I Lied. Admin Shouldn't Be Your First Hire

So I'm going to talk about a time when you actually do exactly the opposite of what I always talk about. Usually I always talk about delegating admin, then operations, and then sales. So before I go out and I find an estimator or salesperson, I want to make sure that every single task around admin has been delegated. Why? Because admin is a lower leverage task compared to sales or operations. So I want to delegate everything to doing the phone calls, emails, payroll, bookkeeping, all those admin related tasks I want delegated off my plate. As soon as possible so I can focus more of my time on operations. Why? Because for $20 or $30 an hour, I can get someone to take care of my admin. When it comes to operations, you might be able to make $80 to $100 per hour just doing the actual work operations out in the field. So if we can delegate admin, getting paid for the work, and then we can go focus more on operations, higher leverage task. Now, as the business grows, we want to focus more of our time on sales because that's where the business growth actually happens. And we want to be able to delegate operations, get an operations manager, have systems in place for training, hiring, and things that we can hand off to an operations manager. And a lot of times I see people, they'll delegate some admin tasks, like for example, answering the phone, but then they're still doing their bookkeeping. They're still checking their email, and then they wonder why they are stuck at $1 million, $1.2 million, is because you're still kind of doing admin-related tasks that could be delegated for $20 or $30 an hour. But the reason you don't delegate those things is because you haven't created systems. And so today I was on a turnaround. I said, look, before you ever delegate, you have to create a system. Because otherwise you're setting up the person for failure and they're going to mess up. If you can't delegate admin, you can't delegate operations, most of the time it's 'cause you don't have systems. What happens is, well, I can't hand my email off, I can't have someone else do my payroll, I can't have someone else do my bookkeeping. And the reason you can't and the reason it keeps you from growing is simply because you don't have a system in place that allows someone else to do it. And so you are the system. You knowing everything about the business is what allows the business to operate. You knowing everything about every single service This is what allows you to do the admin work instead of create a system and simplifying and standardizing things to where someone else can answer the phones, someone else could create the estimates, someone else could run payroll. Those are only possible to delegate once you have created a system. Now, today at a turnaround, I said something I don't think I've ever said before on a turnaround show, and that is I actually recommended that the owner not go and delegate admin and instead go find an operations manager, someone to actually go do the work, manage the crew out in the field, and to make sure the jobs were getting done well. And I said, hey, you go focus on sales, don't delegate admin. I want you to delegate operations first. The reason is this: he had only learned from YouTube University of how to do the projects, and he was doing really complicated projects that are $50,000, $100,000 in size, one project. He had a lot of big projects, maybe 10 or 12 big projects a year, to be able to get to $1 million in revenue. But the problem was he wasn't experienced to be able to actually do that work. And because of that, because he didn't actually have the experience to do the jobs, it created all sorts of chaos and problems and mistakes fakes and yellow slips and callbacks, customers being unsatisfied. And he kept getting dragged back into being on the job site simply because he was not good at doing the work. And he only had about a year and a half or 2 years of experience doing the work, and he was doing these huge projects. Now, what I recommended he do is instead of going and finding an admin person as the first way of delegation, I said, hey, look, you've actually got to fix operations and go get someone that can actually do the work, has been doing it for 10, 15 years, and has tons of experience out in the field. Because is if you go try to get someone in admin, the worst thing that could happen is you get someone so good at admin and they leave because they're frustrated with operations. 'Cause see, operations at the end of the day is doing the work. And if doing the work is not being done correctly, it creates so much chaos for admin. And so if you have bad quality, if you have bad training, if you have bad hiring practices, bad onboarding, if those systems are on operations aren't being done correctly and you have bad quality control and lots of yellow slips and customers being unsatisfied and leaving bad reviews, guess who that all falls on? Falls on? Not your project manager, not your crew lead. It usually falls on your admin people. If you have a really hard time finding an admin person to actually do the work for you, ask yourself, is it because I'm frustrating them because my operations have no systems? And that's what was happening because they had no pricing system, they had no spreadsheet, the estimators creating all the estimates themselves, numbers made up in their head. There's all sorts of problems going on in projects that the estimator— jump, the owner— jumps back on the job site to try to fix, and they're not even skilled enough to be able to actually solve the problems out in the field. All of these mistakes in operations end up falling on the shoulders of admin. If you are struggling to delegate any aspect of your business— sales, operations, or admin— if your operations are broken, you have to first ask yourself, should I be solving that problem first? Because if you don't actually do a good service, if you don't actually have happy customers, it's impossible to sell, it's impossible to admin, and at the very least, it's gonna be extremely discouraging. Disheartening to an admin person if they're constantly just cleaning up after all the mistakes you're making. And especially if you're in project-based work, any sort of complicated work that actually requires you to have a lot of skill. If you're not capable of doing that, your first hire— if you start getting past $600,000, $700,000, $1 million in annual revenue— your first hire might actually be someone that just has more experience than you, someone that can actually manage the team, do the work, make sure it's of a high quality. Because at the end of the day, that's what the customer is paying for. And if you solve the problems of the customer and you have happy customers, you have pricing wrong. You might not have the best systems around project management, but if the job is done right, if your operations are tidy, if things are done correctly, if people are trained, and when you leave the job site, everything is done to specification in a safe manner, customers are happy and leads are going to keep coming in regardless. Even if you make some mistakes on the early onset and you don't make money on them, you can fix pricing, you can fix that. But what you can't fix is reputation. I see so many people get into project-based jobs after a year, 2 years of just watching other people, and sure enough, When I talked to this owner today, he watched Tigger and Gert's and all his big projects and like, oh, that's what I want to do. That's so cool to see landscape renovations and these great before and afters. I agree. But if you don't have the skill to actually be good in operations, it is likely that you'll need to hire someone with a lot of talent and experience to make up for the deficit that you have. Because otherwise it's impossible to sell work when all your online reviews are saying negative things, when no word of mouth is happening, when there's referrals happening in the negative direction. In other words, stay away from this company. It makes it hard for sales and it makes it makes it very frustrating for admin simply due to the fact that no matter how much they want to be able to sell jobs, get more projects on the schedule, whenever they build a relationship with a customer, they're concerned because they know at the end of the day the customer won't be satisfied. The one time that I would recommend you delegate operations instead of admin first is if you have no idea what you're doing. You're doing projects off the cuff. You don't know what— how they're supposed to actually install the irrigation or how to cut down trees. If you're doing highly technical skilled labor and you don't know what you're doing, solve that problem first. Because at the end of the day, the products that you sell is the services that we provide as home service business owners. And if that service, that product is faulty, no matter what you do, how good of a salesperson you are, no matter how much time you spend on working on the business and doing more sales and ad promotion marketing and creating a grand slam offer and upselling, no matter what you do, you will always be fighting the uphill battle of going against customer sentiment and what the market is telling each other about your service. So fix the product first and then you can scale it. And once you have operations dialled, then you can get a stellar admin person that allows you to focus all of your time and attention on sales. And you can sell with confidence as the salesperson because now you know the product and service that you're going to install is up to grade and super stellar. So that's the one time skilled labour. If you don't have the experience, go find someone that can actually do the work, get them installed so that then when you hire an admin person, they don't get frustrated. And when you focus on sales, you have the conviction and the confidence that the work will be done right.

Hey everyone, thanks for watching. And before you click off, I just realized that as we were editing this video that I didn't really address the elephant in the room when it comes to having a weakness around operations. Because if you don't know how to do the work and you get someone else to do it for you, it could actually be a huge vulnerability for the business simply due to the fact that if that person was ever to leave, you literally can't get work done that's already been promised to customers. So one way to solve this problem is make sure that if you do have an operations manager or someone that's doing the work and leading the team out in the field and doing work you don't to do is make sure everything they're doing, you have a video for. I'd highly recommend using the Field Force mobile app of HomeWorks. So when that project manager, that, that operations manager's out in the field making videos of projects, he's walking the crew through exactly how to do it. So that way, if they left and they have 5, 6 weeks of projects on the schedule, there's no lapse in service and the crew can just pick up right where they left off, continue doing jobs that you've promised. Because I've seen this time and time again where now we've created a huge vulnerability in that if that operations manager leaves the business, there is hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work on the schedule that no one knows how to do. So make sure you actually have estimate videos of every, every single property. So when we go to a property, if the operations manager is doing it great, they're estimating it or talking to the customer fine, but every video is going to go on the property notes inside of the Field Force mobile app. And then all my admin, all of my salespeople, and anyone in the future on that job site, including my crew, can see the videos. And that's how to make sure there's systems in place and I'm not having a bottleneck around this person that knows everything about the business and how to do the work and could potentially leave me holding the bag in the form of deposits or a whole bunch of materials or jobs in progress if they were to leave.