Optimize a Dream Storm without Creating a Nightmare Part 2: A Repeatable Process

Next. So now I have a storm attack plan. Now I have to have a repeatable process. And there's three areas where we need to have a repeatable process. I need a repeatable training process. Like I bring people in, I train them like this. I have a quick start thing to get them to the point of getting people signed up and into our world. Then I have an ongoing 90 day growth plan and then I have a annual like continuing education program and laying out that and what that looks like. Because like I said, if we train people well, we don't want them out there practicing on our prospects and clients. We want them to go out there and actually play the game. Practice happens in the office. That's where that training happens. And our goal was always to have somebody up to speed to the ability to sign a service agreement or contingency style agreement after three days. Like we role play, we practice the door knocks and presentation. Everything we needed to do. And until they could prove to us that they were capable, they weren't going out the door. To go and represent my brand and my company and my reputation and we've got to have that type of attitude. So many of us follow a different approach and we'll talk about that and the things that will hold you back, fulfillment. So how is, how am I going to fulfill every project from the time that we, the insurance company says yes and we go and pick out colors with our customer, we turn an order in, what does it look like from there? So laying that out. Exactly. Making that repeatable. And then finally I have those two processes now kind of squared away. I have a training process and I have a job process and exactly how that's going to go. Ideally I have a hiring process, this way of bringing people in. And is it one or two at a time? Because we're going to have a little bit more of a ride along approach to our training, which I would coach and advise against, but I understand. And then also because we don't have the tools, like that's why we do ride along training. We haven't taken the time to build the tools. Training platform, training manual, a coaching process, a training schedule, those type of things, we don't have that. So we put them with somebody that we hope represents us well, teaches them well. But the thing is, it's like the telephone game. Each person that you pass along to it gets distilled down. Distilled down, distilled down. And that expert aspect, mastery aspect of being a salesperson in our industry breaks down to being average or Less so we actually want to have a, a great process for hiring so that we can train them well. So that hiring process, what would that look like? I mean, I've talked about part of it, like, hey, let's go after friends first. That's easiest and fastest. Let's go after our customers next. There's so many folks out there right now that are struggling to find work and do things well. Opportunities create itself. I mean, that's a great way, like get an email out, hey, you're looking for a job change. We have opportunity. We can train you quickly and you can change your life financially as well as lifestyle wise in a culture that fits you. So those are steps one and two, like going after those. Step three is where do I find people that fit what it is we do? And so taking that the next step further, we would want to build out on our website a careers page. We would want to market that careers page. Putting it out on Facebook, putting out LinkedIn, putting it out on your various different career job boards to see what that culture is like. Because the thing we forget is that we're a research society now. Before we buy anything like your company and me coming to work for it. I'm going to go check you out. So I'm going to go check out your Google reviews. I'm going to go look at your website. Oh, there's a careers page. What is it? What does that have? Oh, there's a, there's a guy that actually works there. There's a video and the guy talks about what it's like to work for you, the opportunity it's created, how it's changed his life, the culture he's involved in. That might be the thing that closes the deal with high quality talent. Explain what it looks like to do what it is you do and be honest about it. Don't hide anything. Whenever you downplay the hard work that's necessary. Being on a roof, doing the things that we do, you set a false expectation, set expectations up. We work hard, we challenge you, we're going to push you, we're going to help you reach heights and your potential that you never realized you had. By working with our team. That's what people really want. They want to be challenged, they want to grow, they want opportunity. And so build your careers page around that and then drive traffic to it and sharing it with your network and saying, hey network, if you know anybody, share this with them and you'll be able to recruit and hire people pretty quickly. And then how do you go about Qualifying them, How do you go about interviewing them, how do you go about going through final interviews? And that approach, that's a great place to probably get some coaching. I don't know. This podcast would take too long if I covered all of that. But knowing that you need to have an approach for your hiring is super important. Now my suggestion is hire at least two at a time. At least that. I always like to hire about 10 at a time. I would hire 10. I would do three days of training. Anybody. This doesn't fit. It's okay. You can leave it. Leave me with about eight. And those eight, I would pair up in twos and send them out together. Because when you have guys working together, they have peer pressure. And peer pressure is good. There's this healthy tension that that guy over there is knocking doors. I guess I'm going to keep knocking doors. And he sees him over here and he's still knocking door. I'm going to keep knocking. So it keeps this pressure on them. It gives them somebody to talk to that's at the same place as them. They're not left on an island out there. That's so many of the mistakes I see is just we hire a guy, give him a brief training. It's not very good. Go out there and get people to sign these contract, and he goes out by himself, gets his teeth kicked in for a couple hours and goes. It sounds like it'd be better to hang out at the bar. And that's where he goes. Or he goes home and watches TV or does something else because there's no pressure or healthy tension and support for him to do what it is that he does. Have your print and digital assets ready. Like you should have a folder that's like storm folder. Here's all my door hangers. Here's my flyers, here's my letters I send out. Here's my resources for my signs. Everything that you need, all of your contracts, whatever you need. You have all of those ready to go. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about, like, that's all. If it happens here locally. If you're going to chase one, which I don't suggest chasing and leaving, I suggest catching be after a place that you actually want to be and want to stay. Because why would you go out there and obtain all this work and then leave? You got raving fans. They believe in their evangelist out there. And you're going to walk away from that if you do great work. That's crazy. You built this established company. Now that people trust and have reviews on, wow, what a beautiful thing. So don't be a storm chaser, be a storm catcher. Plan in advance where you want to go. As a matter of fact, at one point I held licenses in 38 different states because if something happened, I wanted to be prepared. Not only did I have that, but I had a contract ready to go. All I had to do was send another printer. I had a, a mailing address, P.O. box usually that allowed me to have an address. I had a local phone number plus an 800 number. I had these things in place before any of that happened. So that when it did happen, I was prepped and ready to go and I knew exactly where I wanted to go to. For me, it was large metropolitan areas that I had picked out that were commonly, somewhat commonly hit by storms. Well, your approach could be something different. You could be mid market, you could be small market. There's all kinds of different ways to approach it. Probably getting some coaching on that that fits your culture and what you're after would be something that's helpful to give you clarity on what you're chasing. So if you're going to chase it, catch it, have a plan for it, take into consideration all of these things that I talked about. Because you have this print and digital media that's got to go out and got to go out quickly because speed to lead is the key. This idea of being first on the ground, being out there and getting after it fast, we're going to talk about in just a minute. Before we talk about that, let's talk about what will hold you back. So there's some things that are going to hold you back. First off, shooting from the hip, I see so many do it like they're running their, their daily stuff and they, you know, hey, I'm growing my business, I'm doing my normal thing and boom, a storm hits. There's no plan. Everybody runs out like chickens with their heads cut off, going to where they think the damage is. And you never what it was that you were after. And if you do get some of it, it's chaotic, there's no process for it. You're frustrated, everybody's mad at each other, dramas created and it just becomes this disorganized chaos. I don't mind organized chaos, but disorganized chaos is not good. So being measured and thinking about what you're doing before you just go out there, run off half cocked, pretty good idea. So don't just shoot from the hip. Lay out at least a formulation. Like if you're late to the game, a storm hits. Now you got to do something, lay the plan first. Always talk about striking first and fast, but if you're going to strike first and fast, you better have at least a decent plan for it. So sit with your team, get on it right away and write out a plan for how you're going to approach it with your goals, your resources, all that stuff under consideration. The other thing, I'll hold you back is right along training, get rid of that garbage. Whether it's a storm or not a storm, it's absolute mess. It doesn't work very well. It takes forever to learn and ramp somebody up. When there's like proven approaches that ramp people up quicker. You can normally get somebody up to speed in three to five days to the point of signing contracts out there. So teaching them your culture, teaching them your door knocking or campusing scripts or how to approach a door. If you're running leads, your inspection process, your presentation, your how you help them solve the problem that they have, whether it's your system or with an insurance company, and then how to actually ask for the sale and close the deal and get a commitment. Because that's the other thing that I see that'll hold you back out there. The idea that you have maybes. Yeah, meet my adjuster. You went up, you said, hey, my name is Jim, I'm with so and so roofing company. We're out doing inspections. We inspected all your neighbors. And so I thought I'd stop by and see if you need an inspection. They go, yeah, sure. And you go up and you inspect. First off, that's a mistake. Number one, you didn't tell them anything about your company, you, your qualifications. You didn't establish your authority or credibility. So they don't even know you yet. So there's very little trust. I would highly suggest, hey, tell a little bit about your company story, tell a little bit about what it is that you do, what you'll be doing, set expectations for your inspection, talk a little bit about how the process itself works and maybe some of the misconceptions that they may have versus what reality is. And so you talk a little bit about process and like, hey, there's this insurance thing. They'll take care of it for you. It will cost you your deductible, but that's the only out of pocket expense. And we just want to help you get the information that you need to make a good choice, getting some of that credibility. Walk around the property with them and prove that you know what you're talking about those type of things will give your closing percentage a better chance of being much higher. So this idea of ride along training, we want to avoid 100% because it leads to maybes, it leads to this. Hey, yeah, you have damage. Here's the pictures of it. Would you like me to work with your insurance company? They say, yeah, okay, I'll meet them out here, make a claim. They make a claim. A day gets set, they call you, you go meet them. Sure enough they take care of it and you come back to meet the homeowner and say, hey, great, we got it taken care of. All we need to do now is get your insurance paper. Well, can you give me an estimate? Because you didn't earn the job, you didn't earn the right to that business. So we don't want to follow that approach at all. If you want to learn more about that approach, we have the rookie quick start for insurance sales. It is a great training course to get somebody up to speed in three days. But you don't have to use our stuff. I'm not telling you that. I'm just trying to help you. There's other people that have great storm restoration stuff, but if it's not built around three to five days and getting them through this course really quickly and then you coaching and training on it to ensure that it's there and role playing and practicing with them, I probably wouldn't do those things. Now go build your own more power to you, please. It's a lot of work and do you have the skill to do it? Do you? Are you that good of a coach? Are you that good of a trainer? Do you have that much experience? It's up to you which resources you use. But remember that was part of the original plan. Which resources am I going to have? Do I have everything ready or can I third party it out to somebody? So really think about that and that's the next thing. So right along. Training is something that's going to hold you back. A training program can speed you up. The next aspect that will hold you back is support. So now I've got all this opportunity. What third party access do I have? Do I have some supplementing teams that could help me supplement jobs that maybe my salespeople wouldn't be good at? I can get pros doing it that would provide a better experience for our customer. Third party answering services, third party marketers like these third party folks that would allow you to optimize this dream storm situation without creating an entire nightmare. And then Lack of support and administration. Your administrative team isn't deep enough and wide enough and they get overwhelmed by the amount of opportunity that you bring in the door. How quickly can you ramp them up? Do you have training tools for them that will hold you back? If you can't build your administration team up quickly? If you can't build your administration team up quickly, those third party resources like VAs and administration companies can actually help you fill those gaps. And then last but not least, do you have a mentor or coach that's walked this path before? Maybe you've tried it a few times, it didn't go quite the way you wanted. A mentor or coach could help you out with that. And I'm not trying to be self serving here, but we help people get those things figured out quickly, solve problems, avoid those mistakes that we would make throughout this process and really nail it. And we can do that in the heat of the battle, but we would prefer it to do proactively and have you set up for whenever that situation happens. Taking a quantity over quality approach. You're going to go out there and you're going to go, hey, we're going to go get everybody, just knock on every door, get everybody to say yes to meeting their adjuster. That's who we're going to be and that's what we're going to do. And you get all these people that say, yeah, but are they? Yeah, are they? Yes. I'm working with you and I know you're my contractor. Do I have a commitment? Is it the type of jobs that we want? Is it partials? And we know they're partials. Borderline damage and stuff like that, instead of legitimate damage that hey, we know we can get approved. Making sure you got great damage, making sure you got the type of project you want to work on, the people that you want to work with that gives you quality and so your time spent on them is going to be fruitful. And if you have quantity, you're going to spend a lot of wasted time on jobs that you don't shoot. We used to be like, hey, there's insurance companies we won't work with. Knock on the door, bam, bam, bam. Hi, my name is Jim Johnson. This is what we do is how we do it. This is my company. A little bit about me. This is why we're doing what we're doing. By the way, who's your insurance company? They're so and so. I'm not going to say because people keep getting sued, but we all know who they are. I'm sorry, Mrs. Jones. It's unfortunate. I'll still do this inspection for you so you can have some. Something to approach and work through it with. But we don't work with insurance company. Boy, that hits hard, doesn't it? And that's a commitment of saying no to somebody like, hey, I've got some borderline damage up there now, if it's obvious, yeah, sure, we'll figure it out. But if it's borderline damage up there, and you know those guys are jackass, you're going to spend a bunch of time wasted on that when I could be helping somebody with an insurance company that actually cares about them, and I would tell a homeowner that. And they're going to call their agent, and their agent's going to call the claims department. The claims department is going to call you. Make sure you give them your name, your information, everything. Anybody wants to talk to me about what I just said about their company, you tell them to call me. And when they get enough of those built up, they might just change how they approach their homeowners. That's part of our job, too. I think that's the right thing to do and the fair thing to do because I want to work with people that I can get the job executed for, who want to execute it with me and who are not not putting hurdles or obstacles in the path to being successful. I can come back to those folks later because they're going to have a hard time finding anybody anyway. And then, like I said before, all of that type of stuff lead to maybes. I don't want maybes. I want yeses. I want commitment. So assigned piece of paper of some kind or another. At worst, a handshake this, handshake that. Mr. Jones, if I meet your adjuster, you understand, if I get it approved, I'm going to be the one doing the work. You get that, right? And that when I do get to work, you're going to pick out colors with me. You're going to pay your deductible. We're going to get like, I'm honest with them. Be clear. I don't want to waste my time on somebody that doesn't want to be my customer that is trying to pull the wool off over my eyes, take advantage of me or any of those type of things. And every once in a while, I'll do a handshake. But you new guys and anybody that doesn't have much experience, and even those that have experience, like go get signature, that's a promise. On a piece of paper saying, yeah, if you do this, I'll do that, and that's what I want. I need some commitment, and you shouldn't be scared of that. If you can't get at least that, you should get out of this business, because that's part of sales commitment. So next piece, strike fast. I mean, you have your plan, you have your approach. You can train. You've got repeatable processes. You know what's going to hold you back. So you've avoided those. Great. Let's strike fast. Pros on the ground, like, storm happens, recon happens. Pros on the ground, and we own the hood. Don't have this approach of, hey, everybody go out there and spread out all over the place and try to cover the entire city or the entire storm. Let's go after our bullseye. These are our targets. Let's go after them together as a team. Every vehicle in there, every guy in there, all working together to own that neighborhood. Because if you own the neighborhood, the others won't come in there. Yeah, signs everywhere you got, they go, oh, well, this one's been tapped out. I got to go find something else. Now we all go, well, we're missing out on all this other opportunity out there. And I've got these honey hole. I want to hide. Like these sales guys that want to hide, like, hey, I got this honey hole. The problem is, you got a honey hole out there, and you got a sign or two up, and you're not working as good as you can because you're running over there to go handle that person. You're running on the other side of town to handle that person. Another company comes in like mine, we go, everybody out of the truck. Let's go and poop. You come back, and we own that hood, too. So own the hood with your team. Go get the hood. Now, while everybody's out there knocking the doors and getting the hood, we've got this leader. We call him the leapfrog leader. He's usually a team leader or a sales manager, and his job is to find the next hood. So he goes and he's doing his research. He's finding the bullseye, the ones we really want, this type of neighborhood. And he goes, okay, new guys that are being trained, boom. Come in here. Guys that were working in the first one that aren't having the success rate that we would like, come on and move over into this neighborhood gets going, and boom. We're now owning that hood. Boom. Leapfrog again, Find the new hood. Leap frog.