Should I Hire a Coach?

Hey, everybody, it is your host here with Contractor Radio, Jim Johnson. It is awesome to have you today on our latest episode. Funny thing is, I had a guest lined up today, and second time I've had him lined up, unfortunately, he canceled again. So two strikes, you're out. We don't play baseball around here. If you can't keep your word to being on something, we're going to go ahead and skip forward. I won't throw them under a bus, but I thought, hey, since I've already got this time scheduled, maybe I could help you guys out a little bit with some questions that we get asked often. I thought I would maybe share those with you about what we do and why we do it. But before we get there, I'm going to share with you a little bit of the inner workings of Contractor Coach Pro and what we do here. We got to pay the bill. So we're going to go ahead and get a word from our sponsor, our premier sponsor, Amazing Rockstars over at Atlas.

The Atlas Pro plus Contractor program is designed to help you build your business. It gives you tools and resources, training, industry insights, bonus structures, technical knowledge, the brand power and science of 3M Scotchgard, and what we think is the best product and warranty in the industry. Become part of the family that is succeeding and growing their businesses.

We went from nobody ever heard of us to the number one roofing company in our region. And we've gone from 12 roofs a year to 2035, and we did over 400 last year. We're on track right now to do a thousand roofs this year.

You'll begin earning Atlas bucks and rewards as you move up to even greater reward levels. Become an Atlas Pro today.

Hey, welcome back to Contractor Radio. That was a word from Atlas Shingles. Super excited. A little announcement for you guys at the IRE this year in Dallas, which is the International Roofing Expo, I'm going to be working with Atlas to hopefully do some education. So probably a few times during the show, I'm going to do some education in their booth, help you guys as contractors to grow and scale your businesses. So today's content is a. It's a little bit different because I'm not interviewing anybody. I'm going to kind of be like you guys interviewing us a little bit. And this concept of, should I hire a coach? Why should I hire a coach? Is a coach really worth what you pay him? And those type of things. I've seen a lot of conversation about this lately. This idea that information should be free. That's A big reason why we do contractor radio. We actually agree with that statement. And that's not really where the value of a coach comes in. While, yeah, we know some things that others don't, we got some cool tools and all that other good stuff, the value of a coach lies elsewhere. And I want to share that with you guys today of what that might look like. So this concept, why should I hire a coach? Well, before we get there, let's look at some of the key identifiers. I took a few notes here, so I'm going to be referencing those as I go throughout the show just to stay on track. But how do I know? Like, man, I probably should hire a coach. You have some key identifiers or what we call roadblocks, maybe villain, that's getting in your way out there. It's causing you to get stuck or not be able to move forward. And so here's a few of those. If you feel like things are chaotic, everything's busy all the time. You're everything feels one off. You're not repeating things very often. You are shooting from the hip. It always feels like a scramble. It's just chaotic. That's the value of a coach. Coach can take some of that chaos out of the equation for you. You stress, you're super stressed out financially with people, with your clients, with the bills that you have out there. Yeah. A lot of stress that you're carrying on you another place where a coach can probably help solve some of those problems. You feel stuck. Like you have tried and tried and tried and you don't feel like you're getting ahead. You kind of keep hitting this ceiling or barrier where you feel like you're capped and you just can't put more into a day. That means you'll increase that capacity, giving you more time so that you're not stuck. That's the biggest problem that we see with a lot of the clients that we coach is they get stuck at certain points throughout the process. And I'll talk about those a little bit here. Now that there's stages to this contracting world. That first stage is like the beginning phase. You just starting, like, what are all the things I need to get it put in place? Business licenses, cpa, bookkeeper, all of my documents in my contracts, and just all that nuanced paperwork, business stuff that tis to start a business. It's not as easy as just going out and getting a business license going. I got a hammer and a truck. I'm a contractor. And many of you have probably figured that out as you've gone down this road is these things jump up and bite you. Insurance coverage and are you coverage covered correctly? Tax strategies to set you up in a way that you're not getting taxed to death. Certificate of insurance, your insurance, audits, those type of things come back that you didn't even really realize existed until they actually become critical. And a coach can alleviate all of those, get those out of the way so you don't even have to worry about them. When you're in this beginning phase, then you have this stage one contractor like you started. You've gotten at least your business stuff kind of in place, I hope, but you're kind of bumping up against about a million bucks. You're in a six figure world and you feel like you're just doing everything you possibly can. You're doing the work, you're doing the orders, you're going and selling, you're doing the bookkeeping, you're doing all those things. And your instincts tell you, I need to get some help. But you're not exactly sure which help to get. And most of the time the contractor makes a bad decision there. They try to replace themselves with maybe another salesperson. And now they brought in this whole burden of another salesperson they got to train and teach and bring up to speed, while all the things that were really getting in their way, like their books and all these things that they maybe were not great at, could have been handled. And usually that's the first person that we want to hire somebody to help us administratively. Then we have the stage two contractor, and that stage two is somebody between a million and three million. So we've gotten over the hurdle. We may have hired our first people. We've got some of our basic building blocks in place, a semblance of a process, but it's mostly up in our noodle and we share it verbally. And to go past that, we gotta start getting things documented a little bit because we're gonna start hiring maybe outside of our circle, or if we are still hiring inside of our circle, we need to be really clear about expectations to separate that friends and family thing from business, which is a big mistake a lot of folks make. And we help people kind of start to install this blueprint that allows them to have that growth without the pain that normally goes along with it. But it's just kind of the basics. That's where we see our contractor boost program really help its group program. It's very affordable. It gets you all your basics in place so you can Actually start to scale your business a little bit. Then we have the stage three contractor. This is the contractor that's kind of hit 3 million. Finally, they've kind of tapped into all their friends and family, buddies and stuff like that. They can help them do what they do. People that they know, like, hey, I know you do that and here's a good opportunity. But we start to get beyond that and communication breaks down. Whenever it's friends and family, we kind of know each other, everything's pretty easy. But communication starts to break down. We start to bring people from the outside in. And so this is where really some HR stuff, setting expectations and standards are really important. Having defined processes are important. But a lot of times we struggle with creating that stuff. It's not in our wheelhouse. We don't know exactly what to do. We're kind of making best guess on a lot of those things. I'm the biggest culprit. I went through all of it myself as a contractor. I was in the school of hard knocks thing. It was this situation where the information didn't exist out there. There wasn't somebody that was coaching or teaching. And I did go find those resources that were business resources and got coaches in that arena. But they didn't really know my world. They didn't know contracting. You could tell they were trying to make what they do fit what we do. And it wasn't always that great. Now, don't get me wrong, I got some good pieces from there that from basic business fundamentals were extremely strong. And that's what we feel like is important for that stage three contractor, getting those business fundamentals in place, really understanding your dollars and your money, those type of things. So moving forward from there now, I'm going to go beyond 3 million, kind of another barrier. I've got all of these things I got to get put in place, which slows us down, creates more overhead, the profit. It's like a no man's land between about 3 and 10 million. Sometimes it can happen a little earlier, maybe 7 million, 8 million. But you're investing now, you're reinvesting back into the company. And if we're over there spending a bunch of money on things we shouldn't be, we set ourselves up for failure. And this is where we start to see contractors go out of business. They break that $3 million barrier. They're starting to try and grow. They get out over their skis. They haven't prepared for all of the different things that come up whenever you start to scale like that, especially from an hr, tax strategy, financial strategy, and it ends up getting coming back to bite them because they didn't do the necessary work from a business perspective early on. And we don't want to see that happen anymore. But during that three to $10 million phase, you're installing a lot of fundamental structure. You know, you're documenting all your processes, you're creating training programs, you have a handbook for your employees, and you start to clear up all the questions that you normally just being the Google for. Like if we're less than 3 million bucks, we're kind of the information resource for our business. If there's a problem or a question, everybody comes to us. And when that happens, you are losing a significant portion of your time that you can be actually working on the business. And this is why so many people feel like they're wearing all the hats. You are the leader of production, you are the leader of sales, you are the leader of bookkeeping, payroll, hr, all of it. And so that's why when you get past $3 million, you got to start getting this stuff down and documented so that you don't make mistakes. And a lot of us do that. You know, I did that myself as starting to put things down, but I was guessing in a lot of cases I was getting some outside coaching from business, but it wasn't niche oriented to us. And so there were things throughout there that I missed and paid the price for. You know, it was, it was very much a struggle to like to go through that process. And I wish there would have been a coach where I would have gone out and hired that guy immediately and said, hey, I saw you did that. I want to do that. Could you show me exactly how you did that? And then for him to actually understand that I'm different than him too, that's the big thing about a coach. He knows who his player is and he doesn't coach the business. That's something that we really need to understand too, from a coaching perspective. He's coaching the individual. We know what their talents are, the resources they have available to them, and we coach to those to allow those talents to be optimized. And we'll talk more about that in just a minute. So I get beyond 10 million. Like I've grown it now, I've invested, I've put a lot of pain in it. And our coaching is, hey man, gotta go from 3 million to 10 million as fast as possible. You don't want to be in that no man's land very long. You can only sustain that for so long. So once you get over about that number, we're in what we call expansion phase one. And expansion phase one is I have this solid business. It's a pretty well oiled machine. We're still fine tuning a few things here and there, but for the most part, 80 to 90% of the cases that exist out there, we've gotten covered with a process or a system, tools to manage it, oversight, dashboards, those type of things. And so now we're just pulling levers. We're starting to pull levers of what's the right thing to do at the right time and place. And so in expansion phase one, this is where we see a lot of mistakes made. Like we got this really good business and we're going to go and do another one. We're going to go do it in this location and that location and this location. Start spreading yourself thin for the amount of leadership you have available when you're not even really dominating the market that you're currently in. In most cases, if you're in a bigger city, there's more room afforded for you to be able to dominate that market and not have to travel so much. And if you do dominate that market, why would you go to a whole other market and try to create a whole new thing with a new name and new everything, like you're starting from scratch. Other than whatever historical value it brings to have had a business before, you're still new to that area. And the further away from the home office it is, the harder it becomes. And so why not another niche? Maybe you do roofing and siding and gutters that afford you an opportunity to do another niche. Maybe fencing, maybe garage floors. Still this very similar type process, but room in the market for you to go in and dominate how you are in those other areas without having to travel all over the place and really installing all the systems and processes you already have in place. Once you've grown as far as you can grow that way, then you want to start maybe looking at opening up other operations. So make sure you expansion phase one, tap that market that you're in, dominate that market that you're in first. And then once you have that dominated, then you have expansion phase two. That's where you get over about $25 million. You're running out of room in your particular market. And the best case at that point is closest mark to you next opportunity and going and installing very similar to what you did the first time around. Start with the core, get that nailed and then add on to start dominating that market. So those are kind of the stages of a contractor. And we go through these stuck points all throughout that. A lot of times we feel like we're falling short. These key identifiers and roadblocks, we feel like we're falling short. We're just not getting things done fast enough. We keep setting these goals. We're not achieving them, or if we are achieving them, it's a big mess because we did achieve them and we're always falling just a bit short. It's taking too long. Like, you feel like, hey, I want this to go faster, but, man, this is just going to take forever to do this. You're seeing a lot of turnover. That would be another thing where you go, man, I'm having a lot of turnover. It's probably something where working with a coach that understands leadership and culture can prevent that turnover from happening. And then a lack of purpose. Maybe you've done well enough and the money's kind of there and there's nothing next. Or maybe you're just starting out and it's just, hey, it's a business, because I've got to pay my bills. But that only carries you so far. Once we understand what we're actually doing and why we're doing it. There's a really good book on this called Start with why by Simon Sinek. I don't think it's necessarily the place that we start. I think we should start with who first. Like, who are we? And then we can determine our why. I have a whole podcast on that. You can go listen to who before why. But once we have that purpose, drive is now in place. Not just motivation and excitement, but there's drive. That's the ability to sacrifice and overcome challenges and hurdles because you feel the thing that you're chasing is worthwhile. And if you feel it's worthwhile, you'll put in more effort. And then the last one is complacency. Like, you feel like, I kind of got this and I'm good where I'm at. As the first sign, you've kind of put yourself up on this pedestal, and that's the place where we see most people go down. They've gotten to where they need to be and they're comfortable and all things are good. And all of a sudden they lose sight of what's going on, they lose their focus, and things start to just little chinks in the armor until it doesn't exist anymore. So if you're seeing any of those key identifiers, those would be reasons like, hey, you know what? I want to investigate into this coaching thing. So what do we all want as contractors? What are we like shooting for? What should be maybe a bit of our North Star that we should wrap our head around the concept of this business that we have, this baby that we have, and we all want this well oiled machine. I think that's really the thing I hear most often. I want this well oiled machine that doesn't take every moment of my day to be involved in, that generates income for me to survive and thrive, affords me opportunity to do other things and really creates this like, hey, I can just check on it thing and make sure no engine lights are on. I got this well machine and if something's not working, I can just replace that part and fit them right into the process and system. If we have that thing, we feel like from there we can grow. Okay, so the well oiled machine is a systemized, repeatable processes and then growth is just adding the right parts to that machine to scale it. So if I have my sales process nailed down and it's 100% and all the tools that are associated with it are where they need to be, then it's just adding people to the equation. I can hire as many sales reps as I want as long as my production team and my administrative team can handle the volume that we would create. So you have this balance that you're running all the time. Ideally you have a dashboard that tells you like, okay, at this time, this is the thing, I should hire three new sales reps. That's some of the things we help create, is identifying when you should hire who. But this affords you this opportunity to grow not only externally and like generating revenue and growing more jobs and relationships and networks and profit. But there's also this internal growth, this growing of leaders that we're going to need to expand our business and scale our business. We have to have this Willow machine first before we can actually start to do that with our leaders. We can start to get them in charge of projects that allow us to grow and manage processes that allow us to grow, that afford us time or capacity to start working on that business instead of in it. Because that's what we're really all after, or after this freedom. So first we got to get control. Second, it allows us to grow, which will afford us some freedom to be in the position to work on our business instead of in it, to manage our business and lead our business instead of doing the business. A lot of us, we create a Contracting business. And what we really created was a job. We work for the business instead of the business working for us. And because we get into that, we can't ever get out of it. We don't take two steps back, so we can take 10 steps forward. And there's a lot of legwork, foundational work that has to be done to make that happen. So who should I hire as a coach? There's lots of good coaches out there. I'll be honest. When we first got into this 10 years ago, we were kind of the first that was really a focused contractor. One on one, coach your business and really customize that to you. Now there was a couple of other, like, entities that have been around for a long time, but they are more formatted and, and just kind of advice places instead of really giving you some systematic and customized approach to your business. Because there is a framework to this thing. There's a thing that is actually consistent across all contractors and really all businesses for that matter. And I didn't really realize it whenever I first started doing this. When I first started, I had come out of the technology world helping to get Acculinx off the ground and create a software for roofing companies that they could manage their businesses and manage their sales and facilitate what they do faster and more efficiently. And I would go in and talk to people about Acculinx and what it did and why it was important to have it. And that wouldn't take very long, about an hour, and I'd have a new customer. But then I would get all these questions like, how did you grow a business from 3 and a half million to 41 million? How did you start your first year at 5 million and do 25 million your second year? And it was like, how do you hire people? How do you pay people? And most of those questions were all questions I kind of knew the answers to. And I said, you know, somebody should maybe help folks out with this. And I resigned and decided to start coaching at the encouragement of my grandfather. My grandfather was like, hey, you are a good coach. You always have been. What are you great at? I'm pretty good at this contracting thing. So I decided to start coaching that. And through that, I walked into it knowing that I had these things I needed to cover. I know that I needed to cover. Culture like that was important to the success of a company. Processes were important and systems were important. Your accountability, setting expectations and holding people accountable was super important. Marketing and sales, obviously, technology. And those were all areas that I could coach in how to recruit and hire people, how to train people, and I could coach in all of those areas. But as I coach more and more, I realized I was missing a few things. Two in particular. Finance was one of them. I had a great financial person that I just had do the thing for me. So I didn't really know it well enough to be a coach. I understood it, but I couldn't coach it. So I knew we needed to get somebody to help with that, and we did. We got Jenny, and she's absolutely amazing. Our clients love her. But that was my whole thing, is I need to fill the gap from start to finish. Where do we need to serve this industry and the coaches and the contractors out there? Because the whole purpose of this whole thing, really and truthfully, isn't about you, the contractor. We love it and we want to help you, and we know that we want to coach the individual and hopefully help make better human beings. But ultimately the purpose is to change an industry and the perspective of a consumer. I mean, come on, most consumers, what do they think about us? We're somewhere between, I don't know, ditch digger and garbage man, Con man, maybe used car sales guy. And the reality is there's a lot of of us out there that are pretty good, and a lot of the rest of us want to be good. And the thing I've learned is that by doing it right, I can actually be more successful than by doing it wrong. Yeah, I can have some quick success and do some amazing things in a short period of time, but it's not sustainable where doing it right. Not only can I do those big things and do it in a short period of time, but it becomes sustainable. And it's actually something that feeds on itself. And so when you're looking at who you should hire, you need to ask yourself first, what do I need and should do? Needs based coaching. And I see a lot of people get attracted by the shiny objects. Like marketing and sales also seem to be the two, or recruiting. One of those three are the ones that people are like, oh, I need to go hire the guru to go coach that. For me, the only problem is, and this is kind of what I learned as I went through this, is, yeah, man, I can coach you like you come to me, I want to get more leads. Sounds great, let's go do it. And I actually do a good job. I help you, and we create a lot more leads. But I just blew up your whole world. First off, you didn't have a sales system that could actually close those. So that's the next thing. Okay, fix that and get that in place. And okay, now that that's in place, we're closing them. But we don't have any systems or processes. So everything that we're doing out there work wise is breaking down, making very angry people working for us. And I started to realize there was an order to these things, and there was a few components that I didn't take into consideration or didn't cover. And I really wanted to help holistically from beginning to end. So if you've got most everything in place and you just need more leads and sales, there's plenty of folks out there that can help you or if you just need to recruit people. But if any of those key things that I mentioned earlier that are roadblocks or jumping up and getting you, you might want to consider somebody that's a little bit more holistic. Because while you may feel you need more leads, the reality is you need a better sales process to close the leads you're currently getting. And even before that, like, if we're able to close more, can we actually produce it? And do we have the labor force to handle it? And if we do, and we create this labor force that can handle and they do amazing work and we get more opportunities, do our processes hand up, stand up? Do we have the right people in place? Is our culture a place that people want to be, and are they led? Well? And so there's two sides of the business. There's this foundational side, and we call this the blueprint. So we have a mission, mission focused, coaching, methodology, help these contractors build a mission. It's an annual mission with milestones along the way, all focused on getting to this high point, Mount Everest. Right. And it takes us about a month to get that in place. We build out a strategy plan that's focused totally on the dream of the owner, a vision for the business, and then this annual mission that we're on, and this mission becomes like the rally cry that we're after. Well, all of that centrally in concept behind that is this blueprint that there's really 12 pieces of our business that if we're not aware of all of them or really too focused on one of them, things can get out of balance. And so we look at it like DNA, DNA of a contractor. We got foundational stuff and we've got operational stuff. Foundational things would be leadership, culture, process, hr, or what we call team performance. Creating an experience for the people that work for you, finance and accountability. Those are your six foundational components. Of your contractor's DNA, this blueprint for your business. And we've got a choice. We can either, like, hey, yeah, it doesn't look great, it's kind of ugly, but we'll be okay with it. Or I can say, hey, I want to build this beautiful baby that is going to be amazing adult whenever it grows up. And foundation is where all that happens. Then you have the operational side. There's these six components that determine the success of your foundation. Those would be technology, marketing, sales, production, training, recruiting, hiring and onboarding. And most contractors come to us for two kind of big things. We want to be a $100 million contractor. I always love that one because it's like, why a hundred million? Why not 95 or 150 or 101? Like, why that number? And we dig into that quite a bit, into what is it that we're really trying to achieve. And once we can identify that, we can build things backwards from there just like any other goal. And that's part of that strategy plan. Okay, now that we really know where we want to go, let's build the strategy for it. So five to 10 years, three years, okay, this year, what do we got to do to get that three year thing to happen? So that three year happens, the five to ten year thing happens, which effectively it helps me achieve my dream. So this is why a needs based approach is really important to, you know, who you hire. Is it that I simply need this? Everything else is running 100% smoothly and if I got more leads, I could sell them. And if I sold them, we could handle it through all of our processes and systems. Great, go get the marketing help that you need. But if you think about that and you go, you know, man, if I did get all those leads, what keeps happening? I keep hiring these people, they do get me leads. And I keep complaining that they're bad leads. Reality is probably bad sales process. Or if you're going, hey, I'm getting all these leads and I'm selling all these leads. But kind of everything is chaotic and it's just like, man, we're working 70, 80, 90 hours a week. I'll never forget one of the clients that came to me, they're doing 17 million. Like, wow, man, that's pretty good. And I'm like, so where do we want to be? They go, 17 million, why are you calling me? What do you want to do? I just don't want to work 100 hours a week. Aha. We can do that. And we help them build that out and everybody. The whole goal of that entire mission was that everybody gets to work a normal 40 hour workweek. Not only did we do that, but they actually raised their volume up to about 20 million where they're actually really comfortable and can do so without a bunch of headaches. So it's all about you and should be, not about the coach. So if the coach is trying to push this program or this system or this thing on you, be wary because it may not apply to you. I believe that the best coaches know who their players are. They understand what they can do and what they can't do. It's hard to make an offensive lineman into a quarterback. It's also hard to make a quarterback into an offensive lineman. So understanding what those talents are and where they lie is extremely important to a coach. Being able to help you. So make sure you understand the difference between holistic and specific. The guys that are specific, I love them to death. They're all pretty good, actually. But they're not worried about the rest of your business. They're worried about getting you more leads or making you more sales or helping you recruit more people without all the understanding of the importance of that foundational stuff that makes that stuff smooth. As a matter of fact, we will take clients that have gone through our stuff and we'll hand them off to the next guy up that can actually like automate and do some pretty cool stuff with what we've helped a contractor to build. So we're not the end of the line. We're just one of the ones on the path. And I've had that over my history. I've probably spent over half a million dollars on coaching in my lifetime. And I would never do it differently. I would have spent more, if anything, because all of that has been a great investment in getting to where I've been. I was looking at the other day I got asked to do this webinar with company camp and it's all about this mission thing, like this importance of a mission. I learned about this when I was younger. I've been applying this into each of the businesses I get involved in. Whether I'm the owner or one of the players and whatever my role is, I apply that mission aspect of things. I got this big thing I want to achieve by the end of the year. These are the milestones along the way. These are all the little tasks. Oh, I can do that task today. Makes it small enough and reasonable enough to go. If I do that today, the next thing will happen. The next thing will happen. And sure enough, amazingly enough, we're able to climb Mount Everest and hit some pretty big things. Most people aren't real diligent to it. They're not disciplined to it. It's one of those things that for whatever reason I'm pretty good at and I'm pretty good at helping others be good at it. And so is our team. And so I talked earlier about knowing that I have weaknesses and strengths. My weaknesses being HR and finance. We went out and got Ginny and Roz and they're amazing. And then I also needed more capacity to work on contractor coach pro instead of in it. And we brought on a sales coach and Chuck Toki, and then we brought on a marketing coach and Tommy Richardson. And then we have our head coaches, John, Mike, Nathan, that are your guides through our blueprint and through your mission each year. And so really what we've done is effectively created a board of directors for your business. If you went out and got a board of directors for your business, it's going to cost you a significant sum of money. It's pretty expensive. I know because I'm on the board of directors for a couple of different things and they pay me. I know I get paid more doing that than for coaching one client here. So think about it this way. I am an entrepreneur. I'm trying to grow my business. I don't know everything that there is to know. And I need somebody that I can rely on to help me with HR or finance or leadership or culture or sales or marketing or recruiting and hiring or training. All these different things that we do in our business. No one person can do that. I covered quite a few when I started coaching, but I knew I couldn't cover them all. And the best thing is I've found that our coaches have turned out to be even better than me, which is super cool. That's my goal as a leader anyway. Like all my leaders to be better than me. And they are, they're amazing. And so you get this board of directors helping you with your business along the way. Depending upon the stage that you're in, whether that's a group concept or a one on one concept is still custom to you. We keep our groups small. Our one on one is very focused on you and we coach you holistically. Yeah, okay, you want to, you want to increase your closing percentages. Sounds fantastic. What does your training program look like? Like we're going to ask those questions instead of just going, okay, let's like improve the sales process. We're going to have Specialists that are going to help with overcoming objections and things like that that our sales team struggles with. We're going to coach leaders and how to actually train their teams. We're going to do things that a lot of coaching companies just don't do or don't do very well. And we can see all the pieces at the same time. We're like, okay, we want to do this. Whoa, hold on. Before we do the sal, we better go over here and make sure that our production's tight. We also better make sure that our overall processes are tight and our hr. We're going to hire a bunch of new salespeople. We better have these job descriptions in place and accountability measures. And so we're looking at it from all sides instead of just this one little thing that we do. I thought that was important to the success of the contractors that we work with. Who else should. What else should I be looking at whenever I'm hiring somebody as a coach? Proven track record, somebody done it before, Somebody that's actually been a contractor. You know, I see a lot of, like, sales coaches out there. Like, they've never sold before, or if they have, is like they sold a million dollars one year, one time, and now they're a guru because it was storm restoration. Anybody can sell that. If you can't sell a million dollars in storm restoration, you should really not even be in the business, to be honest with you. It's order taking. It's literally like selling Mercedes for 2000 dol a piece. Who doesn't buy that? All that is is just being able to work, go out and do the job and show up. And yeah, you could probably sell a million dollars pretty easily. But are you really a sales coach? Like, you understand psychology, sales methodology, human behavior, body language. Like, does the guy have that kind of talent? Does he proven it? Those would be questions I would be asking if I was going to hire a sales coach. Finding people that have that proven track record has proven to be successful with the coaches that I've hired. Like, I go out and hire the best marketing coach for digital marketing because I didn't know anything about it and I needed to get that part down. I didn't just go hire some guy that was sending me a bunch of stuff. I went and did a bunch of research, like, who's the best at this? And I went out and hired Frank Kern, like, top guy. You ask anybody in that digital marketing space about Frank Kern, they'll be like, holy cow, that is the dude. And he's brilliant. Look for Those guys. Look for those guys. Whenever you're looking for a coach, whether it's us or anybody else, look for somebody that knows a lot more than you know and is willing to share it with you and share it in a way that it fits you. All right? That you believe in, because there's lots of options. There's a million different ways to skin the cat. As a contractor out there, one of you might totally believe in door knocking as your sole solution to marketing, while another one might be all about digital marketing. And if the coach can't handle both sides of that, probably not a proven track record. The other one that I would be concerned about if I was looking for a coach is if they were a contractor. Because here's something I found out about coaching you guys. I felt like it was a conflict of interest. Number one, like, if I coach you, we're gonna do a lot of custom stuff created by you and with our that's going to help your business be unique and a value proposition that you might be able to sell in the future. You're also going to bring inside information. To me, it's just like going to a doctor. You know, you're sharing things that you've done that you think are you can. Every once in a while, sure enough, you have one. Well, if you were to tell me that, and I was one of your competitors, I would start using that. And not necessarily a competitor, like, even in your own market, but somewhere else. If I start doing it somewhere else, it's gonna get back around to you. So if they're in the business, I don't know if that's necessarily the person I would hire, because you're probably informing them of a lot of things that they have the staff and resources to maximize and optimize before you can. So try to find somebody that's not in the industry, but maybe has been in the industry. They've come from it. This is their business. I don't have to do this. I'm fine financially. I did well as a contractor. I do this to give back because industry is really good to me. But there is a cost associated with it. And the reason for that cost is not necessarily the information. Most of the information and coaching and stuff we've ever done has been given for free. You could go and find it on YouTube, one of our podcasts. At some of our events, we have all this stuff that's free and we enjoy doing that because that's not what coaching is about. Coaching is about understanding the individual and having a relationship with that individual, that is for their best interest. And you're being selfless in order for them to attain a goal. So I had lots of years as a sports coach, about 25 years coaching baseball and basketball in particular, some football here and there, but really baseball and basketball. And there was always a thing like, for the year, win the conference, win regionals, win state. Those would be like those big missions for the year. In order to do that, I had to understand my players. And we teach this to our leaders that we work with is understanding their players so they get them in the right seat so that we have a very successful season. We coach to the talents that we have. And that's why you're not really coaching the business. From a fundamental framework aspect, yes, but from an execution, implementation, and accountability aspect. You're coaching an individual. You're helping them become more than they could ever be before without that challenge and accountability that a coach is good at. If your coach isn't saying, hey, man, you missed a meeting, you don't have a coach, you have a friend. I'm not here to be your friend. I'm here to help you achieve your goal. If we become friends, that's great. And I've built lots of great friendships and relationships, but that's because I'm actually challenging you and holding you accountable and forcing you out of your comfort zone to accomplish the things that you said you wanted to accomplish. And most of the time, if we don't have somebody like that in our lives, there's no sense of urgency. But when there's something to be done during the week, and I've got something to do for you and you've got something to do for me, I promise you, when I come to that meeting, I'm going to have my part done. You feel that same pressure. And the funny thing is, it's all these little things that add up really fast. And within six months to a year, you're like, man, what happened to all that chaos I was dealing with? So why should you hire a coach? Really? The question of this particular podcast, why should you? Well, you're tired of the roadblocks, number one. You're just tired of not knowing what you don't know. Like having somebody there that you can trust to give you the right answers at the right time for you and your business, because they've been there and done that before, and they've helped a lot of other people just like you. That's another thing you'd be looking for in a coach. Like, who have you Helped. What's your track record look like? Because it allows you to get there faster. That's the biggest thing. I can get there faster. I can get the information that I need right away. And I have this person challenging and pushing me to get outside of my comfort zone and optimize my abilities and talents. I've had everything under the sun as far as a dream that you can imagine. Everything from operating my company from the Cayman Islands to building an amusement park on an island, to owning a marina and managing my business from a laptop, all of those things are on track. And that's what it's all about. It's about this dream of you as the owner. What are you trying to get to? But also being a benefit to the people that work with you and help you achieve that. And that's why that mission is so important. Each year we have this mission that's aligned with our vision and our ultimate goals, our foundational philosophy, this culture and leadership that we're about. That goal isn't about you and it's not about them. It's about us together. By doing this mission together, everybody benefits from it. We expect these results, and from those results, we're going to get this benefit. People will grow, they'll make better income, they'll pay things off, they'll be able to chase their own dreams, whatever those may be. That's what these missions facilitate. And it's super important that once we get everybody on, on, on task for that, to hold them to that rally cry. That's why the missions that we help create usually have a goal of the operation. And whenever I say manual mission, I'm talking annual mission, not like a mission statement. I've talked about that plenty in past podcasts. But this, hey, I got a military or a sports mission. We got to achieve this thing in a year. Then we got to set those milestones and then break it down. Well, my team's got to be bought into it, too, because they're going to have to help me get there. And so it's our rally cry. It's Operation Whatever. We give it, like an operational name, you know, Desert Storm, Serve the underserved, whatever you want to call it, you name it. But that's the thing that you keep top of mind, because what we focus on, we achieve. What we are distracted by will be what we achieve. So if you get distracted by a lot of social media and stuff like that, that's what you're going to achieve. A lot of social media. But I want to stay focused on A mission. And I want our clients to stay focused on a mission because we know that it's going to get them to where they want to be faster. It's going to afford them more opportunity in this short lifetime that we have to have an impact. And I think that's really what this is all about. I want to have some freedom and I want to have some impact. I want to have fulfillment in my life that I did something pretty amazing. And a good coach knows what that is and is able to help you get there by the accountability and the challenge that they apply, not the tools and the techniques, all that stuff out there. There's a million different ways to do it. The one that you believe in and the coach knows you believe in it, is the one that's going to actually get you there. So I talked about the guy that believes in door knocking, a guy that believes in digital. I've seen both sides, both work. Not one's right and one's wrong. One fits and one fits. And that's the key to being a great coach, the right fit in the team to achieve the ultimate goal. So to summarize a little bit, if you're looking to hire a coach, go do your. Go do your research. Don't just trust somebody at their word that they're a great coach if they haven't been around very long. You want to make sure that they either have great results that they can prove to you, or. Or that they have clients that say, yes, he is doing what he said he's going to do and we're getting great results. If you're not finding that, that would be a point of concern. You also want to have a coach that will actually do like a coaching call with you. We do these for free. We don't charge anything for it. First calls free. Go see what coaching is all about. It's. We have. You take an assessment, you go through the assessment, and from that assessment we're able to identify probably the 2, 3 biggest weak points. And when we get on that call, we're there to coach you to achieve solving those two to three biggest weak points. If you like the coaching and you want to work with us, great. We would love to work with you. But if you don't, we gave you something valuable that day that should help you take at least a step forward in your business. If they're not willing to do that or if you hop on the call and it sounds like a sales pitch, that's probably a good one to avoid. They're selling something they're not coaching something. Be wary of a lot of, like, videos. Watch the video and go do your thing. Videos without support from a coach to give insight and nuance based on your talents and skills and what you're good at, usually tend to, like, play out really quick. Like, you go and buy this package. I have $2,500 for this particular system or whatever. Well, first off, that system worked for that guy, not necessarily you. And then there's nuance to it that you need some help with. But all I bought was the actual videos, and I don't have the coach. Actually, you didn't buy a coach. You bought it. You bought a training course, which. Training courses are fine if you're the type of person that executes. So if you are that person, go for it. If you're not and you need help and hold you accountable. That's where coaches come in. I think that covers most of what I wanted to share with you because I get asked all the time, what do you guys do? Like, we know you coach contractors, but what do you do? And we coach them holistically. We look at their business as a whole, their people as a group, as a team, and based on their skills, the resources available to them, their stage of their growth, what they believe in, we customize our coaching to those aspects, following this framework, knowing that things happen in an order. I want to finish with that. That was the big epiphany for me, and so much so that I wrote a book about it called Contractors Blueprint that. Yeah, while I knew all these different pieces and I didn't realize that they all kind of work together, like, really, like DNA does, you got two backbones. Foundational, operational, and then you got components. So those are the things that connect the backbones. I started to realize that and I went, hey, wait a minute. These are in a sequence. They all kind of affect each other back and forth throughout the time that I own my business. And. And the biggest one is, like, leadership. Got to have a good leader in order to have an effective culture. In order to get to an effective culture, that culture will allow you to build great processes. With those great processes, we're going to be able to do some great HR work and team performance. We're also going to be able to put in great finance measures, and we're going to be able to put in measures that hold everybody accountable. But if I didn't work on that leadership and that culture thing first, those other things don't work very well. And so, like, some of the things I mentioned they're key identifiers. You're dealing with stress, turnover, drama, things like that in your business. Dude, I'll be honest with you, it's leadership. I got some skills I'm lacking. I need somebody to coach me through them. And they're actually something you can usually learn pretty quickly that'll make all that pain go away. And that's really the value of a coach, is not only can he coach you who you are as an individual, but understanding the order in which things happen. And so after accountability is like, hey, what technology are we going to use? Okay, now that we got that figured out, let's go market and build that marketing program out. A strategy. All right, cool. Now we're getting leads. Okay? Build out the sales process so that we close more of them. Now that we've got that production process, because we got them, get them all handled. Then a training process. Get that thing nailed. Guess what? Now you got all those processes and things that you need, you can actually do the thing you came to us for. I told you, people come to us for two reasons. $100 million business. The other, help us hire more people. No problem. When I hire more people, build a training program. You can make that repeatable and do it a lot faster than you could if with just ride along training. If you got a training program, you better know how you're going to produce things and how you're going to sell them to include in the training program. So you got to do them first. I got a market to create those opportunities for my salespeople. So I better have a strategy for that before I go out and start to implement all that. And then what technology am I going to use to manage it all with? So they all work backwards upon themselves. If you're struggling over here, it's likely over there. And so a problem is being caused in your foundation. So if you're struggling with leads, you're struggling with sales process, you're struggling with hiring, you're struggling with training is because you didn't do the leadership and culture and process stuff early on. Good coaches understand that framework, and then they coach the individual to that framework, and then they apply a mission to that, to install those pieces as they ebb and flow back and forth throughout your time of growth and expansion in stages as a contractor, because they're your board of directors, they're there because they're experts in what they do and they can help you. I don't believe any one person can do all of that. Not well. I think I can do some of that, but they're not going to do all of it. Well, our whole goal from the beginning is to get best, the absolute best and elite coaches to help our contractors by affecting, effectively giving them a board of directors that no matter what problem that they are facing in their business, we've got the expert to help you. You, what is it? Do you need? Do you need somebody holistically to see your business and walk alongside of you as your guide to help you achieve things faster, or do you need the niche specific thing? And that's fine too, but just know which one it is in order to hire the right coach. Lots of great coaches out there. I'll actually mention a few because I think that's fair. Breakthrough Academy, Danny Kerr, great company. They do a lot of what we do. We do a lot of what they do. We have different approaches and you're gonna like one over the other. The roofing academy out there, Randy Brothers does a good job as far as coaching companies that handle somewhat holistically. That's about the two that I would probably say, hey, they're pretty good folks when it comes to marketing. If you want to own it and you know, we've got Tommy here in house, it helps bring that in house for you. But there's also Joseph Hughes with contractor dynamics. Go find the one that's the right fit for you, that works for you. Maybe it's, hey, start here and get the basics down and then go to Joseph Hughes and take it to the advanced level. There's lots of great coaches when it comes to sales. Ryan Groth and his commercial sales coaching, amazing. Does a really good job with it. We've got Chuck Toki here that does a great job here. One of the two of them is probably going to fit you pretty well. I think there's a lot of good. Adam Bensman, he's the roof strategist. He does a lot of sales content out there. Super good guy. And his heart's in the right place. And anybody I'm mentioning, I believe they put the customer first. I would not mention them if I felt otherwise because that's really what it's about is as a coach, you're responsible for this individual that you're growing, that when he leaves you, he leaves you better. I know all of my coaches that I look back on in sports and have some respect for were the ones that pushed me, challenged me, sometimes were hard on me. Those were the ones I looked back and go, hey, they're the ones that actually made a difference. It wasn't the guy that said you're great, the guy that said you're amazing. All of that. That guy was usually was the guy that was not moving you forward very far. So that's the podcast for today. If you have questions about any of this, feel free to put in the comments. Whether you're watching on YouTube or you're watching it or listening to it on a podcast, put in the comments. If you like this today, check out the rest of our podcast. You can subscribe and download those podcasts, listen to them as you drive. We give a lot of free content. Like I said, we have a lot of great interviews with folks and those interviews should be helpful to you, depending on what it is you're dealing with. Because I'm usually doing interviews in one of those 12 aspects of your business. And so you'll find something that would help you if you're interested in like, hey, this guy sounds like he knows what he's talking about. Maybe I want to check him out, do my research. Go to our website, contractorcoachpro.com or look in the show notes down below. Fill out our contractor assessment. We've done the work, we've created processes, automated and those how you fill out that assessment, you're going to get a link right back to you with a calendar. You're going to be able to get on a call with one of our head coaches and he's going to help you that day. That's his job. And they know when the law comes down about that, that's what we're supposed to do. So feel free. Contractorcoachpro.com Contractor assessment. Meet with one of our coaches, get some coaching that day. Because whether you work with us or not, whatever you get that day will help you here in 2023 and the years beyond. Because we're not planning on going anywhere. We're super excited about what we do. We have a purpose to what we do and that purpose is to empower people to believe it's what our driving force is every day. It's why we wake up and go to work, because we want to allow people to have this place that they can believe in themselves. Like, hey, I now have the information I need. I know I have the talent to do it and the skill to do it. I know that if I do these things, I'll create the capacity that I need to work on my business instead of in it. So we are able to effectively help you believe in some things that maybe you didn't believe in before, which empowers you to grow that business. We also want to help you believe that we're a good guy. Like that's not guy, but guide. We're there to be by your side to help you keep achieving these missions each year to get to where it is that you want to go. And then last but not least, we're a faith based organization. If it brings up this conversation about, hey, what's the meaning of life and why am I here and you want to talk about those things, we talk about those as well. Because we are here to empower people to believe. That's our purpose. That's why we do this show. That's why we do what we do. Because we know that if you believe in yourself and that we do what we say we will do so that you trust us and believe in us, you will see there's a right way and a wrong way to do this business. Right way and a wrong way to act in this world. A right way and a wrong way to treat others. And so it's big for us. It's important for us because what will happen if we are able to effect that change and empower people to believe the perception of that consumer that thinks we're somewhere between ditch digger and con man will change, will raise the bar and be looked at as professionals. And if we're looked at as professionals, the kids of today will want to be in the trades of tomorrow. That's our job. That's our job as people in this industry, is to make this a place that people want to work because they're proud to. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Contractor Radio. We look forward to. We're going to record another one tomorrow. So this one will probably come out this week and then the one tomorrow. I won't tell you who it is. It's going to have a lot of fun with it. Be a marketing one. And so we'll, we'll get that one going as well. So thanks a lot. Don't forget, subscribe, download rate, all that good stuff and follow us out there on social media. I am doing 365 hard, which means 365 straight days of recording valuable content for you guys, the contractors. And Today is day 30 and this is my recording. We'll see you guys later.