I'M BAAAAAACK!

Hey, out there, everybody in Facebook land. It's. It's Jim Johnson. And I'm back, guys. It's. It's been good. It's been really good to take some time off and pursue something that was on my bucket list for a long, long time that I really, really wanted to get done. I've always dreamed of this, writing a book, and I always thought it was going to be this. This one kind of book. I was big when I was younger into, like, fantasy novels and stuff like that. I wanted to write about my own, you know, fantastic world with, you know, super beings and all that good stuff. And what I found out is the super beings are really you guys, the contractors, my friends, people I care about. And so I went off and I wrote a book. And you might be able to see my background. Where I am actually doing this video from is on a. On a streaming tool. But this was the location where I wrote the majority of the book, up on top of a mountain in northern New Mexico. Weather was great, other than the fact it rained every day and I got a grew beard, so nobody's ever seen me with one of those before. Not a real one at least, or kind of real one. I mean, that's about as much as I can grow. And I think it started out dark, and then it turned light while I was writing the book. But it was awesome. I set out to go and write a book, and I accomplished that mission. I didn't get to write everything into that book I wanted to. What I found out is everything I wanted to write was more than a book can hold. The average book out there is about 50,000 words. Seems like that's about the attention span of most folks these days. And I was approximately at that number in five days. So what I've decided to do is make this in two volumes, volume one and volume two of the book. Work on it, not in it. And that was. The whole thing is to help contractors understand from a strategic aspect the things they should be pursuing in the order in which they should be pursuing. This has been one of the biggest epiphanies of this coaching of contractors, is finding out that, yeah, there's a lot of different areas of our business that we need to develop strategies in, and those things actually happen in a particular order and build off of each other. And that's been super cool to realize over the last three or four years working with our contractors. And I want to share it with the world. I want to put it out there. I want to help contractors and even entrepreneurs Most entrepreneurs, if you read this book, it should give you some pretty good insight into maybe why you're struggling in some areas. Because we tend to start a business with this idea of I'm going to build this great business business, but there's not a lot of strategy behind it other than I'm going to go sell a bunch of stuff and people are going to buy a bunch of stuff and there's more to it than that. We need to think about a little bit deeper than that. We're not going to sit there and write 100 page business plan, but we need to know where we're going and then a little bit of how we're going to get there with the strategies and tactics we're going to use. And then finally what's going to happen when we get there and what that looks like. And so I sat down, like I said, it was 12 days, 12 hours a day writing this book with a little bit of inconvenience here and there. There was rain every afternoon. So I have to shut everything down, sit through that for a couple hours and get back out and write again. I was being harassed by chipmunks everywhere, if anybody's seen my profile picture. But what ended up happening is the way we look at things is there's two sides of your business. There's the foundational side of your business, we call that the foundational DNA. And then the operational side of that business, which is the operational DNA. And so this first book, volume one of Work on It, not in it, is the foundational side of your business. It's leadership, culture, organization and hr, your processes, your finances and numbers. And then finally accountability and how each one of those things works off of each other and sets up everything you're going to do in your operational DNA, which that book is going to come out really quickly, but it's going to take a little bit, I think about two months. But I've given you more than enough to work on in this first book on how to strategically position your business to maximize your potential and achieve the dreams that you've always had about your business. There just wasn't really a roadmap or a blueprint for it. And we actually call this the contractor strategy blueprint. It's the way that we coach contractors. And I'm going to pull the curtain back and hopefully share this with all of you guys, some of our views on leadership and hopefully making that simple enough to enact and do so quickly to take advantage of your opportunities. The power of culture and what it can do for your business, why it's so important to understand your organizational structure and how it communicates and how you document things to prevent all the drama in your business and then process the exact order in which you're going to do things that you can replicate over and over again. Not only makes your life easier and eliminates thousands of questions from your world every day, giving you more time to work on your business instead of in it, but it also makes your business valuable. Then you have finance. Finance is the fun one. That's the one where everybody gets all excited, let's talk finances. But I talk about it more from a contractor and entrepreneurial perspective, not so much from a CPA perspective. And I do believe you should incorporate a great cpa. There's some great financial champions for you to help you make great decisions in your business. But we want to talk about numbers, too. The numbers we need to know. And we always talk about, know your numbers. Well, what numbers? Which ones are important, which ones aren't. I lay out all that in the book. And then we talk about finance and how finance relates to your numbers, how you're going to use that to make great decisions. And then last but not, not least, we're going to talk about accountability, the achilles heel of 90% of contractors out there, and how you can make that thing a strength instead of a weakness to really explode your business. So I hope you guys were okay with me leaving for a couple weeks. It was a big deal to get this thing written. It's been a dream of mine for a long, long time. Somebody asked me, you know, where is this on your bucket list? And my bucket list isn't in a numbered order or priority order or anything. It's just a list of things that I want to get done at some point. But if I was going to rank this, it would be in the top three. I know what number one is. Number one is I want to visit all 196 countries in the world. This would probably be two or three. It was big for me. It takes a lot to get a book written to really think about it. And that was the coolest thing about being out there, is I got to slow down. And so a lot of our problem out here in the world today is that we're always having to make snap decisions because of things hitting us every day. But when we take all those things that are hitting us every day out of the equation, we can slow down, really think things through, really take them for what they are, and hopefully put out something that is Maybe a game changer. It's not necessarily that there is a lot of new quote ideas, like all those things I just talked about. You've seen books written about all of them. But we have some unique perspective in several of those areas, especially leadership, culture, accountability, finance when it comes to contractors. And then this idea that they all go in a certain order, that's what we want everybody to click to, is like if we'll take the time to work on our foundational stuff, all of our operational stuff is going to go really well and take the drama out of the equation. We're going to take all the upset homeowners out of the equation. We're going to create a way of operating that truthfully is what the book is all about, giving you the ability to work on it, not in it. So, guys, I'm back. Here we go, let's rock this out. I'm super excited too, by the way, if you haven't heard yet, our strategy conference is coming up in December. It's one of the big reasons why I wrote the book too is we do this all the time. We build strategies with contractors to put them in a position to reach their fullest potential. And this strategy conference we do every year, we sit down with these contractors in a way that you haven't ever seen before. There's not a lot of pop, uncertainty, circumstance. And talking about high level, you know, 50,000 foot view, it starts out that way, but we dig in, we dig in, we dig in. And the idea is to develop a detailed mission for you and your business for the next 12 months. Exactly what you need to be doing when you need to be doing it to accomplish the goal of your mission. And so we help tons of contractors do this all the time. It is a blast for us. May not be as exciting for everybody else. That's one of those things that it's difficult to do. It's not, it's not easy. Having a guide or a coach to walk through it with you, challenge you, make you think about it, make you think about everything it's going to take to get this big thing you're after done is extremely valuable. It's life changing for the people that have been to our conference. We hope that it's going to be life changing for you. Go check out contractorstrategyconference.com and give you a little bit more information. And everybody that comes to the strategy conference, I'm going to give them a copy of the book. Actually, we'll give them two, give them two copies of the book. And if you want it before that, you'll have to buy it, but we don't know how much it's going to cost yet. I know that the book is probably going to be out sometime around the end of September is kind of the goal. It's in review right now with about 40 industry experts and mentors and people I trust and respect. They're giving me lots of great feedback. Hoping it goes to the editor next week and they do their thing. If they get their thing done quickly enough, we should be able to get this out hopefully by the end of the month. If everything goes perfectly. I know how that goes, but we'll try and get it done as quickly as we possibly can. As soon as that thing's ready to go, I'm going to start writing the other one. I'm going to do a little bit different process this time. I'm going to take two days a week over four weeks and get this done. Because I work in sprints. It's the best way for me to work and to get out of all the distractions, stay focused and get things done. Guys, I so much. Oh, I see comments over here. Give me a second. I didn't see all the comments. Give me one second. Matthew, dancing, looking refreshed. Yeah, man, I am pumped up. It's good. Thank you very much. And there's other people. Hey, can't wait to read it. I roofing. Yeah. That's awesome. Matt Grassmeyer. Thank you, man. Hey, Matt. Big influence on it. We talk a little bit about something that you referred and shared with me and in powerful moments and how we can do that in what we do. The other thing I want everybody to realize is this contracting thing. Although we weren't sitting there in high school going, oh, I can't wait to be a contractor. It truthfully is a vehicle to achieve some pretty dramatic dreams. And I hope we open your eyes to how you can go about doing that, maybe changing the world around you. So, hey, everybody, thanks a lot. It's good to be back. Nathan, Jenny, Michelle, Braden, Matthew, Michelle, my whole entire team, I am so grateful and thankful to you because you gave me the capacity to go and write this book. I didn't have anything to worry about for the last two weeks. Everybody was taken care of. They were amazing. Oh, somebody's like, hey, I like the face area. That's. It's gone. This is it. This is why I'm doing this today. I want everybody to see the end result of not showering or shaving. I did shower, but shaving thing was a little bit extra. Didn't want to waste that time when I should be writing a book. And so this is what it ends up looking like. And this is the last you'll probably ever see of it if I want to ever get kissed by my wife again. So everything, there's a strategy, right? So, guys and gals, thank you for bearing with me. I'm back. I'll share more about this book. I'm going to share some videos and stuff that I shot while I was out there as I kind of went along doing the book. I'll share with you some of the successes and trials and all that other good stuff, but it was a blast. It was a good time. And I. And I put this out to you. If you're sitting out there thinking about, man, I wanted to write a book. I've been wanting to write a book. I've been wanting to write a book. Go do it. There's never time like the present to get something done if you're truly passionate about it and needs to be done. And so go take that opportunity. Go take this time. Get it done. Shoot, man, that. That picture in the background, that's. That's some social distancing. I saw four people in two weeks, which was pretty fantastic, to be honest with you. So thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you later. Peace out. And get yourself into a position to work on it, not in it.