How Micro-Scaling Can Grow Your Home Service Business

It's funny. I've started coining a term for this, and I started to coin the term micro scaling. And the reason being is because we hear a lot of content around scaling. Your business get big, huge, but scaling. And maybe we'll talk a little bit about this later. So maybe I'll just kind of save that. But this idea of micro scaling.

So let's lead into that, because I think that's where I want to head next. It's like I've now hired my person that I need to take the little things off. So now my company grew a little bit, and then I maybe hire a few salespeople and they're doing okay. I'm leading them now. One rises up, and now I have a sales manager. So I'm starting to scale, doing some of that micro scaling you're talking about. But I put somebody in a place of authority, so I give them empowerment to run this thing, whether it's an office manager, production manager, sales manager. What's the biggest thing you see owners do whenever they make that first step? That's their biggest mistake.

They probably step completely out of it when they hand something off is the biggest mistake I see.

I would argue that they don't let go of it. They stay involved because they have the relationship with those salespeople. And they raised one of those salespeople or maybe brought somebody in from the outside to be the sales manager. And those salespeople do the mommy daddy thing. They try to get something out of the sales manager, and the sales manager says, no, that's not the way our system works. Not the way we do things. You have to hit this criteria to get this thing, or you have to turn it in this way. And they go around that guy to the leader, the owner, the true person that has the power, hey, man, I really need to get this job through or I need to push that thing through, or can we cut. What he's really saying is, can we cut this corner because I'm special. And the owner truly believes he is and actually gives him what he's looking for. What's wrong with that?

They just subverted their leader. They put in place and they set a precedent. They set a precedent that if you want to get. If you. If you want to get what you want, you can't go to this person. You have to go to the other person. So the mommy daddy analogy is quite true. Right? But that's why Daddy says no, Mommy says yes or vice versa.

That's why that structure is so important. If you Put somebody in a place of authority. You have to allow them that authority. You have to sit there and go, oh, sales guy coming to me. Uh, you need to go talk to your sales manager. I don't do that anymore. Nice job. Swallow the butt. High fives. You're doing a great job. I love you, brother. And let that salesman, that's what you're paying him the big bucks for is to lead that group of people. You have given him the criteria on how to lead that group of people. Allow him to do it. He's going to make mistakes. He's going to do exactly what you did when you were learning. Let him do it, and he will learn from it. If you do it for him, you will always be expected to be the sales manager. You're just paying somebody 100 grand, 200 grand a year to do the little things for you, not to truly take that thing off of you. Because when you can take that thing off of you and have it fully led, that's when you start to become an owner of a business, truly. You start to lead leaders instead of lead everybody and have your hands in everything. This idea of a control freak, that was me. I had a big problem with that. And I had to learn that art of delegation. And I still struggle with those things.

I was gonna say was, yeah, I.

Knew that was coming, so I went ahead and subverted it before I. Before I was so. So let's. We kind of got a lot about structure, talking about. So that structure sets the expectation for what we hold people accountable to. And that accountability side of things has to do with compensation, like how we get compensated for what we do has to do with how much of what we're supposed to do in a certain amount of time has to do with the behaviors that we should within the company. So explain a little bit about how those two things tie together.

So in my own life, accountability is one of those. Is another word that's a little HR ish. In other words, we hear HR and we go, I don't really like the term HR or I don't. It conjures up things. And then you hear the word accountability and you tend to get. A lot of us get the same thing. I think about accountability, all I think about are the negative aspects of being held to account for having not hit the mark. And that feels. But what I can say is that accountability has been the number one thing that has led to my own growth. Being held accountable, having somebody say to me, nathan, I know you can do more than this. I Know that you can do better than this. I know that you can hit this place, I know you can do this thing. And I am going to be here to help you and hold you accountable to hitting that mark. That has been one of the number one keys to my growth in my life ever. And so the impact of accountability now, and here's part of what I see with owners too. Once they start hitting that mid company level, it's not that they have two or three people. That's not that difficult because each person is up in the other person's business like crazy all day long because there's not that many people. Once you start having a other people inside your business now all of a sudden there's things going on that you may or may not be aware of on a day to day basis as a leader, as owner. And then all sudden you find out about this stuff and you're like, how come nobody did anything about this? Or why is this allowed to go on further? Or why are we not hitting our numbers now all of a sudden you're asking questions of your people. And then when I talk to owners in that stage, you say the word accountability and you'll watch their eyes light up or you'll watch their head go back down. Either way, it's the same response really. They're going, I need accountability and I know my people can do amazing. And I know that we're not doing what we should be doing. How do I do this? And so making sure that you had a lot of the structures we were just talking about before is key, number one. And then number two, this is, and this is tricky, we gotta track it. If we have a metric or a number or a standard that needs to be hit. If as much as absolutely possible, and it's not always possible, but as much as absolutely possible, we need a way to measure somebody's progress towards hitting whatever that standard is.

One of the biggest mistakes we see is literally like it seems so simple. It boggled my mind whenever I got into this industry. Well, this is perfect, right?

How many sales managers have a sales guy who's underperforming? And your go to is what? The guy is.

Weak.

Lazy.

Yeah, he's lazy.

He's not putting in the work, he's not grinding. Well, do you know that for sure? Because here's the thing. Odds are he probably is a little lazy. Sales guys, all of us, I'm a sales guy, as a sales guy, like we do tend to be a little lazy at times. We want the path of least Resistance.

Sometimes that happens because we're trying to manage more people than we can effectively manage. So we leave them out on an island and we see them as lazy, but they don't have direction, they don't have motivation.

And if you don't have those metrics, that'll be your go to. But what if you got a guy that is hustling and is grinding and is putting it in and you have no way of knowing that that's what they're doing. Now all of a sudden you're hammering them over being lazy or not putting in the grind, and they're going, I am. But it's something else. And so accountability requires that having the standard and then being able to track it, being able to track it and point at it and say, you're doing these things, you're not doing these things, you're doing these things, you're not doing these things. And then you know where to improve your people and you hold them accountable. Because I'm telling you right now, there are a few unicorns running around in the world who don't care what the standard is. They're gonna blow it out. They want to blow it out of the water. It doesn't matter when you say our guy did two and a half million in sales or this admin over here is capable of processing this many files in a single day, or this person does this, can produce this many jobs or handle, you're, you're going to bump into those people who go, I don't care what, what, what's the best like, like, what is it? That was it John Daly who said, what's the course record and where's the first tee box or whatever, right? Doesn't care what, what the, the bare minimum is or who did the best, they're going to crush that. Those are the unicorns. They're rare. Your average people. And don't hear me wrong, we love average. Like, we love the average people. The people who do exactly the amount we're hoping and asking for them to do. They're the ones that pay the bills, by the way. They're the workhorses. Okay? We love those folks. Your average person, though, going to do it, will generally do just get to exactly what you're asking of them. And they won't generally push way too far, but they are capable of rising to that. So you have to be very cognizant that when we want to hold somebody accountable, are we holding them accountable to the bare minimum? Because that's where most people will just rise to the bare minimum. And then they'll celebrate it. They'll go, oh, I hit my numbers this month. Meanwhile, you might be going, that was terrible. That's not what I want. Well, but what did you tell them?

Hey, 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 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.