The 7 Leadership Super Skills That Drive Real Growth

In today's session, we're going to be talking about the super skill, super skill that leaders have and really strong leaders to grow and scale their business. And I want to just take you back for a second so that we can understand exactly what it is that we're talking about. In our past few episodes and courses, we've been talking about the contractor's blueprint, this blueprint to having the pillars of your business and then also the contractor scaling matrix. Think of that as like an overlay over these pillars. Well, these pillars are divided up into two sections. Six of them are foundational pillars or the backbone of your business. And then you also have the operational pillars of your business as well. In the foundational pillars, we have leadership, we have culture, process, HR or team performance as we call it here. You have finance and numbers, and you also have accountability and standards. So those are your six pillars of the contractor's blueprint, foundationally that we got to focus on. And then operationally, we have technology, marketing, sales, production, training, and then recruiting, hiring, onboarding as one final pillar. Most contractors come to us for a couple of those, hey, help us build an amazing sales process or help us recruit and hire a whole bunch of people to scale our business. But if we don't do the right things at the right time, we're unprepared for what that would bring to us by creating those things without the other supporting things to make it optimized the way it should be. And so we're going to be walking through over the next few weeks, each one of these pillars and what we have to learn and know in each one to grow and scale our business. Because what we've learned over the last few years is, is that doing the right thing is something that a lot of contractors do. They just happen to do it at the wrong time. They're up here doing something in the matrix that a owner type business or a business type business is doing when they're still just an operator or solo tech. And that ends up getting them out over their skis, spending too much money doing things out of sequence, which, if you really want to think about this, is like the DNA of your business. And our DNA has to be in the right sequence to be a beautiful thing in the end. Or if it's out of sequence, we're going to end up with something pretty ugly. Now, before I go any further, I want to mention you might see this little logo right up here. We got sponsored and we're sponsored by Hive AI. It is a agentic operational Software that will help you understand your business better. It'll also process all your commissions for you, all your crew payments, and also all of your material invoices, verifying that every single one of them is as accurate as it should be. So go check it out@hiveai.com if it's super cool, you think it's neat, set up a demo. Those guys are amazing. Now on the blueprint, we talked about the blueprint, the 12 pillars and then the stages of growth. That would be the scaling matrix. Down here at the solo tech level, we have to know the million dollar must. So we have to know how to create opportunities, we have to know how to sell those opportunities. We have to know how to do that profitably. We have to know how to deliver or fulfill on that. We have to know how to collect on it. So that's the things that we want to know about the million dollar must for a solo tech. Now when we get into operator, entrepreneur, we got to pay attention all 12 of those pillars. We're going to talk about that here in a high level and then we're going to move into a couple of skills that are really important. So especially that super skill. So let's take a look at what we need to do with our business. So last week, whenever we met, we talked about these levels that we have to go through, these stages as we grow throughout each one of the pillars. And if we were looking at the leadership pillar here, we're going to go ahead and grab our pen. We're looking at this leadership pillar. We, we have down here the solo tech. We have our entrepreneur, our business, our owner, expansion, so, so forth. We have each one of those as we grow through this. Now what we learned last week was that there were levels that had to happen down here at the solo tech. We had to make this decision to lead at all. Is that something we actually want to do? Be responsible for these people and lead them well. And we have to ultimately make this decision because we're a solo or tech type person. We're one man show, one woman show. And we're either providing this service, but we're also wearing a lot of other hats. We're marketing, we're administrating, we're paying like all this stuff. But we don't have a whole bunch of people to lead, it's just us. We got to make sure that that part is the thing that we do. And then you have this level of position of leadership that has to do with the operator. So I'm an operator. I'm. I'm the person that owns the business and you follow me because you have to because that's the way it works. I'm the owner. You do the thing I tell you to do. So you're growing in your leadership and through level. Then we have permission here. And this is the entrepreneur person. This is where people start to follow you because they want to. You started to learn some things and we're going to talk about those things today and those skills. But this is where the level of permission comes in. This all comes from the John Maxwell five levels of leadership. I don't want to claim ownership of this, but it was very valuable for me and I want to teach other people about this and I go into detail about these levels in our previous recordings. Now the next one is production. This has to do with what you've done for the organization. That's why people are following you. And this applies more towards that business level of business or stage as you grow. And then you have your people development and then ultimately you reach this pinnacle of leadership with that one relating to the expansion leader and then also the people development. Being the owner, the person that's truly owns a business has people running it for him. And the reason that people follow in people development is because you're building better people. You're helping them achieve their goals and reach their potential and challenging them. And they're becoming better people and being impacted by you because you're becoming a better person as well. And then when you reach the pinnacle, people will follow you because of who you are. You have done some things and built some people and built some businesses and had an impact far beyond just what normal people do. And people want to be around people like that. You talk about your circles that you want to be in, kind of question, which one of these circles are you in? And to move to the next circle up, you need to be around those type of people. Now what skills do these people need to have to grow their business through those various levels of the contractor scaling matrix? Well, the very first one that we have to start to develop as the solo tech leader is the ability to create and share a vision, one that we can engage people in that actually makes that first person that even wants to come to work for you. You've decided I want to grow this beyond me. And so I'm going to move into the next stage of my business, which tends to be the operator position. You're going to be getting people. So you've got to share a vision of what this Thing is, now that could be huge vision. You want to grow it to $100 million plus a billion dollar company, whatever it is, you're gonna have multiple locations and trucks and all kinds of stuff. Or it could be smaller, it could be, hey, I want to build this thing that generates the amount of revenue and finance that I need to retire at some point, maybe hand it off to a son or a daughter. We all have different things about what we want to do with our vision. And I strongly encourage you to realize what comes with those huge visions, those big ones. There's a lot of work that gets you there, a lot of skill that you have to learn. And those people that are going after those big visions are way up here in their level of leadership. So that means you've got to learn some skills. And so that's the first area where we really have to work. Going from a solo tech, moving up our stages now, next up, we have what we call optimization. This is where we start to get control of our time. This is the place where you start to allocate time appropriately because it's the most valuable asset that we have. We start to streamline a bit of our processes, at least at a small scale. So optimization. Now you get into really formalizing your systems and processes. You have SOPs, they're written, they're documented here. They may be systems that are being worked towards optimization, but they're mostly verbally translated. They're not documented and clear for any person. And ultimately, here in this stage that we're in as the entrepreneur, we're putting those systems in place, we're documenting, we're documenting them in a way that anybody could get behind a desk and do that job. It gets really, really clear. Then we have the next stage and set of skills that we have to learn, which is analysis. We have to be able to analyze our systems and our time according to our vision. That is all in alignment, that we're moving forward, we're making progress, and where can we pull a lever and move things and shorten time frames to make it as optimal as possible? So you're building off of this optimization. You're building off of the system, you're analyzing it, you're reflecting on it, and you're adjusting it as necessary. Then our next one is growth. These are growth skills, and these are skills that we learn not only to help ourselves grow, but to help other people grow within our business. And so we start to do some things like book clubs. We start to do things where we challenge people to take on some. Some duty. We are growing people in their leadership. So that's the growth skill sets that we're going to need in people development. And then finally, for you to reach the pinnacle, you've got to have some empowerment. Hopefully that fit on the screen. It did. Empowerment. And so this is where we really, like, we've started to empower people down here in growth, but where we truly empower people. And when we reach that pinnacle, we're looking to expand our business as an expansion leader. That means that we have people in place that run our business for us. We may meet with them once a week to make sure everything's on task and still going in the direction that we want. I'm over here working on a new trade, a new business, a new location. We're expanding out in what we do, and I need my focus there while I have people I trust that want to work for me because I have reached a pinnacle that they want to achieve, and I have to empower them to do so and trust them to do so. So that's. That's what I want to be clear on. Today we had those stages, then the levels of what it looks like to lead, and then the skill sets that we're going to have to learn as we move through. So I want to go through today a couple of those skills that you may need to know, especially if you're early on. And we're talking down here in this decision and optimization aspect of things where we're creating visions and optimization. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the super skill that underneath everything else that applies to all of these, we want to start setting that base foundation for. Let's go ahead and scoot this down a little bit, make sure we got it selected. There we go. Get my eraser there. OCD type person. I like things to be nice and neat. And I drew a little line there. I didn't mean to draw. All right, we'll come over here. We're going to talk about our first major skill. This was the skill that truly optimized what it was that I could do, what it was I could accomplish. And the concept has continued to grow and refine and get better and better over time. But I'm really focused on optimizing my time whenever I first started. The concept that I started with is what we call time blocking. Now, most of us tend to run around in this world in a very reactive way. Homeowner calls us when they say they want us to come out. We go out We. We get an opportunity, we go take that opportunity. We get an email, we answer the email, get a text message, we answer a text message. And what that does is it distracts you from what it was that you were focused on. You were working on something, and a phone rang, an email came in, a text came in, somebody knocked on your door, and you went up from it, you got distracted, went over, did the thing, because you think it's a fire when it really isn't. And then you try to come back to doing the thing. And so this distraction aspect is a big thing. Our phones and our watches and all the things, the gadgets and the stuff, distract us from optimizing our time. And so the first piece of this concept that I want to explain to you is to group things that are similar together and then put them in your schedule to be done at that specific time. We're going to talk a little bit more about that in just a second. The other thing that you need to realize, and it's part of this concept that's super important, is that when we're working, we're doing the thing. And after just a few minutes of doing that thing, we kind of get in a flow. We're rolling along and everything's going really smoothly. And then, boom, distraction hits us. We take our mind off of it for a second, we go over there and do whatever or minutes or hours, whatever it is. We try to come back to this thing and we gotta find flow again. And it takes a while, takes a while to get in that rhythm and pick it up and start running with the ball again. People like me, we have a very difficult time with it. My family tells me I'm add. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. Never been diagnosed. But I have a lot going on in my world, which is why I have to have something like this to keep me focused and accountable to doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done. And so let's talk about this concept just a little bit here and think of it this way. I have these morning hours, and those are really early morning hours. Then I have the actual morning, and then late morning, probably some time for lunch, and then early afternoon, then late afternoon and evening. And this is our day. From the time we wake up till the time we go to bed. We need to account for everything in our lives so that we find valuable, that necessary, that needs to be done to stay focused on so we don't let the distractions get us. And so in the early morning, you May say, hey, on Monday I do my workouts. And you, you meditate, you take care, recover, do whatever it is, stretching your thing, have a cup of coffee, do some Bible study, whatever it is that you may do. But I kind of look at that as like my me time. There's me time there. I'm taking care of my body, I'm taking care of my mind, taking care of my soul. And I tend to do that every day of the week. Now, this day is Sunday. And for me, as a man of faith, this is God's day. I got God, I got some football. That's what I do on Sunday. Those are. And my family and. And me. I'm going to take care of me, I'm going to rest, I'm going to take a break. And I'm very, very adamant about that break, that it's a place to get filled back up and to recover from this week that I've put myself through. And so for me, that's a big X. I don't do much anything on a Sunday. I want to recover. But the rest of the week, these six days, there's things that I need to get done. So early mornings are usually about me. Now, that is my own personal preference. You may be different. And anybody that tells you this is the one way that you got to do things, you should be cautious about that and really always ask the question, is that true? Like, really, Let me think about that for a minute. What do I believe about that? Because you might be a night owl and this me time might happen down here in the evening when you exercise and when you work out, when you take care of your body and when you think, when you do your deep thinking and writing, when you do those types of things, they could be in the evening, they might be in the middle of the day where you take that break from work to do the things that fulfill you and help you continue with the day and perform at a high level. So I'm just sharing mine today. But I want you to think about this. When do you work effectively on these various things? So morning comes along, the rest of the world wakes up and gets after what they're doing. I tend to be a fairly early riser. Never was originally, but I found that if I could get that two hours in the morning before everybody else, I could do a lot to take care of me. So once the morning hits, I'm probably doing some things like planning. I'm going to do some planning right away, want to plan, and I'm probably going to do that throughout the week as well. Get my plan put together, what it is that I need to get done that day, what's high priority, what's the things that would move the needle, that type of stuff. Late morning is when I start to get into real work, like the things that need to be done. So let's talk a little bit about what those things might be. For example, on Mondays, late morning, I tend to be very focused on the paperwork. We all got paperwork. We got things that need to get done, that need to go out to people and follow through, get things written, do whatever it is that we need to do to move the ball down the road. Mondays are usually not the greatest days to interact with other humans that you're trying to convince to be your customer because they're in a bad mood too, because it's Monday. So paperwork was a really good thing for me to do in the late mornings. Now I want you to think about this for just a second because this isn't hour by hour and it really should be. I'm trying to explain it more to you conceptually and really every 30 minutes, what am I doing? And there's some things that I might do inside of those 30 minute blocks. For example, right here in my late morning before I have lunch, I'm going to do email, phone calls and text messages. I don't look at them any other time. That's when I do it. I do it late morning, about 11:30. I go and look at my emails, follow up with anything I need to follow up with. I send text messages, anything like that, make a phone call if it's necessary. Rest of the time I'm not doing that. Phone comes in, it's on silent, I don't even hear it. If you don't get me, I'm usually working with a client. Or you can leave a message and I will get back to you. And I do all the time. If you don't leave a message for me, I'm probably not getting back to you. Send me a text message, I'm going to answer that as well. But I have a specific time that I do those repetitive things that I do over and over again. And I tend to do those down here as well. In the late afternoon. I will catch anybody that came in later. So don't think that this is just the six things you want to break this down by probably 30 minute sections from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. Now on those Mondays, I would also come back over here and we'll get back to orange. I would focus on marketing and not marketing like going and knocking doors and walking into various opportunities. I would be doing marketing that was in the office in most cases. So I'd be working on email campaigns, social media posts, those type of things and they're all blocked out together. And it's what I do that whole entire time. It's not a specific thing. It's not work on social media campaign for this. It's do marketing during this time. I know that that was the best time for me. Some people may prefer to do that earlier in the morning. Wherever you're thinking. The best is when you should be doing that thing. Then late afternoon I would be doing try to grab a different color here real quick. Let's see what other color I got. There we go. Green. I might be doing some wrap up. So I'd be wrapping up my day, making sure everything was good. And this is what it looks like as a leader. This is, this is me leading. I might have to do reports. And if I've got reports that I do daily, they would be in my plan. If I have reports I do weekly, I'd have them on a specific day of the week. For example, like I only did marketing and we'll grab that orange again on Mondays and Wednesdays at about that time. So marketing. As a salesperson I worked in the evenings. I did a lot of my normal work earlier in the day. Paperwork, CRM stuff, whatever it may be, phone calls and emails, estimates and the things I needed to do. But as a salesperson I would come down here and from late afternoon about there through the evening I'd run appointments. I'd do that on Tuesdays and Thursdays and then money day to early afternoon. I'd run appointments in those times. I'd run three to four appointments here and I'd run three to four here and I would close six to 10 sales every single week. But I controlled my calendar. Other people didn't. And I explained to people this is when I could meet, hey, I've got openings on Tuesday and Thursday. I've got one at 4:30 on Tuesday. I've got another one at 7:15 on Thursday. Which one works better for you? And you'd be shocked. People are like, well 7:15, I'll take that one. But whenever I left it wide open, hey, when would you like to meet with me? How about 7am on Wednesday? 7am on Wednesday. And this is just make it clear, I have Bible study. Am I willing to give up my Bible study to Go out and get a new client. I'm not. I don't think you can even read that. I wrote that terribly. But Bible study is important to me and I don't want to sacrifice that because I need that. So I need to control my schedule. So this is time blocking. So this is the concept I want you to understand. I want you to understand there's groups of things that you do. You do marketing things, you do sales things, you do leadership things, you do reporting, you do emails and communication things, you do updating of CRMs. You do these things that are all similar but not perfectly defined during that specific time of the day. You should do those things and stay in the flow on those things until they're complete without having people distract you. As a matter of fact, I used to put on my door hard at work because I didn't want people knocking on my door during certain times because I wanted to stay in that flow. If you're not familiar with the flow, you've probably seen it before, especially if you watch sports. Like that quarterback that can't miss a throw, that basketball player can't miss a shot. That homer, that hitter up to bat that's hit three homer. That dude's in the flow, man. He's. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's just getting after it. We do the same thing with our work. Think about the time where you took the time to just really knock something out and how good it was. You probably weren't distracted during it. You probably did it at a time that was of optimal time for you. So that's time blocking. I'm going to go ahead and stop there just to give you the idea. This is the things that you should be doing when you're in that solo and tech world. Like, hey, I want to start to optimize time. But if you haven't done it there, for sure, you've got to be doing that in the operator. When you start to hire some people, you've got to start controlling your schedule. So that's that one. Let's come down here. Let's talk about that super skill. This is probably one of my favorite things to talk about. I'm going to make it as big as I can because I'm going to need some space here to write. I think we probably got it covered right there. But this is what we call. This is the super skill. This ability to connect with other human beings in a way that they want to follow you. You have created a relationship and a bond where they feel like they belong and you care about them and they don't want to leave. And so one thing you got to ask yourself is, as you start to move and move towards this leadership thing, is, would you work for you? It's a big question, tough question. I can remember being asked that by my own coach way back in the day. Would you work for you? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, of course I'd work for me. He's like, well, I don't know. Do you bring value to other human beings? Do you have skills that you can share with other human beings that would uplevel them? Do you want to see other human beings do well? If they had this problem, could you solve it? I started to really question whether I was capable of leading. And it put me on a journey of learning these skills that I needed to know. And that journey, what I found out during it is there's a bunch of skills. I think at last count, I counted like 37. There's probably more than that. There's a million books on it. It really started to get confusing. And so what I did is I brought it back down to its core, really. And truthfully, what am I trying to do as a leader? Trying to connect with people. In a way, they see enough value in me that they're willing to follow because it brings them them benefit. They get value from the interaction as well. So let's talk about what these subset of skills are that allow you to connect with other people. So the first one that you need to know, and I'm going to make sure I get the right color here, I don't think I have the right color. Here we go. Is I have to learn the skill of engaging. And usually in a vision, I have to. Whoever I am looking at to become a part of my company, I have to engage with them. And I need to do that continually, all the time, be consistent with it on a vision of what this company's going to become and what that means to them. If I cannot engage them in something that seems beneficial to them, that they can grow and become something they weren't before, they're not going to work for me very long. They're going to look at it as more of a job than a possible career. And here's a funny stat for you. 90% of people after day one of coming to work for a company have decided to quit working for that company. Not right that day, but they have decided that this was a job and they're going to do it as long as they need to do it till they can get to the next thing. Because it's not a career. It's not the thing that's going to get me to where I want to go. I'm just going to get it done until I can find the better thing. And so we have to engage them in this vision and think of that as almost like I gotta sell them on the idea. So my vision has to be really clear. I tell people, write it down. Like, what is your company gonna look like three years from today? What is this company gonna look like? We're gonna have multiple locations, multiple offices. Are we gonna have leadership levels? Are we gonna have trucks? Are we gonna have wrapped? What is it gonna look like for you guys out there in your business that you can clearly explain to somebody else? And then how does that benefit them? Do they have opportunity to grow? Are they going to learn skills that they didn't have access to before? Or is their lives going to change financially? What is it that's going to change for them, that's going to grow them in a way that they want to stay? And so we've got to engage them in that vision. So think of that as like the very first time you ever get to do it is in that interview. We're talking about it. It's the very first thing I talk about. Let me just explain to you what we're all about here and so you can understand who you might be coming to work for. And I share my vision and I share how we're elite, I share how we're different. I share all of those things and then what that means to them and the ultimate result they'll get if they put in the hard work and the effort. And I. And, and I sell them. Seriously, like sold. And I created something. I created this thing. It's called buy in. They're bought in. They're like, whoa, Great pitch. Love it. Want to be a part of it? Sounds great. But everybody that sells something has to fulfill on that thing to lock the buy in in. And so the next thing that I have to do is I have to educate. I'm going to make this a little bit bigger here so I can write inside the box and you can actually see and we'll move it up and down and around. But I have to educate. And not just. Not just them, I have to educate me as well. I have to put in the time and effort to get better at what I do and who I am and how I do it. And so I have to educate myself and I Have to educate them because remember I told them in the vision they were going to become a new person, a a new human, a new and more valuable person. I have to educate them. I got to give them the tools. I got to give them the education, the training, all the stuff, the even role play and practice. If you're teaching salespeople, I've got to educate people. I don't want anybody to ever tell me I didn't give them the tools and education to succeed. Because that's where you lock that buy in in. And when you lock that buy in in, you have the next thing that you have to do, which is we have to set the example or be an example. So what I'm talking about here, if I'm the example, is I asking people to work and I'm asking them to go hard and challenge themselves and push and become just incrementally better every day. If they don't see me doing the exact same thing, why should they do it? Most people come to work for you because they want to be like you. They feel you have something that they can learn so that they can up level in this world as well. And so we want to make sure that we set the proper example. If I'm telling people to work from 8:00 o' clock in the morning to 7:00 clock at night, guess what? I'm probably working from 8:00 clock in the morning to 7 o' clock at night. I'm probably going to be the first one in the door and the last one to leave. That doesn't mean I'm not going to optimize the way I work. It doesn't mean they're not going to see the results of my work. It just means that I have to and I mean I have to show that I'm willing to do what they're willing to do. I'm willing to put the effort in just like they are. So that's, that's the second or the third skill that you have to learn which is setting the example. And when you do move this over here again, you start to get this crazy thing called activity. Riding sideways. Not the easiest thing in the world. I get some activity and so when I get that activity make this a little smaller now I start to move things. Remember, you're the center part of this leadership wheel. You want to look at this like a tire. It's a wheel on a vehicle. You're the center part, the hub, okay? And that hubs being driven by the axle, the transmission, the drivetrain and the engine, if you're a gearhead, and that engine is all your internal things, your skills and all that good stuff, and you're the one putting torque to what's going to happen with your business and the people that work for you. And so when you get these skills, you start to move. You start to twist just a little bit, and you start to do each one of these consistently. You start to move the tire. So the hub starts to move, the wheel starts to move, and the tire itself starts to move, and we start to get traction from that torque that we're applying. So up next, we have. I'm on the right thing here. There we go. Empathy. Now, I engaged them, I educated them, I set the example, and something's not going quite right. They started off good. Maybe there was some activity, but activity dwindled down, and I start to find out that they're. They're not reaching the standards that we set. And then I discover that, hey, maybe there's something happening at home, and there's excuses coming out, and I don't like excuses. That doesn't mean I don't care. This means we got to overcome them. We got to beat those challenges. And so I care so much that I'm willing to put the effort and time into you to help you overcome the obstacle that you're dealing with. And so you have to be empathetic, not sympathetic. Sympathetic is where most of us default. It's one of the number one things we see leaders do, is they have such a soft heart that they don't ever want to fire anybody or let anybody go because they're sympathetic. I understand things are hard at home or your car broke down or what. Every reason under the book, there's all kinds of excuses of why people don't continue to have activity. I have to care enough to understand, put myself in their shoes, because I've likely been there before, or if I haven't, I know somebody that has so I can share a story about how we overcome it, develop a plan on how to overcome it. That empathy means I care enough to put in the effort to help you overcome the obstacle. I'm not just going to let you slide by and become a ghost out there and end up not being with us anymore. Because I lost sight of you, it means that I'm actually looking for you. I'm searching you out. I didn't leave you on. I did all this other stuff up here, like, really good. This is where we usually fall down, is down here, wherever it's empathetic. Caring enough that somebody succeeds with us. Hey, I gave you all the education. Go get it done. See you later. You would never check in with them again. And I have check ins every single day, every single week. I want to see how you're doing. I want to be. I have my finger on the pulse with you. Because if I do and I show I care enough, you're going to find something that is inside of you that you may not have had before. Let me see if I can do this as well as I can upside down. That's going to be backwards. Hold on one second. Still playing with my new technology here. We can write that whole thing better hope you guys can read upside down. We start to get some discipline. Discipline, also known as consistency, starts to deliver something. We're going to talk about that in just a second. But you can see that tire starting to move. I got some buy in, I got some activity. Might have had a little bump in the road there. I worked with them, I cared enough to put some empathy and time into them and they started to find some discipline. And the second that I see that discipline, I see that incremental improvement. I see that hard work, I see that willingness. I'm going to give them the next thing that I'm after and what they're really looking for, encouragement. I am going to encourage, I'm going to notice, I'm going to have an eye for. This is not something that I'm naturally good at. I had to learn this skill. I had to learn how to encourage people. I just expect people to be encouraged on their own. I expect them to do what they're supposed to do. And unfortunately most time that's not the way other people work. What they need is a little bit of encouragement. Hey man, good job. And not just on something fitted like they sold a job. Everybody says good job on that. Hey, you knocked a few more doors today. Hey, you sent out a few more flyers today. Hey, I saw that you went to a B. And I encourage you see the activity? You encourage it, encourage it, encourage it. The little things make big things down the road and then they become even more disciplined. They see that you care enough to put into them. You noticed the discipline that they're building by encouraging them. And they just want to be that much more disciplined because what they want, they want your recognition, they want to know that they belong. They want to know that somebody cares about them because that's what human beings are truly striving for. Somebody cares enough to be willing to put time into them. And then recognize the benefit of the effort of both parties. So we get some discipline, we get some encouragement. We're starting to get some consistency. And what that does as it continues to rotate that tire. And we have our next thing that we're going to be doing, and that next thing is that we're going to empower. We're going to empower those people to do great things. I need more space. But we're going to empower them to start to build on those skills to become the leaders that we need in the future. We see this activity, we see this discipline, we see this incremental improvement, we see consistency. Awesome. Be looking for the thing they do well, whatever it may be. If you're a sales leader out there and you see somebody that's doing well at a certain thing, empower them. Go to them and say, hey, man, you're really good at getting appointments. You think you could help me out here and show other people exactly what you do? Maybe teach it a little bit? Would you enjoy doing? Yeah, I would, man. That'd be awesome. Great. Why don't you get it put together for it? Make an outline. Let's go over it together. Show me the goal of what you want to achieve when you teach them. And then let's do this thing. Let's. Let's put it into practice. Sure enough, they bring it back to you. You go over, do some coaching, and boom, they're out there doing some teaching and training for you, which would then take some of that load off of you in the future, if you think about it. And they're getting the opportunity to lead because, remember, they followed you for a reason. They want to lead like you do. And so when you empower them to do those things, they start to build their skills. The point of up, leveling into a new position. They could become a team leader. They could become a sales manager. Man, if I'm a sales manager, I'm trying to build sales managers, because when I do build sales managers, I get to be vice president sales, because our volume is up there. If I'm an owner and I'm trying to find a sales manager, I'm looking at my team first, who's showing me the activity and the discipline. Because what comes from all that is results. Boy, oh, boy, riding sideways results. We start getting results. This discipline has led to results. We see more sales, more active, more, more, more. And they're having success, and you're excited about that success, and so are they. And that machine just keeps on rolling. And now we have the most difficult of all of these seven skills that you have to learn for the super skill of connection. These are habits. They're not just something you do once. You do it all the time, continually. You're constantly applying torque to your team. And that last one and most important one is you expect. You set standards. You have accountability measures in place. You have activity levels to achieve, and you expect them to be met. And when people don't meet them, what do you do? Do you do anything about it? Did you talk about it? But you didn't stand behind it? Because the second you don't stand behind what your word was, everybody looks at you and goes, I guess none of that really mattered. I guess none of that was important. I guess I don't have to work that hard. I guess I don't have to do that much. And human behavior tells us that to be honest with you, most people will do as little as they need to do to cover their bills and maybe have a little leftover for date night and a vacation. Most people don't go and supersede. Those are the exceptional fuel. We call them purple unicorns. We run across them very rarely. But when we truly do expect, we hold people accountable to it and we find that they're not meeting it. I'm going to pour into you one more time. I'm going to put the effort into you. Hey, 30 days together. Let's go. We're going to put a performance improvement plan in together. We're going to get you back to where you need to be, that you get one shot at that. Now that we've done that and got you back to there, don't do it again. You got to stay up on pace. And when we have that person fall again and just not be willing to do what we expect, We've got to let them go for two reasons. One is they're setting a bad example for everybody else. And everybody else goes, oh, I guess that doesn't matter. So we don't have to do it either. So that's one thing. And the other thing is it's not love to keep somebody that shouldn't be there. It's actually not love. It's the opposite of that. It's selfishness. You just don't want to let them go because they might make another sale and that could be money in your pocket. You're actually doing them a disservice. This person, this human being is not doing good or cut out for what it is that you do. It's time for them to move on and find the thing that fits them. And I'll tell you this, when you start to do that one, set standards of what's minimum, what's expected and what's goal. Anybody below minimum, hey, I'll work with you. Going to give you a month, get you back up there. But next time you're below minimum out of here, we don't allow for that. Everybody else looks around, goes, whoa, better get on the stick. Seems like this is real. And we get something that I think we're all after as leaders and what we all hope for as a leader, which is belief. They actually believe in you, that you can lead and that you can lead them to this new theme that's so much better than the old them they were that you're going to bring them value, which then gets you a little more buy in, a little more activity, a little more discipline, a little more results, and a little more belief. And we just keep that cycle going. And what ends up happening, that tire starts to spin, you start to get some traction and you start to peel away as hell. Like, man, that rubber hit the road and we are propelled forward and we're constantly growing and moving forward. We're not just growing as a business, we're growing as people. We're making a real difference that impacts people far beyond just making a paycheck. So that's our super skill of connection. The seven sub skills that you have to do, you have to do them consistently to gain buy in activity, discipline, resources, results, and ultimately get that belief in you that you're the leader that, you know, you probably could be. You just have to do the work to learn the skills. All right, so that is our training today. We've talked about the super skills connection. We've talked about our time blocking. We talked about how that applies to the leadership pillar of the contractor's blueprint. Next week we're going to talk about the culture pillar and what we have to do in each level of the pillars to achieve a killer culture. That's our training for today. If you thought this was valuable in any way, you found that, hey, this is something that, man, I need a little bit more of this in my life. You got two options. One is you could say, hey, I want to work with these guys. I like what they're about and how they do things. It looks like I need to grow in each one of those things to scale my company to where I want to be, where I invite you to shoot a picture of that QR code right there and and take our contractor assessment. It's going to assess your abilities in each one of those 12 pillars and what stage you're at. And then once you're done with that, it's going to invite you to a free coaching call. We don't charge anything for it. It's not a sales pitch, it's a coaching call. We're going to be going off of that assessment saying, hey, these are the next two or three things that if you just move the needle in them, you'd be able to break through that ceiling. We walk hand in hand with you in one on one coaching. You're not in a group or anything like that. It has been our bread and butter for 13 years and we've grown amazing businesses. 8 figure, 9 figure, crazy awesome businesses. That's not what it's all about, growing how big you can be, it's how good can you be and what are your goals and your dreams. That's what we assess and that's what we help you achieve. Whether it's a $10 million company, a $5 million company or $100 million company, we're here to help you build the business of your dreams, not ours. So that's our contractor assessment. Feel free to go ahead and take a shot of that. Take the assessment. It's going to take you about 20 minutes. That eliminates a whole bunch of questions that we would have to ask you that would waste a bunch of time because we were tom optimizers. Because we want to make that hour the most valuable hour that you've ever had in your business before. You like it, great. We'd love to have you as a client. But if for some reason it's just not a good fit, at least we served you well that day. Now maybe you just need some questions answered. Maybe you're not ready for one on one coaching yet. The next best option is to chat with me. We built an AI tool called Contractor Sage that can help you out. Those questions that you have about next steps and things like that, you're going to get some really good answers there. If you enter your information in right at the beginning, like a little bit of context, like I'm an owner and my company's this size. These are the things I struggle with. This is what my goals are on that it's going to be focused on giving you the right answer at the right time to start up leveling you and your business. One thing I'll tell you is you'll never replace true relationship one on one, somebody walking hand in hand with you and knowing you intimately in relationship with AI, it's just not going to happen. But it is a good way to get some of the answers answered for you so that you can move the ball forward a little bit. So if that's a good answer, that's 29amonth. It's less than a cup of coffee that you make at the house daily to get the answers that you need. It applies to any role. You're a salesperson, you're a production manager, sales manager, owner. Whatever you are, if you let it know what you are, it's going to start to give you the next steps that you need to do for the role that you you're in. So that's contractor training room for today. I'm your host, Jim Johnson. We helped you learn the seven subskills of the super skill of connection, some time blocking and then the levels that you're going to need to go through and the skills that apply to them for that leadership pillar. We'll see you on our next episode.