Contractor's Guide: Scale Without Chaos | How to Build Processes That Grow Your Business

Your process has a bunch of different downstream benefits as well. So if you. We get a lot of people who need to build job descriptions for their people. Well, what, what do we base the job description off of? Because honestly, you could just go Google production manager job description and it's gonna bring up something for you. Yeah, very generic and it might not be half bad.

Might be a good starting point.

Yeah, it might be a great starting point. But how do you know that that's the right one for you? You know it's the right one for you because you go back to consult your process and you look at where the production manager is involved and where they're not. And if you can find those things, then we can begin to generate the scope of work that they're supposed to handle. So you remember how we started with this idea, or there is this idea that your biggest process is your customer start to finish. Well, different people in your company are going to interface with that customer or with that process throughout that whole life cycle of that customer. And so where does that happen? Those are the things that go into your job description. And from that job description, you now have a scope of responsibility. And the greater the scope of responsibility, the more you're probably going to pay the person to hold those responsibilities. The smaller the scope of responsibility, potentially the less you may end up paying that person. But your processes are how you're going to get to that point.

Have you ever tried to build a job description without a process?

People do it all the time, build hundreds of them.

It's impossible to do.

It's impossible to do a good one.

So, and my experience with that, when I ran Nubs Media, I brought my mom on as like the secretary.

That's what we'll call it.

We'll just call her secretary. I had no process behind when she was supposed to like, do what or anything like that. I was like, answer the phone, reply to email, send invoices, make sure everyone gets paid.

That's your job.

But when and how?

Yeah, and, but, and then I never thought about any of that. And I would spend a lot of my time answering those types of questions. But I was so new of owning a company, I didn't understand. It's because I was missing a process which bled into the social media manager that I had that worked on all of that stuff. There was no process for her on how to go about doing it. It was just me telling her what to do and then just go do it.

Well, Nathan mentioned the downstream side benefits of a process and that's one of them right there. Back again, talking about leadership and capacity. One of the things that will bog us down as leaders is not having a process. And by not having a process, the reality is we become Google, and we are easily searchable. They just type in our number, hit a text message, and boom, here we go. Or they dial us on the phone and they call us. And we're constantly in this mode of answering questions that if we would have just sat down, did the hard work, put it together one time, we'd never have to answer that question, which. This is the big epiphany that I had. Once I finally did a process, I created about 70% more time for me to work on my business. Everybody had exactly what they were supposed to do, how they were supposed to do it. All the questions stopped. I didn't know what to do. I was like, man, I got all this time now, okay, let's make this thing repeatable. Let's make this thing scalable. Let's measure it and improve it. And that's the ultimate benefit of it, is if you can create a process that's repeatable over and over and over again and train to it. Now you know what to expect from everybody, so you can inspect what you expect instead of just simply out there shooting from the hip and doing their best to try and get something through. Well, if you can measure that, you have a chance to improve it. It can always be improved. Nothing's perfected. And it's amazing, the new things that come out of that, how that process actually goes from this kind of big thing that you created. It actually gets smaller and smaller and more refined and cleaner. And when you make something repeatable and scalable, it's valuable. I can now sell this thing. And here's the real key thing. This is one of the things that put me down this road, like, why I started thinking about it. There was a story behind it. I got a call at 1:15 in the morning from one of my sales reps, asking me, how many squares does a roll of felt cover? And for those of you that don't do roofing, a roll of felt covers four squares. We have talked about it a hundred times. I've done it in training, but we never.

Some rolls of felt. We know some rolls of felt.

Ten pounds, ten square. Like, we get it all right. Yeah. At that time, in that place, in that circumstance, it covered four squares. So instead of, oh, that's gonna be brutal. I can't wait. So instead of answering the question, the frustration, the lack of emotional intelligence, all that other good stuff, because I was a young leader, young owner. Instead of answering the question at 1:15 in the morning, I took the phone, threw it up against the wall and shattered it against the wall. Woke my wife up in the middle of the night. She was like, what's going on? And my reaction was very emotional. He's an idiot. I've told him a million times, how in the world can they not know it? And all the other good stuff. And that was what started me down the road. I asked myself, why, like, why did that, why did that guy need to do that? It was my fault. It was my fault because I did not give the instruction, the guidance and the process to do it. So then I went and hired somebody to say, hey, how do I build a process the right way? We ended up building that process. We made it very repeatable. And so every single time that somebody went out in the field or interacted with a homeowner, or interacted with a vendor, or interacted with a teammate, I knew exactly what they were supposed to do. And I could measure it, I could hold them accountable to it. And it freed up a whole crap ton of time for me to grow and scale my business, which also made my business very valuable to the point that lots of people wanted to buy it because it could function without me. That was the key.

And maybe lastly on this, if you really are envisioning dreaming of truly scaling your business, I mean macro level scaling, you will not be able to accomplish that without having this process written. Because what many don't understand about scaling is scaling isn't just adding people to your company to grow it.

What?

Come on, no way.

I can hire a hundred sales scaled.

You know, scaling is when you increase your production and ability to handle greater volume by decreasing the amount of responsibilities that each role holds to down to the truest form of what they're best at. And so in other words, when you're scaling your business, and Jim alluded to this earlier, you actually reduce the number of responsibilities your salespeople have, trying to get them into the zone where they are their most efficient. You do the same thing with your production people, the same thing with your administrators. And so you're adding people to your company, but for smaller amounts of responsibility. That is actual scaling. Because each, each pile of responsibilities has so much volume in it that what, what one person used to be able to do 10 different steps, there's so much volume that now five of those steps is a full time job now. And so that's what scaling actually looks like. And you're not going to be able to do that unless you have these processes laid out so detailed that you can then say, okay, we're going to take this hat, cut it in half, and now this hat is smaller, hat's handling way more of those tasks now. And then begin to add people to your company with more narrow and more specialized jobs to do. And that's not going to happen unless you have your processes built.

The biggest thing about process that I realized is it reduced friction. There was so much friction between people and how they did things. And like this guy did it this way and that guy did it this way and they would turn it into the next person in line and they'd have two or three or four or five or ten different ways to look at something. But when they got it one way, the same time the friction was reduced, the process sped up, they could do it faster and repeat that thing over and over again. And like you said, scaling isn't adding people. Scaling is reducing the amount of responsibility for somebody to perform because your volume has necessitated it. Correct. And think about what that does for you. What that does for you makes your training easier. Now I only have to train this little piece to this guy instead of this huge big piece. And then he can grow, he has a growth path with your business starts out here, moves to here, moves to here, moves to here, and gradually learns all this stuff that when you were a smaller company he had to learn through a lot of experience. It's a beautiful thing.

Like Nick Saban said, trust the process, trust the process. Trust the process.

Well, I think that's really it.

Unless you guys have anything else to.

Add from that perspective.

I don't want to beat a dead horse.

The last thing I would say. This I think is really important because if your eyes haven't glazed over at this point and you haven't stopped listening to us and it's overwhelmed you and seemed overcomplicated, start simple. First nail the milestones. Just get that down. Like let's follow these milestones and that might still be a little willy nilly inside of each one. Then find the right person to help you define what happens inside of those milestones. Because you don't have to do the whole thing. Maybe you have a production manager assign the production part to him. Maybe you have a sales manager assign the sales part to them. Maybe you have an administrator that's helping you give them the bookkeeping or the invoicing or the paperwork or whatever it is that they're doing. Have your team help you. That's why we do process. Where we do process, we do leadership culture and then process. If we have great leaders that foster a great culture, that culture wants to build those processes because it makes everybody's lives easier. So don't think that this thing is this big gigantic thing that you got to bite off all at one pop. Get the milestones, then start to work inside of each one of those milestones until you get that ideal process. Once you have that, whenever you get the if then statements, if this happens, go do that, then you build out that little process and you do that with just the small little milestones that are in each one of those. Have you heard that there's a social network just for you? Well, if you haven't, you're going to. It's the Contractor Collective. It's a purpose driven social network that we built just for you. So you have a community that's just like you, sharing information to make us all better. No negativity, no distraction. If you're anything like me, you hate social media because of all the distraction and ads and all the other garbage algorithm telling you what you want. This allows you to create your own algorithm to follow the people you want to follow and and get the feed that you want to have. There's also all kinds of other training, content groups to join. Fun stuff to do as a community of contractors without the distraction of traditional social media. If that sounds like a good thing for you, go to the Play Store, go to the App Store, download the app and join today or join right below. In the description there's a link. Invite all your friends and we'll see you inside Contractor Collective.