Strategy and Working With Your Competitors - BTA - Danny Kerr

Hey, guys out there. Facebook land it is Jim Johnson here with another episode of Contractor Radio and just thought I would take a few minutes here to kind of catch you guys up to speed on what we're up to and what we're all about. We had a special guest planned for for today. It looks like he's trying to log in, and I'm not understanding what may be going on with that. So we're gonna give him a second here. Just be patient with us, get joined in, throw some comments in there. What's happening. Great for you today. And let's see if I can get him in, See if I can try to invite him again. One more second. You guys be patient with us, because it's gonna be a good one. Today. We got Danny Kerr from Breakthrough Academy on, and we will try to get him on here. Sent him a new link. We'll see how it goes. This is a little unusual. Usually we're on, and no problem. It looks like he might have been running late to try and hop on. Usually we get on about 10 or 15 minutes early to handle that. And so I'll give a second. Hey, there we go. There's our man. So before I bring Danny in, I'll just kind of do a quick restart here and get everybody up to speed on what's going on. So here we go. Hey, everybody, it's Jim Johnson here, the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro, with another episode of Contractor Radio. And this is an episode that I'm super excited for for a multitude of reasons. Why. One is because I have a lot of respect for the gentleman that's gonna be on with us today. The other is a concept that we're gonna be talking about today that a lot of people in an industry are a little bit unnerved to talk about, and that's working with your competition. We're also gonna talk a little bit about leadership. He knows quite a bit about that. And one of the reasons that I'm bringing them on, they're like a direct competitor to us. We do very similar things, but we both have respect for each other, and it has a lot to do with the fact that our morals and our core values align quite well. And we're both here to do the same thing, which is hopefully to make this contracting thing a little bit easier on you guys as contractors. So without further ado, let's bring on the contractor savant, the incredible Danny Kerr. Mr. Jim, what's happening there?

I made it.

I figured it out. I figured they just said, hey, you Know what? We're not gonna let these guys from Canada in. They just can't cross the border on that Internet.

Can't even cross the digital border anymore.

So today's topic, we're gonna talk a little bit about leadership first. I think we'll start there, and then we're gonna talk about working with our competition. And. And we are competition. Breakthrough Academy helps a bunch of contractors. Contractor Coach Pro helps a bunch of contractors. And before I get to you a little bit, I want to talk a little bit about the first time we ever met. We were at, I believe, an Ms. Okay. Img. Yes. Yes. And I couldn't remember exactly what event, but I remember what happened there. My co. Coach, lead coach. Now, Nathan had gone over to your boot. I had him, like, strip off all this stuff and go take a look around all the. What was going on. And he met you, and he came back over me. He goes, you gotta meet this Danny Kerr guy. They do what we do or similar, and they got a lot of cool stuff, and he's a cool dude. I think you'll like him. I said, well, let him know. Come by the booth and we'll talk. And you came by the booth at the end of the show, like, it was kind of over. And we sat and we talked for, like, an hour, hour and a half about how we do things and the way we saw things on this coaching and consulting side of things. And we had a lot in common. You had a lot of really cool tools that you were using. I hope you think the same about what we were doing. And we saw some things where each other had different strengths, but we're both trying to get to the same thing. So that was a weird deal to, like, sit down with somebody that was competitive to us and go, hey, I'll open up my books to you. And you did the same. And. And it was. It was really, like, almost surreal. Do you remember that day?

Yeah, man. Oh, yeah, of course I do. I was like, I like this guy.

It's. And from there, it's kind of become a relationship. I hope that you consider me a friend. I consider you one. We're both members of the Catalyst group, so still competitors inside of there. And so I really want to talk about some of that today, this. This competition thing. But before we get there, tell us a little bit about Breakthrough Academy and how you guys got to where you are and kind of your. A little bit of your story for those of those out there that may not have heard.

Sure. Yeah. So when I was 18, I think I was in university to be a police officer, and I was not super loving the university vibe. I'm. I'm actually super dyslexic. Like, literally, I'm dyslexic. So I've always struggled with reading and writing. And I saw the sign that said, run your own business. You know, College Pro Painters. It's like a painting business. And I was like, that sounds like an interesting way to make money. So I applied, and for about 10 years of my life, I ended up running a franchise, working for corporates, oversaw Western Canada and ran franchises in the. In the painting space, the contracting space. And when I left, I was like, there's got to be a way to do this without the franchise. You know, I saw so many young people learn very quickly how to run a business, ramp up really fast, make lots of money, you know, in between their university years. And I was like, these franchise systems are amazing, but they. They're locked up in franchises. I was like, wouldn't it be cool to create a business program or business coaching program, I guess you'd call it that. That is a franchise without the franchise. So that's where the idea originally came from. And me, one of my really good friends, Igor, who was also with College Pro, another really good friend who was actually my boss for a lot of years, James Dale, got together and in 2015, we launched Breakthrough Academy. And it was mostly to our just our friend network. We knew a lot of contractors that needed help and treated them like they're our franchisees. Gave them all the, like, the systems, coaching, built system templates for them to utilize every two weeks, held them accountable to their goals, track their financials. And we watched as they started to grow quite a bit and really had the same success as an internal franchisee had with us. And we're like, this is cool. Like, we could scale this. And instead of selling franchises across North America, we can just bring people in who already have a business and away we go. And one of the biggest things when you run a franchise company that you start to run out of over time is turf. You don't have more space. You sell all your space. Actually, one in Hunter got junk. Who's a good friend of ours, Brian Scudamore, ran out of turf to sell. So he went from junk removal to window to painting to they sell, moving service. And then they actually bought my business partners, one business, a window cleaning business. But the only way that they could expand was by geography. So we were like, well, we have unlimited geography because we don't have a turf. Everybody kind of works together. And we're going to talk a little bit about this idea of working with your competitor. But it's something right from the beginning of BTA starting, I said, look, if you're going to come in, you have to be comfortable knowing you're going to work with other people in your area. And we're not going to bring in everybody and their dog. We will screen who actually comes in. But you're going to work with good people and you're going to be willing, needing to be willing to be open book with them. And that mentality started right from day one. So now we've got 300 and I think 15 contractors and you know, together they're doing almost a billion dollars in revenue. So it's really cool to see the influence they have. And they're all working together and they're all helping each other and they're all collaborating. And for a lot of people that makes them feel pretty uncomfortable. And for them, they just, they've seen the benefits long term and it's a big part of our what we do now.

So that's super cool because we had the same attitude like we weren't going to be this exclusive thing, but we weren't going to let just anybody in. As a matter of fact, we probably talked to 10 contractors and take on about two. Not everybody qualifies, I guess is the best way to look at that. And the big thing for us was the leadership side of things. Like you had to have a really. And we didn't get that early on. You think I would know that stuff. Like you have to have a good leader for everything else to go well. But we were really concentrating on culture and accountability and that kind of stuff and those processes and systems. And what we found is that the leader was the linchpin. Did they have the skill? They had the ability, capacity to take their business where they really were wanted it to go. And we've gotten a lot more about that. Like that's our barrier of entry is you got to have the skill. If you don't have the skill, be willing to go through learning that skill before you can get into the, to the actual coaching part of it. And so we believe a lot like you, like, hey, we're going to be in this thing together. You may have a competitor or two or three or maybe even five in your market, depending on the size of that market, but it's such a small percentage in the big scheme of things. It's not like we're going to coach everybody, right? And not like you're going to coach everybody. And so, yeah, I think it was a little tough to swallow at first, but now people get it and they see the value of it and it's been really cool. So let's talk about that a little bit. This leadership, like, you're leading your business, right? I'm sitting here leading mine. At least I think I am. And how's that been for you? Like, were you a leader and had that kind of stuff? I know the college pro thing, but were you on this magnitude?

I'm a little. I'm a little interesting. So I've noticed I've got very strong skills in certain things and very weak actually in other things. And I actually lean on. I have two business partners as well, and I lean on them to be kind of completing me as a full leader of this organization. I think where I strive is I'm very visionary and I've got a lot of ideas and I'm very good problem solver and I'm very compassionate. I'm passionate and compassionate about the people I work with. And so that draws in a lot of our members and I think that draws in the people with a certain value set. And I have just a lot of purpose behind what I do. And I think people really believe in that as well. When I look at managing our staff internally, like, we have 25 people on our team now, I'm not a good manager of our team. It's funny, but I'm not. Like, I got certain people on our team that are very independent, they're very entrepreneurial in their own way, and it works pretty well. But when I look at like the structural side of even what we teach, it's funny. I'm not the engineer, I'm the dreamer, right? And my business partner, Igor is much more the engineer of our organization and really drives and leads the team internally. And I think there's just. It's been very humbling for me to know.