Free Form Friday

Hey, hey everybody. Jim Johnson here and thought I'd go live today. Went so good the other day I thought I would go ahead and do it again. I've been working on this 365 day hard thing and no, it's not 75 hard. 75 hards. The workout and the water and the reading and all that other good stuff. But I wanted to challenge myself this year to do something I'm actually kind of uncomfortable with. And that thing that I'm uncomfortable with is creating this type of content where it's live kind of a little bit off the cuff. And I didn't want to just do what everybody else does. I wanted to make sure that every day was something valuable. And so that's what I'm hoping to do today. And so I said, hey, how am I going to do this and keep it fresh, keep it cool. And so I decided to start doing some themes and yesterday I did think about it. Thursday did a short video post down on Facebook reels and Instagram Reels and TikTok and stuff like that. And day before that I did a live just introduction to what it is that I'm doing. And today I thought I'd come back with a live and do what I'm calling Freeform Friday. And so I've got all kinds of topics I could talk about. But those of you that are out there watching right now, this is my man. I don't know who Facebook user is. You could type that in. I think it might be Eric Richardson. He popped up as my man the other day, so. So it might be the same guy. Hey, welcome back you guys. This is Freeform Friday. This is going to be about you guys. But if I don't, am I anonymous again? Yeah, you got to give Streamyard the whole like hey, tell them who I am thing. But yeah, you're anonymous again. It's the best way to be sometimes wish I was a little. Ah, good. I guessed correctly. So Freeform Friday, I would love for this to be a thing where you guys have something on your mind. It has been something that's bothering you all week. It's something that you're proud of. It's something that was just good news. It could be anything and everything. That's why they call it free form. Who knows, I might show up on here one day with a beer. It is Friday afternoon anyway. So what do you guys want to talk about today? There's quite a few of you already on. I have some ideas and I can throw some of those out if you like? Because there were things that came up throughout the week as I was working with contractors and things like that. Some of these things came up, and I thought maybe we could share some of those here live on Facebook and maybe help a few people out. One of those things that came up this week, like, who should I hire first? We could talk about that if you like. What they wanted to talk about this 365hard, like, why am I doing it? And so we could talk about that if we want to. Resolutions came up and the lack of belief in them and the belief in them and what they do and how many people fail, why they fail and stuff like that. There was a lot of AI. What areas do contractors who are trying to grow struggle with the. Oh, great question. They struggle with a couple of different things, and it depends on their stage. Great question. So I'm going to write that up on the board here. I'm going to use my vibe board today. We're going to use that and kind of show what that does. What do contractors. I'm talking the other direction, so you probably can't hear me real well. What do contractors struggle with the most when they're growing? Struggle with growing. Running out of room there. So a couple of things they struggle with. First off, not realizing that it's a business. They think it's the same thing they were doing before. So they might have been a salesperson. And they. They think that because they're a great salesperson, they're able to translate that into running a business because they could sell a lot, but they miss a lot of the factors that go along with that, like understanding your finances would be a big 1. Reasons 1 and 2 why contractors fail the most are lack of leadership skill and lack of financial acumen. Not having those two things, even when you're small, can really hurt you if you're bringing on your first two or three people. If you don't know how to lead people, you're kind of more about you than others. Because you were an individual superstar sales guy, you're gonna have a hard time getting people to follow you. You hear it all the time. Like, people aren't loyal. They don't stick around, and millennials are lazy and all that stuff. And it's not that they don't want to work, it's just that they don't want to work for you. And that's because you're probably lacking in some leadership skill. And the great thing about it is that's a skill. It's something anybody can Learn. And so we can get out there and learn it. Go put in the time and the effort to get disciplined, learn how to be a great leader. Because if there's a bunch of other companies out there that have a bunch of people working for them, they're doing something right. So it's possible you're just lacking in something. The other side is the finances side. Just understanding quickbooks and ledgers and budgets and profit and loss and balance sheets and things like that really, really sticks people on. Being able to take their knowledge that they have, whether it's being great at sales or greater installation and translating that into actually running a business, understanding all of the pieces that go with running a business. And if you're interested, I'm not trying to sell you anything, but you can go buy the book. It's on Amazon Contractors blueprint. And it's going to give you some of that format of what you need to know to keep you from going out of business. So let's see here. I was asked today when your second book is coming out. Yeah, it's been a bit of a struggle, to be honest with you. I hate to say I'm busy. I hate that word. It's a little bit of why I have done what I've done this year with creating this content, this 365hard. What that's going to do is it's going to keep me where I need to be, which is here, creating content for you guys out there. You won't see me at as many conferences. I was trying to not travel as much as I did. I was only home, I think, five or seven weekends out of the whole entire year. And that's not conducive to me being successful or the lifestyle that I wanted. And so I sat down over the holiday and said, hey, how are we going to do this and give back? Because we go these conferences all the time. There's a thousand of them. They're good, don't get me wrong. But it's pretty much the same 500 to 1,000 contractors that are out there. And just so everybody knows, there's about a million of you out there. And so things are holding them back from going to those conferences, whether it's finances, it's time, one of those things. So we want to do some things that maybe kind of give you those snippets throughout the year that you need, those golden nuggets. But you don't have to travel anywhere, you don't have to spend anything. It's free, it's Helpful. So we're going to do a little bit of a different route on that and probably do some more webinars and stuff like that to get you the content you need, short timeframes to help you build your business. But back to the book. That attitude and that approach is going to give me time to finish that second book. I'm hoping to have that done by the end of May is the game plan. And I will probably go do what I did last time, which is go out in the middle of nowhere where nobody's around, so I can just stay totally focused on that. And I'm going to write the second half of the book, which is all about technology, marketing, sales training, production and recruiting, hiring and onboarding. And so now we'll have both pieces. Our foundational side of our business and our operational side of our business. Good question. What's up, Jim? You are. You're what's up. I don't know who it is. It says Facebook user. You didn't give streamyard the approval to have your name on there. So not sure who it is. What's the fastest way to sip my ties in Boca Raton? 24. 7. Okay. Boca Raton, that's Florida. If I remember right, I've actually done three commercial buildings in Boca Raton. Fastest way. Okay, so this is the fastest way to sip a Mai Tai 24. 7 in Boca Raton. So what you got to do is you got to go to. I can't remember the name of the hotel, but it's got a rooftop bar on top of it. And what you do is you get a funnel, take it up to the rooftop bar, and you say, hey, just keep this thing full. All right? Keep it full throughout the day. I'm going to be down in the pool. We're going to run a tube all the way down to the pool. And you just keep filling it as you see it go down. And I got you. That's the fastest way to drink my ties 247 in Boca Raton. Michael Stearns. Hey, Michael Stearns. That's you. I don't know. Was that you with the Boca Raton? That's cool. William Thomas Riley, you rock. Hey, thanks, man. I really appreciate that. I hope you guys are kind of enjoying this. I'm having a fun time doing it. When we join, it doesn't give us an option to join stream. So when you see the. Hey, that's a good question. So when you see me post the live on there, it'll say, Jim's going live using Streamyard give Facebook approval to see your name. So you gotta do it like before we get on the live. So as you come to it, you're gonna click on the live. Click on that little link up above and that should give you the ability to do that. So hopefully that takes care of that. Either way, I can get you guys by having you type in your name and all that other stuff. So what else we got going on out there? So I've, we figured out how to drink a my. Okay, we have drink Mai Tai's 247 fast Boca Raton. And when we get, when we get this board filled up, that's when I'm gonna be done. That's when we'll be done. Second book. So second look. All right, cool. All right, what else we got when we joined. Okay, so that's where we are. Nobody else has got anything. I've got topics we can certainly talk about who has a better mustache than Eric. So that's a, you know, that's really been kind of one of those things. The mustache thing seems to have caught on for whatever reason. And some of you guys are amazing at growing. Like you can grow one overnight. It's like shave and the next day you got a mustache. I'm not that guy. And on top of that, my wife just absolutely hates the idea of me having a mustache. She will not even kiss me. Like, she won't have anything to do with me. So I'm not one of those guys. But the question is, who has a better mustache than Eric? And so I'm going to give a shout out to my boy, Luke Hanson, the creator, founder, CEO of company camp. Dude has a rock star like, handlebar, full out mustache. Looks like he should be like the Monopoly Man. He can, he can rock it pretty good. Eric Chris, Aaron Christie. Yeah, he's got a pretty good mustache going. My guy, my right hand man, Nathan Thibodeau. That boy can grow a killer mustache. Very Magnum PI or he's somewhere between Magnum PI And Ted Lasso. One of those two somewhere in there trying to think who. Matthew Mulholland. That guy's got an awesome stash. Like, I don't know what you guys do and how you grow them so fast, how you take care of them. I get all these ads like, hey, the beard gel and all that stuff. I'm like, dude, I seriously, I don't even have hair, much less a beard. So what are we going to do with that? The. I don't know any of you members of Bespoke. Have you ever Done that. The bespoke thing is 49. You get this cool box every month and if you don't catch it, you get whatever they send you. I almost didn't catch it and I got was going to get some of that beard stuff. I'm like that's not me. So what else we got? I love questions like I would rather it be like that today. Just have a little fun. It's fun Friday. It's the afternoon. Have a good time doing what we're doing. Guys want to talk some business stuff? We can certainly do that. I got a question today actually about the podcast and running a podcast and creating a podcast. Anybody out there thinking about that? Stearns again, what do you see more frequently? Storm contractors that participate in digital that don't participate in digital marketing or retail roofers that have sales teams that don't do self gen activities. Oh the one I see more often, retail teams that do not have self gin aspects to their business. Now neither one of those are very high. Like Storm guys don't do a lot of the retail. I'm sorry, Storm guys don't do a lot of the digital marketing. They, they're challenged a bit because of the moving around and and digital marketing has some establishment side of things to it where like your SEO you got to kind of establish yourself. There's some ways to do that. We help teach a lot of that here in our coaching to overcome those type of things. But you have to be a little bit more proactive and plan those things out for whatever reason. The retail guys, I always talk like there's two things that are kind of wrong with those two different models. One is the storm people. All the guys who do storm restoration thinking they're salespeople. If you go out and you sell a roof to somebody for their deductible and put that roof back on, you're not a salesperson, you're an order taker. I'm sorry to say it that way. That is what it is. I think about it, you'd be the world's greatest salesperson on the planet. If you sold Mercedes for $2,500, you'd sell a million of them. You sell every Mercedes that they make. So that's not sales. That's order to have. People would line up just to get that done. And then the other side of it is on the retail side, those guys are lead babies. They wait around until they get a lead and they don't understand that if they were out doing some self gin aspects of what they do it would make a huge difference in their income, make a huge difference to the business they work for, make a change in their lives and for their families, maybe some generational wealth. So expand your minds a little bit and open up your minds to these other opportunities. Some of my best clients out there are retail clients. That door knock. They door knock. They also create leads digitally, and they absolutely murder it. So stormers probably want to hide from callbacks for states. Depends on the story. Now, I know us storm restoration guys, I was one for a long time, get kind of a bad rap out there. But for the most part, most of them do it well. It's the ones that don't do it well that get noticed. It gets loud and gets knocked, and everybody's like, stormers are bad. I think a lot of those guys do really good work. They're really trying hard to do it right now. Don't get me wrong. There's the nefarious ones out there, but I think there's more good ones than bad ones. 100% great. Valuable information. All right, let's go. Hey, Pancho. Good to see you, man. Good to have you on board here today. What other cool. That question was retail versus storm marketing. I'm leaving some more space. What other questions we got out there? That was a great question. What is it that's on your mind you've been thinking about? Is technology scaring any of you guys? Recession scaring any of you guys? The consolidation side of things that on anybody's mind, you guys kind of going home, man. These are all things that are concerning me, and I'm worried about them. And all that good stuff. What's. What's happening there? Those were some things that came up this week. Automating your processes came up this week quite a bit. And then one of the other questions I got after my last live was like, what do you guys do? What are you. And we, you know, contractor, coach, pro. I think there's some indication that we're coaches, but what do we coach and how do we coach it? We got an amazing review today from one of our clients that really kind of summed it up. He said, there's lots of coaches out there. There's marketing coaches, there's sales coaches, there's recruiting coaches and business ops coaches and things like that out there. We. We're the only one that I know of that kind of covers all the bases. That's really what we're about. We have head coaches that help our clients in leadership and culture, process, accountability, sales, marketing. They Work with them in those areas, recruiting and hiring. And then we have like specialist champion coaches that they are very focused on a specific area that us head coaches probably you wouldn't want us coaching you on. So, like finance, hr, advanced sales coaching, like what Chuck Toki does with us, advanced marketing coaching, like Tommy Richardson does with us. Those are our team. So from start to finish, all those 12 areas of our business, we're able to help you in all those. And they said, how would you describe yourself? I said, like, kind of like a board of directors maybe to look out for you. We're not like your. Your virtual CFO type of thing. We're more board of directors where you can rely on us to be able to answer most any question you would have about your business in all the various aspects of it all in one place. And super affordable for having a amazing board of directors. Usually a board of directors pretty expensive to have for your business. How can I hire Eric Rich now? Eric, are you posting this like it says Facebook user? So I'm not sure who's posting it, but it says, how can I hire Eric Richardson to come and teach me solar? He would be a good guy. That would be a great guy to probably teach you some solar. He does an amazing job of it. I don't know if you guys know Eric Richardson. He's based out of San Diego, been doing roofing for a long time. Understands it inside and out, from installation to business to marketing. And the solar thing he's really invested a bunch of time in. I don't want to, like, throw him out there, but if he's one of those guys that will answer questions, reach out to him if you're interested in solar, because there is pitfalls there that can take you down in a hurry. We've had to do some reclamation projects with contractors after getting into solar to get them out of the hot water they got themselves into. But solar can be really good for you if you know the ins and outs of it and what you're doing. Yeah. Eric said, yeah, it's me saying that. Are you offering that now, Eric? Are you, like, going and teaching people how to sell solar? That's pretty cool, man. You are one of the top. Like, I would ask you to come teach me how to sell solar. That's not one of those things that we do. It's one of the few things that we don't teach here at Contractor Coach Pro. Maybe you can come to work for us, Eric. Maybe come be our solar coach. That's cool. Anytime you can Help. That's great. So what else we got going on? How's the first of the year going for you guys? It's January 6th, right? January 6th. We're six days into it. How many of you have kept up with your resolutions? Like I made a resolution, I'm going to do this thing. You kept up with it. Like for my wife and I, one of our resolutions was dry January. We're not going to have any alcohol in January because we had a very wet December. So we're going to have a dry January and we've been good so far. And don't, don't get me wrong, I was tempted to have a beer last night. We were next to a beer garden. So how are you guys doing on yours? That would be cool to hear. What else you got going? What's on your mind? I got space for two more. Yeah, Eldridge just flew out yesterday and spent a few hours with me. He thinks Top Rep should have a solar coach name. I don't disagree. Maybe we should talk about that. Maybe we have a third day and we add in some solar coaching. There's some other things that we're thinking about on Top rep where it could be a third day of things that we cover and really get teams up to. Up to snuff and. And solar would be one of those, some personal marketing and how we handle that to self gen leads. We would be able to create more time for that by adding in the canvassing and door knocking side of things because we don't talk about. First off to learn how to canvas, it shouldn't take anybody more than maybe half a day to learn the ins and outs of it. Like the script, the role play, the practice, get it down well enough to actually go out and start implementing it. Now over time you've got to have some experience to get great at it. But I can get you pretty good at going out and door knocking, generating leads. Whether retail or storm shoot in half a day. It wouldn't even probably take that long. Few good scripts, a few different things about approach, a mindset that you have to have that you're not out there trying to sell something, you're trying to serve someone and it's all that hard. But from there on, what do you do with it? That's where it starts to get a little bit more difficult. The ins and outs of being a solution selling methodology type person. So what else you got? Hey Eric, maybe you and I should talk, man. That would be great. I think Chuck would love having that conversation. Well, if you're interested? We could probably figure something out. So hit me up. Anybody else got anything? So Solar, Eric Richardson is getting into teaching that stuff. That's cool, let's do it. He says, all right, cool. Why don't you reach out to me and get on my schedule? Probably not next week, but the week after. After the first year it gets really crazy with new clients like that. Everybody kind of waits till after the first year and says, all right, I'm ready for coaching. And it's crazy. Like we will have people that we talked to three years ago come back and say, okay, I'm ready now. I got everything in order. Then why do you need coaching if you got everything? It's like I had to get stuff in order. Start then and we'll help you get there a lot faster. You don't have to wait three years. We could probably do it in three or four months. And that's really the value of coaching. It speeds up what it is that you're learning, that we have the experience and the knowledge to share it with you quickly and then we hold you accountable. That's really the biggest part of the whole coaching thing. And you think about it, if you played any sports or played in the band or anything like that, you have this accountability piece that you had to learn the thing and come back and show the thing. And that was the most valuable part of coaching I ever got. It's the most valuable part of what I think we do is saying, hey, we've got a meeting coming up. We're going to do that meeting and we've got to have these things done by that time. And sure enough, over a pretty short period of time you got all this stuff in place and like well oiled machine and it's spitting out money to you. So I, I'm a believer in coaches because I use them myself. I have a financial coach, I have marketing coaches. We just hired another Automations coach. So there's, there's things that we do coaching wise as well. All right, I don't see any more. I don't see anymore. What do we want to talk about? It's Friday. What's tomorrow? What's tomorrow? Anybody know what tomorrow is? Go ahead and type it in there. If you're, if you're on watching and stuff. What is tomorrow? It's Friday today. So what's, what's tomorrow? Tomorrow, Saturday. So what is Saturday to a contractor salesperson? I got signed a few weeks one industry. Just you. I can expense a snow, a snowboarding trip. Okay. Let's go. Like you want to see me crash and die? That would be great, but I would do it. I'm not scared of it. And funny enough, my. My daughter, son in law and grandson live in Castle Rock, Colorado. So we're, we're headed out there end of January. So want to meet me out there? We can go snowboard and bust our tails. I'm not very good at. Can you teach me, can you teach me how to snowboard? Now we got. There's a topic right there. Snowboard. Oh, dad forgot my thing there. How hard is it to snowboard? Is it hard? Like, is that one of those things? Like, can you just pick it up and go? I mean, I was pretty good at like skiing and stuff like that as a kid. Slalom skiing, kneeboard, whatever. But it's been a long time. So I don't know. The dura last the next week after and cancun the week. Man, you are just traveling like crazy. And it says, heck yeah, I can. All right, good. I got an instructor snowboarding. Let's figure out if we can, if we can make that thing happen. And like I said, reach out to me for next week, later in the week and we can probably set something up. I feel like it's a conversation with me and Eric. This is great. I love it. Eric's one of my favorite guys in the industry. He genuinely pours in to others without expecting anything in return, which is super cool. That's a good alignment with us. All right, so we got snowboarding up there. I got room for one more thing. I got room for one more thing. And I said, hey, what's tomorrow? Don't forget that. What's tomorrow? Saturday. What is Saturday to a contracting salesperson? What is that day? Anybody know? I'll tell you what Saturday is. To a salesperson in our industry, Saturday is money day. Saturday is the day where we earn our difference between everybody else. It's the day that nobody wants to work, but everybody's home. Everybody has the. They've gotten their week done, they're at home, they're not stressed as much as they were earlier in the week. That's the opportunity to go out and start talking to people, meeting people and working with them and reinvesting with them. Reinvigorating old leads that you had and getting out there and seeing them just dropping by on a Saturday, you know they're going to be there. I always talk about it, like I see this number that everybody talks about for a salesperson to sell three a week, like sell three a week, that's 12amonth. It's pretty good income. We can all put the numbers together. I'm like, I can do that on Saturday. Is that what this is? It's a one day a week job. Like if I just focus on Saturday, I could do that on Saturdays and did for several years. So why aren't we selling on Saturday? Take Monday off. That's fine. I get it. If you've got something to do with the kids and the family and stuff like that, you certainly should go do those things. But try to schedule them. Like, hey, I'm going to go sell from like 10 to 2 or 3 and then let's go do our thing or schedule it. But schedule at least one or two Saturdays a month to go add to that revenue that you can generate. So any sports goals for this 20, 20? Oh boy. Somebody asked one of those questions. Dude, with young kids, my weekends are tighter than weekdays. And that's completely understandable. I get it. If you have the opportunity to mix in one Saturday a month, it will probably make you all of your sales goals and probably top salesperson in your company. Because nobody else is doing it. If nobody else is doing it, we do one little thing extra above and beyond what everybody else does, we usually end up with a better result than the rest of the team. Any sports goals? I do, but there's a question mark with it and I talked about this the other day on my live as well. I'm dealing with some health issues. Like most people can't tell, like if you walk up to me and talk to me and stuff like that. But I got some kind of autoimmune that's going on. We're getting it figured out. I've got some doctor's appointments and I think we got a good handle on it, but it's going to be a 7 to 12 month thing to get it under control. About the only sport that I can do, and it's pretty dang painful right now, is golf. Like that's about the only one. But Pancho, in answer to your question, I have put it on the board to do a Spartan. A spartan race at some point this year. Probably in the fall sometime after I get through some of that stuff. So as soon as I start feeling like, hey, I can go do that thing, I'll go do, it's frustrating because I can't work out. Like, I really want to work out, but my shoulders are just absolutely killing me. So I'm trying to find other ways. Walking just. I feel like Feel like an old dude because I. It's about all I can do is walk a couple miles. But yeah, Spartan is pretty intense. I mean I. If I'm going to do something, don't do it halfway, right. So. Yeah, so maybe I'll add that down here. Spartan race. Now, I don't know. Do you count fishing as a sport? Is, is that, is that a sport? That's the one I'm going to do for sure is I'm going to fish. Black Canyon of the Gunnison. In August. We're gonna go on a trip, probably with my brother in law, maybe a few contractors. We'll see if anybody wants to go along with us. But. Yeah. So Joshua. Hey man, thanks. I was able to catch a break. How you dealing with all that stuff? Yeah, I'm dealing with it. It just is, you know, I look at it this way. Like I could be all pissed off and angry and angry, you know, having a bad attitude about it. But a couple of things, like number one is I can't change it. So why have a bad attitude about it? Have a good attitude. Positivity. More than likely I will be able to overcome it. So don't freak out over it. And so many other people, I mean so many other people have it so much worse, man. I got all my arms, I got all my legs, I can walk, I can talk, I can hear all of those things. And so many folks just have it so much worse than that. Who am I to complain? So I don't want anybody to take that I'm complaining. I'm not complaining. It's just something I gotta deal with and I will, and I'll do as well as I possibly can with it. So Joshua, just to set your mind at ease, I got this, right? And even if I don't, that's okay too. It's the thing that I got to deal with in this life. Okay, this life's pretty short and still not too bad. So we got it. Have you ever heard of the Game Changers, man? This is like stuff that's coming out of the woodwork about this. That's why I kind of didn't want to share because I was going to get a bunch of like stuff back about it. So I have not heard of Game Changers. I, I will go check it out. Put a link in here if you want to and I'll go check it out. I look at all the comments whenever we get done, but I've looked, I've done acupuncture, massage, cryo, infrared, bed, all of those things work, but they're short term solutions. 48 hours to 72 hours and then I'm feeling pretty crappy again. And I want to solve this deal. So I'm going to a functional doctor. And that functional doctor has a pretty good grip on what's going on. She's pretty famous. She treats people from all over the world. And I think we have some answers and I'm going to follow through with that. But I have also checked into some stem cell stuff like, hey, Texas does that. So we can actually check into that kind of stuff. So, yeah, we're working through it. Any of that kind of stuff that you guys have, let's go ahead, send it on to me. I will check it out because it does hurt. So I'm willing to try just about anything. I was sitting there in acupuncture, like a little over 100 needles in me, so that was a lot of fun. All right, anything else, guys? I'll give you one last shot to drop something if you got a question or anything. I think fishing is pretty cool. I've always wanted to go to Lake Fork. I don't know where lake for. Where is Lake Fork? Where is that? Once you type that in, some of you out there, you're typing and doing, you know, putting comments and stuff in. Unfortunately, this tool doesn't get all of them. It gets some of them. I get a lot of the Facebook ones, especially my personal feed. I'll really see that one the most. But if you're like watching on YouTube and you're seeing the live on it and you're typing in comments, I won't see those until later. Please put them in. I will go back and answer them. But just keep that in mind. If I'm not answering you, it's because of that. So I don't know where Lake Fork is, if it's cool. What kind of fish do you catch on lake for? Let's go there. Man, that sounds like fun. But if fishing is a sport, I will be doing that in August. And I think it's kind of a sport because it's going to be three to five days on the river and not in a campground or anything like that. So it should be kind of interesting. All right, everybody, I hope you got some value out of this. Let's see, we did get some stuff about why contractors struggle.