Training Strategy: “Your People Aren’t the Problem—Your Training Is”

The Contractor Training Room. I'm Jim Johnson, your coach, and we are going to be talking about the Momentum Mastery Method. What gives you momentum in your business? And I heard a story the other day about this guy online. He was asking, like, how do I recruit and hire amazing people? And the answers were all over the board. But the reality is you create a place they want to belong, and then you equip them to achieve their goals. And we're going to talk about how we equip our people today in our little presentation here at the Contractor Training Room. So what are we trying to equip with here in what we're talking about today? Well, let's go over here, and we're going to talk about this gap that's really important that I'm going to try and help you fill today between expectations. And performance. And there's a gap here that I see not get filled all the time. We've been talking about this thing called the contractor's blueprint. These 12 pillars that are really important to our business and how contractors tend to focus on. On the operational side of that, marketing, sales, technology, recruiting and hiring. Like, that's the place where they tend to focus most of their time instead of focusing on some of the foundational things. But there is one thing in operational that they don't focus on that they could probably focus on a little bit more and make the biggest difference. And what is it that bridges the gap between these two things? That is training, and that's the pillar we're going to be talking about today. And my promise to you is you're going to know how, what, when to train people on the right thing at the right time, based on the size of your business and what you need to do next to grow your business to the next level. And so what we want to do today is we want to fill this gap a little bit now in order to understand exactly what it is that we're talking about, we've been doing a series here. This is the 11th pillar of our contractor's blueprint. And I'll just bring that over real quick so everybody understands what we're talking about. We have this blueprint that our businesses follow. And you can think of this as two sides. I'll grab a pen here real quick. I think I've got one right there. And we'll just draw. Oh, get back to my pen first, though. We'll just draw a line right here. And over on the left side. Okay. On this side over here, we have the foundational stuff. And over here we have operational, Six of them on the left, six of them on the right. That are all things that we have to do in our business. It was something that we learned about whenever we started coaching contractors that there were these pillars of our business and we had to do them in sequence. And I'm going to just make this a little bit clear. I'm going to pull this off of here for just a second. These are our stages of our business and these are the pillars. These pillars right here are the things that we have to do in our business and we have to do them well. They are leadership, they are finance and numbers, culture, process accountability, how to hold people accountable, team performance. And then on the operational side, you have technology, marketing, sales, production, training, and then recruiting, hiring and onboarding. But whenever we're running our businesses, we have to do the right thing at the right time. And so the size of our business determines how much of each one of those things that we need to do. If I'm a startup, I'm not even worried about the pillars. I'm worried about five things. I'm worried about how do I create opportunities, how do I sell those opportunities, how do I produce them to create a world class experience with my clients, how do I collect my money and how do I be profitable? Those five things. But as you move up into Solopreneur and you're starting to turn this thing into a business, you need to be focused on the 12 aspects of the business and doing the right thing in each one of those. Today we're talking about training. If you want to go see the right thing to do in the other pillars of your business, go back and look at this series. Go all the way to the beginning, where I explain the entire concept of the contractor's blueprint, this scaling matrix that goes over the top. Because the thing that we see most often with contractors is doing the right thing at the wrong time. They're really small and they're trying to build out a huge training system, or they're really big and they haven't done a training system at all. Because being the right size to do the right thing is so important. And you only need so much to make sure that you are successful out there at the stage you're in. Little eraser there. That was bothering me a little bit. So let's talk about foundationally and fundamentally, what do we have to do to train our people well. And so what I'm going to do over here is I'm going to talk about the fundamentals, bring this over here real quick. And this is what I call the inverted power pyramid. We'll write that up there so everybody can see it. This is the inverted. Power pyramid. And there's inverted for a reason. It's because what I see most of the time out there, when people want to do any kind of training, they struggle with the actual concept itself. It's something that in order to have a great training program to equip your people well, you need to have some information that's really important. And most of us. I'm going to just make this a little bigger. Put down a little, pull it down a little bit. There we go. And we're going to section this off just a little bit. Okay. So let's grab something where you guys can see it and you've got your first level up here of training and the fundamentals that you have to have as a individual running your business and then ultimately in your business that are extremely important. And the first piece of that is simply knowledge. And this is where most people start training. They got a little bit of knowledge, which makes them dangerous. Those are simply facts. But they're missing something that would make that knowledge way more valuable. And so having a lot of knowledge is not a bad thing. But it tends to be that we have a lot of knowledge. We're really thinking thin. I call it like a thin ice society. We know a lot of things, but we don't actually, and this is the important part, understand them. And I'll give you a great example. Somebody's really good their sales and they open their own business and they're going to start selling and then they decide they're going to hire some new person on. So they have some knowledge of sales, but they aren't trained sales professionals. They were good at selling whatever it is that they were good at selling, but they didn't understand sales. So they can repeat what it is they do. This is how I do it. But they can't tell why they do it the way they do it. If we don't understand the why behind the things that we're doing, we tend to not have as much impact with the clients that we're with our people that are working with us. There's these really important things that need, need to be included in all of your training. And that is how do I do the thing. Sorry about that. Let me reverse that for just a second. What am I doing? That's what most of us teach from knowledge. Okay. Also from knowledge is the how to do it. But not very Many people teach the why. Why am I doing it that way? The why is the most important part. I can teach a lot of people what to do, I can teach a lot of people how to do it, but all I'm doing there is I'm creating mimics or parrots. In other words, they can say what it is I taught them to say, or they can do the thing I taught them to do, but they don't understand why they're doing it in context and in relationship. And so with anything gets off kilter at all, it throws them completely off. So we have to take into consideration at all times in our training, what are we doing, how do we do it, and why are we doing it the way that we're doing it. And you can't teach somebody why something's being done unless you actually understand the mechanism, psychology, the process. All these things that are super important. Because what they do is they give you something really valuable. They give you this thing called insight. And if I have insight into why I'm doing something, if I get thrown off track at all, I can now start to make some decisions of going, hey, I know where we're at and what we're doing. I know why I'm doing it and why this is important. And if I have to say different words and do it a different way to accomplish the same goal, I'm still gold because I understand what it was that I was trying to accomplish. I'll give you an example. If you use a solution selling methodology, you could show somebody that methodology of how to do it, the process all the way across. So that's what we're doing. You could even show them how to do it. You can role play and practice back and forth, but if they don't know that what the homeowner is actually doing is picking and choosing their own solution as you go through. They don't realize at the end that they have this ability to remove and add things in, to set the price of the actual trade or product that you're doing. And so they get lost, they break, they freeze up, and they get stuck in what they're doing because they don't have insight. So keep in mind this is the most important part of what we're doing whenever it comes to training is we gotta have strong knowledge. I would say, hey, keep your knowledge tight. Don't get really why. Keep your knowledge tight, but really deep. Understand it well, gives you insight that you can pass on to others and that's going to deliver something for them. That's I think what we all would like to have in our worlds these days, a little bit more of it, is some wisdom. And this is fundamentals. This is the fundamentals of being a good trainer, having good training programs, really being somebody that knows what it is that you're doing. Because if you have wisdom, you have. This other thing that becomes really important is discernment. I'm able to discern right from wrong. I'm able to discern the path I need to take and not be confused. This discernment allows us to use the wisdom that we've been able to gain from the insight of what it is that I'm doing, because I understand it based on this knowledge to make the right decision more often than not. Which gives us the thing that I think we're probably all looking for out there, I'm going to put that in red, is the ability to take action. And so whenever you're smaller as a contractor, one of those early stages of a contractor, whether you're a startup or solopreneur or even friends and family, you're going to spend more time on you getting the knowledge, getting understanding, getting insight, getting wisdom so that you can discern the right things and the wrong things to teach to people, so that they can actually take action on what you teach and they can be highly successful. But you can't do any of that unless you understand, so you can take action to actually teach. Well. It is far and away the single biggest thing that prevents contractors from scaling is this ability to train people and train people well, to put people in position to be successful out there in the field, because most of them only go about that far. They don't understand. And if you don't understand, you can't give insight which prevents you from teaching in a variety of different circumstances and approaches. And so what should we do to get some of this knowledge? Well, go out there and learn the various systems. There's a lot of different sales systems that are out there. Sandler Sales is a great system to go and learn. That's some good knowledge. But you got to understand it so that you can actually teach it well. If you don't have insight, you can't teach this thing well. Another choice out there is Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, any of those pitch anything by Oren Klaff. Those are all knowledge. Those are all things we could all go, read, learn and see. But if we don't know how it works, if and why it works the way it does, we're going to have a hard Time teaching anybody else. So this inverted power pyramid is a thing that I just think more people need to spend more time on before they start bringing a bunch of people on. Because if they don't know how to teach it well, they're going to have a hard time really getting people successful and thus they're going to have a lot of turnover. They're going to get frustrated. You're going to feel like people just aren't smart anymore. And it's actually us, It's. It says, me, I gotta be better at what I do. I was lucky enough to have somebody share this with me, at least this concept before we refined it, that I needed to go build me first and so fundamentally build you. And then you're going to be able to take some things from there to really make it powerful. Let me get over here and make sure I stay on track with my talk today because once you understand all of this, okay, we're gonna be able to do the next component or the next phase of what we need to do in training. Over here. Oh, I wanna go right here. We're gonna use another little inverted pyramid here to explain this one too. Think of these as like funnels. I have this wide piece of knowledge that I can understand, gain some insight, wisdom, discernment and action. But on this one, this is about documentation. And think of this as a documentation funnel. Bring it down here, documentation funnel. And remember this whole conversation, this whole series about what do I do and when do I do it based on the size of my business. And so early on in our business, we're the ones actually practicing the thing. We're the ones doing it. And it's the thing we do all the time. It becomes a part of us. We do it out of habit, we do it out of experience, we do it out of just almost innateness at this point. It's natural for us because we've done it enough times that we have this practice that we do. And so I'm going to give us a one here and we're going to use that color and this is the practice. So we have a lot of practices in our business, especially early on in startup and solopreneur and friends and family. We have a lot of practices that aren't necessarily systems yet. They are things that we do based on having an experience that allow us to get our work done. But that's all they are at this point. So we need to identify. Okay, so that's the next piece of this, is to identify. Our practices. And so we have Sales practices, we have production practices, we have administrative practices, we have payroll practices, we have all these different practices that we need to identify what. Once we've identified the different practices, what we want to do, A different color here is we want to record them. And so this is where we start to make them concrete. Okay, we record them. They could be written. Or they could be video. Now when we're earlier on in our stages, we just want to get to written, just get it written down exactly what it is that you do. If you don't write down the practices that you do, you prevent yourself from scaling because it's always verbal from that moment forward and it actually taxes your capacity because all you are now is the Google of all things in your business. And that comes down to processes and systems and all the everything, the whole entire thing, not just your sales stuff. And so we've got to get them written down first. And then as we grow, we move into video and tools like that that help our people be more successful. Before we start doing the video though. So over here on this side, whenever I'm still small, before I start doing any kind of video or anything that I want to do the next piece of this, Which is to refine. So I want to work through the written process of our training. All of the tools that, everything that we need to train on, I have all these practices that we do. We're going to record what they are going to start to write them down and, and then we're going to refine them. We're going to make sure that they are tight. We're going to get them as well as we can possibly get them. But that doesn't mean they're perfect and they never will be. Nothing that you do in process or training will ever be perfect. You're always looking to get a little bit better. And so refinement is where we really are doing some analysis. Does this thing actually work? And this is where we're getting to be a little bit bigger of a company, where we start refining up here, we're in those early stages here. We're moving into a bit of a larger company and we start to analyze whether our training mechanism is working very well or not. And so the rhythms of our training, like how often we train, and you'll start to see that you'll do more and more and more as your company grows. We're going to talk about that training rhythm in just one minute, what that looks like over time for a company. And so then we come to our final piece, which is the most important piece as far as I'm concerned. I'll give us a different color here to work with. And this is where we equip people. If we don't equip our team well, with solid training, we're going to struggle and we need to equip them as well as we possibly can in the stage of business that we are. I'll talk more about that at the very end of what to do, how to do it, when to do it, what to focus on and the actions to take in this particular pillar for training. But this is your documentation funnel. I've got to get some practices written, understand what they are, identify them. I then need to record them, usually written first, moving towards video later. And then I have the refinement of them so analyzing. Like are they working? Are they not working? Can we make them better? Getting them as good as I can. Then I've got to equip people. And so what, what is equipping people mean? I'm giving them the tools and the roadmap. To be successful. So we move from maybe a pitch book and a few pictures on a phone to a presentation that's on a, on a laptop to maybe an iPad. Like our tools keep improving over time. You don't have to have the greatest delivery mechanism early on if you have a good sales process or if you have a good process for anything else. This training mechanism doesn't just apply to sales, it applies to everything in your business. And so if you're going to bring somebody into something, I want to make sure that they're well equipped. If I'm a larger company and I'm starting to scale and I'm bringing on people and I still have everything written in a little sales training manual. And that's all that it is. I'm not equipping them very well. I'm not giving them the tools to be successful in the, in the field, nor the roadmap to be successful. And that's why you start to see videos being added down here on this roadmap to make training easier, more digestible, valuable, something that people want to do, something I can test people on. And this is the final part of this is testing when you really get to be a larger company, you're testing everything that you're doing to ensure that the whole entire thing is. You're back here analyzing here. You're testing. This is leaders and, and you as an individual giving some analysis and trying to get better at it. This is actual testing of the people on what they've learned to ensure that they have retained it and that they are modeling it and using it. So this is your documentation funnel. So here at the end, you're gonna start building some scorecards and some stuff like that to make your company even better over time. So this is our documentation funnel. Next up, we want to talk about the skills that we need to build and how we build them, what this rhythm looks like. And we're gonna use a triangle again. I'm Mr. Triangle. There we go. And so I'm going to talk about this triangle, this, this rhythm that you should be using whenever you are in training. So think of this as your triangle rhythm. Okay. And so what does it look like? Early on in our businesses, our training rhythm is not a rhythm at all. Usually the way the training works is if something has gone wrong, we train on it. And that might be once a week. It might be, we skip a few weeks and do something else. It's very random, kind of a roller coaster aspect of things. But that doesn't help people retain things very well. And what I'm going to share with you in this rhythm I'm about to put together here on the screen is if every company could do this single thing, it would make the biggest difference in their ultimate results. Remember that part where I started where I said expectations versus performance, there's a gap in between? Well, that gap is our training. And we as owners and leaders expect our sales teams to do great, or our production teams or our administrative teams to do great. But if we don't equip them well and we don't put a rhythm to that training to reinforce it, often we struggle. And so what foundationally needs to happen to make sure that our team is trained pretty well? And I would strongly suggest that you get into a habit of daily training. Okay, we train daily. That's foundational. Now, early on in our businesses, we're training ourselves daily every day, and then we're bringing somebody on. We're incorporating them into that daily training. But this isn't necessarily early on, an hour every day or anything like that. It could be five to 15 minutes of getting somebody something daily to help them improve through personal growth or in their particular role, to ensure that they're constantly getting the information of how to do what we do, what to do when we do it, and why we're doing it. So think of those three things as this order that I want to share and I want them to understand. So anytime I send them something that's going to be training or if I'm going to do some training myself, it's going to say, what are we doing, how do we do it and why are we doing it this way every single time? And so if I have some daily training, I want to make sure it fits that even if it's short, even if it's 5, 10, 15 minutes long, I want to make sure that it fits that model every single time. And then, well, before I move on, what have we focused on here in daily? I want to, I want to make sure that we, we stick with that here for a second. This is skills, okay? These are the skills that it takes to be successful out there. And so in daily activity on training, we're focused on skill, work, role playing, practicing, using a computer, entering a lead, whatever it may be, we're going to practice on how to do that very, very well. Those are all skills. And so moving forward from that, the next thing that we're going to have is we're going to have weekly team at a minimum. Okay? Ideally you add the team in here over time to the daily. But if I just have a couple people, I'm getting them their daily stuff each week. But then I'm going to have an organized weekly training at least an hour long to hone in those skills even more. And the things that we're talking about there are concepts. And skills. So we're working on concepts, this thing, this big thing that we're working on. And then my daily training is going to be about that all throughout the week to get this concept across to my team. Now where do I go from there? We have a monthly aspect of things. So monthly. I'm like, man, there's a lot of training. Yes, it is. And I want you to really think about something for just a second. The best sales organizations out there, and if you think about Home Service world, we are a sales organization that just happens to do the trade that we do. If you look around in your trade or your group of trades that you do and go look at who the biggest and baddest and best company is in your space, they're going to be the ones that train daily. They are focused on training. They are. They will not let people out into the field until they're well trained first. So many of us are training people as we go and doing right along trainings and stuff like that where we want to get a good foundation. Every one of those opportunities that you have is worth money. And if you put somebody out there that's untrained with that money, it's like setting it on fire. And I don't want to set money on fire. I don't want to set this person up for failure. Even worse than the money being on fire is setting a person up for failure. Because if we set them up for failure, they're going to fail to be there with you for very long. And so what are we doing monthly? Well, monthly these are deep dives, these skills ones. Anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. These are one hour to 90 minutes. This monthly training is going to be two to three hours a morning or an afternoon, usually a morning where we're going to dive deep into an entire thing. We're not just going to talk about how to beat this objection like, or a couple of objections back here in the weekly team stuff. We're going to talk about the whole entire process, the sales process itself or this entire process of client experience, or this entire process of, of delivering on the, on what we sold in production. We're going to do some deep dives. We may get very hands on. We could be out in the field doing an inspection with our entire team to go through it together. Those type of things create this powerful moment of a deep dive where there's lots of questions being asked and it allows you to improve the team's game. These monthly ones also can be a special guest coming in. In our industry, people can make great money. I brought all kinds of people into our, into our office to teach them things about money, about personal growth, about all kinds of different stuff. I brought manufacturers in, I brought, I would set these two or three hour things up with two or three different experts or manufacturers to come in and talk about their products or this thing that they did very well. So once a month, some type of deep dive. And then finally, and I bet you can guess it at this point is we're going to get color here. We're going to have yearly or annual, okay, we're going to have an annual training event and this is actually one to two days where we're going to onboard new people into our world. We're going to talk about our business, our culture, the way we perform, all this stuff about our business. We're going to bring experts in to talk about newest and latest and greatest innovations. And we're going to have this annual big deal training where we're going to get people started off on the right foot. And this is what we call an intensive. I do a lot of intensives. I come in for those one to two days and work with companies all the time, it might be about sales, it might be about the whole process itself, from sales to production to collections. It might be working with leadership folks. But I do those intensives annually for people all the time. Go in and organize and put that whole entire thing together for them. Obviously I get compensated for it, but it's structured and allows this to be one to two very, very powerful days. So this is what your training rhythm should look like over time. Where people usually start and whenever they start to get into a rhythm, I'm going to circle it here so we know exactly which one I'm talking about right here. At least get to there. If you've got any semblance of a team, it's you and one other salesperson or two other salespeople, at least once a week, get together and train. That'll be more than the majority of your competition does, giving you an advantage out in the field. When you get to doing daily training, just think about and think about this concept for just one second, okay? If the majority of the industry is training on a roller coaster based on issues or problems, so it's irregular, it might be one time this week and we skip a few weeks and then we do another one. If everybody or the majority of contractors are doing that and I just start doing weekly training, being really consistent with it, I'm doing it two to three times more than they are. So I'm getting two to three times more better than they are and faster than they are. Now, if I move that to daily, I'm getting five times better every single day. And ideally, we want to get to it at least 30 minutes to an hour of training daily. You'll be shocked at how big of a difference that makes for your team. Now, whenever you go into these trainings, I want to really drive this point home, be prepared, have a topic, have some best practices. Make people write down takeaways and questions, just like I should have you do. Whenever you're watching something like this, I hope that you've written down some questions and have some takeaways, and I'll handle those at the end, allowing you guys to have some conversation back and forth. But if you don't have interaction and you don't have an understanding of how to teach people, you're going to really struggle out there and keeping people on board and wondering why they're not performing well because you have all these expectations. But the reality is you don't understand what learning styles are, the difference between them. Some people learn auditory, some people learn hands on, you've got to understand those things to be a good coach or teacher, to train people well. So this is our training rhythm. The next thing I want to talk about. And I'm just going to leave it on the board right here, we can see it. There we go. Okay. You get good at this. Okay? You move from a startup to a solopreneur and you've got a couple people helping you. And now you move into friends and family and you start to get into some of this rhythm. You're starting to get training manuals and maybe a couple of training videos here and there and you're really starting to get some good rhythm. The next thing you want to do is you want to identify the person that has the talent to help you. Our job as leaders is to build other leaders. We're not just training the frontline troops, we also have to train leaders. And so we look in our team, we go, wow, that guy's doing a really good job at that. And he likes helping other people with it. I want him to teach a thing. And so I go to him, I say, hey, I see that you do this thing exceptionally well. Would you be interested in doing some training of the team in one of our weekly trainings on that subject? Yeah, I'd love to. That's usually the answer that you get, but then you got to go, great, I want you to put it together, I need you to put it together. And what is it that we're doing? How do we do it? Why are we doing it the way that we're doing it? What are the best practices? If there's some role play, what that looks like, and how are we going to score these people after? So you go get that put together, bring it back to me and then we'll, we'll work through it. This gives me an opportunity to see where they're at, number one. Number two, it gives me an opportunity to coach them. Oh, have you considered this? Did you think about that? Did you do any research on this and ask it from a point of asking questions, not telling them what to do. I want them to self discover the right thing and the wrong things to do with a little bit of helping, guidance. It's taken me years to learn how to do that well, and that's because I went back and went, okay, knowledge, understanding, insight, wisdom, like that's how I look at each one of those things, is how I want you to look at building your leaders. So identify leaders. A couple of benefits of that. One is it might take some of the training off of you. Okay. Ultimately you might have a trainer on your hands that could step into that as your business grows and scales. And so you're looking for those type of people to build them up inside of your organization. All right, Want to get to the right one here? Yeah. So if this is your first time watching, this is one of our pillars. Okay. And it has the stages. Right here. So we have stages of our businesses. We're startup, then we're a solopreneur kind of operator. We wear all the hats. We might have a couple, a couple of part time people. Then we move into being more of an entrepreneur where we start recruiting our friends and family into the organization, we start generating a little bit more revenue and then we move into where we become a company that's a real business. We are starting to get serious about what we do. And if you're looking at numbers, this right here, startup is usually something. Make sure I got a pin here where these folks are less than 500k or so. Startup, hey, annually like might generate about $500,000. This operator and solopreneur probably bumping into 1 to 2 million dollars depending on the trade that you do. There's more to this than that, than just the numbers. But from a general sense, like where are these folks? An entrepreneur is moving into the 3 to 5 million. They brought some friends and family in, they're able to do a little bit more volume. And now we start getting serious. And when we get serious, we're sitting in that 5 to 10 million mark. Usually somewhere in there there's other factors. Of course. We actually have a really cool survey that you guys could do. We call it the growth and scale brief that you could do to figure out exactly where you are in this based on a few different factors, not just your stage, but your capacity and your readiness to actually grow and scale your business. That'll be out here in the next couple of weeks. And then whenever you get into growth and scale as a business where you're a true owner, where you have leaders doing the job for you, you're talking usually 10 million to 25 to 30 million somewhere in there. And then we get into expansion where we're going to 30 to 50 million plus. They're just expanding, you know, more locations, maybe other trades inside of their markets, those type of things. So this is the stages. Wanted to just make that really clear here at this time. So when it comes to training, get this all erased off there. When it comes to training, what should we be focused on and what actions. Should we take and win? Okay, so as a startup, you are in learn mode over here on your focus. You need to learn the business. Likely you have some skill in one area or another. Usually people that start up one of these businesses come from one of two backgrounds. One, they're either really good at installing the thing, and because they're good at installing the thing, they get some side jobs and then those side jobs become more side jobs. If they do good work and all of a sudden they kind of got a business on their hand and they go out on their own while they were working for somebody else before they start to go, well, I could go do this on my own. And so they have a very production or construction background. The other one is somebody that's good at sales. They were working for somebody and they're really good at sales. They understand how to sell the thing. It is that they do. They're knowledgeable enough of the construction process and stuff like that to sell it, but not necessarily a construction professional. And so we've got to learn both sides of those, plus some other stuff. Got to learn about finance, we got to learn about how to be profitable, we got to learn how to create opportunities. And so we're in learn mode right here when it comes to training. Because if we build that strong foundation of knowing the business across the board and all of those pillars, we're going to do a much better job of training. So our focus is to train yourself. Now what does that mean, to train yourself? That means to be disciplined about taking time every day to get better at what you do. If you're the construction guy, you're spending time in learning how to sell, you're spending time in learning how to create opportunities, you're spending time in learning how to run your books. Those things are where you're going to set a great foundation. And so you have to be disciplined about it. You need to set aside at least 30 minutes a day, in my opinion, to scale faster. It sounds like you're going to scale slower because you're taking this time. But if you don't take that time, you're setting just a terrible foundation for everything else that's going to happen in your business. Now, when it comes to being the operator or solopreneur, this is where you start to have self mastery. In other words, my focus is to master these things that I need to know. I said there was five things that a startup needs to know. You have to master those before you start to decide, hey, I'm going to bring somebody else on and move up a level. So we're going to master the things that we do and that's going to bring competency. When we're competent with the thing that we need to know, we start to become confident. And nobody trains very well without being confident. If you're not confident on the things that you're teaching about, it's to going going to come off flat. Guarantee you it's going to be doubt. You have to have no doubt about what you're teaching and training on. Now, as we move into the friends and family part of things, this is where documentation becomes important. This is where we start to go. Okay, let's identify all of our different processes, the things that we might need to train. Let's just make a list of them. Okay, now let's write down what we do in each one. Super simple. That starts to become the basis of your training program. Is this document of what are we doing and then how do we do it? There's not necessarily even any why yet. It's just what are we doing, how do we do it? That documentation is going to set the great foundation for your business. And so exactly what are you doing? You're building some tools to use and what we call tts talk tracks. So those are simple. They're not scripts or anything like that yet, although they may turn into scripts over time throughout this phase of your business. But I'm giving them tools to be successful with. Maybe a pitch book, maybe a presentation tool. I'm giving them talk tracks like how to deliver this. We're starting to get organized about what we do, and this becomes things that we train on, these tools and these talk tracks. Now when it moves beyond that, we start getting serious. The focus for us is rhythm. I'm going to be bringing new people into my organization. They're not my buddies and they're not my family. So they don't know me like everybody else knows me. They can't just read my mind. Like I can read the mind of people that I'm really close to. They're strangers and so they're going to need a rhythm to follow. And so the actions that we're taking is we're going to build a quick start. That's the first thing. So, hey, I got to get a quick start, put together something to get somebody off of the ground really quickly. And I'm talking the first three to five days. How do I get somebody into position to do their job fairly proficiently? 75 to 80%. So what do they need to Know, in order to get to 75% of what they need to do in their role, I want to get that to them in a quick start in the first five days. And then I want to get them to a 90 day competency. Okay, so this is 90 days. That's the next thing I'm going to be building whenever I'm in this stage of my business is, okay, I got to build out my 90 day thing. They got the first week. Now how do I take it out to 90 days and exactly what's going to be happening in my training for each of the roles that work in my business. And then finally we're going to have just the annual, right, some annual mastery. So we get into this 365 days. What does our training look like? Okay, so it doesn't have to be build the whole training program. What can I build that gives somebody a good start? Let's start there five days, Boom, let's get them started so they can go out and do what it is they do or do the function that they do. All right, so now we're moving to the next stage. And this is usually one where people get stuck a lot. Where we tend to work with folks just to kind of give you an idea is these two stages right here, they're stuck. They've gotten to here and they can't get to there, and they've gotten to here and they can't get to there. There are certain things, as you can see, that get a little bit more difficult. You need to have more knowledge and understanding so that there's insight and wisdom behind your next step. And what we tend to do is we tend to shoot from the hip. We make best guesses, school of hard knocks, maybe do a little bit of searching and hope that we nail it to do the right thing at the right time. But most of the time, we fail 2, 3, 4, 5 times before we go. Okay, I got it. Finally. And that takes a long time, like to speed things up. That's our whole goal as a coaching company is to help you speed up through these stages to get to where you want to be. Now, when it gets into the scaling and growing aspect of your business, where you become a true owner, this is where you have leaders working for you that you're holding accountable. But they own each aspect of the business. Sales, marketing, production and administration. I've got at least those leaders running those pillars of my business. The thing that I need to focus on is analysis. Get back to the right color there. I want to analyze how my training is working? Is my training working in all aspects of my business the way I want it to? Are we getting the results that we want? What could we do different? What's innovative, what's new, what's available out there? Do we need to leverage some other tool to get to there? And so analysis of our training programs and what we're doing there and the actions that we need to do to analyze that well is to track our skills, our reps and our performance. So we need to track the skills. Like, hey, are they learning the skills? We have scoreboard scorecards in place. We're giving tests for reinforcement and to ensure that they're learning the things that they need to learn. I'm making sure that I have the right numbers of people in the situation and they're all learning together. And then I'm also making sure that the output or the performance is where it should be. If it's not, I need to make adjustments to get that where it needs to be in my training. And then finally, this is the fun part, this is my focus right here is leaders when it comes to expanding. Because when I go to expand and I say, hey, we're gonna, we're running this thing Perfect. We're doing $30 million a year, it's clean, it's a well machine. You guys are running it well. You. I'm going to go over here and I'm going to open a fencing division and I'm a roofer or I'm going to open a new location in that city over there. I need more leaders to do that. We could have the greatest system in the world. It's just absolutely well oiled machine, perfect. But if I don't have the leaders to go and install it over there, I'm going to have all the same headaches that I had before. So now my training becomes very focused on training my leaders so that we can actually expand. So what does that look like? This is multi. Team rhythm. In other words, I've taught my leaders how to lead their different departments and they're doing the training, they're doing the trainings inside of each one of their departments and they are bringing those folks up, identifying the ones that have talent to teach something and then bringing them up to, we're not pushing people down as a leader, we never push people down, we're always lifting them up. I think so many of us operate from this place of fear that somebody might take my job if I do a great job of building them up. No, we as owners go Great job of doing that. I want to lift you up too. I want to lift you up to running both of our locations and a leader in both of them. So don't ever get scared of bringing somebody up. All right? Now a couple of little notes here that I want to make. There's all kinds of ways to get our teams trained, especially when it comes to sales. You don't have to build everything from the start. You can leverage other things to be successful with and so you can leverage platforms. There's several of them that are out there. Find the one that works for you. We have our own called the contractor training room that covers anything and everything you could ever imagine for a sales team. How to self generate leads, how to sell professionally, how to do an inspection, how to if you're an insurance restoration, how to work with insurance companies, identify, hail, everything you ever would want that you know you want to build. That thing already exists. You could leverage that earlier on in your business before you actually build out the whole thing for your specific company. So keep in mind that those things are out there and available to you as well. So that takes care of our presentation today. What I'm hoping is that you see this thing where I've got to learn the things, I've got to apply those things, I've got to reinforce them, I've got to continue to improve them and then repeat them. It creates a flywheel. And if we do that in each stage of our business here, okay, if we have this, hey, I got to learn it, then I have to apply it, then I got to reinforce it, then I got to repeat. Like if I get that going in each one of these stages, you're going to move really fast through these stages and get to that business that you always dreamed of. Now if you want help with any of this fun stuff, that's where we could be of assistance. Let's bring this down. There we go. Maybe you are a do it yourself person. You're early on, you are a startup, a solopreneur, maybe early on in friends and family and you just don't my pen back here. Do that way too much. You can do it yourself. Shoot that QR code right there and learn from our platform called Contractor Sage. Contractor Sage is a tool that's 13 years of our coaching experience, 27 years of my experience in this industry exiting out of two eight figure businesses and then all of our coaching call tools. Everything's there so it understands the questions that you would have. One of the great things about that tool is Whenever you first hop in, say who you are, are you the owner, are you a sales manager, are you a production manager or a salesperson? Whatever you are, say what you are and give context, like where you are now, where you want to go to and the things you think you need to learn and any maybe critical issues. If you give it that first, it's going to help you do the right thing at the right time. Throughout. Now maybe you're a little bit further on in your business. You're moving from friends and family to getting serious, to maybe even growth in scale. And you are needing some hand holding on these big things, these heavy lifts, building out processes and systems, building out presentations that are world class, that win 50% of the time in retail and 85% of the time in insurance. You are trying to build out a recruiting and hiring system that consistently brings you the best folks out there. You might need a little more hand holding with some of our one on one coaching. This has been our bread and butter for 13 years. We built some of the best contractors out there in the industry. We love to work with you guys and build those relationships right there. They're some of my best friends. After all of these years of coaching, we enjoy it. It's one of those things that our goal is to help you achieve the goals that you want to achieve without sacrificing the things that matter. Your family, your time, your health, all those things that are really important. And by doing our process, going through that framework and doing the right thing at the right time, it takes the chaos out of the equation and creates order. So if you scan that, you can take this assessment. It's going to take you 15, 20 minutes. It's a no joke assessment. It's going to help us learn everything we need to learn about where you're at in the business, what stage you are in, what you're capable of, if you're ready to go to the next stage or not. And what we're going to do is we're going to hop on an actual free coaching call. It's not going to be a sales pitch, it's not going to be a bunch of questions trying to figure out where you are. It's going to be, hey, based on your assessment, these are the two or three areas where we see the most leverage, that if you could pull that lever right there, that would make the biggest difference in your business. If you like coaching, great. We would love to have you as a client. It would be awesome to work with you. But if it's not the right time or the right situation at this point. Hey, no problem. At least we served you well that day by giving you the two or three things that could help you propel your business forward. My name is Jim Johnson. This is the Contractor Training Room. I hope you've enjoyed today's conversation about the pillar of training and what we need to do in each stage of that and foundationally, what we need to do ourselves to become great at coaching. Because if you really want people to stick with you, equip them. Well. Thanks a lot. And we'll open it up for some questions. Now, Those of you that are there, feel free to open up your mic and you can just ask a question or you can put it in the comments. Either one. Ah, Yeah. Request to join the call. Oh, he's just hanging out in the lobby. Okay. Did we not let him in? Okay, so I'm not Mr. Technology. My boy Braden is, and he's taking care of all that. If you're out there watching live on YouTube or Facebook or any of those places, LinkedIn, we have this going live all over the place. Put your questions in the comments below the video and I'll get those answers out to you. I check that afterwards and we'll get all those answers to you as well. So if you're sitting there in a waiting room or anything like that and just viewing the thing, click join the call and you can come in and ask some questions. Otherwise, we'll call it a day. Merry Christmas. I hope that you guys have an amazing Christmas. This was my little gift to you. A little free, free coaching on how to build out a great training mechanism in your business. All right, not seeing any questions. We'll see the ones in the comments below. You guys go have an amazing Christmas. Enjoy your families. Be present with everybody. Don't worry about the presents you get. Enjoy the fact that you're in community with those that you love and care for. Take the break. You deserve it. Enjoy it. Rest, relax. Be ready to hit it hard come the new year. We'll talk to you later. I'm Jim Johnson, head coach here. Contractor coach, pro.