The Contractor's Blueprint - Why Most Roofers Fail Without It

And we're going to be talking about the DNA of a business. And this really applies across all businesses. Whenever you think about it, businesses are like this living, breathing thing that we bring to life, and all of them have a DNA. And one of the things that kind of became this epiphany to me as I was coaching and teaching contractors is that there was literally these 12 things that really needed to be done in a certain order or sequence. And then at certain timing as we continue to dig into this. And so I'm going to share a little bit about that today and what that means. Some of you have probably seen this before. Please hang out anyway, because this is super valuable and maybe a new way of seeing this. So the idea is that we have this contractors. I'm going to try and make that a little bit bigger if I can do it this way. All right, there we go. Contractor's blueprint. So think of it as like the blueprint of a DNA. And this idea that we all have a DNA and we have this choice in our businesses, whether we want them to be, oh, a beautiful, amazing, A plus, just wonderful thing that adds value to the rest of the planet, or it's this ugly baby that maybe for a little while it might do well for you, but then it falls apart on you. And so one of the things that we discovered as we were coaching over time is that there was two sides of the equation. There was a foundational backbone, so this is foundational, and then there was also this operational backbone. And the thing that we really discovered was that most contractors were really focused on the operational side of things. Sales, production, one they miss a lot, training and then recruiting, hiring and onboarding. And so those are the operational components of the DNA of your business. Those are the things that are out front, we're constantly focused on and stuff like that. But what we realized is that if we did them out of order or out of sequence, without doing the foundational side of what we need to do, these businesses would fall apart. And so what are these foundational things? These things that are super important to businesses scaling beyond a million, maybe two or three million dollars? And those things were leadership, culture, process. What most people call hr, we call team performance. Then you have finance and numbers, because it's not just finance, it's actually knowing your numbers and handling those well. And then finally we have accountability. And we found that if you looked at those in order and grew your business according to that order, you had a much better chance of being successful. When I first started coaching, I Wasn't really focused on the leadership one because I just assumed somebody starting a business already knew that they were pretty good leaders. And funny enough, that was not the case as we started to meet with a lot of contractors. And that's a hard thing to share with others. But you think about it, if you don't have good leadership, you're not going to build great culture. And if you don't have great culture, you're not going to build solid processes together as a team and you're not going to develop the team performance stuff that needs to happen in your business, which leads to not managing your finance and numbers real well and then ultimately holding people accountable to the standards that we would like to have. And if we do those things well first, then the technology, marketing, sales, production, training, recruiting, hiring and onboarding are much more effective, efficient and those type of things. So if you look at it backwards, that's the key thing here, looking at it backwards. Most people would come to us for coaching for a couple of major things. They would come to us for sales like, hey, how do we sell more jobs? They would come to us for marketing, how do we get more opportunities? And they would come to us for recruiting, hiring and onboarding. How I scale my business, I need to hire a bunch of salespeople. And the problem with that is they're out of order. If you don't have those other things done well, if you don't have processes and systems, if you don't have the tools for them to be successful, if you don't have those things in place, onboarding people into a situation where they don't have great training, which isn't backed up by good production to create a world class experience for your customer, which isn't backed up by a sales process that's replicatable and provides value in proprietary situations, the marketing that you do is useless. I see so many people go to conferences and events and stuff like that and they're talking to all the various different folks out there and they get sucked in by the candy. I mean, there's a lot of candy out there. Marketing, get more appointments and we'll get you 30 more this month, we'll get you 150 more leads, all that kind of stuff, and we get sucked into it, we go do that thing. But if we don't have a sales process to actually close the deals, we think the marketing company is bad. In some cases they're poor, of course, but in most cases it's actually a combination of factors. If we don't have the tech stack that we need to track the leads, make sure that those things are being followed up with the way they should be followed up with. Being able to know which ones are working and which ones aren't. We fall into this trap of always chasing the money, always trying to outsell our weaknesses. So that's the contractor's blueprint in the Reader's Digest version. And I bring that up because some of the things that we've. We've learned and we want to share with you have something to do with how we want to look at our businesses even deeper. And so if you look at those 12 things, I kind of have little icons there for you. Leadership, culture, process, team performance, finance, numbers, accountability, and so on and so forth. You can think of those as, like, pillars of your business. And those pillars, each one of them stand on top of something if it's going to be stable. And the thing that it stands on top of ultimately comes down to the owner's guiding principles. What kind of business are you going to be? These guiding principles, we have to ask ourselves, what are we all about? Because if we don't know what we're all about, the thing that we build might be built on a weak foundation that is focused solely on achieving a goal or making money or buying a boat or all this stuff that we tend to see that happens out there that isn't focused on what the actual customer experience is going to be like, what it's going to be like to work for you. And so you've got to really ask yourself, what are your guiding principles? And think that you're building this business based off of that foundation. And I'll give an example. Whenever I first started in business, the guiding principle that I had was, let's see how much money I can make and how big I can build this thing. Those were my guiding principles. Each person that worked for me was a dollar sign. And if you produced, you could stay. If you didn't, you gotta go. And that wasn't because of anything about them necessarily. It's more about me, Achie, my goals. And so my guiding principles were what I would call pretty selfish, narcissistic, and those type of things. And don't get me wrong, it works. It works really, really well. We did awesome for a little while, but those guiding principles came back to bite me, because I wasn't about the other people. I was being selfish instead of selfless. Some bad things happened. I had a bookkeeper, still $585,000 from my business. I had a Young man that I had brought in as like a little brother to me that literally radically changed his life of where he was headed and, and what he could accomplish in life. And he decided to go be business partners with her to start a competing company. And I had to ask myself, like, why is all this happening Whenever I did such good things for these people, or at least that's the way I perceived it. But what they realized is I was worse than a thief. I was something else. I mean, I don't even know what that is. I can't really describe it other than maybe narcissistic jackass. And so I had to change my guiding principles. And so my guiding principles changed literally overnight to being selfless. Now, yours are all going to vary about what it is that you're about and what you want to do. But that was my experience. I think we should really challenge ourselves that if we're going to really try to scale something, make it sustainable, make it something that we can be proud of and that changes people's lives and have an impact, we should really ask ourselves about those guiding principles. So that's component number two. There's a DNA of your business. These components happen in a sequence. There's an operational side and a foundational side. And we're building this company based off of our guiding principles. And so whatever your guiding principles are as an, as the leader or leadership team or owner of the company are going to bleed into all of these pillars. So just want to establish that part that underneath everything, the rock that your business is being built on is those guiding principles. Which leads us to a bit of a new thing that we have started to establish with people. This isn't a new idea, but it's a little bit new for our world. And one of the things that we see people doing more often than not is they're actually doing the right thing. They just happen to be doing it at the wrong time. So this is what we call the contractor scaling matrix. So there's a matrix to this thing. And the very first piece of that matrix is what we call the solo. This is the one man show. This is the guy that is maybe doing work on the side. And it's starting to get to be a few more than he can handle and still do his regular job. And so he kind of starts to step out on his own, thinking that he's got a business. And the reality of it is that he's a solopreneur. He's doing everything, he's got all the hats on and he's sometimes trying to be something that he's not. If he doesn't have the revenues to be one of these other levels, he's got a bit of a problem. So he has these things that he's got to do. He's got to generate opportunities, he's got to make sales and he's got to do good work and he's got to collect. Those are the main things that he has to do. He doesn't have to be a good leader, he doesn't have to build a strong culture, he doesn't have to really develop airtight processes early on. Those things aren't quite as important, which is why you don't see the lines. Those, those 12 sections that you see right there carrying down below. In order to get to the point to where he can turn his solopreneur operation into an actual business, he. He's got to do those four things very well, and those opportunities, he's got to know what to do in them on a budget. He can't go out and spend thousands of dollars on some kind of big marketing push to generate those opportunities. He's got to learn things about guerrilla marketing and word of mouth and referrals and those type of things that are low budget but generate positive opportunities to sell more jobs and get good at sales. So he needs to focus on those sales things to get really good at sales and close the deals, do great work, so he gets more word of mouth and ensure that he collects in a timely fashion so he doesn't hurt his cash flow. So that's the solo guy. Now the solo guy turns into usually the tech or technician. He might have a few more people working for him, usually one or two more at most. And that guy is moving from the $250,000 a year or so to 1 million. That's kind of who that is. You think about it, one guy that can sell a little bit can probably generate a million dollars. But if he does, he might need some assistance. Whether that's an administrative person taking care of paperwork, a production person ensuring that work goes well. He starts to kind of outsell what he can do by himself. This solopreneur is usually less than $500,000. So think about 500 gram and being below that number. So the technician, the solo can turn into the technician. Depending on the trade that they're doing, sometimes less than 500,000. If it's a smaller amount and more of them, it could be as low as $250,000 and then moving up into about A million dollars? Maybe a little bit more than that. Two million max, depending on market and stuff like that. But if you think about it, they've got to do certain things throughout those 12 pillars that are the right things. So can this guy that's doing less than a million dollars spend, I don't know, $50,000 a year on marketing? Likely not. If he can, he's not going to have a whole lot left over. So he's still got to do some of those more budget minded marketing ideas and maybe a little bit of extra marketing. And so he's learning some new skills along the way. And then you have nextup and that's across all the pillars, each one of the pillars. There's a certain amount of stuff you need to do in each one and you need to do them in order. He's got to become a little bit of a leader now. He doesn't have to become John Maxwell overnight, but he's got to become somebody that can engage people into a little bit of a vision and they want to work with them if you get a chance. There's a great book out there by John Maxwell called the Five Levels of Leadership. It kind of walks through a bit of what the leadership track and that pillar would look like if you were growing your business. So after the tech, you have what we call the operator. And this person is usually moving from that 1 mil up into the 5 mil or so somewhere in there. And so their level of ability has to rise. They've got more people that are, they're responsible for. They tend to have people that they know. It's like friends and family type of thing, close confidants. Still not a very big squad. It might be five, six people. There's usually an administrative person, probably somebody running some production. There might be an assistant that works across the board. They may have a bookkeeper. So now there's other people involved. And so you have to be able to lead those people even just a little bit better than the tech does, which is much better than what the solo does. So you're gaining these new skills of communication, collaboration, these, these things that we need to learn to become a great leader. But we also have to start building our culture and being more precise about it and more aligned in it in each person that we hire. So once again you kind of come back and you're over here doing the next right thing in each one of the pillars. And so my challenge to you is, as I go through this, is to think about where are you in the process of what these various things are because you have the next one and that's what we call the entrepreneur. Depending on the type of trade that they're doing, they're usually moving from about 3 million up to as much as 10 million. So this person's starting to understand business a little bit. They're still entrepreneurs, still a little bit of the seat of the pants, but they're building off of these things that they've established and doing the next right thing each time. And so now they might start adding in some digital media because they've been setting their money back, because they're paying attention to their finance and numbers to reinvest in their business. They're learning about reinvestment, they're learning about profit margin. They're learning about these things that if you pull the right lever, you're, you can begin to scale your business. They're learning how to lead people, they're learning how to lead leaders. They might actually have a sales manager and a production manager and those type of things where they're leading leaders instead of just leading employees. That's a very different thing to grow other leaders than it is to just direct people. And then they're actually going on and finishing out each of the things in order that they need to do to grow their business to the next level, which the next level is an actual business. And I think a lot of people go, wow, What a minute. $10 million, man, that's, that's a business. It could be, but depending upon your market, what trade you're doing. I see people do $10 million that aren't businesses. Businesses are organized. Businesses have processes. Businesses work off of KPIs and metrics. Businesses are using more difficult and better strategies to accomplish their goals. And so you see these guys usually being from about 7 million up to 20 to 25 million somewhere in there. And now they're becoming amazing leaders because they've started to step back from day to day operations. They've started to be the leader of culture and the leader of the way it feels to work. The leader of leaders, the leader of high level leaders. They may even have C level type leaders. One of the biggest mistakes we see about people doing the wrong thing at the wrong time or the wrong, the right thing at the wrong time, sorry about that, is somewhere down in here in these others, they're giving out C level titles to people that are not C level ability. They're going, hey, I'm chief executive officer, I'm chief financial officer, I'm chief whatever officer and you're not really, because those people have skills and talents that have been honed over time to be true chief operating officers and chief executive officers, not just somebody with a title. So be cautious of the titles that you give people as you grow, because you should be doing them at the right time. Because with those type of titles comes certain expectations, especially financially. A CEO to me runs my business for me. If I'm the owner and I have a CEO, they run my business. I don't have to be there and I know they're going to run it well. So that's a little bit of the difference of what you're doing as you grow your business. And so this business starts to accomplish everything it needs to accomplish in its scaling metrics. And now it becomes what we call it an expansion business. And it starts to expand down here in business a little bit in that section where you start to maybe do some more trades, you might even open up another location. But it's usually messy. It's usually like really messy because they hadn't thought about it, like, hey, we're doing really well here, let's go open one across the country. And that's probably not a really good route to do. They understand things like an expansion matrix and what that means and how important that is to what we do next in our businesses. These guys are usually in that 20 going on up to hundred million businesses because they're expanding and they've learned the skills of a leader that has put the right people in place that runs the business for them so that they can then start to put time into the expansion process of their business and then putting the right people in those places as well. And so they start to accomplish these big amazing things, their skills continue to grow, and then opportunity presents itself. You could sell your business, you could become a part of a platform. You can do all kinds of things. You could just continue with it and have it spit money into your bank account. Maybe you become one of those other businesses that are above and beyond even expansion. So that's what we call the contractor scaling matrix. It's really key to do the right thing at the right time. And sometimes it feels slow, but sometimes we have to slow down to speed up if we don't do those things and we try to rush through that and we, we're down here as a tech guy trying to do what somebody in the business thing is doing when it comes to sales. We got a problem. You're trying to do a sales process and system that has a training mechanism to it. And that has all these things. You don't have the time as a tech person to be doing those type of things. So I really want you to think about that in your own business. This might be one of those takeaways that we have whenever we're done with this course that, hey, where am I? Where do I sit in this matrix? And what are the things? What are the right things and the wrong things? We're going to get into that, into some of our future ones. I'm going to get into each one of these pillars and talk about what those things are that need to be done in each one. But I just want to get the concept across to you guys today. And so that's the contractor scaling matrix. So what happens when you put it all together? Okay, what does it look like when you put it all together? Well, it looks a little bit like this. You think about your business. It has these 12 pillars. I got the little icons up there so you guys know which one's which. And I'm down here as the solo guy and I'm working my way up through the technician and then through the operator, entrepreneur business and expansion. And I'm knocking off everything that needs to be done. So you'll notice this solo guy down there doesn't have those pillars necessarily yet he's laying a foundation. Think of it as like the slab of your business built on top of this rock. That is your guiding principles that usually turn into things like your core values for your business. Our guiding principles here at Contractor Coach Pro is to love, serve and care for each and every client that we come in contact with and individual in our industry. Those are our guiding principles. And if we're not following them, everything else starts to break down for who we are and what we want to be in the culture that we've created. And so this gives you an idea of what you should be doing. And the big caution is if you're in one of these areas down here, be cautious of doing the things that you might see up there. It's probably the number one thing that I have seen that causes businesses to get compromised and maybe even go out of business. They over invest into something that they can't do. And so you think about something like technology. You're down here as an operator doing somewhere between three and five million dollars and you decide because somebody sold you on the idea that you need to invest $100,000 into a marketing platform. Well, that's something that a business should be doing. That's not something that an operator should be doing that's a heavy investment that's going to massively affect people. You can hire the cash flow that you'll have, especially if risk comes up and if something happens where your cash flow gets compromised, boom, you're out of business. Because I spent a hundred thousand dollars over here that was really important to doing the right thing here, sorry, here when it comes to technology. So that is the contractor's blueprint, which is the framework, those 12, the scaling matrix on top of it, brought together as a concept of how to think about your business. Where are you in your business? Are you a solo person just doing the million dollar musk? Like I gotta get marketing, sales, fulfillment and collections down that I have a process to it a little bit, at least enough to make a living off of. And now I've decided I want to become something more. Most of the times we see in here for sure there, for sure there as well. And even in here, in the entrepreneur, you're more of an operator than you are an owner. Owners own businesses that people work for. They may be involved, but they're not necessary for day to day operations in most cases. So one of the questions you should ask yourself is who are you? Are you an operator or are you an owner? And if you're an owner, do people do the job that they're supposed to do with light supervision, being held accountable to the things that need to be done, not doing it for them, not telling them what to do. Every step of the way they know what to do. So that is your contractor training room training of the day. I hope you guys enjoyed it. One of the things that I did not have a chance to get put together and I wish I could have, so I'm just going to say it to you is there's lots of questions about all of this. What is the right thing at the right time? And I get those questions all the time. This is a daily thing. I probably get 50 questions by email, another couple of dozen by text message, phone call. Hey, you got five minutes? I got a question. That type of thing, messaging from Facebook and stuff like that. And to be honest with you, I'm just out of bandwidth. I'm like a bit out of bandwidth to handle that kind of stuff as much as we're getting. And so we created something to help answer some of those questions for you guys. It's called Contractor Sage. You can actually go to contractorStage AI or jimjohnson chat, either one. And if you're looking for the answer to those questions, you can simply ask. And we have built an AI large language model of all of our coaching, all of our tools, our instruction, our documents, our courses, everything that you can ever imagine. It's close to 20 million words in that large language model. Now that if you're wondering, what should I do next in my business, tell the model who you are. I'm a $1 million contractor, and these are the things that are going on in my business. It'll understand that context, and then the coaching that it provides and answers it gives back to you will be the right answer for the right time. And I think that's the thing that made what it is that we've built with the AI aspect of things really unique and different. It changes the game that we have this framework or blueprint of 12 pillars and a matrix of what to do and when. And if you give the tool the context, you'll get the answers. We're going to go ahead and answer any questions that you guys may have, those of you that are online, on YouTube, Facebook, wherever it may be. If I can see the comment, we'll get it addressed. And if there's, let's, let's talk takeaways. Any takeaways from today. Remember that whole challenge at the beginning? Write a few down. What were my takeaways? I got, I got one. Yeah, sure.

It's a big, big hairy one, right? Like, I gotta figure out where I'm at in the matrix, because right now we started in March, and I've been, I've been the, the guy at the bottom, right? The solo person doing everything. So good news is we have some, some good candidates that I, I, I'm hiring. I sent out five offer letters today, and two, two of them stepped in support. So we're going in the right direction.

But I got to figure out where.

I'm at and where I need to get to reach the goals I got to have.

Yeah. So you got to think about if you have support, what does it look like and where is it? Okay, if, if your revenue volume is in one of those areas, you need to be looking at your business like that. Like, if we're less than a million, I need to be looking at this like a solo. How do I, on a budget, get as much opportunities as possible? How do I refine our sales process to close as many as possible, then do great work and rely a bit on that word of mouth and referrals to continue to build that business to the point to where we have enough positive profit from our revenue that we can then invest and move to the next level. Now, Josh, I know you a little bit and I know you have some more support than just a solo person. You've got Wendy, you've got some other folks around you as well. You've got a couple of salespeople. I'd think you're more in that tech or operator world, but you're also brand new, so you're just growing. So, yeah, I would really evaluate that over the next few weeks. I'm going to get into what the specifics are in each one of the, like, leadership things, culture things, what should be done in each one of those pillars. But yeah, I think that's a really good takeaway. Anybody else?

I mean, my takeaway was, you know, on that scaling metrics, you know, just identifying that, you know, I'm at that expansion business level.

Yeah.

But when I look at, well, one of those things, you know, new trades, new location, you know, you know, I've. I've talked about a second location. I don't know that I want to do that this year. I think I might want to. Our next year, I might want to take a break, relax, enjoy it a little bit. Enjoy it a little bit and then.

Enjoy it too much. That's always a caution.

And then kind of launch into that other market, 2027, just to just have a breather, you know. But when I look at going into that other market, can I. Even though I've got all the people, you know, I like to be involved in the business day to day. You know, like, I'm not managing every. Any specific department day to day, but I'm here every day. You know, we train together as a leadership team. But if I was to launch Austin, would I be. Would it be okay if I went back to that, like, entrepreneur level, to where I'm more involved in that, or should I just stay back and just put somebody over there and say, rock and roll?

I love. This is such a good question. First off, you have to decide, do you do a new location or do you do other trades? So this is the expansion matrix. So you have this matrix and it's this decision between new location or are there trades out there that we could do that are very similar to what we already do? For example, like roofing. If you do roofing, I know it's on the ground, but fencing is very similar. Same type of profit, pretty high ticket item, actually a lot safer to do. We already have the marketing chops, we already have the, the goodwill with the community. And if we just Added that thing. What kind of revenue would that add? Where we currently sit already versus going and opening a new operation now? Some people go, hey, I don't want to do fencing. I don't even like fencing. Fencing sounds like crap to me. I don't want to do that. I like what we do. We do it really well. That makes sense to go, hey, I want to go open a new location. When you open that new location, a couple things you have to know. You got to be there. You can't just go, hey, you three guys go over there and open that thing and run it in most cases, unless they've already been doing it for you and doing it very well without supervision. And there's probably something that has to be the incentive to be in Austin versus in San Antonio, you're located. So I usually tell people, if you're going to open a new location, expect three to six months of just heavy involvement there, being really, like, on site and stuff like that. Because I've got the leaders over here doing what they need to do in my. My headquarters, which means growing leaders and kind of. It's not starting over. You're starting way ahead of the game, but it's not where you are over there either. The other thing is location. Like, how far away? Like going to Austin. Not a big deal. You actually probably have people that know who you are. They've probably driven by your billboards and your signs and stuff like that already. So it makes a lot of sense. Going to Dallas. They don't know who you are from Adam. And so you've got to build it all over again. Start from scratch with that goodwill. Where you can really see that is, I think, one of the best examples. To me, there's two of them specifically, they really come to mind. In n out Burger. In n out Burger became a thing in California. And the way they did is like, they started here and then they went, hey, I'm going to build another one there and another one there and another one there. And people would come from outside and they would track who was coming from outside. And they go, oh, that one, that one, that one. They just kept expanding like that until it was all over California. Anybody that visited California is like, man, in n out Burger is the greatest thing in the world. Everyone in n out Burger, they got enough goodwill that now they could go towards the national thing. The other one that's a great example of that is Buc Ees. If you live in Texas, you've known who Buc Ees was for years. The very first one, I believe, was in Madisonville, Texas, between Houston and Dallas. And their big thing was billboards, signs that said, cleanest restrooms in Texas. And you'd always stop there. You're like, dude, gotta go to the bathroom. That's the place. Halfway between Dallas and Houston. But then they've turned it into this whole other thing. And I just saw last night that They've opened BUC EE's on the Texas A and M campus. Like, that's crazy to me. Like, now people at Texas A M can go to BUC EE's, I don't think. I don't know if it's a gas station or not, but they got Buc EE's Beaver Nuggets all over the place. So I would really strongly, like, consider, like, yeah, Austin seems like a good move. You would have to get that established before you think about where the next place would be. And I'd be going, maybe Waco. There's close enough that people know what that is and you have enough of a market area to handle. So that. That would be my advice on that, David, is like, hey, I know I've got to dig back in, and I know I got to work with all kinds of new problems and new situations because it's just everybody's in a different location, but you have the systems and processes already. It's literally like, I'm going to go open the next McDonald's over here, and we're going to do it. I just got to get the people. And that takes time to get them all into your culture the way you want them to be. Any other takeaways or questions? We'll take some questions now.

Hey, Jim.

That's Robert. Sounds like. Yeah. Hey, man. Well, good to see you.

You too. Thinking about, let's say, you know, you. You grow pretty fast for month 15, where I'd say we're in the. In the operator role with a real proclivity toward the entrepreneur. But it's just, you know, takes a little time. But. But the foundation for me in this business has been sales. So I've got sales as like, my number one. But all the other stuff, you know, I've delegated stuff already. Some of the system stuff. I'm big on systems, too, but, like, you know, operational stuff with the business. At what point? So. So I'm asking this personally, like. Like, if somebody's like me, who's really sales driven, good with sales, I'm kind of like, as the sales leader in the company. When do you. When do I have to, you know, get my hands off of that particular one. Stop clinching to that and let that go and delegate that. And at what stage with this matrix.

So that was a lot right there. Can you wrap it up into like a shorter question? Yeah.

What stage? Do. Okay, if your owner. Let's say you're operator and you're still doing sales.

Yeah. You're in day to day. You're probably sales manager or something like that in the organization.

Yeah. Is. Is the next step is when you would finally hire that sales manager.

It's that person that replaces you. Yeah. Yep. Okay. That's what I'm asking. That's how you move from operator more into entrepreneur. Start to become an actual owner. You're. You're leading leaders at that point. You're probably not too great at it, to be honest with you. Like, we all do well enough to get people to follow us. But where I would really invest my time right now, because you, you mentioned that you said, hey, sales, I got sales down. We're awesome at sales. And I know you are. You guys are really good. The next thing I would invest in is all of my leadership stuff. For me personally, like, what all can I get and learn? I want to just become a sponge for it. That's. Robert, you're actually following the same path that I followed. Like, dude, I got. I was awesome at sales. I was awesome at actually like teaching people sales. And so I was sales manager. I was decent enough at leadership to get people to follow me and stuff like that. But I wasn't a leader that could run an organization. I wasn't a leader that can rations and sales and finance and marketing and all this stuff. And so I had to learn that next level of leadership. I give you that book again, Five Levels of Leadership by John Maxwell. That's just a fantastic book on that. 21 irrefutable laws. Like, there's all those books. There's some really great people. James Collins is another one, or Jim Collins another great one. You see David shaking his head like, David, I feel like you've read a few of those books. I would make that a study for me and then I would look for leaders in this industry that you would aspire to be like. Like a David. He's a really good example. And say, hey, ma', am, let's. Let's connect. Like to talk with you about like some of these next steps. There's some. There's some really good guys out there that can help with that. And that's what I do. That's what I'm here to help with. Any other, oh, there's a chat. It looks like something came up.

You know, I'll comment on what you just said, Jim. You know, I get all the local San Antonio contractors reaching out and they're all in that place where they, you know, they get excited because they hired a new sales manager or they hired a general manager and they talk and they complain. You know, three months later, yeah, I'm probably going to get rid of the guy because. And he's just not that good. And, and I'm, you know, my whole thing is, well, what did you do to develop them? You know, he's like, well, he was a really good sales guy and I thought he'd make a good manager, but he just not. And I'm just like, well, what did you do to develop them? Like, do y' all develop your leaders? And no one does. It's, it's weird to me, but no one spends time together and as a leadership group leveling each other up.

Yeah, that's one of those big things that you start to put in place when you move from operator to entrepreneur is your, your whole job is to, your job isn't to run the company and do the day to day operations anymore. It's to, to grow leaders to the point that they are empowered to run the show for you. And your job is to be there as mentor, to bounce ideas off of, to challenge. Like, hey, is that, is that what you really think we should be doing? That kind of stuff, but to give them enough rope to go out there and do it. So many of us are in this, especially if we've started down here at solo and tech and Operator, that when we move into entrepreneur, we don't empower and enable people to do the job. We tell them what to do in their job. And that's a very different thing because now you're still, now you're still the guy in the day to day. Every time you tell somebody what to do, it's your responsibility. Every time you ask somebody what they're going to be doing and how they're going to do it, it's now their responsibility. It's one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a mentor. Quit telling people what to do, ask them what they're going to do, challenge them on it. If it's not the right thing, help them discover the next right thing and then they own it. And that really changed the way I looked at leadership. David, One thing I would say before that Aspect of things is an assessment of if somebody has the talent and skills to lead. Because you might have to go one step back to get the skills in there. That's necessary before you actually promote them into leadership. I always did that with little small things like, hey, man, you're really showing out in sales, and you're really good at this thing. Would you like to teach one of the classes on that? And I'd teach them the structure, how to put it together, go over that with them, coach them up on it and let them do the thing. Then give them some coaching and see how it went with them. If they did great, hey, let's keep going. If they really struggled with it, it was beyond their capacity and ability. Because sometimes sales guys are very individual. Like, hey, I want to win. They're competitive, that kind of stuff. They might not be a team player. And so if they're not a team player, which is usually the case with your top two or three dogs, they're usually the worst ones to promote, to be your sales manager. There are other unicorns out there that, hey, they. They want to take the hit in pay because they're going to. To be a manager and lead, and they want to learn it. But most cases, that top dog guy is, like, still worried about his bank account. Yeah.

You know, Jim, the reason I joined the call today was your email that went out to register. There was one part of it that caught my eye, and I was like, this is perfect. I'm going to jump on the call.

What was it?

It said people nailed down the marketing before they have process. They hire sales teams before they. Their culture is defined, and then they invest in technology before their leadership foundation is solid. Like, all that is true. And then when you, you know, what got you to one stage will kill you at another. And. And I see that all the time with people. You know, people want that marketing. They see, you know, us getting these leads. They're like, oh, we want to go do that too. We're going to go spe. And I'm just like, man, slow down.

Yeah, but you better.

You're gonna go broke. You do it.

You have to really assess what the assets and resources are that you have versus what somebody else may have.

Yeah.

I mean, you guys were very fortunate. You had the money to go, hey, we're gonna go out. We're gonna take this strategy. And that's what a lot of people don't understand about what you guys have done is the strategy. You had a strategy is like, hey, we're not gonna make any money for three years. That's just what we're going to do. We're going to go pour everything into marketing and become the. And we. And you had the resource to do that with. And it was millions. It's not just chicken feet, it's millions of dollars. But that was your strategy. You can still accomplish what you've accomplished without those resources and assets. It's just a different route and a different way of doing things. Oh yeah, that's great insight. A great insight, David. Well done. And I have to give some high fives to Noah. Like he wrote the email really well.

How would you recommend to someone like using the scaling metrics to identify like where their biggest constraints are, like holding the contractor back from getting to that next level.

That's what I'm hoping to go over in the next like 12 weeks. So I went over like broad concept. Now I'm going to go into leadership, just that one pillar and I'm going to go, okay at the solo. You gotta be doing this nothing. I don't care. You don't have anybody you're leading or anything like that. You have some people you're interacting with and you have slight leadership stuff, but it's not important. But whenever you get into the tech side of things, you have a few people working with you. Communication super important. You gotta have that. You gotta. Transparency is super important. Sharing your vision and all that other stuff, we not all that important just yet. Whenever you move into operator. Now we're starting to start developing vision and where we're going with our business. Moving into entrepreneur, you're now core values and mission and purpose and stuff like that. And so I'm going to lay that out. We do have this thing called the scaling matrix where I can share it with you, but the name identifiers, you'd be going, what does that actually mean? Like, it means something to us, but if you want it, I'll share it with you. You can ask me questions about it and things like that. But it identifies those pinch points. For example, like in the sales pillar, there's 101 and then there's 201, then there's 301. Like moving those advanced skills up where 101 is just, hey, learning a sales process. Like, hey, this is a sales process and this is what I'm doing, how to do it and why I'm doing it, understanding that concept. But advanced sales is handling objections that are more difficult and things like that. Then when you get into 301, it's understanding psychology and body language and stuff like that. Like moving up the ladder each time that you grow your business. Because now you have to start teaching people. Before, you didn't have to teach anybody. Now that you got to teach somebody something, you have to know how to teach. And that's one of the things I see hold a lot of contractors back is when they bring people on, they think that for some reason they're going to get it through osmosis, like, hey, watch me and do what I do, and you're going to be great. And the reality is, you didn't really teach them anything. They just heard a bunch of stuff, and they don't know what it means, how to actually do it, or why they're doing what they're doing, when they're doing it. And that why part is left out by so many coaches. So many, like, hey, I want you to do this and say that, and then, okay, and you do this and say that, but you don't understand why it's being said. The second the homeowner throws you a curveball, you're screwed because you're off track on the pitch. The parrot, the mimic, and so becoming a true salesperson. So I can. I can share that with you. Any of you that want it, just shoot me an email, head coachontractorcoachpro.com and I'll shoot a copy of it over to you.

I feel there was a big benefit to Rhino because when we started with you, Coach Pro, we hadn't even hired a salesperson yet. You know, it was me, Dante, Misty, and we built our business with your DNA. Right? I didn't know it was. It wasn't called DNA at the time.

It was. I just didn't tell you everything that was written.

That's the way you taught us everything that we did, in that order. Looking back, it's cool because we. We started the right way. But how does someone that's been in business for three years, five years, that's still at that operator level or below, putting that into their business and then saying, how do I reverse this and then rebuild it? You know, like, what do you tell someone like that they got to tear their business apart?

I get to say that one a lot. That's what I said earlier. Sometimes you have to go slow to move fast. Sometimes you gotta take a couple of steps back. Traditional thinking always tells you to, you know, take a step up. Fail forward, fall back, fail forward, fall back and learn from it. Well, hey, you're at that point now. That you have gotten to there. It's a decision. You just gotta make a decision like, hey, I'm tired of beating my head against a wall. Tired of like getting to this. I bet you I talk to 50 contractors a year that say something like, man, I keep getting to a million dollars and I just, I can't get anything. But I might do 1.2, but then I fall back and like that thing. Or we get to 3 million and I can't do any more than that. Or we get to 10 million, I can't get any more than that. It's because you're missing one of those pieces that you've jumped. You got out over your skis and you're not doing the thing underneath that's necessary to put that scale in place. And so most guys, they're in the heat of the battle, so we can't just go, hey, we got a bunch of money, people are getting paid and we're going to work on this stuff. We have to say, okay, we're going to set aside a certain amount of time every day. So set aside 30 minutes, an hour, what can you afford? We get that understood. Once we understand what somebody can afford, we coach them through that process of putting those pieces in place. One of my best examples is like doing that with somebody. And I challenged him on his team. I was like, hey, I want you to really think about your team. He's about three and a half million dollar contractor and couldn't break through it. You know, are they in it to grow and be something different? Do they want to get better at what they do? Are they aligned with what your guiding principles are and who you want to be as a company? So think about that. Let's talk about your team whenever we meet again next week and we'll start to decide what to do. So we had the meeting the next week and comes back from it. I said, so what'd you come up with? What'd you think about? He goes, I fired everybody. I'm like, what? He goes, I just made a decision. It's time to do this right. And if it takes me taking a step all the way back to the beginning from scratch, I'm going to build this thing right. I'm tired of beating my head against a wall. And so we built it all out over about a four and a half month time span, the basic framework for it. He continued to coach for another five, six months after that to just get everything implemented and put in place. And he absolutely killed it. Did 7 1/2 million the next year, did 15 the following year. He's America's best. Some of you may know that guy. He's a. He's an amazing guy, but he wanted his company to be a certain way. And I asked him. I'm like, dude, what do you mean he fired everybody? He goes, yeah, I fired it. I said, your wife works for you. He goes, I fired her, too. Like, we're starting from scratch. We're starting over. I don't want her in my business. Causes conflict. You talked about that lifestyle and those type of things, too. I want her to go be her, and I'm going to go be me, and this is the way we're going to do things. I'm like, all right, man, let's go. It was a lot of fun coaching that guy, and I've done that several times. Any other questions? Anything? I feel like I've been playing a game of Twister, and I didn't know there was a mat that I was supposed to be putting my hands and feet on. Yeah, that's. I. I think that's pretty common. But to David's point, you know, we're at. Is how do we. How do we. We need Jim to help us understand where to move our hand next, to unwind and untwist and get some stability. This is something we do, and it's. It's one of those things that I just think so important. First off, most people don't know what we do as coaches. Now, you kind of understand a little bit of what we do. We're holistic. We're looking at everything. So we're doing the right thing at the right time, not just this one thing. Really, really well. Like, man, you want me to help you generate a bunch of leads? I can do that. I'm really good at it. But do you have a great sales process going to close them? Do you have a work process that's ideal, that's going to be a great customer experience every time? Do you know your numbers so that you're profitable off of each? Like, all those things are so important to the overall strategy being successful. So we. What we send out. I got it. Braden. I think. Yep, there we go. You guys should be able to see that in the chat there. This assessment. Take the assessment. When you take that assessment, it gives to us what we need to know about your business. Instead of us getting on a call with you and asking you a million questions, we can actually coach. Like, hey, we see. Now we're going to go through a coaching call with you so you can see what the example looks like. And we're going to tell you the next two or three things that you should do in your business. If you want to work with us as a client, great. We'd love to have you. If you don't, at least you know the next two or three things you should do. Um, we're not going to hard pressure sell you or any of that kind of stuff. We're either right for you or we're not. That's. That's a whole different story. But we're here to provide value as often and as well as we possibly can. We've been doing it for 13 years. We're pretty good at it at this point. Any other questions? Well, thanks, everybody, for attending today. I'm going to keep doing these. I'm going to do them every week. We're going to do leadership next week. I'm going to talk about what should be done in each one of those scaling matrix roles, and I'm going to do that. I'm doing this to guide. Hey, here's a foundation. You can go watch that thing and just go learn about all that stuff. And if. If you can do it on your own, go for it, man. Seriously, I want you to. But if you need any help, we're here to do that. The other thing is, Braden took care of me, I think. No, there's a studio chat here, too. I got to put it in there. You guys have the link. I just want to make sure that you have it. Cool. Josh and David, same Marcus. I see you guys chatting back and forth there soon to be same markets, maybe. It sounds like he's going to take a year off, so, man, you better get after Josh.

I know. That's what I said. And I've got a spy over there working on this side, so hopefully.

Yeah, the kid is freaking awesome.

Awesome. He's amazing over there.

He's so smart. Y' all did a good job.

Thank you. All right, guys. Well, hey, I appreciate you hanging out today. If you have any other questions, anything like that, just let us know. You can always get me@head coachontractorcoachpro.com if it's a question that I go, hey, that chat thing can handle it. Go use that. Seriously. I made it, like, stupid inexpensive. It's like $29 a month. That's less than your homemade cup of coffee on a daily basis. Robert, you've used it quite a bit, I believe. I remember you calling me going, dude, I just talked to you for, like, three hours last night. I was like, no, you didn't. He's like, yeah, I did. So use that tool. It's funny, we've probably had a couple hundred people or so so far get on it, and. And we're just adding to it every day. It's just constantly adding to it. So it's just going to get better and better. That's it. Peace out. Be amazing humans and go do good things by other humans, and we will catch you next time.

See you guys.

All right, see you. Bye.