Best of Contractor Radio Season 4

Hey, I'm Jim Johnson, your host here with Contractor Radio, and I want to thank you for taking the time today to listen to our show. And our show is all about you, helping you get control of your business so you can grow your business and find that personal and financial freedom you're after. So hang on tight. Episode about to start.

The next kind of component to this, once again, working. We can only control ourselves, really. Let's become a human. Try that one on.

Now.

That sounds kind of weird, but let's try being a human. It's okay to be upset. It's okay to have a bad day. As a matter of fact, it's okay to struggle. It's okay to have some problems. If work was easy, everybody would do it. So maybe we become a little bit more of a human and we show a little bit more empathy and we try to dig just a little bit deeper and ask a few more questions, as well as opening ourselves up to communicating with others. So, for example, if you're having a bad day, it might not be a bad thing to say. Hey, look, Charlie, sorry, man, I'm just having a bad day and I'm just feeling a little grumpy, man. Imagine if you were talking to somebody and they said that to you. Your first instinct as a person, especially if you like Charlie or if you like Nathan, would probably be to be to say, hey, man, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you. I don't want you. For you to have a bad day. And sorry if I came off a little negative. So I made myself a little bit vulnerable in. By expressing my own humanity, which actually opened a little window for that person to see into my head, into my emotions, into where I'm at. It will also allow them to probably feel safe to communicate that themselves. The first place I heard this phrase was the village church out of Dallas or the Dallas area. So shout out to the village church. It's okay to not be okay if you work in an environment where it's not okay to be not okay. Believe me, there are people that are not okay at your work environment. They're just not telling you because everybody deals with these things. So let's try being a little bit more human. The next component to this is probably seeking some ways to create. I know there's some. There's a hot button term if you want to go there. But a safe environment, a safe place where people can actually express that they're struggling a little bit, that people are having some problems that might create more context to our Communication. And furthermore, if you're working on a team and you express to your team that you're struggling with something, odds are your team will probably be willing to come aside, come beside you, and help you. Especially if you're dealing with some things that could turn into really, really big fires later on down the road. Remember, the only person inside your head is you. And if nobody else knows what's going on inside there, then they. Then that. That miscommunication is going to be highly likely. So just in a little bit of a synopsis here, everybody has their baggage. Some of it we can help, some of it we can't. We never leave our baggage at any door. Our baggage influences the way we see ourselves, the way we see the world and our behavior. Furthermore, in order to come up with solutions for this, we actually need to address ourselves first. What is our baggage? What are our triggers? What are our patterns? Can we make better assumptions about others? Can we operate from those better assumptions? And can we become more of a human being and create a safe place for people to be able to communicate on a deeper and more productive level? If you guys want to dive a little bit deeper into this concept, there's a book out there called Leadership and Self Deception. I'll see if we can put a link down below to that book. Great book. And I highly recommend that if you're dealing with some of these things at your company, have everybody.

What do you have to say to those that say is dangerous to put your religion in your business?

I'd say they're right.

Yeah, I, I would say it's. It's dangerous to train a real good salesperson as well. He may go off and, and start his own company, but it's more dangerous for your business to not train them.

Well, I mean, I think the thing comes to mind for me now is what. Who are you more afraid of? That would be my question. Somebody says, well, I want to be careful about doing this and doing this and doing this. And my question be, well, I mean, who, like, what are you called to do, first of all? And who are you more afraid of? Like, if, if I got a, if I got a friend of mine that says, hey, you should go do this thing. And I'm like, okay. And then my mom says, you should go do this thing. Which one of those two am I more likely to be? Like, I'm probably gonna do what this person says. I'm gonna do what my mom says. Why?

Not?

Because I'm afraid of my mother. But I have more respect and I have more respect and more, more honor. And, and I'm, I'm afraid. Like if you imagine being a kid and can you getting, getting your backside whooped. Like I'm afraid of what my dad says. I'm afraid like I'm going to do that thing. So am I afraid if I don't do the thing my friend says of offending them? Well, maybe. Right, but which one am I more afraid of? And, and I don't think it's necessarily has to be like a, like a trembling fear, but that, that concept of honor and of glorification and of respect and that kind of a thing. Like I'd be more afraid of violating a directive by somebody to whom I owe so much than worrying about Joe Blow over here doesn't like the fish on your, on your business door. So he's not going to take, he's not going to use you as a, you know, as your contractor. Well, okay.

Might be God saying, hey, you probably didn't want that guy anyway. Very possible.

I think it can make you a target too though. That's the other thing. Some people, some people look for an opportunity to attack that. And so I feel like if you decide, do you believe that what I'll take, I'll rip off Del Tackett. I don't know if any of you guys know who he is, but do you believe that what you believe is really real? And if you do, how should you act in accordance with that? Because you're, you're, you're putting a flag down when you make the kind of statements, when you make the kind of statements we're making today, you put the flag down. And here's the thing. People are going to be, people are going to A, want to know if you're really who you say you are. And they'll be watching from that perspective. B, some people are going to try and tear that down because they don't believe in it. And C, some people are going to see an opportunity or an advantage to try and destroy you or use it against you.

Right?

Like, hey, don't, don't go work with contractor coach, bro. They're a bunch of, they're a bunch of God believing nut balls Bible thumpers. Like, okay, if you don't. Okay, so yeah, it is, it is, it is dangerous. But what danger do you fear more?

I'd like to piggyback on what Nathan just said. Who do you fear? Who do you fear more? Man or woman or God? And to me, when Jesus says these words. So because you are Lukewarm Neither hot or cold. I'm gonna spit you out of my mouth.

Okay.

I'm all in for Jesus. I don't.

I'm not gonna be lukewarm.

I'm not gonna.

I'm not gonna be on the fence and go, yeah, I'm a Christian on Sunday, but during the week, I need to, you know, I need to scale, scale, scale and, you know, make 100 million bucks. No, no, I'm gonna. The fear of the Lord brings wealth, honor, and long life. So, yeah, I'm not. I'm not scared of any man. I'm scared. I fear the Lord.

So a lot of people don't believe. How does that affect our boldness?

It. It affects it. If you think the world belongs to you, you know, you think everybody's got to believe you or understand you or accept you or, you know that, then that's where you get confused. If you go. If you literally believe that what you have has a audience that's specific to the voice, and you may not. Y' all may not believe this, but then you shouldn't have asked me on here. I just believe that we have a uni voice and a unique gift, and not everybody is going to pay attention to it. And we stay frustrated and we. We try to conjure up ways, in my opinion, to like, try to make everybody palatable to this word that's in us, and it's just never going to work. So you can keep going back to that well, so to speak, but the fact is, either you believe that you can affect everybody, or there's a portion of metron that deserve. That belongs to you because of your uniqueness and the spirit of the Lord within you, or you don't. And so I just don't get frustrated with people who, like, well, you know, they're Bible thumpers.

Okay, cool.

We're. We're probably not going to be in any kind of real deep relationship. And so I'm not throwing my pearl before the swine.

Okay. Anybody else on that one? Yeah.

You know, I would. I would say for. For any non believer, it's not about them believing the same as me, but, you know, what I want them to feel is. Is like the hands and feet of Jesus. You know, what was it? Faith, open love. The greatest of these is love. What I want them to feel is. Is that. That it's coming from a place of love, comes from a heart of love.

You.

If you choose not to believe the. The same way I do.

Okay.

It doesn't mean that I can't still demonstrate to you loving kindness.

That's where I was hoping it was going.

There's this gold star for Larry. Whatever.

Well, there's this thought process that as Christians, you're either on our team or off our team. Right. Like, there's two sides of this thing. And while you may not be on my team, I'm absolutely okay with that. I still love you. I still will help you. I will still do for you. I will still take action and serve and love and care for you. Because that's what we're asked to do. That is what a Christian is. And we're gonna fail. We're gonna fail every day, all day long, because we are imperfect. I think that's the thing that may get missed. The most defining a Christian is that with that comes certain expectations that we're going to act in a certain way and we're going to be, what would Jesus do all the time? We're not Jesus. We just aren't. There's a reason we need him, because we are him.

And.

I think we set ourselves up for failure when we put ourselves on a pedestal of, I'm a Christian and you're something less because you're not. Because you slam the door closed at that point. I don't want to slam the door on anybody. It's always open. It's always welcome. You can hit me through anything, Facebook, text me, call me, email me, send smoke signals, whatever it takes, my door's open. That's what I worry about. That's what I worry about more than anything else by us being bold is closing the door. Because people see that boldness as something that stands in their way, that we have drawn a line in the sand or put a flag down that prevents them from walking through that door. How do we walk that line? Because it is a line. Right. Why? Why the cardio first thing in the morning before anything else? And you also mentioned that it was fasted. Because I do the same thing. And I know why I do it. Why? Why you?

So two best times to do cardio, either first thing in the morning or immediately after your workout. And the best way to put it in, in layman's terms, is if I just ate right before I got on here and spoke with you. So if I were to go do cardio right now, really the first 30, 45 minutes, all I'm doing is burning the food off my stomach that's in my stomach versus burning stored body fat that I'm actually trying to get rid of. So you do it fasted so the whole time, start to finish, you're burning body fat.

Ah, okay. That's another good reason. That was not my. My reason was, you know, when you sleep overnight, you build up a lot of cortisol. And cortisol is the fear hormone and a stress hormone. And if you go work out, first thing, you get rid of it.

Yep.

And it's the. The wildest thing. Like, whenever I'm done with. When I start my workout, I freaking hate it. Like, it's early. I don't want to be awake. The last thing I want to do is start running around and moving my body all over the place. I'd rather sit down, maybe read a book or have a cup of coffee, kind of work my way into it. But if I just take the first step, lift the first weight, you know, do my first run, do my first pedal, whatever it is I'm doing to work out, I find that the segments easier. By the time I get about five minutes into it now, I'm starting to feel a bit of a rhythm. And then by the time I'm 10, 15, 20 minutes into it, I'm like, all right, let's go.

Let's.

How far can we. I'm starting to think about how much can a push. And then when I finish, I'm like, dude, that was awesome. I'm, like, ready to go for the day. Is that similar for you?

Yeah, it's a big, big difference for me. When I do cardio in the morning, it gets me going, gets my metabolism spiked. And plus, it's just part of everything that I do in bodybuilding. For me, you know, a lot of it transfers over into the business world from the discipline aspect. So a lot of what I do, I do it to challenge myself. Not just to be the biggest, the strongest, you know, best bodybuilder around, but I want that discipline because I know that there's stuff that I don't want to do. Like when my alarm goes off in the morning, normally I wake up before it goes off, but if it doesn't, there's days that I don't want to get up, and I definitely don't want to get up and do cardio, but I just have to. I have to get up and do it. And I know that, you know, and I tell people this all the time. Like when you hit the snooze button, that's your first task for the day. When that snooze button goes or when your alarm goes off, your first task is to get up. And so if you hit that snooze button, you failed your first task. And so from there, stuff starts to snowball. So then you miss your cardio. Well, I didn't do my cardio. I'll just get some extra sleep. I'll have a rest day. I'll have some cheat meals. I'll have this. I won't work out tonight because it's a rest. What stuff? Snowballs. So it's just a matter of getting up and doing it. And same thing with my meals. Every single morning after I do my cardio, I go out, I make all my meals for the day. Everything is weighed out to the gram, and then I package it all up, go take a shower, get ready. I don't want to do any of that. I hate cutting up chicken every morning. I hate cooking ground beef every morning. I hate. I hate it all. But it's discipline, and it's stuff that I have to do to get me where I want to be, to get to the results that I want. So it's the same thing. It transfers for me over in. Into business and anything. There's a lot of stuff that I don't want to do, and that goes with anybody in business. There's stuff that you don't want to do, hard stuff that you may hate, but you have to do it to reach certain goals. So that's another reason why I do it.

All right, let's. Let's take a pause right there, like we do around here. We got great partners. I want to make sure those partners not only get their money's worth with us, but help us keep the lights on around here. But I want to come back and talk maybe a little bit more about that discipline. And then why are you doing all this in the first place? Kind of think about that for a second. I hate interrupting these videos, but this thing is something that every contractor should have. It's CompanyCam. It is the one piece of software every home service contractor should use to document their jobs. Every picture you ever take is associated to the address you took it. It's like Instagram. For every project that you have, give a link to the homeowner and share it to them while you're doing your inspection and win more sales. If you want to find out more about CompanyCam, check the description below. Save a few bucks by following our l.

It was a field marketing management tool. And for people who don't know what field marketing is, it's kind of when you send promoters, like brand ambassadors into college campuses, and they're like, Selling Red Bull or like, giving out things. It's not sales, it's marketing. And so we had an app for. That was a very basic app, but like you said, in the back of my head, I was like, this is not. Not the next big thing. So we were always looking for that, in that first year that we were doing that company. And then we found it. And usually how we got into AI. Well, I do data science. Any. Any kind of amazing, revolutionary product. It's usually at the cutting edge of technology, right? Because that's. It's like, why now? It's. Well, because the technology exists now to be able to do whatever it is that you were thinking of doing. Amazon started because the Internet was a thing, right? It was not possible to do Amazon. Facebook started because the Internet was good enough. So there's Airbnb started because people have mobile phones and Uber. You know what I mean? So, like, there was like all these enabling technologies. So we knew it was going to be somewhere at the cutting edge. But the. The day that the idea struck me, it was. I was talking to one of our users, a field marketing manager for one of these big companies that we had in. In our. In our customer base. And it was a very simple set of questions. I asked her, it says here that you guys are talking to 100 people per event. And she said, yes. And it says here also that you guys do 50 events a week. And she said, yes. And I said, you're talking to 20,000 people per month, like field marketing. And she said, yeah, I mean, that's normal. And I was like, how many markets are there, like you in this big company that you're working with? And she said, there's about 200 markets. It's like big brand, big companies. And I was like, are you talking to 4 million people every single month, like, face to face and all these interactions? And she said, well, if you put it that way, I never thought about it that way. And then in the back of my head, I'm thinking, the marketing executives at these big companies, which I know they're spending, you know, half a billion dollars every year on surveys, social media analytics, focus groups, all to try to get into the minds of their consumers so that they can, like, you know, create better marketing, better products, better experiences, and here and then from all those sources of data, even social media analytics, and you guys can look this up, like, you look at one of the most popular products, like, like Bud Light or like Anheuser Busch. You look at the total engagement that they have in social media like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and it's like a couple hundred thousand points of engagement every single month. Maybe like getting into the millions when they go viral or something like that. But on average, on average. And here's this lady telling me that, you know, these field marketing brand ambassadors, these cosh kids are reaching like that they have the single biggest source of data from their consumers. It's happening at these field marketing events. Four million conversations every single month. And I was like, wow, what if we could actually capture this, you know, transcribe these conversations, analyze it with natural language processing and turn them into these little dashboards that these marketing executives are used to seeing for their surveys and their social media analytics. What if we could do that? And then I started doing the numbers and I realized it wasn't only this company. It was, you know, Red Bull and Heineken and Molson, nineheuser Busch and Coca Cola and Pepsi. And it wasn't only brands, it was anybody that was talking to customers face to face. We did the numbers and there's about 10 billion conversations being had between customers and salespeople or service people offline, face to face every single month. You think when you walk into the retail store, when the roofing contractor goes into the home, the solar, the telecommunication, the banking, all these tens of millions of salespeople who are having tens of billions of conversations every single month. And just to put it in contrast, there's 80 billion Google searches. So 10 billion versus 80 billion Google searches. So Google's worth $2 trillion. We were like one eighth of Google's. Not a bad number. And when we saw this idea, it was just like a no brainer for us. I told to my like one of my co founders and I was like, hey man, do you want to drop this thing that we're doing and you know, go to this, you know, really hard problem of AI and just figure it out? Like we were doing good, man. We were like could have kept growing and made a couple million and be fine. We weren't interested in that. We were like, no, no, no. Go big or go home. We're going for this. 10 billion conversations. Let's do it. Let's go.

That is that first off, amazing story. Just the, the whole thing of you got something going good. A lot of people when they got something going good, they're not looking for the next best thing. And it's like, hey, let's just nail that and get that thing perfected. The, the way that you see things like you through those questions, you got 10 billion conversations. Like you asked a few questions, then got to 10 billion conversations just like that. Like, wow, this is big. And you understood how big that was. You know, first off, that takes a smart guy, like, to understand.

Yeah, yeah.

Click to that. So kudos to you. I was sitting there seven years ago thinking about the same thing. This idea that there's so many sales conversations going on and nobody knows what's being said. Yeah, yeah. It's one to one. And you could say anything to that guy and that guy could respond with anything and nobody knows anything about it except for the final result.

Yeah.

From you. Or they didn't. But what led to that? Right?

Like. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so we have for generations been Neanderthals and really like guessing what works. We're guessing, we're putting it together. And you see from format, presentation, practice, role play, you see results improving and you keep improving them over time. And it can be successful. But I always felt it could be way more successful. But the technology wasn't there yet or I wasn't smart enough, which probably to find it.

It wasn't there.

It wasn't there. I feel better now because I searched, I searched up and down, backwards and forwards like, hey, how can we analyze these conversations to generate feedback back to the company, the manager and the salesperson to give them the highest possible feedback that would allow them to have success more often to find out what actually works. Then Contractor Coach Pro got busy. Contractor radio.

Set off on a back burner.

And I'm grateful and thankful that somebody chased this because I thought it was something. That's a big thing.

Yeah, I mean, we're certainly not the first people that, that had this idea. I know many people, like some of our customers that are pretty smart guys themselves. They were like, I thought about this in 2015, we couldn't make it happen. So there was a lot of things that had to happen for this to exist. 2015, 2016 is when speech to text transcription got good enough to be able to transcribe audio well enough so that it could be used. And now 2020, we are actually at the very cutting edge of, I mean, if you think about like a home improvement sale, it's usually face to face. Outside, it's like really, really difficult to capture this kind of audio because you're like dealing with like noise and like multiple speakers and you have to like, you know, you're dealing with like the, the husband and the wife and the, you know, everybody who's talking in the thing and it's being captured by one microphone. Whereas in like a call center, you like, you have, you know, multiple people speaking on each microphone. So it's like multi channel audio. When, when you're trying to bring speech analytics to a lot of these industries that it has not been in like those 10 mil, those 10 billion conversations, which is mostly offline, you're, you're really at the cutting edge of like AI because you have to identify people by the sound of their voice. You have to like understand who's talking when you have to filter out noise if there's, you know, you have to know what speech, like what someone's speaking. And when there's like music that has people talking in the music and you have to know that that's music, music. And you need to. So that's like really difficult to do.

But.

And the technology was not there at all in 2012.

It just wasn't there.

So I, during my time inside of Home Improvement, inside of my time as a manager, I've always lived by, I've heard it and lived by. It is, you know, if you do the right thing, the money's going to come. And it's. For me, I didn't even become, I was one of the top sales reps in the country in mortgage, and the money came so fast. My wife, when I told her that I wanted to become a sales manager, I mean, she was devastated because she knew that the gravy train was about to be over. But that moment that I was able to help somebody the first time, where.

They were going to have to go.

Back to a $30,000 a year job. And now, I mean, this, this person that I helped is still making three, four hundred thousand dollars a year. And that does something to you. You know, just like with you, it's not always about the money. And I wanted to have your story about medicine, but you know, there's so many people that come under you and that is worth more than anything you ever get paid. And so, you know, I know that Becca's the same way. She has that heart of art of gold that just wants to help.

You know, it's. And I have, I'm real big about sending the female reps that I have to Becca. Right. Becca knows how to use that, that female Persona without, without having to play this little game, you know, to try to make sales happen. Like she knows how to be a sales rep as a woman in, in a man's industry. Right. Which is total bogus. Right? Because like if you're, if you're not hiring female Sales reps. You're insane, right? Like you're just. And you just, you just, you need to grow up or something. 20, 22, you know what I mean? Because we got, I mean, Brianna gave me a run for my money last year and I mean, I had to. I, you know, I started sales managing. So my, my sales kind of backed off a little bit and. Because I'm trying to focus on the team and do that whole thing and, and so she actually passed me up and I was like, dude, no way. So like I've turned it on in the last quarter, right, and passed her back up. And it's been an ongoing joke since then, but when it comes like that, I want to get back to what you were just talking about over a second. I have a whole bunch of people that are under me now, right? And my solar sales team, man, they've got more experience than me in abundance, right? Like abundance between five of them. They sold $35 million in solar last year, okay? And I sold a million dollars in the month of February, right? Like that's, that's the extent of my solar career. Whenever I'm trying to recruit like $35 million worth of closers, you know, but, but I got the job done, right? And regardless of what, of what goes on, when you're a closer, you're a closer. And that's the same thing in hiring, but, you know, you got to close them. But it's the self fulfillment that I get out of the people that I watch go from situations that I was in, right? And that's the biggest value to me in this industry is it has given me a platform to make a change, right? Like a legitimate change. And there's $35 million worth of closers. Hey, they had money when they came over, man. I love them to death, you know, and those guys are crucial to our team and always will be. But the ones that didn't have nothing and that came from other roofing companies not selling a dime because they didn't know how to. And the company wouldn't take time to teach them. And then to watch them now, as she's the number two rep in the whole company, right? That right there, dude, is worth way more than the quarter million I've made this year, you know, Way more. It's. Yeah, I mean, it's.

Yeah, I mean, I'm right there with you. The feeling you get, the hair that stands up on your arms. Just when you think about it, that every time you see her and see the big smile on her Face knowing that you didn't just change a life, you changed lives. Because it's a domino effect.

Yeah.

That she's gonna take the knowledge that you gave her, she's gonna pass it on. That's, that's human nature.

You know, it's so cool, man. Like, you know, I didn't, I had Brad there to fall back on with any like, life problems that I, because I was in the army before I was an addict, right? So I was really good at doing exactly what I was told. Right. I was never good at making my own decisions in life because I never got, I never had, I never had to do it. Right? And so by learning how to, how to do this and having to go and reach out and make these relationships right here without anybody making it happen or telling you to and just realizing, oh crap, I'm gonna fail if I don't figure out and swallow my pride and go ask for help by people that obviously. Right. Know what they're doing. And so that, and that created kind of a, a double, a pro and a con for me, right? Like the pro is, is my reps, My reps are going to teach themselves how to do this job, right? And my reps are gonna, and I'm not gonna take it any, I'm not gonna take it easy on them. And I'm even harder on my friends, right? Because I've hired some people and had to terminate employment on friends, right? Because that's just the nature of the beast. Not everybody. I'd rather have to terminate somebody than watch them lose everything they have because they're just not made for it. Right? But my reps, my reps know how to self educate, right? And my reps know how to. I, I, I say it all the time and I'll censor it here, but you mess it up until you figure it out, right?

Yeah.

And, and that's the truest statement that you're ever going to hear. If anybody in sales say, I can go knock a door and get past it at ease now. But when I first started, I knocked 500 before I got that first. Yes. And when they did, I said, are you sure? You know, like, I got so many no's, man, that I asked the lady if she was sure and I'm like, yeah, it was. They were like, probably shouldn't say that. And I was like, yeah, I know. I panicked. You know, I've had no 500 times. I just expected it, you know, Really? I was like, sure.

Then.

Now I'm like, you know, I look back now and I'm like, oh, my God, it was terrible, you know, but yeah, I did. I said, are you sure? And she just. I think she just lay over, felt sorry for me because I was sweating so bad. It was August, you know, but, yeah, man, it's. It's been a crazy day.

When it comes to owning our marketing, can you describe for me what that actually means? I think we hear this ownership side of things, and a lot of times we look at it as, okay, I'm the owner and I own my marketing. So I've got that company over there and that company over there and that company over there doing my marketing for me. I am getting the reports from them, and I'm making decisions based off those reports of what I'm going to do with that next. But when it comes to owning market, what does that mean to you?

Well, let's use that example that you just gave of taking a look at those reports.

First question is, do you even know.

What you're looking at?