walls, then you put on the roof and then. Right. So there's an order of operations in doing it. Well, some parts of your vivid vision are not going to happen until the third year. Some parts aren't going to happen until the second year. Some parts won't happen until Q4, Q3, Q2. It's important when you roll this out to your employees that they recognize you're not crazy and that they know that some parts of your vivid vision won't happen until 2026.

Because you recommend three years, right?

Correct. Only three years.

Yeah. So you know what I got stuck in is when I read Rocket Fuel and Traction, and I love those books. Those books changed my life. But they talk about the ten year.

Right. And, like, the biggest part that Gino Wickman missed in the book, Traction. And there's parts of Traction that are actually right out of my book Double Double, which came out two years before. The whole thing about traction is he created the Vision Traction Organizer, which is a list of 10 goals. Those 10 goals are good, but they're not a vivid vision. So the vision is the one missing piece from Traction that if everyone has a vivid vision, traction is how you put that vivid vision in place. The key is to remind your employees when you're rolling it out that this is how it all fits. But for you as the CEO, all you need to be super successful in 2024 is a vivid vision for your overall business. A small, vivid vision for each of your core products or services, and then goals and a plan. Your team can come up with the plan to make the goals and the vision happen. You just have to sign off on their plan. They have to sign off on your vision. Much like me, as the homeowner explains my vision for my home to the contractor so many times that he goes, I get it. Let me go and draw some blueprints and elevation drawings to build your home. He comes back with blueprints. I'm like, yeah, kind of almost here. We tweak it. He goes away, does some revisions. He comes back second or third time. We're like, yep, I sign off on the blueprints, which are the plans to make my home. He's like, I'm so clear on your vision. He hands the vision and the blueprints to the employees, and the employees can build my dream home without ever speaking to me. When your leadership team or management team starts putting the plans and the budget in place to make your vivid vision come true, you can actually step back as the CEO and really focus on your brand and the podcast and these other cool parts of building your business, because you know that your team is focused, they're all completely aligned, and then your role is just to cheer them on and become the chief energizing officer.

So part of the reason I'm doing the podcast and now I'm, you know, doing the training for other roofing companies all over the country is because I really get a good, good glimpse into how all these other companies are operating right and part of my big, big dream, I'm talking like maybe even 20 years out, would be to like have big fish contractings all over the country. Right. And to be able to do that, I want to partner up with guys that are already really successful in those markets.

Right.

Because I don't understand every single market. I barely understand the Pittsburgh market. I'm trying to do all this at a high level now because there's a lot of private equity coming in and there's a lot of these big corporations coming in and paying a bunch of money. And who knows what they're going to do with these businesses? I have no idea. But I think that I could take all the good guys. You know, maybe this is just my nobility here. I think I could take all the good guys and eventually kind of push it, put us all together. And so while my team's building a big fish in Pittsburgh, I want to help be putting these seeds right all over the country. And I think one day that it could just like they could meet somewhere in the, in the universe and like, it could just be like an explosion of like big fish contractings. And not just like the roofing part. The roofing's cool, but it's more about the culture, like you said, the culture impact for the employees, leadership plan for people to grow, develop. You know, I don't necessarily want to be the CEO. I actually would rather sit on the board. Like you said, board of directors, investors. Like, I'd rather invest.

You get to be able to start spending time thinking of this and planning on this and meeting with franchisors and companies doing roll ups and VCs. You, that's what you get to start spending your time on in 24. When you know that your management team has the vision and the goals and the project plan in place so that they can execute, you kind of know that one toilet is taken care of that allows you to then start spending time on this other toilet. But if you keep talking to them about these big ideas, it confuses the out of them or what they're to focus on.

I've noticed that I can. And Rob, you know, the integrator president, he gets a little frustrated sometimes, right? And then, you know, I'm so like on social media a lot and everybody else is seeing all this, they're getting a little confused. So I could definitely just need to clean it up. It sounds like need to get that vision nice and tight for them.

And then you explain to them, hey, your role is to execute on this vision and this plan and this budget and while you're doing that, that I'm going to keep thinking about and worrying about and planning our future together. So you guys focus. It's kind of like Elon is talking about colonizing Mars, but there's a team at SpaceX that's focusing on SpaceX. The team at Tesla is focusing on Tesla, his team at this AI companies doing his AI stuff, a team at Solar Cities. Like he's got the teams focused on their goals and visions and plans for their unit and then he's still talking about the big picture stuff, but they know it's because he's got them in place, focused that he can talk about that other stuff.

Stuff that's good. I like that analogy because I, I do, I do see what he's doing. So I can definitely see all the dots that he's connecting.

Here's the other thing I'd like you to consider this year too, and this will blow your brain. I'd like you and your wife to write a vivid vision for your marriage and describe your marriage as a couple, as parents. December 31, 2026. You describe your relationship with each other, your communication with each other, what you do for fun, your family's core values, your family's vacations, your family's health, what your family is doing to grow spiritually and to grow and have fun together, the two of you craft a three or four page description of your marriage and your family. This vivid vision is the one that my wife and I wrote to describe our marriage together. So the way that we did it is we took a bunch of areas and we went off site separately and we wrote down a bunch of bullet points separately. And then we came back and talked about them and merged them together. So we talked about travel in our daily life. And I wrote down three or four points and she wrote down three or four points. Then we talked about our health, then we talked about fitness, then we talked about recharging ourselves. Again, three or four points. We talked about personal growth. Then we talked about our vacations and our bucket list experiences. Then we talked about our friends and family. Then we talked about recreational substances, sex and connection and conflict in space and how we manage conflict and how we manage our businesses and how we manage money and all of those things and how we feel and pulling it all together. Well, all of those points I wrote down 3 or 4 or 5 points about. She wrote down 3 or 4 or 5points about. And then we met for dinner and we read each other's lists and we Decided which ones to keep, which ones to ask questions about and gain more clarity and which ones to throw out. And then we started to write it together as a document. And then we got a copywriter to help us polish it. And then we added the design elements and the, you know, the graphics. And now we share it with the world. And the reason we share it with the world is twofold. Number one is to inspire people to have better lives. But number two, it's to hold us accountable. Because the more people we share this with, the more they come to us and say, hey, I saw that you guys like to have friends join you and travel around the world. When are you going to be in Dubai next? I've always wanted to go to Dubai. I want to come and hang out with you. So we've got three friends coming to Dubai at Christmas, and then we've got eight friends coming to hang out with us in Japan to go skiing. So we're constantly meeting with people and sharing with them so that they can help us make it come true. I want you and your wife to write this because you're going to continue to build your business, and the thing that's going to hold you together is the. That matters most at the end of the day, which is your kids. You don't want to be an expert at marriage because you've done it six times. So this is what you're going to focus on in addition to the business.

That's beautiful. I got. When you said Dubai, that's so interesting, because last year I had a vision came to me that somehow some. Some. Some Dubai guy with, like, you know, the. The whole Arab clothing was gonna summons me to go speak at a world conference on love and trying to bring people together. I don't know when that's gonna happen, but that's literally on my vision board. That's so interesting that, like, you are, like, connected with Dubai now, because I don't know that many people, obviously, that are connected to Dubai.

So my company is now based in Dubai. I'm a resident of the United Arab Emirates. I'm a resident of Dubai. I have friends and family in Dubai. I'll be there for a month. I've been there five times this year. Dubai is freaking amazing. Like, it's. It's an. I think there's four entrepreneurial hubs in the world right now. Bali, Austin, Texas, Portugal, and Dubai. Silicon Valley kind of used to be, but everyone's leaving there because California's falling apart. That would be maybe the fifth. There's Lots of other cities where there's lots of cool entrepreneurs, but Dubai is absolutely on fire. So. So what's interesting right now is if you describe your vivid vision and it includes things about Dubai and you share that with the world, then guys like me come along. Go, oh, I didn't know you wanted to do. I'll introduce you to Spencer, I'll introduce you to Carl, I'll introduce you to, like, Ken. I've actually, I'm talking to a group tomorrow about me doing speaking while I'm in Dubai. So what's cool is when you share your vision for your personal life and your business. People conspire to make that come true because they're excited to help you. You, Gary Vee will help you make. He's spoken over in Dubai so many times, he's forgotten. But if he doesn't know that that's on your vision board, how can he help you make that come true?

I only ever get 5 or 10 minutes with him and he's real fast.

So, like, that's okay. In the five or 10 minutes, all you do is mention a couple of little nuggets. So your role as CEO is to always talk about the future. Your employees and management job is to figure out how to make that come true. And when you're connected, if you're in, like, a group coaching program, a mastermind program, the more that you communicate your future, the more that these other CEOs help you make it come true. Because they don't know they're clear on what you're trying to pull together.

Yeah, it's really helpful because it just. You know what else I feel like? I feel a sense of peace already and I feel a sense of confidence at the same time. And I haven't even done it yet. It's almost like. Like I can see it being done and I can see it, like, working beautifully. And I think that these calls are good because I think it gives you the little extra push that us entrepreneurs, we all need. A little push. You know, as much as we're driven.

The best athletes in the world work with coaches. The best CEOs in the world do as well. I was coaching the CEO of Sprint, 82nd largest company in the United States, and I coached him for 18 months. Thank you for sharing this stuff. You've got a cool few years in front of you.

Thanks, Cameron.

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