A short coaching talk by Jim Johnson emphasizing that leadership and culture must come before operational execution. He argues businesses often focus on hiring, sales, and marketing without first fixing leadership, culture, and processes, leading to poor training, slow "time to money" for new hires, and inconsistent service delivery.
How many of you in here are hiring right now? Raise your hands. See, I can go get a job with a roofing company. Why would I work for you? What makes you different that's going to help me achieve my goals? Because if that's not your focus, all you're giving them is a job. And your job better pay them more than the other place. Yeah, I got a yeah. Okay, we're getting close to passing the plate here in a minute. As soon as we get an amen. The other backbone is your operational backbone. This is the one you all love. This is the one everybody is. This is the one where you all focus on technology, marketing, sales, production, training, recruiting and hire. Let's go do those things. And if you do those things before you did those things, you're screwed. All you're doing is putting people into a broken place. And that was the epiphany for us. That was the light bulb that went on for us. We went, haha, I get it. These guys that are doing really, really well, they have great leadership and culture, they at least have that. If they have great processes, they do even better. Which one of these things do you think people come to us the most for? Which one are they like, hey, can you help us with this? Sales, marketing, and the last one, recruiting, hiring and onboarding. Can you help me hire more people? I'm like, yeah, sounds great. We can certainly do that. We're good at it. What does your training program look like? And it gets really quiet. Well, you know, we'll put him with one of our guys. You know, he's going to ride along. Ride along. Training takes forever. And I'll tell you right now, number one component of your training better be time to money. How fast can I get this guy up to speed where he's actually making money or girl? Because if I'm not focused on that, I'm going to hire a bunch of people. They're going to ride along with somebody that's not saying what I want them to say out there in the first place. They're going to fail. They're going to take a long time to make any money, and I'm going to go through that cycle over and over and over again. And if I do train everybody, how am I going to produce it all? Do I have enough crews? Can I get those crews? Can those crews execute exactly the way we want them to every time? Or is it a little scared to send that crew out there? Is there a process for it? Is every single customer happy? Is it an oh my God experience, See how they happen in order. Because I'll tell you right now, if you don't have a good leader, you'll have a terrible culture. If you have bad culture, you're not going to have good processes and just put them in order and think about them.
