51. Breaking Through the Roof of Resistance

Foreign. Hey, my friends, Kenny Chapman here, your host of Leadership in a Nutshell for home Service. I'm super, super pumped to be back with you. Why? Because today's episode is about a breakthrough. It's about creating a breakthrough, and it is about breaking through the roof of resistance is what I am calling this. I've had multiple clients lately that have been kind of hitting their head as we dive deeper into specific home service scenarios and. And things that we talk about in home service and things that I hear from clients and things that I pay attention to. I just want you to think about your own roof of resistance. I got to use the word roof, right? So you think about Maxwell wrote about the lid of leadership. I was first exposed to leadership lids by Gerber back in the day. One of my mentors, Dan Sullivan, talks about the ceiling of complexity. We do quite a bit of work with clients around that. And so today I'm calling it the Roof of Resistance, based on some recent conversations that I've had. And most specifically, I want to share a story that I had recently with a client. And so just to kind of frame this up for a moment, let's go for a little journey together real quick. And then I'm going to give you four ways to help you break through this roof of resistance. We all have them. What the fallacy is is that we think that we will get to a certain level and they're going to go away. So let's realize that they happen. So if you're on an elevator going up, I mean, imagine if there was. There was no elevator shaft and you were on a pulley system and you were getting pulled up and hitting your head each time you hit a new floor. It's kind of what happens with your leadership capability. And as you scale your business, and many of you listening are just like me, where I didn't have a lot of formal training, a lot of formal education. I didn't know what I didn't know about leadership. I did know what I did know. And a lot of that was from parenting, from peers from previous experience that created my beliefs, how I saw previous bosses treat me and those around me. And one of the reasons that I launched this podcast and one of the reasons that we even went deeper into home service with it now, is to be able to share openly without calling clients out or naming them specifically. I just want to help you get better by understanding your peers are going through some of the same things. You're not alone out there, my friend. That's why we want to Play together here in this community. So I want to just go on a quick little journey. And then before I share these four strategies for breaking through. And this particular client's a plumbing only client. They do residential repair and replacement primarily, but they've decided and have executed a relatively quick scale up process. And they're in the process, I should say, of scaling up from about 2 million to 6 million in a period of six months. And I mean in 12 months. I should say they're about six months into this process, about halfway there, running revs on track. They're, you know, they're scaling like crazy. And this is a company that went through some growing pains as they started this quest of massive scale up. And they decided, you know, hey, we're gonna set a new budget, we're gonna bring in some new who's, if you will. I believe in who before how. And so we teach clients that, you know, it's more important. Who is more important. Now, don't get me wrong, systems matter, procedure matter, all, all those types of things. But you and I both know that the quality of what you get done on a daily basis is the quality of the team that you have. And so they decided they were going to scale up from a talent acquisition standpoint. And they went through and they were building progressive, great company, fun to be there. And all of a sudden, they lost six people in a week. Check it out. $2 million business losing six people in a week. I think four of those were technicians, four trucks, six people. Oh, my gosh. What's going on? Sky's falling. I remember the airport I was in when I got the call. And a lot of challenge and a lot of pain and a lot of struggle. Okay, cool. We regroup, we understand. What's that mean? Here's the reality. Everything is just information. There's no such thing as failure. And in the trades, guess what? You're going to fail all the time. Your team's out there failing, your salespeople are failing. Why? Because they don't have 100% conversion rates. Your CSRs are failing on the phone when they're not closing deals. Now put failure in air quotes. It's no such thing. We don't close every deal, but the world says that's failure. So I believe in information. And I just believe that sometimes we get the result that we want. Meaning I closed a sale. Meaning I hit a budget. Meaning I executed a successful marketing campaign. Meaning I recruited effective, whatever it is. Right? However, when we don't get the result we want, we have this knee jerk reaction. And as leaders, you might be able to relate, my friend. Are we not hard on ourselves or what? Give me a little head shake. Say, yep, Kenny, we are damn hard on ourselves. And we need to be easy with ourselves. Because what happens as we look back in hindsight, losing six team in a week was the best thing. Let me repeat that. And you know I'm right, because you're listening. You're listening to this right now. My client that I'm sharing the story about, I told him I'm not going to call him out, but best thing that could have happened, didn't believe that at that moment in time. So I've learned, don't always tell the truth to, to somebody when they're in the midst of the funk. Right? But I knew right then it was going to be a really good thing. And so they kind of restructured how they were going to market, how they had their service and sales process built. And because of that, they've been able to add better talent, more tenured team, stronger capability, bigger opportunity for capacity. Then right after that, they added 10 team members in a month, lost six in a week, turn around 10 in a month, and what happens? Oh, my gosh, here we go. Here we go. Now, I want to talk about this roof of resistance. Why? Because this particular client is wired a lot like I am. And maybe you are too. You know, I personally subscribe to the belief that I can accomplish anything in the world, anything in the world, as long as I don't have to do anything that's outside of my unique ability. I love what I'm doing right now. I love podcasting. I love spending our time together. I love training, I love coaching. I love all those things. I don't love the editing that has to go into this behind the scenes and whatnot. And I believe in not editing podcasts much. That's why you might hear my phone ring once in a while. That's why you might hear some. Oh, I forgot to turn off phone. Oh, hey, I forgot to close the studio door. Oh, whatever it is, right? I'm real. That's what it's about. But I believe that I don't have to do anything that I don't want to do in my life and I want to do my unique ability stuff now. It doesn't mean that I don't do it for a period of time until I can create it, figure it out, hand it off, whatever. And that's what this client was doing. This individual was an office manager. The service Manager, the warehouse manager at 2 million, figuring all that stuff out and then got to a point where it's like, that's too much resistance and I'm not having fun. I got to get rid of this warehouse piece. Then went to. Now I'm the office manager and the service manager now. Oh my gosh, there's got to be a who I could bring in and help with this service management function. So now I hand that off and now I'm the office manager only. And now we had a client call this week where they were like, hey, you know, it's time to kind of get this off of my plate. So there's the roof of resistance. When I'm doing all things for all people, there's a roof of resistance. As soon as I break through that roof. And let's say I go to floor two, now I learned some more things. I developed some new capability. I created more capacity because I offloaded some things. But with that, now I learn, I grow. The business is growing. Boom. There's another level of resistance. We take the elevator up, here's number three. And now we're on floor three. And now I'm only the office and the service manager. Now I go on up. Oh, now I'm only the office manager. Now I'm handing that off. I'm only really focused in marketing, whatever that looks like. What about you? This isn't about my client. This is a hundred percent about you. And were you able to see yourself anywhere in that story where regardless of if you're plumbing, regardless of the trade that you provide, I want you to think about, you know, where are you hitting resistance? Where are you bumping your head on the ceiling of complexity as Dan talks about. When Maxwell wrote about the lid of leadership and he was talking more from a strategy of, you know, you've got to increase your leadership ability to increase your effectiveness. I'm talking today about offloading some stuff with. When you hit that roof of resistance, it's because you're probably doing some stuff that's not in your unique ability that you really don't want to be doing anymore. And it's one of the reasons that I, I have to scale teams around me and the companies that I create and that I'm involved in. When I launched Blue Collar, I was by myself, just the lovely Christy and I, I was just a high powered consultant for several years. And with that comes complexity I don't want to deal with. And I miss team. I want, I want team to. My team is my family. You know, and I wanted to scale up and have, have a group of incredible people around me that I get to play the game with. That's less resistance to me because I get to be in unique ability more. What about you, my friend? What do you need to offload? Where do you need to evaluate? Let's run through this four step process and I'll get you out of here. Number one, identify your internal resistance. If you feel that you're, that you're at the roof of resistance or you're approaching the roof of resistance, what is the internal resistance that you have? Because there's internal and external. We start with internal meaning. Do I have a lack of commitment? Am I afraid of something? Honor your truth. Is there something that, that I'm being fearful about or that I'm afraid of? Am I lacking confidence? Do I have internal resistance? Because I just don't have the confidence to go get this done or to work through this. And one that's big for me is am I lacking passion around it? If I don't love it, if I'm not having passion, you've probably seen me kind of go hot and cold on social media some and I'm back rocking it right now because I, I'm not super passionate about social media, but I'm. Well, in fact, let me reframe that. I'm not passionate at all about social media, but I'm super passionate about relationships and connecting with people. And I don't love that other people hold the algorithm to who I get to connect with, when and how and all that type of crap. But what I do know is it's a world that we play in right now. And I'm passionate about sharing information and helping people interrupt a pattern of their day or whatever. So I had some internal resistance I had to work through and get back in the game of playing full out. Number one, what's your internal resistance? Number two, what's your external resistance? When you think about where that's showing up right when it's like, okay, so it could be people like I talked about the who. So people who are you? You know, is there external resistance that you don't have the right people? Or maybe you have the right person that's not getting it done, or I should say the wrong person. You have somebody, but they're not the right person. External resistance, people, external resistance. Are you missing a strategy? We talk about how, who and how strategy, you know, is there something missing there? Then we move to execution resistance. Am I not taking the action well? You know, that kind of ties to the internal commitment. But what's blocking me from taking this action? Then we think about other resources. What about cash? Is there an external resistance that I have because it's going to take too much capital or I'm afraid of dipping into my cash reserves or borrowing money or whatever the case may be? How does that show up when you think about that? So identify internal resistance. Identify external resistance. Number three, schedule a strategy session for yourself. I'm a big fan of self strategy sessions. My mentor, Keith Cunningham calls it thinking time in the great book. The Road Less Stupid was the book that Keith wrote about. I know I've mentioned it on here a few times. And when I spent a day with Keith, it was, it was phenomenal as he just, he taught me so much about implementing plans and not ideas that changed the course of my life. But have a self strategy session where you're like, you know, really reviewing your own commitment levels and what do you want to go do? And then lastly, number four, get on an action item list. Not just like, oh, I'm going to do this and here's my to do list. An action item list is different than a to do list. Let's be super clear. If it's an action item, guess what that means? I'm going to take action on it. And you never leave an action item list without the identifying what the first action is going to be. What's my first action I'm going to take? And then I start from there. Internal resistance, external resistance, self strategy session, action item list. And boom. You are breaking through the roof of resistance. That's what we're here to talk about. It's leadership in a nutshell. For home service. We're cracking that code of the driven mind. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman. It's always a pleasure and an honor. Give us a like, give us a review. Keep on listening. Make sure you're subscribed. Refer it to somebody. Send this to somebody that you care about. We're only talking home service from here on out. I'll be having guests, I'll be having clients, I'll be having contractors until we talk. Make it a better than fantastic day. We'll see you real soon. Thanks everybody.