Your Business Is Growing. So Why Are You Still Broke?

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we're talking about how contractors can escape the chaos, build a more profitable business, and scale without everything depending on the owner. Joining me today is Lee Miller. Lee, thanks so much for joining us, man.

Yeah, good to be here, Phil. Thanks for inviting me on.

Yeah, I was going to go the conqueror contractor chaos and other stuff, but I'll leave it up to you to share about your business and what you got going on. So If you could, people that don't know you, could you give us like 2-minute, 3-minute background of who you are, what you got going on?

Sure. Yeah. I've been told in the past that even if I give my elevator story, it'd have to be an incredibly big building in order for me to get all of it. It takes a while. But yeah, in a nutshell, I'm a business coach and mentor for contractors. I've been doing this for about 5 years. I have a background in franchise painting businesses, but also other home services like moving as well. And then before that, for a long time, I was actually a corporate trainer for one of the biggest hospitality businesses in the UK. So I would actually go into all these restaurants and turn them around very much like Gordon Ramsay does in Kitchen Nightmares. So I've got a people development background with some hands-on experience owning and operating a multimillion-dollar home service business as well. But yeah, moved into coaching 4 or 5 years ago when COVID became cool, sold my painting business, started consulting, and it's been off to the races ever since.

Love it. Love it. I know we were talking pre-show a little bit about your experience and we're going to dig in on some of those franchising things. But most of the people that listen to this show is going to be like $1 million to $10 million home service businesses. So they're, you know, trying to scale, maybe the number one salesperson, that kind of stuff. Do you have a specific formula or something that you use from a coaching perspective? Like, let's say I was a home service business guy million to $3 million or $3 to $5 million, like how would you diagnose what I need to fix or how would you help me?

Yeah, so everything kind of starts in the same kind of fashion for me when I'm working with a new client. But essentially the first thing I want to do is fix your profit before you do anything else, right? We do spend quite a bit of time building out the vision in the beginning. So our first call typically with a new client is a 4 to 5 hour strategy planning session where we basically build out the next 5-year big goals on paper, kind of going from big goal in the distance all the way down to a really detailed 3 months. And then we go and we jump straight into profit. And I, I usually tell my clients, I'm like, hey, I want you to forget everything you know about being profitable, and I want to, I want to teach you completely from scratch. I'm going to teach you like a 5-year-old. I'm not trying to like belittle you. I'm not trying to like— I want to take it back to like the, the brass roots to this thing.

Yes.

And reteach profit from scratch. 9 times out of 10, guys are like, they'll come to me and they'll be like, do I get more leads? How do I get more jobs? How do I scale? I say don't just jump into scaling and trying to get to that vanity metric of 7 figures or beyond. Fix your profit first so that you're going to be profitable hitting that million. And I'll be upfront, the first time that I went for 7 figures, I did more net profit at $750K than I did at a million.

Yeah, of course. So

typically it always starts with profit, then it moves into, uh, getting the owner off the tools, getting them in the office and teaching them how to be the owner of a home service or a construction business. And then lastly, it's about building that infinite copy and paste scalability. So yeah, there's a bit of method to the madness, but for the most part, it always starts with the vision and profit first.

I love it. So at my home service business, I started there, we were about like $3 million. And when I started with the owner, he'd been stuck at like $2.7 for 2 years. And he was doing $2.7, but only 10% profit.

So

it's like he scaled with revenue, but then his profit wasn't there. And what we found was that his actual business mix, he was giving like 20% of every single job to his referral partners. And I'm like, dude, if we just keep that 20% and then we get just straight organic, you know, COD-style residential customers, your profit's going to skyrocket on the jobs. And basically we came up on the next one, we hit $4 million and he went from $300,000 to $900,000 in profit.

Wow.

And a lot of people, they just want, hey, I want more leads. When it's like more leads is just going to be more work and it's going to be not even more profit. So let's say someone was like sitting across from you and you're like, hey, let's talk about profit. Do you like pull up their P&L or how do you break it down to like the kindergarten level?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's a good question because I think people who use their P&L as their source of being profitable maybe don't know as much as what they probably should be in an entrepreneur state. Uh, you know, like I typically look at the profit and loss statement as a A historical, you know, transcription of what has occurred, right?

Yeah, yeah.

The funny thing about PNL is by the time it gets in your hand, you're 45 days past when you've spent that money.

Exactly.

You know, so I go to the beginning of this, right? Like I actually have this concept that's called the four gatekeepers of profit, right? The four gatekeepers are essentially starts with sales, right? With these two major levers in sales, you've got pricing. Which you can control. You could make that decision today that you're going to up your pricing and that will kick in on the next book. So we start there, we start with pricing and we start by looking at, well, am I charging enough for these projects in the first place? And is there still opportunity to boost that price more?

Of course.

But by also boosting the quality of the experience, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I look at this like Disney, right? Like what does Disney sell? They don't sell theme parks. They sell magic. They sell that feeling. They sell that look on your kid's face, right? You're not thinking about how much you spent on that when you walk through the gate and you see your 5-year-old lighting up, right? So how can we increase the level of service but also in order to boost the price essentially, right?

Yes. So this is what we did at My Home Service is actually, because when I came in, our average ticket was around like $600 and we were doing duct cleaning. So I'm like, okay, well how can we increase our average ticket if our guys don't sell? And what we could do is add a dryer vent cleaning on top for like $1,500, $200 extra. And what we did was on our confirmation calls, we had our CSRs just say, hey, do you want our guy to take care of the dryer vent while he's there? You should get that done like every year. And then boom, it was like, we tracked it, 30, 40% lift in combo dryer vent cleanings, literally overnight, just by a quick script change, but way more profitable average tickets. So like, I love that you start there because that's exactly like, you already have all these things happening. You just have to like make it make sense to make more money.

For sure. Yeah. And I mean, I think upselling is absolutely incredible. And if you're not actively trying to upsell, you're leaving money on the table, right?

Yeah.

Call me a low-hanging fruit farmer, but I mean, essentially, like, if you're already on a job site, that's going to be one of the highest return on investment places where you can upsell, make more money, get more clients, right? Like, do more advertising. Like, being on site is probably one of the best ways to actually grow your business rather than trying to always create new leads and new revenue sources. Try and maximize the LTV. For example, I tell my contracting clients, my GCs, I'm saying, hey, you're going in to quote this project, this project, the one that they're asking you for today. Why not build a lifetime plan with them? We all have them. We all look at our own houses constantly saying, hey, I'm going to do the bathroom first, but then it would be really nice to redo the kitchen, and then it would be really nice to redo the patio out back. Sit down with your client, map out the next 5 to 10 years worth of projects that they're going to want to get, and then call them every year and be like, hey, are you ready to do that patio now? You know, I can start ordering the materials. Here's my calendar. So take control of the lifetime value of the client, but also upselling on the job site to increase your average ticket price. Sure, 100%. You should be doing that. Not just you. We used to always tell our guys that we have 3 layers of upsell. Right? We know that when the salesperson walks onto a quote to go and quote a project, that they're the worst person to try and squeeze the customer to get more work. The customer's already in a state of defense, even though they've invited you to their home to come and quote. But if you go in and you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, you're gonna scare the customer away. You're gonna lose the whole thing. So we introduced this like 3-tiered upsell process where we would go, all right, okay, when we go in to do the quote, We're going to take a note of the potential upsells that we could, that we could sell to this customer. And then when we actually give them the quote, we're going to put it on there, but we're not going to say anything about it. We're just going to leave it. Option A, potential, you know, add-on, this price, potential add-on B, potential add-on C. And we would leave it. We wouldn't push the customer.

Yeah.

But then when we did the follow-up call a couple of weeks later, right? Like we had a one-ticket, like one-shot close call. We'd close them on site. But, you know, a couple of weeks before their project starts, we call them up, be like, hey, did you actually see those upsells? Or sorry, we didn't say that. Yeah, you see those add-ons, right?

Yeah.

And they would say, oh yeah, well, actually, well, it's like, hey, well, it's kind of like now or never. So let us know if you want to add those on. It's going to be cheaper to do it now because if we have to come back, there's truck and travel fees and setup costs and all this stuff. So we found that we had a pretty good conversion there. But this was where our best salespeople came in, were our painters. Right? Our painters would show up on the job site and they'd be like, hey, $50 to do that, $200 to do that, $300 to do that, because we incentivized them to do so. Like, we would actually give them 10% of profit on anything they upsold on a job site. And I actually remember this one time my operations manager Jerome called me up and he said, he's like, hey, um, just sold a massive upsell. I'm like, great, like, what did you sell? He's like, I just did popcorn ceiling removal in an entire house. It's an additional like $13,000.

Yeah.

And I was like, dude, super proud of you. Good job. You're going to make a ton of money. But here's the kicker. My schedule is slammed. This is the middle of summer for an exterior painting business. I cannot do that, you know? So I had to call the customer and be like, I'm really sorry. We can probably come back another time and do that. But you know, if you put the incentive in place, you'll increase it, right?

Yeah. I love it. Yeah. All right.

So that's the first gatekeeper.

First gatekeeper is sales. And then—

First gatekeeper is sales. Yeah. So sales controls price and volume, right?

Yep. Yep.

Inbound and outbound, right? Like inbound sales, marketing, stuff like that. And then actual outbound referral relationships, networking. The second gatekeeper is whoever is in your production, right? Like they manage labor and materials, right? It's their job to make the labor as efficient as possible. So things like the right incentives, training, onboarding, developing people. Like there's a concept called lean. I don't know if you're familiar with lean, Lean, but like— 2-step lean. Yeah, 2-step lean. But implementing lean principles makes your labor more efficient. And then on the material side, it's material cost, right? What you're actually paying your supplier for your materials, but also mitigating your damages, your wastage, your miscuts, whatever. So actively working on those 2 metrics and trying to get those down is how you control up to the point of gross profit. That's where we always start.

Yeah. One of the big things with the lean labor at my home service business, we had 13 routes and it was like, can we just get the route density cleaner so we get our guys to the right jobs? They're not driving all over God's green earth. Um, we didn't have AI back then, but now, like, if it was me, I would literally just screenshot the dispatch board and say, can you organize this with the right addresses to be the perfect thing? Like, it'll take 2 seconds. Um, a lot of opportunity there for sure. So yeah, it makes complete sense. Absolutely.

Yeah, like always, always be lean. And the concept of lean, right? Like there's this concept of kaizen, right? Kaizen means the mindset of continuous improvement.

Yep.

So for, you know, if you, if you were to take someone who's on your production team or someone who's running your production for you and say, hey, I want you to be the lean implementer in the business and give them time every week to sit down and study the concepts of lean, your business will become more efficient.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Because that's all it is. It's the mindset of continuous improvement to constantly be looking for things and saying, hey, could we do this better? You know? Um, and there's a million. Yeah.

I think sales is like offense and then production is more defense.

Yes.

Of like making sure things slip through. So makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Well, and then the other 2. Oh, go ahead.

Yeah. Think about it like this. Sales makes money.

Yeah.

Everyone below that and the 4 gatekeepers. They keep money, right? The production guy doesn't make you more money. He saves you money from what the sales guy sold, if you've got a sales guy, right? So yeah, you're totally right, man. Um, really good book that you should look at. It's called The Toyota Way.

Yeah, it's a great book.

You read that one? Yeah, great book. Absolutely phenomenal. Um, but yeah, lean applies everywhere, whether it's in the office or in the field or in sales. Lean can always be leveraged, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, so that's, that's where we get to gross profit, right? And I tell guys, don't even worry about net profit because if you don't make gross, you won't make net. There's no way. There is no way that you'll make net profit. So why are you even talking about it? If you can nail gross, and we run on this rule, it's called the 50-30-20 rule, right? Mm-hmm. 50% gross profit is the, the beginning goal. If you're not there yet, trust me guys, if you're in a home service field, you can get there. And that's still low. The bar is still on the floor at 50% profit. But if you can get to 50% gross, You carve out 30% for fixed expenses allocation of revenue, and then that'll leave you with 20% net profit after. And you have to treat it in stages, right? I usually look at it like an NFL game, right? How often do you see the guys getting absolutely thrashed in the first half and then they go into the locker room, they compare notes of what they've seen and what they've heard, and then they come back out and crush it in the back half and win the game. It happens really, really often. Yeah, you have to play profit at the 4 stages, at the 4 games, in order to be in the Super Bowl for the net profit.

Love it.

You know?

Yeah.

So if you can get to 50%, you're doing a good job. Now it's time to move into the net profit equation, the part where you actually get to keep the net profit. And that comes down to the 3rd gatekeeper, which is going to be your bookkeeper or your admin person. And if you don't have one, I highly recommend that you go and get one. Just because you don't understand the impact that a bookkeeper and admin makes to your business doesn't mean you don't need one. I know what it's like. We're just like, ah, well, you know, I'll deal with the numbers later. I'll look at the P&L. I'll make the decisions. Well, who's keeping you accountable to the budget for how much this business costs?

Yes.

Like in my business now, Danielle, my wife, but also operations manager for the business, Every Friday we sit down and we tear apart our profit and loss statement. And here's the cool thing. She knows nothing about what I do. So she's got no assumptions.

Yeah.

She's got no assumptions. So she just highlights everything in red that she doesn't understand and she makes me justify it.

Yeah. I love it.

Got it. Got it. Got it. And we save like every Friday we save something. Yeah. It was about keeping it tight. So the 2 levers that you've got with your bookkeeper is having a budget. Second one is a meeting cadence, like a rhythm of communicating and meeting and looking at that, that profit and loss. Loss statement and having an agenda. That's the real value that they provide. Now we're keeping money. And then the last gatekeeper is your accountant, and they can only deal with whatever the last 3 gatekeepers have done. So if they've done a bad job, your accountant is going to do a bad job too.

Yeah,

but I do also find that nobody knows how to leverage an accountant, right? You have to look at an accountant like your partner in profit. And really simple test for this is to ask, do I feel like my accountant cares about the growth of my business? And if the answer is no, might be worth going out to find another one, going and looking for another accountant, because your accountant should be coming back to you and helping you forecast. They should be helping you find grants that are available in your area. They should be coming back and saying, hey, I know you wanted to buy that Sprinter van to expand the fleet, but I'm looking at your numbers, you can only afford it in September, right? As an example.

Yes.

They are the, the financial planner for the business, and you have to use them as such. And only then, once you've got your 4 gatekeepers, right? And again, that might be you. If you're a business owner, you're doing everything yourself. It's not about having 4 members of staff on the team that you're paying tons of money to, to do this for you. That could just be you, but you have to play those individual games if you want to make that profit. But that's our concept, right? Like the 4 gatekeepers, and we systematically walk our guys through that from start to finish.

I love it. What, what I found working with home service businesses is that usually Majority of them are the salespeople. Like, they love that side of it. Like, yeah, I can go sell more, do more. The production side, maybe 20% of them are really good techs and love the technician side of things. And it's like, yeah, I can do all that. The bookkeeping and the money side is like maybe 2% of the guys like get that and like that's their jam because that's the hardest thing to like. But as you progress like up to $1 million and then through to like $5, $10 million, it's getting those buckets dialed in. With great people, whether it's fractional or systems inside of your business. But I agree, all of those, when you laid it out, it's like looking at my business, I'm like, oh man, I remember I got the bookkeeper finally and I was losing all this stuff and then they saved my life. So it's definitely like, it makes sense when you lay it out. And it also makes sense like from a coaching perspective, there's a lot of stuff to do. Like someone has to know what to do and help coach you and how to do these things. So very cool to lay it out that way. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's when you become, you know, like at what point do you become, you have to stop being the technician or you have to stop being the house painter or the HVAC guy and start becoming the CEO of a business because those are 2 very different skill sets, right? Like I always tell my guys, you'll never scale your business from behind a piece of machinery or from a ladder or on the tools. And it's a decision. If you want to stay small, you can be really profitable and stay small. Right? You may not be the guy that wants to have 20 employees or what do we have, 8 vans, 8 Sprinter vans and, you know, 70+ employees. Like, you might not want to be that guy and that's totally fine. But you have to understand that you can't have your cake and eat it. You have to develop yourself as a CEO and learn the skill set of a CEO. And that comes with being able to understand profit and loss statement, being able to forecast, being able to write a vision, you know, be able to inspire and develop your team. Exactly. Those are the skill sets that we teach is when our guys are like, right, I'm ready to grow. And I'm ready to leave behind the technician, you know?

Yeah.

I want to be the entrepreneur now.

I love it. And both are hard. Like they both have different challenges on both sides. Not neither one is like easier. It might be comfortable for you now because you're used to that, but there's benefits on both sides and there's hard things on both sides. Um, I'm curious about the getting the owner off the truck piece or out of the weeds. Um, specifically with us, it's like $1 million to $10 million. What we find is like that $1 to $3 million, Usually the owner is like the number one salesperson or they keep getting pulled back into the firefighting thing. How would you coach someone on like elevating past that? Like not going out every day and running, you know, sales calls or not running to every fire. Like how does that, how do you, how would you help someone with that?

Yeah, well, I think, I think this comes like just to bring it back a sec before we go forward is, is we have to have a perception of the value of our own time. Like, this is the biggest thing, right, when it comes to scaling a business. We have a couple of tools that we use for this to kind of figure out the value of your time now versus the tasks and roles that you will be doing in the future, but it's at a different dollar amount per hour, right?

Yes.

And I'm not talking about $22 an hour as a window washer or whatever.

Yeah.

What I'm saying is if you want to grow your business and scale, you need to look at your time first. That's what I get my guys to do. So when I'm working with my guys, and I mean, we've got 175+ guys in the program right now, is we tell them to hyper-obsess over their time, right? Now I understand for a lot of home service guys, because I was that guy. In fact, I was that guy who had coaches in my inbox every week over and over and over again. You need a coach. You need a coach. I'm like, I don't need a coach. I don't need a coach. I don't need a coach, right? I wish I could go back and get one of those coaches. Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, but the thing is, is like when we think of, uh, how, how we provide value to the business, especially as a, as a young, younger kind of construction guy or home service business, is we say, well, if I just jump on the tools, then I am providing value to the business. And if I'm sitting in the office, I'm not providing value to the business, right? They don't— they've not built that bridge yet, right? Yeah, it's a mindset thing.

And they get stuck. Like, I got stuck in my own business like this where I was like, My guys got to see me out there on the field with them fighting every day. And I felt like that was how I was adding value and I was with them. And it's so hard. It was really, really hard for me because I was the guy that was like up at 6:30 in the technician room with them ready to go to war. So like, that's a tough one. That's a really tough one.

And hey, look, there's a time and a place for that for sure. When you're building your business, there are some 90-hour weeks, right? I wish I could tell you that every client that I work with doesn't have 60 to 80-hour weeks sometimes. Like, that's just the nature of the beast, right? Especially if you're a more seasonal business, like a home service business who works exterior, like landscapers.

Yeah.

But, you know, you need to understand that the lowest amount of value that you provide to your business is when you are on site swinging the hammer. Because when you're doing that, what stops? The vision planning stops. The, the, the skills to become the CEO stop, right? Or the development of skills. The team development stops. What stops when I'm on the tools swinging the hammer, right? It doesn't mean you're lazy. It's that you need to find a new way to provide value to your business. And so the exercise that we use, we call it revenue responsibility per hour, right? Concept's pretty simple. If I want to make a, you know, let's say I was a $1 million business trying to go to $5 million. Well, take your total hours that you will work in a year, right? Let's just say, for example, you were going to work 40 hours a week and you're going to take 2 weeks off a year. That's like roughly 2,000 hours, right? 2,000 hours in a year. If I want to make $5 million, what is $5 million divided by 2,000? That will be— and I don't know, and here's the thing, I suck at math. Like, yeah, yeah, good at the equations and the formulas, but I suck at doing it mentally. But you know, that's your revenue per hour, right? If you're, you know, $1 million trying to go to $2 million, right, then same math, right? How many hours am I going to work? Total revenue goal divided by that number of hours will tell me What my time is worth per hour as the business owner, and then the exercise becomes really simple because now what I can do is I can say, well, if my new revenue responsibility is let's say four hundred dollars compared to two hundred dollars the year before, what actions or what tasks am I doing in my business that are absolutely not worth that amount of money anymore? Answering emails. dealing with the, you know, fires on the job site, maybe it's worth hiring a production manager. Maybe it's worth— so again, you have to look at your time and say, how do I make my time the most valuable time when I've only got 8 hours right now?

I love it.

A lot of these guys are family guys, right? Like, what's important? Being back at the dinner table on time with your kids, not constantly looking at your phone. That's worth something. That's worth you having a higher dollar amount per hour when you're at work for 8 hours a day.

Yeah, I

just did that on vacation. Yeah.

So $3 million divided by— so we went into $3 million divided by 2,000 hours is $1,500 an hour.

There you go.

So could you hire someone to answer your emails for $1,500 an hour? Absolutely. Like $10 an hour, probably. And I think this is something in my business that once the, the fufu thing— when I hear people like you say this, I used to be like, okay, well What am I going to do with my time?

Yeah,

right. Like, that's a big shift for me was like, okay, well, I'm not out here doing sales calls. I'm not out here on client calls. I'm not over here. So what exactly am I supposed to do to grow the business?

Yeah. And that's an incredible question. And that's where most of the fear comes from, from young, like from guys, because they're like, oh, if I trade out my job description, I don't have a new one to replace it.

Yes.

How cool is that though? You get to decide, right, how to do that. Now, if I look at the CEO and I look at the job description of a CEO, it really falls into like 3 major categories, right? It is the visionary, the guy who is constantly obsessing over the vision of the business and then comparing the actions that they're taking today to the trajectory, right? Am I on track? Think of it like a ship captain, right, of a Navy boat. They can't pilot that ship themselves. They can't. They need their entire crew. But what can they do? They can decide the destination and then they can constantly ask, hey, how many degrees are we off from that path? So, if you become hyper-obsessed with a vision, and you might have read this in Brian Scudamore's book, right? Like Willing to Fail, where he goes and he talks about going and sitting on the dock for 2 days and just writing down like a big list of crazy goals. And it's actually really cool because if you go to The Junction, their HQ in Vancouver, BC, you'll see this wall. It's called the Can You Imagine Wall. And it's got this crazy stuff on it. Brand on the Starbucks cups, being on the Oprah Winfrey Show, limited edition Lego sets with the 1-800-GOT-JUNK guys, right? And it's all got little green tick marks next to it, right? There's hundreds and hundreds of little goals there. So, if you became hyper-obsessed with a vision and these little milestones, how much more likely would you be to achieve them? Probably maximum, right? So it starts— has to be with vision. Second one is going to be decision-making, and I'm not talking every little decision. I'm saying the big decisions that move the needle. Instead of getting that next one client, how do you get your next 100 clients?

Yes.

Right? Instead of buying that one next van and getting 2 more technicians to make a million dollars, how do I get 5 more? Right? Think of what— think of the decisions that Jeff Bezos is making, right? Like, he's not talking about how he sells his next Amazon package. For some reason, he's sitting there trying to send Katy Perry to space. I don't know why, but that's his decision he wants to make. High-level decision-making in the business that moves the needle towards the goal. And lastly is the development of your gatekeepers, right? Something changed for me in my business, right? And again, like, our moving company and our painting company combined did $10 million, right? So at that level, you can't be on the tools. You can't be even in the office for most of the time. The way that I got around it, and this is when everything changed for me, was when I decided to become a people development business that happened to do it through home services. So I would pour into my managers, you know, teaching them everything that I knew— financial skills, marketing, sales. In fact, for of my gatekeepers from before, 2 production managers, 2 sales guys, now own their own painting companies.

Wow.

To this day. And they're doing extremely well. I still get calls from all the time. I'm still getting referrals. It's amazing, right? Super cool. But when they were there, the culture was so good because they knew that I was committed to their development. If that's all I did, how great would our salespeople be? How great would our production members be? Right? And we have to also admit as well that like, we can't be the best at everything in the business forever. At some point, you're going to need to hire people who are better than And you're going to have to hire people who are smarter than you and you're going to have to be okay with it. I find a lot of guys aren't. They're like, I don't want to hire that guy because I don't want someone being better than I am. You

know? Yeah. Yeah. So good. I don't think I've heard someone break it down. It's like, what do you do with your time? But those are really like, if you're listening to this and you're like, how do I actually grow my business? It's not just go out and get some more leads coming in, right? It's not just like go and do this new AI hack or run some Meta ads or something. It's literally like starts Inside of the business, freeing up your time so that way you can have the visionary, you can have the scale to go in and fix your booking rate, your close rate, your bottlenecks, and then unlock the growth so that way you can figure out. This was what a big unlock for me was that it was like, okay, what's the bottleneck in my business? And then how do I go fix that and then go to the next thing to fix that? And when you don't have the time, you just feel like everything's swirling around you. You try to find these like small little things or Band-Aids to stick over it. But when you have the time to step back, it's like, okay, well, what's, what is the big vision and how do I make it happen? So I love that. That's really good, man.

There's really, there's a really cool exercise that I like to do with my clients where we will sit down and I'll, and I'll say, hey, be goofy with me for a sec, right? Just sit back in your chair and close your eyes and verbally write me a letter telling me about what your life looks like now, 3, 3 years from today, right? So we'll be like, it's 2029. On the 28th of September, what just happened in the business? Oh, we just got our fifth truck. All right, cool. What happened just before that? Oh well, me and my wife and you know me, my wife and kids went on this amazing vacation to the Maldives because we had just hit our profit goal of this much money. Cool, sweet. What happened just before that? And we will literally walk it back from that three-year vision down to tomorrow. Like what did you do tomorrow? that led you towards that vision. Oh, I canned that guy that I always wanted to fire because I knew he was a bad culture fit, but I just didn't— like, I needed his hands, you know?

Yes.

So again, it's like you kind of have to put yourself in the future and work your way back. Um, and that kind of applies to a lot of different things, right? Like when it comes to systems building in a business, for example, I like to go backwards. Because if I said to you, hey Phil, what's your process for like onboarding, selling a job, and getting a client? You'd be like, Well, we meet the client, we do an estimate, they book the job, we do the job, and then we collect the check. I'm like, cool, that's 5 steps. But if you switch it and you go backwards and you go, well, what's the last thing that happened? Oh, actually, we asked them for a review. Okay, what happened just before that? We sent them the review request. Oh, what happened just before that? We, you know, we called them to say thanks for the job. What happened just before? Dude, by the time you work that back, literally the start, it's like 65 or 70 different steps in a customer journey. You have to go backwards because it forces you to have to think about what comes next. It's like doing the alphabet backwards. So anyway, that's our little, our little exercise for that.

Yeah.

Just one more on revenue responsibility, like I talked about before as well. Like, I've sat in rooms with guys whose revenue responsibility was $30,000 per hour. So think about the decisions that they're making and the visions that they need to have, because, you know, by the time they think of something that has to happen on the production floor, it already happened 3 days ago. You know?

Yeah. Yeah.

And they're like, oh, I need to run a Home Depot. Like, no. Yeah, exactly.

I love that. Um, all right. I want to ask you about AI and like your take on AI, how you can use it in a coaching business. Um, do coaches still matter with AI? All those things. Like, what do your take— what's your take on that?

Yeah, 100%. And, and that's a really loaded question. We're still very early in this process. Um, I do see everyone jumping on the bandwagon. But what I will say is AI will amplify what you've already got, right? So if you have a broken business with broken systems and you're using AI, you're probably going to just get more of the same of what you've already got, you know?

Yes.

Now, you know, I understand that not a lot of guys have the time, the know-how, or the knowledge to jump in. And I think that that's going to be their own demise, right? We're in this like crazy phase where it's kind of like, why do I need a Google page when I've got Yelp? You know?

Yes, yes.

Or, I'm in the Yellow Pages, so why do I need an HTML website, right? Like, same thing is happening here where I think if you're not on the AI train at least a little bit, you're probably missing out. You're probably working harder than you should be. Now, you touched on this, and I'll say the same thing, is I never had AI when I had my home service business.

Yes.

Every SOP would be written from here, right? And it was usually written when something bad had happened, you know?

Yes, yes.

Isn't it like that's essentially what our contracts are, right? They're just a written history of everything we've messed up in our businesses before. Yes.

Um, but yeah, like I was at, I was at Job Burnout last week and someone asked me for a script of how I would say this and I just, I crushed the script. Like I was like, boom, boom, boom.

Yeah.

And I was like, AI did not write that. Okay. Like I wrote that by hand and I coached all my team on it. Like exactly what you were saying. It's something to be said about like when you actually did it and you can rip it and it's just like, It just ingrained in you. It's good. Like, it's good.

Totally. It's like a toolbox, right? Like, I mean, scripts, especially when it comes to like sales or how you talk on an estimate or, you know, even deal with a bad customer situation. I mean, we all have them, right? Like, I mean, it happens. You know, it's like a toolbox, right? You don't hammer a screw. So like, you need to have these things memorized and in the bank, even if you're not using them in the same order every single time. You need to like have a script that always works, right?

Exactly.

Um, but yeah, dude, I mean, AI is great. I use it for pretty much everything. But I'll tell you what, like, I would say that, you know, from all the people that are in our coaching program, we give them AI, like we give them some of our AI and we're like, hey, like use this instead of calling me and asking me because I've got 30 hours of coaching calls booked this week and I might not be able to get to you fast enough. So it is a force multiplier. And I also find that so many guys will like go into AI with an original idea and then AI will start spinning them off. They'll say, well, you can't have that until you have these 5 things. And then they get sidetracked and they start doing those 5 things and building them, and then they hit another wall and they go, well, I can't— like, it's, you know, 2 AM in the morning and I need to be up at 6 for work, right? Like,

exactly

the rabbit hole. So here's my rule when it comes to AI, especially if it's like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. If you can't define the outcome of what you need to see well you're putting your prompt in, don't even bother because it's not something that you need that much, right? You don't need it that bad to have to prompt AI. And hey, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to be some like, you know, holy saint here. When Claude first came out, I was like token maxing like crazy. I'd be like, yeah, I think there was a day where I had to bump it 4 times. I had to up my tokens before I was like, I'll just get the max plan and I'm gonna use it. Now we have AI brains and agents and You know, it's time evaluations. You know, like, I use AI to evaluate my time. I tell my clients, go give AI access to your calendar, ask it, hey, where am I wasting time? Right? But like I said, you have to give the AI the outcome that you want to achieve. So if I build— if I sit for 6 hours or 7 hours planning out my vision, if I do the 3-year exercise where I work it back and I say, cool, here's all the things that would be cool, AI, everything that I do with you, make it lead towards this vision. Now you're going to get a lot more tangible results, or you're going to get a much better result from AI because it's going to be working towards that goal.

Yeah, I love it.

I think it's a force multiplier, but I also think it's a shiny object as well. You just have to be careful.

I agree. I think what I try to tell people is like, AI has all the answers, but it doesn't have all the questions. And so if you show up without the right questions, you're going to get the wrong answers. And that's why there's still something to be said about having someone that knows the full picture and can help you and then guide you and use it as a tool, of course. But it shouldn't be, you know, the end result of everything. I agree.

Yeah. And here's the thing, man, like AI's learning models are based on everybody's opinion, right? Opinions are like assholes, right? Everybody's got one. So if you've got 2 guys who have done it and walked the path and messed it up a couple of times, but then figured it out. Like they're selling it during coaching. They're not posting that on the internet for everyone to find. So the only, you know, the majority of the people's opinions the AI is taking into consideration is people's how they think it should happen, right? Because they posted something on Reddit, for example.

Yeah.

So I mean, did I like— I'm not, you know, the way that I learned how to fix my business, I lost a hell of a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? Bad processes, bad systems, bad hires, all of that stuff. AI might be able to tell you about it, but it'll never be able to help you feel what that feels like.

Yes.

You know, so sitting down with a coach, it's special. And again, I use that term really loosely, coach, because I'm like 70% consultant, 30% coach.

Yeah.

If my clients come to me and they're like, hey, I'm thinking of doing this, I'd be like, that's a dumb idea. I tried that twice, messed it up, lost 50 grand. Do it this way and you'll get that result. I'm not gonna be like, well, how do you feel? What do you think you should do? Like, I'm not that guy. I'm just like, nah, like, I fucked up, you'll fuck up. So like, yeah, just do it this way. This is how it worked. And 9 times outta 10 it works like that, you know?

Yeah. I love it. I love it. Um, cool. Well, Lee, where should people go to learn more about you, your, your program, anything?

Yeah, 100%. So a couple of options we've got. Um, our most famous one is we've got our school platform. So we have an entire online classroom and community on school. So if you go in and type in Conquer Contractor Chaos, you'll find our free one. There's actually 6-week boot camp that works through profit, uh, works through marketing a little bit— not touching on Phil's toes here— not touching on, you know, um, it goes through recruitment and pro— like, it gives you like a very basic kind of 6-week crash course in being the entrepreneur. And hey, we used to charge $5,000 for that. Every month we would have a new class coming in, and we're like, nah, do you know what, like, you can get this information for free online, and that's our gift to you. When you're ready to start implementing higher level systems, then you come to our pro classroom, which you can pay monthly, or you can come into one of our one-on-one coaching programs. So you find us, we're on Instagram at Brave Academy Coaching. That's the name of the company is Brave Academy. It's the Conquer Contractor Chaos program. And then there's also conquercontractorchaos.com. That's our website.

Awesome, man. I love it. I talk to a lot of like coaches, woo-woo people, but like I can verifiably say that you know your stuff because I pretty much like took you to task on these things and you broke them down. So, Great job. And you have really good stuff going for you, man. So appreciate you hopping on the pod today and great connecting. And talk soon, brother. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Phil.

Yeah, man.