What Stage Contractor are You? - Coach2Coach with Jon Townsend

Hey, everybody, it's Jim Johnson here, the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro and your host here on Contractor Radio. And we get to do this every once in a while where we have a special guest in studio. And anytime one of our coaches is in, I definitely want to get them on a podcast and highlight what they do here at Contractor Coach Pro and highlight them out there on Contractor Radio because you guys may only listen to that and so you don't know all of our other coaches. And I want to wish that to light a little bit. Today we're going to talk about some fun stuff. We're going to talk about kind of what John does for us, and we're going to talk about the different sizes and stages that contractors go through, because I think a lot of times we kind of look at it as like, one thing. I'm a contractor, I got to grow in scale. And what we've done, I think pretty much is decided that there's multiple stages to this and certain things you got to do at this stage and then this stage and then this stage. And you get to do two things for us. You not only help our contractors that are in our Boost program, which is stage one contractors, they're usually under a million dollars and they're trying to get to that first 2 or 3 million. And then you also are a head coach, so you help our clients that are in that 2 to 3 million dollar range and then scaling up into the 10s and 20s and getting into 8 figures. So welcome to the show, John. It's good to have you here, man.

Thank you so much. I'm excited. I'm excited to meet. It's been a fun trip so far, so I think it's been pretty productive. Had a little bit of fun.

It's been cool because one of the things we do here, I've made a significant investment, I think, into our studios and things like that. So we get to bring you guys in as coaches and have you do some of your content, whether that's marketing, sometimes some silliness. We had some silliness this time. We're excited about sharing that with you guys out there. And so that means you got to go follow us on social media. Seriously. It's about to get good. So Facebook Contractor Coach Pro follow John on his stuff. It's going to be pretty fun. So, John, how long have you been with us now?

It's going on two years.

Yeah, it's going. It's been a bit now. And so just so people know what it's like to work here. What are some of the things that you like about being a part of Contractor Coach?

Probably, man, I don't know where to start. It's like, how much time do you have? No, we first and foremost, the culture of. The culture of excellence at Contractor Coach Pro. When I first joined the team, I mean, I'm not just surrounded. I mean, I knew Jim, I knew Nathan. Right. We developed a friendship and even a mentorship capacity over the last couple of years. A couple years before I even joined the team. But it was like that very first meeting when you sit down and you're in front of all the coaches. Rosalind, Jenny, Chuck, now it's Tommy, Mike and all the players that are working with. I mean, everybody's just so good at what they do. They bring so much to the table that it was a little bit staggering at first.

Right.

But the culture is iron tight. We exist to love, serve, care for the industry and all of our decisions and all of our conversations are centered around that and that just becomes very magnetic. So from the get go, I felt like I was, I belonged, but that I was also going to be pushed. Right. And there's sometimes in life we don't intentionally put ourselves in positions to be pushed like we'll choose the path of least resistance. But this has been a continuous series of being pushed, of stretching myself, learning new skills and yeah, bringing our clients impact.

Yeah, it's important to me, number one like that if we're going to bring coaches in, I want them to improve. That's one of our core values also is to master our craft. And I think that comes through gaining skill and growing as a leader, building capacity, those type of things, the same things we teach to our clients. I think it's super important to do that internally as well. And you came on, we kind of brought you through our contractor's blueprint. So you understood that framework inside and out and backwards and forwards, which takes a lot of time. What was that like to go through that?

It was eye opening from my seat. I mean, I've done a lot of training in the past and I've worked primarily in sales, but when you really take a step back and you look at all the components that need to, and furthermore, not just all the components, but kind of the, the ideal order to which they need to. That they could be built. Every company is different. And that's another reason why I love what I do, is everybody's uniquely different, even if they're at the same stage. But being able to take a step back and see all the things that really go into building a successful contracting company that you can remove yourself from or do whatever you can, find freedom within and empower other people to see how many of it can be skipped or overlooked. And so the more I dove into, I mean the blueprint, if you've not purchased the contractor's blueprint, what are you waiting for? Get yourself a copy. It's eye opening, but it's easy to see how these steps can be overlooked or bypassed if they're not something that we're comfortable with or have, for instance, building process. If you're not process driven, then it could be something that you bypass because it's going to take a lot of work.

Well, it's going to take a lot of work. It's intimidating. You're not sure exactly how to build one. You got to build, build something in order. Right. But what are the components of a process that make it effective? Like that's the big thing. And so teaching our clients those five components that go with every task that you do in a process and getting that clear, I think that's invaluable to our clients.

Yeah. And so in general, I just, I mean there is a, there's a lot of, there's a lot of content, Jim. You've built a lot of content. It's robust.

Well, I think that's something that contractors may lose sight of sometimes, is that there actually is a lot to being a business person or an entrepreneur. I think entrepreneur kind of has this connotation to it that it's I gotta be able to market and sell and I gotta be able to make money. Like that's kind of the entrepreneur jive. But whenever you turn into a business, it becomes more metric driven, it becomes more well oiled in the shape machine, repeatable. And that's not something that's a common theme in the trades. Like it's hey, I do this work really well so I can get more work by word of mouth or I can sell a lot. But man, we have a lot of problems because of that because there's no process, no systems and stuff like that. And if I want to scale, then what? Right? Like how do I scale what I do? Exactly, it's pretty easy to scale those first two or three people. I think the place that most people struggle is like who are those first two or three people? A lot of mistakes are made there because they think they have to replace themselves. And what would you say to that? Would you say that people actually need to replace themselves or could it look a little bit different.

It could absolutely look a bit. Yeah. Particularly in those beginning stages. I feel like, for instance, an owner's out there selling all the work. Right. They came from sales, and they're just the one out there producing the work. Right. Excuse me, When I say producing, they're the ones selling the work. They're the ones managing the jobs, and they feel like, oh, I could just.

Get another guy to do that.

If I can just get somebody to do that, then I'll have so much more time. Or, you know what? Sales is not even my strong suit. I want to pull myself out of that role. So I need to replicate myself and just get somebody else in here to do it, do what I don't want to do. But oftentimes that's a swing and a miss.

Yeah. Right. So, for example, like, I've seen this quite a few times. Guy's really strong at sales, and so he goes, hey, I need to get more salespeople to scale my team and get me out of sales.

Right.

But the reality is that's probably not the person he needs to hire. He probably needs to hire somebody else that does all the stuff he's not great at. Right. And so what would that look like?

Well, salespeople don't like to do paperwork. No, I mean, you know, like to point what you said, I mean, lord forbid you hire all these salespeople and they actually do what they're supposed to do and they go out and they sell a bunch of work. And now who's going to administer all that work? Who's going to take care, who's going to be able to help to make sure our production, that we can actually do the work and that it's up to the level that we as an owner expect of our company. So I think that oftentimes the very first direction you should look for help or for capacity. Right. Is in the form of administration. Like, is an admin assistant, somebody that can keep you organized, that can do the things that you likely, likely don't like to do and aren't really that great at it anyways, because it's going to. Then I see this as we got to look at, like, the second and third level down the road. They got to be a little bit. That's why establishing your vision, I think, is so important. Because they say, okay, I want to get out of sales as quickly as I can. We'll get you pulling yourself out of sales or whatever function. It doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen Alone, you usually need somebody else that's going to step in and allow you the capacity to go out and sell more. Right. And sell it profitably. Because now you don't have to pay any more salespeople, you don't have to pay a commission. And you can, whatever you're paying that part time admin person or full time admin person, the amount of revenue that you can generate for your company profitably will more than take care of that person's. The overhead of having to pay somebody a salary. Not to mention, I think this gets missed a lot. Nobody sells like the owner.

Yeah. Well, nobody can make the decisions an owner can make.

Right.

Like if he wants to lower the price a little bit to get the job, he can certainly do that. Where once you get scaled out and repeatable, you know, there's certain standards that have to be met. He can say, I'm the owner and so you can trust me. Right? Yeah. You can always come to me. Which a salesperson can't do. And that's another reason why it makes it hard for them to hire salespeople and think they're going to replicate what they can do because they literally can't do what they can do.

Exactly.

They're not the ultimate decision maker. Right.

And there's just a lot of, a lot of supportive beliefs that you have as an owner based on your pricing, the kind of work you do. Like nobody's going to, nobody's going to talk about your company with pride the way you do it.

Right. Yeah. So let's take a step back for a second. Let's, let's talk about what we're explaining here. That there's more than one stage to this whole thing. It's not just a simple stage that I'm a contractor and I've got to grow. We grow through these stages and we hit these ceilings at certain points. And so I'll lay out a little bit of those stages and then I'll talk a little bit about how you play a role in that. So there's startup phase.

Right.

The startup stage is, hey, I'm going to go out and get a business license, maybe a truck, and I'm going to go out and start obtaining some business. And it's actually a pretty simple stage. That's why I think in this industry it's so easy to get into it. I don't think there's a requirement for any education. You might have to pass a test to get your contractor's license, but that's like any other test. You study enough for it, you can probably pass it, but that's about as hard as it gets. I don't think when you go to take that test, they say, hey, have you graduated high school or have you graduate college? You don't even have to have a ged. Anybody can do it. And that's why there's so many contractors and why there's such a miss rate. You know, 80% of contractors go out of business in the first three years. And I think it's because they're missing some of those tools that they need to be successful, which is our mission. That's why we're here. We want to help and give back to an industry that was pretty good to me. I was very fortunate. I had some training coming into this before I actually got into the contracting world. So that's kind stage one, that startup thing, right? And one of our coaches, Mike Bose, is actually building out some content for what that startup phase looks like. Super excited. He's going to be coming in here in a couple weeks to do a lot of what you're doing, record some of that content, get that some of that training put together. So let's assume we kind of get that start, right? That's stage one. Stage two is what we call all the hats. So we got all the hats on. We're everything. We're the salesperson, we're the production person, we are the admin, the bookkeeper, everything. The field inspector, the collector, all of it.

Customer service.

Customer service, yeah, exactly. And so those guys are held back because they're wearing all those hats and they usually start to bump up against the ceiling at about a million bucks. Like they can get to that and sometimes far less. I mean, they start bumping into it around 300, 400,000. And they just work more hours. They work more hours to get everything done. And then some of them, pretty sharp, they'll be like, okay, I don't like doing this paperwork thing, so I'll get an admin that bump them up to that million. So some of them are two people and that's kind of stage two, right like this, hey, I'm gonna get one person to help me out, get me close to that seven figure number. But I can't go any further than that. Then they go, hey, I got some buddies, I got some family, I think they can do these other things, so maybe that allow me to sell more and pay them. And that's that friends and family phase. You're able to recruit some of those folks in there and that can get you into that two or three million dollar range. But then you bump into some other hurdles. Like, I run out of friends and family. I find out that my friends and family aren't the people I actually want to work with. And I run out of people that know me and know how I think, know my personality, know my strengths and weaknesses. And literally, like, we can think for each other, we like fill in each other's sentences. And I know that I just need to cover that for him and she needs to cover this for me. And that works pretty well. And it starts to run into those problems at about 2 or 3 million dollars. And that's where we will see the growth phase, where there's the stage where you go, I get it, I need to start documenting stuff, I need to start making it repeatable if I'm going to go to that other place. Because there's kind of this Death Valley. There's this Death valley between about 3 and 8 million, 3 and 10 million where you've now decided to scale this thing. And you're going to do a lot of investing. You're going to put people in place because you're going to need them. You're going to have to get systems put together. You might even get a coach. So you got this investment, investment into this thing to scale it up. And we really work hard to skip that as fast as possible. But once we get into that, then you got this expansion phase. So we get through the growth phase and we get a lot of the stuff in place, becomes well machined. Now you're thinking about expanding. And this is where I think a lot of contractors make mistakes. They're like, hey, I got this cool thing. It's working pretty good. Like we're doing okay. And I want to go open a new location. Opening a new location, new place is like a whole new business. And while you may have all the systems in place, they don't know who you are. It's like you never existed before. And I would challenge the best way to expand is to dominate your market first and then start to dominate other trades that are very similar to yours that you can roll into what you do. And that can easily take you to 25, 30, 40, 50, sometimes even $100 million.

There's a golden nugget right there, by the way. If you're thinking of expansion, press rewind. Listen to that again. Write it down.

It's one of those things like, hey, man, you do roofing really well. Think about what roofing is, okay? So you Go out and you sell it and produce it, build it, collect it. You've marketed to get people interested in your product as a roofer. Okay, what else is like that? Well, fencing is a lot like that. Same labor and manpower. Actually, probably safer. They're like, hey, man, I don't have.

To be on a roof.

I can go install a fence, and that would be great. Oh, that sounds good to me. Your profit margins are very similar. The process is very similar. Market for it, sell it, build it, collect it. And now I got this new trade that I can be very targeted in my marketing around fencing or targeted in my marketing around roofing instead of targeted in my marketing of exterior services. Like exterior services. What does that mean? You want to be very targeted in what we do. And now I got this fencing thing down, and you can apply that same logic over and over and over. Now, let's do some siding. Let's do some windows. Let's do some patio coverage, like one off thing. Garage doors, garage floors. And now you just dominate this market that you're in in a way that prevents you from having to travel all over the world. You still get to spend time with your family. You install the same systems you had before. You already have earned trust with the community that you have. It's easy to market. Hey, guess what? We do fencing now. All you people that we ever did roofs for need some fencing. Boom. There's your first sales right there.

Right.

So you've been here now this two years, and I don't know, it's been about a year now that we went, hey, we've got this program, it's called Boost, and it's for that stage one contractor, that guy that's under a million dollars. Up until then, you've been head coaching. Like, you're taking clients all the way through the whole thing, like starting at that, you know, 2 million to 3 million number and taking care of those other phases. Right, right. So the growth phase, expansion phase, and stuff like that.

Yeah, I've been really blessed to see. To see and work with a lot of different contractors at different stages. And like I said, the thing that jumps out at me, though, is regardless if you have two contractors that are at the exact same stage, they're still so uniquely different. Right. And the way that they. And the way they solve problems and their skill set, but I've just been really blessed to be exposed to a lot of them. And like you said, the last year that we've had boost, it's predominantly that stage one contractor, just that's either stepping into stage two or maybe they've been there and they've backtracked.

Some of them are startup and saying, hey, I just want to get the stuff in place. Right?

Right.

So it fits everything from startup to like, I tried to scale and I messed up and I had to reel back. And our whole goal is take you from that number that's less than a million into that 2 to 3 million dollars by getting the basics in place of this blueprint, like these things that we have to do in order. So about a year ago, I had run the first group through Boost. Kind of got a good feel for what that looked like. There was pretty good success out of that group. And I went to you and I said, hey, John, you went through a lot of this with me. What did you think about it? You really liked it. So what do you think about maybe running the whole Boost program? And so what's that been like?

Boost has been. Well, I mentioned earlier that it's been a stretch. You know, I've been stretched in certain ways. So taking on Boost was a little bit of a stretch. But lucky for me, there was already a program that you worked your butt off to create and it already had results. But I immediately, when I started joining the Boost classes and spending time around smaller contractors who some were, you know, some were small because they've chosen to stay small, and some are, some are now saying, you know what, I want to grow. I want to make this thing a legitimate brand in my community and I want to incorporate other people. It's been incredible. This we've now run since that first session. We've now run like, I think seven other cohorts. Each one is uniquely different. I've. It's just been a, it's been a really great time. I connect really well with that, that size contractor.

Take a step back for a second. What's a cohort like? These guys that are listening, they may not know what that means.

Apologies, gang. So that's okay. So our Boost class is unique. It's group coaching, right? It's a group of folks from all over the country, all different markets, who are all kind of fighting that same fight. They're at the stage one level. They're thinking of, okay, how can I create system, how can I create process? How can I get more work without driving myself crazy? So every cohort has about anywhere between 10 to 15, 10 to 15 different contractors who are all on the same team for about six months. It's a six month course, right? And we meet Weekly.

Yeah. It's like going to college.

It's like going to college. It's. It's. There's a curriculum that's very applicable to you. I always challenge everybody to see it through the lens of your business. Like, what we're. What we're talking about, what is it? And that can be a struggle because a lot of folks don't understand. I feel like the very first. Even as an athlete, right. It's very important to learn about who you are, what you do well, what you struggle with. Like, that becomes the lens that you filter. You filter training and coaching through, right? So, but they're all doing that. They're all able to apply the teaching and the coaching to their particular stage right now. And furthermore, what they want to accomplish. But it's been really great. We have a unique way of making it. It's in a group setting, but making it very personal and very unique to every single client. What I found overwhelmingly is that these folks that are at this stage are incredibly coachable. They work incredibly hard. I mean, these. They are just working, working, working. They're working in their business and not on it. And they need a safe place to ask questions and learn what they need to learn, right? And work on things and try and try new things.

I think one of the biggest things is we get so, like, in our business and we start literally working for it, and we never take any time to work on it. And so we're caught in this cycle we can't get out of.

But I don't have time to work on it. But in order for me to get time, I need to do more work. I need to sell more work, right? Or I need to hire this, like, chicken and egg. How do I just create space?

So that's the whole block scheduling thing, right? We teach guys how to block schedule so they can be more efficient, effective with the time they have. Creating capacity to work on that business. And setting aside two or three hours a week, I mean, that's all the sacrifice. It is. Like, take two or three hours a week, work on it. And what will happen over time if you do that, you will have to work less in it, Affording you more time to work on it. And then this real scaling, it's like a hockey stick, right? You're dedicating a little bit of time, a little bit of time, and things are getting a little bit better, a little bit better. And then all of a sudden, it hits this, like, crescendo, because now I've got some people in place Where I can, I've got all my systems in place and I can just start hiring to that and it's boom and just let it run and you can take it as far as you want to take it. Which is pretty cool to watch these contractors do.

Yeah, it's interesting. One of our, one of our contractors who went through Boost, he shared this analogy. He lives in Indiana and he said I feel like I'm trying to get to California. And I started off just on foot.

He said, headed towards Pennsylvania.

But he said eventually somewhere around the county line I found a moped. He said, and then, you know, eventually I got towards the state line and I found a little beat up truck. He said, and then across a couple of states and then I found, you know, I found a nice sports car. He said all of a sudden I'm on my way to California. So it's, it can be tough to say to see the light at the end of the tunnel and like actually allow yourself to visualize what you want this baby to turn into. Like it can be, it can be a stretch to do that. But like you said, the more if you can develop habits, create capacity for yourself to work on it, it will incrementally. You'll get to the point where you feel exponential growth just within the activity within your business and developing your business.

Well, it's hard work to make things simple. It really is. If you want to simplify what you do and make it easier to do the thing you do, it's going to take hard work on simple things. Right. It's not rocket science, anything that we teach, but it takes hard work and accountability. And so do you think it's important that the size of these groups for Boosts, like is that important to it? Because I mean most of the other like coaching things that we see out there, especially when it's group, they're like as many as you want. This is like advice channel. Is it a little bit different than that?

Yeah, absolutely. This we have a cap of how many folks can be in every class for a reason. I mean it's. And a lot of folks when they, when they join, they, that's what they think about group coaching. They're like, oh, I'm just going to get lost in the shuffle. I'm going to be forgotten about. No, we boost. There's a level of accountability. And the cool thing is, I mean I force you two hours a week. This is what I tell them. I've forced two hours a week on you to work on your business. Like While you're here. Right. But now I have to hold you accountable to that other two hours. Right. And in a class with 80, you know, with 80 people in it, it's just impossible. I won't say it's impossible, but it's very tricky to hold everybody accountable to actually getting the work done.

It's hard to build relationship with them, too, like knowing their business and what their strengths and weaknesses are. When we keep it small, we're able to, like, understand that. We're able to understand, okay, that guy's a good leader. He's got those skills. That guy's not. We need to work on some of those skills. This guy is picking up on the whole process thing, and that guy's not. Let's get them working together because we do that throughout the week where they'll join up and work together on things. You can't do that with a large group format.

Right, right. The magical thing about accountability that I found within this group, it applies to a lot of things, but when they create a plan and a vision for where they want to go and then the mission, kind of using some internal language here, but the mission that I'm going to be fully focused on this year, that's going to get me a step closer to achieving that vision. When you uncover that and you discover it and you create it and you have a North Star and you have a direction to go, not doing the things that are going to get you there now just become a choice that you made. And so the accountability within the boost group kind of shifts. Our contractors are holding themselves accountable, and I am holding them accountable because I love them, I like them a lot, and I want them to win. And so it's me saying, hey, did you do the things that you said you wanted to do this week to get you one step closer to where you want to go? But the other special thing is they are holding themselves accountable. You mentioned that we encourage them to do peer reviews every week. So pretty much every single conversation we have, something is brought up. Whether it's a software that one person's using that another person's not, or it's a tip and trick that, hey, I tried this. Or it's developing a YouTube channel. Like, I'm really great at digital marketing, or I love to. I don't know how to make social media posts. Oh, hey, I can do that. Let's get together. They're all. They collectively are learning about each other and building a relationship and now holding themselves accountable to showing up. I don't have to text people and say, hey, you getting on the call today? Because everybody else is texting them.

Well, you had this thing, right? Like as one of those contractors in the group, you know, there's other contractors in the group too, and they're over there doing their work. You don't want to show up without having your work done right. And there's almost every group. There tends to be one or two that are like, all in. They're boom, boom, boom, just nailing it. They're willing to help. They're good in the breakouts or good in the peer reviews. And it literally pulls the other guys towards that type of. Have you noticed that as well?

Absolutely. There's definitely some leadership. It's because. And it's pretty easy. It's because the results, I mean, they're saying, you know, they're doing the work and they're showing up and they're saying, you know what? Yeah, we just, we just instituted some core values. We had a meeting with our team. They'll share a picture of the meeting with the team, and everybody's bought in and there's, there's excitement. So, yeah, it's, it's. It's addictive, right? Like when they, when they show up and they're showing their. They're showcasing their results or even their challenges. You know, the best thing can sometimes be when they show up and they say, hey, I'm really struggling with this. And they're like, oh, man, I can help that person. And everybody wants to be helpful, but, yeah, there's always a couple of people. There's no secret to it. They're joining the calls, they're carved out time, capacity. They're able to prioritize their projects and what to work on next, and they get the work done and then they show up to the call again. You know, they are disciplined, but they inevitably, they lead everybody else to just kind of. So, you know, rising tide lifts all ships, right? Yeah. So they, yeah, they are the role models in the.

Well, it really follows a lot of what we teach in our leadership side of things. You know, first part of it, we got to get some buy in, right? Like, hey, I start to see this vision and mission and that starts to get some buy in. Like, oh, I can actually see this thing happening where it was always a little bit foggy before. And then we start to do some work and we get some activity going, and through some positive reinforcement, we start getting some results. Right. And some discipline. And whenever you get those things working in that order, that belief thing kicks in, and that usually kicks in about the fourth, fifth week. Like, hey, man, this is actually something that's going to help me. The final product is off the charts because they're working together to put those things in place. What are some of the common things that you've seen across contractors, the things they struggle with? Like, they're coming into this boost group going, hey, please, God, make this work faster for me. I've been hitting my head against a wall. I'm tired of waiting or.