BURNOUT Nearly Cost Me My Life | Dylan Jones

If you just start creating like a single thread in chat GPT and talking to it every day, planning your morning, talking about what you want to achieve, it will learn how you think. It will help you become your second brain where you can just dump stuff.

Now, our guest Today, at just 32 years old, a doctor warned him that his intense work habits were life threatening, telling him, look man, you need to stop or you're going to die. For nearly nine years, Dylan worked relentlessly, eventually reaching a point of severe burnout in 2019, which led to the closure of one of his businesses. As the founder of Profit Launchpad, he is laser focused on helping service businesses scale past their first million dollars in revenue and get out of the overworking mindset. Welcome to the show, Dylan Jones.

Thanks, Richard. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

I'm excited about this conversation today for a number of reasons. I mean we're at the time of our recording, I mean this will air into 2025, but we're, we're, you and I are hanging out right around the Christmas break and you know, thinking about the end of a year, a lot of people are pushing hard, pushing hard to close the end of the year. Whether it's a revenue target, some goals that they set at the beginning of the year, and even if they're just working for someone else, they're often put under these pressure cookers because we have all the family events, we have travel plans, there's, there's a thousand things happening in the last month of the year. And what I found is it really puts people under that, that pressure scenario now having, you know, been forged into a diamond through pressure yourself, what are some of the things that you would suggest people need to be aware of? If we take, take us back to your story and what was happening for you over these nine years that kept you hustling so hard?

I mean, beyond just trying to make a living and trying to make a splash in my own career, I think it's just that I have a, you know, natural, like a lot of entrepreneurs have a natural born tendency to just work and especially when it's earlier in your career or this was my second business that we had closed. But the first one was really successful because I worked my, you know, worked really hard for all the time, all the time that was available. And then the second one, I thought the same, I could apply the same thing. And that turned out not to be true. And so I, I, I do, I, I look back at that not super fondly, but at least in a I learned a really strong lesson of it doesn't, you know, you cannot work a bad idea. You cannot work poor product market fit. So, you know, make sure you're, especially this time of year, you're working for the right things. Like for me on Friday, I'm, I'm logged off until the third, and I think a lot of people should do that. So when you, you first ask, like, what, how to mitigate, like, if you have to burn the candle on both ends for the rest of this week, do so, but only if you're taking a break. And I think a lot of people for some reason work through this time of year thinking they're going to make, you know, get ahead of next year. It's like nobody of any consequence, decision makers, anything is working during that time. You know, it's like trying to raise money in August. It's like, no, all the rich people, all the investors, they're, they're on break. You're only talking to junior analysts, like, just, just wait until September. And I think it's the same lesson this time of year is it's a great time of year to slow down, to focus on the, the big things in your life and business. Focus on one big problem, what, what you want to change. But like, it's not the time to be grinding away, especially over the break. And I just don't see the success in it. I've seen many people try and never really make that splash. It seems like wasted effort.

Yeah, well, I'm glad that you identified that. Now, thinking back to going through this experience, I can only imagine being, you know, in the doctor's office when you're being told like, you know, basically having the, we'll call it the coming to Jesus conversation, that you need to start making some changes in your life. And what was the first kind of reaction that you had when you, you, you kind of had that sit down conversation and you felt that like, were you a little, were you, were you upset? Were you offended? Were you like, well, how am I gonna keep going on? What were some of the thoughts that came up for you when you were told that you really needed to take a step back and start slowing down?

Honestly, at that point it was like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. So I, I was told, I, I had. There's a slew of things, but one of the big ones was my mineral. The minerals in my micronutrients in my body were so low that like, my, like magnesium and calcium of my bones was a bit depleted. Not. And which Was like, I didn't know that could happen, but it was just because I've been not taking care of myself for so long. It was weird. I was still very fit and very active. I was skiing and CrossFit and hiking and stuff, but I just was never allowing myself to rest and have my, like, have that time to recover. So I was pretty, pretty much perpetually exhausted and very irritable. I remember that specifically being very struggling, articulating myself, struggling to find patience. I was just always really irritable, and I was just exhausted. Right. And I think a lot of people, that's that last emotion we have. When you're too tired to be happy, you know, joyous. When you're too tired to be disappointed, you just. The only thing you have left is anger. And like you say, you just. You find a lot of entrepreneurs I work with, a lot of entrepreneurs are just kind of angry. It's because they're white.

Wow. And, you know, you must have seen that starting to show up, I would imagine, in your relationships and the people that probably working with you, working for you, and even just like your personal relationships, you know, family members and people surrounding you. Was. Was that part of the reason. I'm kind of curious, obviously, the fatigue that there's a natural feeling that knows maybe I should go get myself looked at or checked out. Was this kind of an annual regular checkup, or did you go in proactively, say, you know what? I need to try and figure out and resolve what's going on, how I'm feeling. And is that sort of how this all came about for you?

Honestly, it's because I. I could have sold that business now. I would have been selling it for basically pennies on the dollar, but it would have been enough to cover, like, the initial investment type of deal. I was so uninterested in even going through the process of the due diligence and. And working with the buyers. And they were. I'm from Vancouver, Canada. They were in Cleveland, so I would have to fly back and forth from cle. I was so uninterested in it. I just turned. Just closed. Literally just closed the doors, Just emailed. Everyone said, we're done. Thanks. All the best. And after that period, after, you know, legally we signed the. The closing documents, and I was just kind of reflecting, man, why didn't I. Like, I was so uninterested and like, you know, at that point, I was like, sleeping a ton. I've never really been a big sleeper. I'm like a seven hours a Night kind of guy at the most and you know, like 10, 11 hours. So I was like, I was just white and uninterested in a lot. And that was like a real like, I didn't want to do my hobbies, I didn't want to go see friends, I didn't want to be social even now, even though at that point I had a lot of time. Right. And so I went to the, my family doctor and talked to him and just said like I just wipe man. He said, oh, let's go talk to. Can't remember who the specialist was. But anyways, I did like a blood panel and, and they're like, you are. Your cortisol is as high as it can get and you know, your micronutrients are very low. And I had things like, you can still see here a little bit, like my beard hair was falling out and I had lost a ton of weight. And it was like pretty obvious. There's obvious external signs, but the, the like, the real catalyst was just that like uninterested, which you know, is, is super common in people with like depression and things like that. And what I found out is I had like, honestly, I can't remember the name, but it was like depression for a reason. It wasn't like a long term chemical depression that some people really suffer with. It was more like just this like acute anxiety and depression from that particular instance. And once I was able to, you know, re. Energize, rest, find, you know, find a new purpose or you just honestly just walk my dog a bunch, I started coming up on the other side.

Wow, very interesting. And so, you know, as you started to come, come back around again, getting rid of the business at that time, you know, what, what was the thing that you felt finally created some spark for you? Where did you start to get, you know, do you recall what was the first kind of fire that began to reignite for you as you started to work your way through that?

Yeah, for me it was definitely recognizing I, I pursued business in the way that I had because that was what was popular in terms of like business marketing, what you'd read in, you know, Forbes and Inc. And. But I don't know what else, maybe business Week or something like that. And you see these guys and like there's, it's, it's always been popular. It's popular again right now. Like Alex Hermosi's like perpetuating it in a terrible way. And you know, I like a lot what he says about sales and marketing, but around where he says lifestyle. To me, he's crazy. And it really showed. We are marketed to as entrepreneurs to do things a certain way. And the result is like, most businesses fail. And I don't think most businesses fail because people don't work hard enough. I think they work too hard in the wrong directions and they don't take the time to learn about how their business works. They don't take time to learn about the market and like, really work into a sustainable business process. Really, most people want to blitz scale because we're all marketed that SaaS is the greatest thing in the world or tech, and that we should all be tech companies. But I was a manufacturing company. Now, like, my company works with local services, local trades. They're not. You're not supposed to blitz scale in two and a half years and raise a bunch of capital to have a two, $3 million plumbing, plumbing company. Right. You're supposed to grow sustainably, build relationships with your vendor partners. And anyone who's been in business for a long time, like, really knows that is like, where do you make the most money? Where do you make the, or not even the most money, but like the most profit, the most value, where do you build the business? Where do you build your long term, like, accessibility, capital relationships? And when you're in that mindset of I have to burn it, I have to do this, I have to do that, and you outside of like Silicon Valley, it's like, you don't need to do it. If you want to go build a tech company in two years and make hundreds of millions of dollars in, in Silicon Valley, like, by all means do that, but look at the failure rates as well. Before we only hear about the winners and you know, to come full circle is like, we only hear about the winners, but there's way more losers than there has to be, especially in local businesses. Like, there's so much room in the ecosystem for really well operated businesses. But so anyways, to answer your question, that that spark for me was really like, how can I help people? How can I build companies of my own based on those principles, which I've been doing. But then as I build those principles into my own businesses, how can I help other people? And that's where Profit Launchpad came from.

Wow. Incredible. Well, we're going to hear more about Profit Launchpad when we come back after these important messages.

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So we're going to talk a little bit about hiring and specifically why you shouldn't just hire anyone with two feet in a heartbeat because there's much more to it than that. Now Dylan, during the break we were talking a little bit about the importance of a hiring process and something that you've really been able to nail down for yourself what you guys do at the Profit Launchpad. But what I'm curious about is if you can share with our listeners what was the kind of impetus of this? What made you recognize that you needed to approach hiring a little bit differently from your own vantage point?

So when we were just starting the idea of Profit Launchpad, it was more of a fractional COO agency model. In order to deliver high value to these like local service companies, do the implementation for them. We, we. I really have stayed away from the consulting like management consulting model model where it's like here's your report, best of luck type of deal. I remember hiring people, those from multiple my businesses and I hated it. He's like oh Great, I spent 40 grand on a report. I can't, I don't have the time or money to implement perfect.

The reports, all past based information. Meanwhile the business is going so fast that a lot of the reports out.

Of date already, yeah, 100%. Everyone knows the model. So the outcome though of this fractional COO business, which was a pivot into what we're doing now with a more platform based growth partnership, is it's really hard to do implementation as a fractional just means part time person. Right? And when I found a lot of fractionals, unless you are at a, you know, $20 million company or above and you're working on a specific project. Fractional just means to me at least that you are a full time worker who's paid part time and you get a lot of arguments with CEOs. So we, I really looked at it like okay, well we, we, we're not. The people are bringing on fractionals and people are bringing on eight agencies and consultants because it's really easy to get pitched by an agency who's got a good pitch and a good offer to fix a problem. But it's really hard to find an agency or consultant that actually can fix that problem on a budget and timeline that fits a sub 5 million local service company, right? So I looked at this and said, well, why is that? And it's because hiring is so crazy expensive, right? So a lot of local service businesses don't understand. It takes nine months really to have someone fully integrated into your company. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunity costs and real cash value and lost, you know, lost upper or a productive time to hire. If you make a mistake in the hire, like if the person's not the first, if the first person you pick is not the winner, it, it's, you know, it's double the cost type of deal. And there's lots of solutions. You know, there's recruiters are actually there's some really great recruiters that do find people. There's finding contractors and. But instead we just looked at this like what if we, what if we started hiring people with a purpose of an outcome? And it actually is a book right behind me on my, on my desk that talks about that a lot. Funny enough, that's not a plant. And so outcome based hiring and what we do and this is ties into our software package and platform as well is we're hiring. Rather than being like you are office manager, you are a bookkeeper, you are, you know, H vac technician. It's like what, what outcomes does the business need to reach its goals? And what that forces owners to do is build intelligent planning. So we don't do like strategic planning and mission and vision and statements. We pick a vision of for the, the owner and it's what do you want to do? Like what do you want to be a $5 million company? Do you want to be $20 million company? Why do you want to be a $5 million company? Like what do you actually want from this business? Because a lot of people go into business, believe it or not, a lot of people go into business without really knowing why. Maybe they just were sick of working for someone or they were doing side jobs and it morphed into a business. So the first step is that vision of what does the owner, what does the day to day runner of the business actually want to do? What are the decisions in, in the objectives and the intelligent KPIs that are set up to achieve that and then what are the functions or the roles of the tasks, like there's a million different words to use that need to be completed at a, you know, above a specific KPI, then you now have a job description and that's outcome, that's what we, we follow now is this outcome based hiring system. So then when we go through the hiring we have the very, we have a very strict like step by step process that takes it. People hate it. Like I hate it. It takes a long time. But the results are we find the right people for the right seat and we find them in like the first time. There's been very few mistakes and so we've used this internally really well and now we're rolling it out, teaching our clients how to do it, helping them find the right people. And you know, there's, it's all wrapped up in doing test projects and going slow. Like that's the thing is if for these smaller businesses these main hires are so important because they're, they're essentially business partners that are paid a salary, right? And unlike what I used in a description before of like a tech company where you're like, I need 40 full stack engineers because we're going into major dev to on, you know, because we want to scale to 100 million users. It's like, this isn't what that's for. This is for that, like those, those first five killer hires where a business owner doesn't really know what they need and so they start saying I need a coo, I need a vp, Sales. Like yeah, but what does that actually mean? And that's where we focus on those outcomes. Like what are the outcomes? And if you don't have the vision and you don't have the objectives picked out on how to get there, then your hires are not going to, they're, they're going to be expensive over a long time as you figure it out together. So this is a way for these business owners to really like skip those, those messy steps. A few of the messy steps. Like there's still going to be messy steps made, but it's to skip a few of them.

So walk us through a couple of the intelligent KPIs that you might identify. You know, whether it's from your own business or even just some of the clients that you serve. You know, you go through that process, you, you go down a line of questioning, you get some clarity. You, you're extracting clarity from the business owner about what, what these outcomes look like. And then now you're framing that into like say an intelligent KPI. So what would an example of that kind of look like for yourself?

Yeah, the, the best one I have that I find every single person I talk to if they're under seven figures. So, and they're like, we want to be a seven figure company. Okay, great. What, What? Pick a number, right? So there someone's always like, oh, I want to do 1.5 million, I want to do 3 million. And I say, okay, why, why do you, why do you want to be 3 million? Why don't you want to be 30 million? And the reason I go through that process and what we do is we shine a light on what that actually means. So you're at 600 grand, you're at 800 grand, whatever. Now to grow to that number, roughly. Now if you have like great referrals and network, this might be a little different, but roughly, you're going to spend 20% of the target revenue in marketing to generate the leads to get there. That's with the assumption that you've got functional marketing channels figured out right now. If you don't have functional channels and you're just on kind of like you're on the revenue roller coaster, you're on, you know, trickle of, trickle of leads from a friend, referral here, network there, breakfast there, like you don't really have a functional consistent lead channel. It could be much higher. So we asked them, saying like, you picked this number of 1.5 million in revenue, but it's going to cost you, what's that, like $300,000 to get there. Do you have 300,000 in cash today? No. Okay, so we can get there doing incremental growth. But here's our, like, first thing we have to fix is marketing. We need a channel that works. We need consistent lead flow out of it, and we need to apply a normalized budget to it and be measuring KPIs every month to ensure that's happening. And then we need to replicate it and we use that bottom level number of how many leads can we generate for the budget that we currently have and what's our closing rate. So then we go into sales efficiency, things like that. But we look at that as the number to base the future revenue projection off of so many I. It's the one that I actually built a course around it. A free course for all my clients that sign up to watch before they start working with us because it's so common is like if, you know, you picked a revenue number that's probably unrealistic because you have no plan on how getting There other than working hard. So this goes right back to what we talked about. You can't just work hard to get a number. And across the board I get big light bulbs. A lot of has and a lot of like happy like oh okay well we can do 800,000 this year or a million this year, but we can also pull 15% net profit out of that. It's like yeah. And if you do 1.5 or 1.8, you're going to be negative 10% net profit because it's going to go all into marketing. And so we get that change in perspective as people really look and go oh I can actually make money doing this if I, if I think about it. And that's, that's when I always use intelligent budgeting, intelligent KPIs as, as a ground level of what can we achieve to what can we get rather than you know, just picking numbers. And again like this is for local service businesses. There's lots of different industries like that can grow that fast with just using especially like if you're in E commerce or again tech and you know how to scale ads specifically you can scale crazy fast way above the numbers I'm talking about. But local service businesses is way harder because there's a lot of, there's a lot of on the ground issues. Right. Like there's just a lot of competition but there's a lot of lack of know existence in the local market will prevent you from scaling like that.

Yeah, you have geographic, whether you call it competition or certainly other providers often and also you're fighting against their other marketing. But then it's, it's a matter of again what I really appreciate how you identified. Sure numbers are easy to think around and to assess and we can do math on them very quickly. But it's never about a number. It's like there's a, there's a video out there. It's not all about the nail. Right. It, it, it's about what the representation of what that number means. And so what is the value proposition? Why is this actually important? I think that's the key thing you're trying to identify for people for these business owners. And the more that you can dial in on that, the, the more you can relate what that proposition is, what that, what that meaning for the individual is and how that connects to a number. Because a number is just a number.

Yeah. And it puts us like I do it specifically because we, we aim at our clients to be growth partners. And the difference between that and like a consultant or A fractional is. My mandate in my contract is to be as transparent to my client as possible and help educate them along the process of like, why it's not being pessimistic, but like we can do anything we want as long as it's tied to reality. And that's what we really, really do focus on, is, yeah, I can get you to $10 million, but you're gonna need like 1.5 million in cash to do it. And that's just the reality. There's gonna be, there's always breakouts, right? There's always a guy who's like, well, I started my business two years ago and we're doing $20 million. And it's like, sure, of course there is. But not 99% of businesses are not in that, that boat. And that's who I'm, that's who I'm trying to work with is creating those like, again, creating the sustainable long term businesses that people can be proud of. Maybe you sell it, maybe you give it to your kids, maybe just creates a cash cow or maybe you work it, I don't know. Those are the decisions in that vision process that we go through. And again, it's not to create like a wishy washy vision statement. It's like literally just what do you want to do? Like, you want to sit on a boat and get a phone call once a week about your marketing budget and how it's killing it. Like we can do that, but a lot of things have to be set up before you can get there, right?

Yeah, I love it. Well, we're going to hear more about some of the ways that you're innovating into 20, 25 and beyond when we come back after this. Commercial break. Are you looking for a great book to read?

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So you need to hire some people, but how do you even get them to come to work? A lot of people are dealing with these challenges now in this modern day and age. A lot of people want to work from home. Sometimes that makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. If you're a plumber, it's kind of hard to work from home unless you're doing plumbing work in your own home. So. So there's some challenges, especially with local service based businesses where they're trying to really attract talent and find people and keep them. You mentioned earlier Dylan, the investment, the cost investment, the lost opportunity on not picking the right people. I'm sure you even experienced that to a degree in your own business challenges. But why is it so critical for a local service based business to be able to dial that in, filter people and get down to the core of who's going to actually help their business thrive? What do you think that, why is that need so high? And also how do you go about that process of filtering people to get down to the core elements?

So for, for the local trades guys especially you scale on people in local trades, which is really hard, right. Because you have to scale on that. Everyone follows the same system. Like a software guy can scale on software so he knows the software is going to follow this the system if it's written correctly. So hiring not for you know, the, the flashiest or hiring for you know, the best talker or you know, the, the longest in the the field, but the, the technician or and again I'm talking about like maybe higher skilled people. But it does go down into the. Even journeymen and especially apprentices is, is hiring for a person who's willing to learn, willing to connect with your processes. They're not in that position of like oh, I've always done it this way because you can only scale one system at a time, right? So if everyone does, you know, installs a, an H vac heat pump differently when you go to that point of maintenance diagnosis what's wrong with this thing which will happen especially if you're in service and they're all different, you know. Well, I have one guy who can't, you know, he has to take two hours extra on every job because he's got to figure out what the guy did before. It's why like home rental companies which I used to own have such a hard time comparatively to a new build because new build falls a plan. Home rental is like as soon as those walls are open, you know, it's all bets are off type of thing. So our hiring process was really built around recognizing the right fit for the, the owner of the company or and so we do things like Colba Index testing, Myers Briggs Disc, et cetera. There's like, there's a ton of them and we do that testing not so much like I don't really believe in them as great indicators of like a person's true self. And I think Myers Briggs is based on like nothing. I Disc and Colby are a lot better. But we, we look at Them as a balance to the owner. So if the, the owner is a really fast thinking, fast talking, always moving, then he or she's going to need someone who can slow things down, who can think about how do we actually get that great idea done? Maybe that's not such a great idea. How do we go through the process to figure that out? And that starts with looking at something like the Colby index and looking at like energy fits. You know, if you're high quick start versus a low follow through. Like you need someone who' on the inverse. And then we go through like a really rigorous process of. And this is different for everyone. It really fits in like how the owner wants. But like how I do it for my company is you have to send in a video, you have to answer five questions in that video. I give you the five questions and it's gotta be three minutes long. Now if any of those parameters are not met so you don't set in video, you don't do the five questions and it's not, it's over three minutes like gone, immediately gone. So this, that would be for like a. We're trying to find say people we really want to follow directions. So to do a, to do a process or something like that, right. And then from there we go into, I mean there's a book called who that we follow. You go into the skills fit, you go into a culture fit and then you go into test project and then a test project and then a probation period. I do, I pay, do paid test projects. I don't believe in not paying for test projects. I think you should pay people for their work. And the test project should be like one based around what they would do in real time. And actually a little hint is it's a great way to get some client work or customer work done. Like you still pay for that. So maybe you're running behind on or something. You get someone to do it, you pay them, but you have like a real time look at what they would deliver. And then the second test project would be something that you want to do in the future. So something you don't know how to do, something you struggle, you're struggling with and let them think it through. And this, this can be, that's more like for a knowledge based company, but it can very well be used for infield workers as well. And we do all the time. So you, you again go back to that first thing I said in the previous segment where you know your outcome, you know what you need in terms of the skills that Are like a gaps analysis. You have skill gaps and you're hiring the people that go through that process. And the, the thing is like a lot of, I get a lot of pushback on people who like, oh, you know, tradesmen won't do a video. It's like everyone's got a video camera in their pocket. How hard is it to put up, you know, if they can't figure out. And like this is why I do it. I should preface it is every single company I work with now uses apps on their phone like service Titan or Jobber. They're like every single trades job is a, is a. Unless you're like commercial doing high rises and you just check in and check it out. But if you're like in a small service company, you are on your phone on apps for that company. So there's a little bit of tech that needs to be able to be handled. And so picking up your, your camera, looking at five questions, answering them in three minutes, even for a tradesman is a very doable thing. And you know, I think a lot of people overthink it. They're like, oh man, what a pain in the butt. I gotta, you know, oh, I'm gonna have to be so perfect. It's like nobody cares about that. We just care that you're honest. You're like have, you're transparent about your answers and that you do it. And it's such a great, it's such a great qualifier because tons of people hate it and they won't do it. I'm like, great. We try to do our best to pay A wages and A players. I can tell you right now, do it every time. The B minuses and the C and the D players like, no, that this is too much effort to get hired. And it's like, all right, great, that's perfect. That's exactly why we do it.

If it's too much effort to record a three minute video and ask five questions, answer five questions. I could only imagine what would happen if the client wanted to. It goes directly to servicing or connecting with a client. Clients have questions, probabilities you're need to answer them on the telephone or in person or in some other way. So it seems like a really good way to even identify some of those basic skill sets on how that person will be able to activate in a client sitting relationship with the people that that business serves.

Yeah, a hundred percent. And one of the, the little hint to any service company who's listening is one of the things that I find the most Impactful in customer communication and improving it. This is for clients and myself. Is voice dropping, a voice note dropping, a quick video of yourself answering their questions? Because it's easy to text or send, you know, an email at the end of the day, but to pull that camera out and say like, hey, you know, Jim, I hear your concerns. This is what I'm thinking. I'm sorry, I can't, you know, can't get on a call right now. I'm on job sites loud. But here's what I'm thinking. Five, you know, for one minute, send that to them. You have some pretty happy customers. So it is very you. You nailed it. It's indicative of how that person will work with clients in the future.

Well, and one, one thing I could see are some of the pushback you might get when you're meeting with clients in the service industry and they're already maybe struggling to find people. They're like, well, geez, if we put in all these barriers and these gateways to entry, Dylan, how are we even going to get anyone coming through the door? Is that the type of, you know, do you ever hear comments like that? Well, if we have all these steps that people got to walk through, are we even going to end up with.

Anybody all the time? I hear that. I would very commonly say you're, they're under pain. Under pain and under training people who are comfortable, have a, you know, living wage, you're better. They feel like they can provide for their family and you're training them to become better in your organization so that they have a future prospects that doesn't come up. It's when people are like, oh, you know, the average rate of a third year apprentice in H vac is, you know, 28 bucks and I want to pay 22. Of course they can't find anyone to work. Right. Nobody wants to work anymore. Yeah, because you pay, you don't pay living wages. That, that has been overwhelming. My experience there is the odd job market. You know, Vancouver's a tough job market. There's there for senior guys because they get paid really well. So it's a, it's a tough market for smaller companies to be able to afford those guys and you have to get a little more creative. But man, overwhelmingly people just don't want to pay their employees enough to get. It's like you want an A player, they want an A wage and then you get a work. But if you pay an A player, you know, B wage, they're not going to be with you for long. And I, I don't care if people think about like oh, they should have pride in their work and their company. No, it's 2024. There's no such thing as life version companies anymore. Like people need to be paid, they need to be appreciated, they need to be trained and they're going to be with you for 10 years probably max. And so build your company around that, that realistic knowledge we have now.

Well, and there's always people looking to transition between these different types of service business. You mentioned the trades. I'm a recovering trades guy myself, so I, I saw that process. Granted it's been, it's been, it's been a few moons since I was in that industry. But you know, I don't imagine a whole lot's changed since I've been out of it. I still have a lot of friends in the industry and, and there is a transitional environment, especially when you have larger commercial or industrial projects, massive amounts of manpower versus a small kind of more mom and pop type businesses. The guys under 5 million. And those people are always going to be able to attract the people that are on these bigger projects because they're looking for a different lifestyle and they're also looking for an opportunity. They want to be in a place where they're not just a name, they're not just a number, they're actually somebody, they're a coworker, they're a person. They can, they can have some influence on the growth of the business and they want to be able to feel that contribution level.

Yeah, a hundred percent commercial. You know we have towers going up in vancouver like every 15 minutes and that putting up fly tables, standing in, you know, knee deep concrete in the ripping wind on a bear. You know, bare exposed building in the winter in Vancouver sucks. Like it just sucks. And I'm sure there's guys who love it. I have not met them. I've met a lot of commercial construction guys looking for jobs in residential because of the lifestyle. They're working indoors, they're working on the ground. You know, there's, maybe it's as good as money, maybe it's different. I'm not really sure to be honest. But that's very common. And it's, that's, that's where the opportunity is. Right. Like that training and to, and kind of further answer that question about, you know, if you're, if you're unable to compete with your smaller business then you need to be able to train. And I think that's something that maybe people have forgotten or maybe People's never were good at is finding guys who are, you know, journeyman third year, fourth year apprentices and training them to be excellent. It's a lot of work but it, it's, that's how you build that long term sustainable business is those excellent training programs and bringing people in at a lower wage, training them up to be really excellent employees rather than hiring the guys who are at 70 bucks an hour. Right.

Well and if you, if you want to grow and you want to scale and you want to build the business bigger but you can't afford to pay at least market or even a little bit over market to attract the people you want, probability is you're under bidding your jobs and maybe your business isn't on a strong foundation.

I was just about to say sounds like you need to raise your prices.

Awesome. Well we're going to talk about raising our prices in a modern world and use AI when we come back after this commercial break.

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So how exactly do we use education AI technology to create a bigger, better future? Especially if you're in a local service based type business. What are the things you can do differently and how can you leverage modern technology to duplicate yourself or more importantly save a whole bunch of time and effort. And Dylan, you're working on some projects for your own business in that area and the people you serve. Walk us through what you see as the vision for 2025 and beyond for service based companies.

Oh man, it's all. AI is a monster topic and there's, I'll kind of, I think we'll just stay pretty general is really get, it's really easy to, to become mired in the details and I think kind of my first piece of advice is if you are a smaller local business, you're like I need to incorporate AI, you need to sit down like what, what do I need to actually get off my plate? And I would think like administrative tasks is the best place to start and not just like replacing your administrator with an AI bot, but instead allowing them to do a lot more of the administration that you do and just moving through things a lot faster. Where I see the first kind of phase one AI implementation is not removing workforce or people, it's allowing people to be a lot more productive and like incorporating some of the tools that just easily exist within Google like Gemini or Microsoft Copilot for things as simple as like I can't remember the document name was and find that and I know that sounds really simplistic but starting to play around with those type of tools is a great entry point and I've been working with AI for about a year, mostly agentic at this point which is like more complex than your basic generative and it is absolutely mind boggling the amount of tools that already exist and you get terrible analysis paralysis on which tool to use for what thing. What I have found to be really really successful is talking to like I'm a, I, I, I'm a more like sales marketing type of guy. I'm more creative in my like I, I want to create something but I'm not a technical, I don't have a coder so I find talking to whether it's in Mastermind or, or a, you know, a peer group talking to a person who's more focused in the technical world but finding out like what's even possible and going down like a really curious path is the best way to get into AI rather than trying to like I must build something, I must become AI. Today is go talk to like even go on you know upwork or fiverr and find a full stack developer and talk to them for an hour, pay them a hundred bucks or whatever it would be for an hour of their time and just kind of throw ideas you have at them and see what they think. That's how I started was I, I, I now have a cto but we started just talking about how to automate this, how to automate that. Like one of my favorite things I'm, I do a lot of client calls and on those client calls we record them all and through video and so two things that come out of that and this is just what we call an AI agents. This is an example. The first thing is it pulls a transcript the and we've trained an AI now an agent to go through the transcript and pick out all the to do items and then it puts all the to do items in a Google spreadsheet that's a project Management board for the client and then it puts those same to do items in an internal board on a software called Monday.com for us. And that goes notifies my behind the scenes staff and they just start working on it. They start whatever the to DOS are. They just start going off. So nobody has to have a meeting about the notes that I wrote down in my terrible chicken scratch on how to get it done. It's like it just starts going and people and we use these like Monday.com like oh, I don't understand this. How do we do that thing? Like the other side of that is the same transcript now gets pulled and we query the client's transcript if they had any like oh that's cool or aha moments. Right. And if they did then the. Excuse me, the, the AI will actually pull what I said and it puts into another spreadsheet and that becomes content. So that's the outline for a new script for new. You know, we do a lot of marketing on Instagram on reels. And so that becomes the new, the new content script for the reel. It becomes a new you know, short blog for LinkedIn or something like that.

Right.

Maybe newsletter. And you know those type of things haven't really replaced anyone. It's just allowed us to put out a way more content and get working for the clients way more, way faster. And so for service companies like you're looking at great tools for project coordination, for budgeting, for tracking. If you're on time and on budget and using that type of tool to keep very like on top of everything and using it like a second brain. I would say like I actually have a tab on my on Chrome called Second Brain and it is a combination of why it's just chatgpt. I'll just keep it there. I don't know how complex it is but if you just start creating like a single thread in chat GPT and talking to it every day, planning your morning, talking about what you want to achieve, it will learn how you think. It will help you become your second brain where you can just dump stuff and then recall it later. Hey, what did I talk about that other day that kind of was sounded like this or whatever and it will help you recall, it'll help you find resources and do research and you can use it as an assistant in that way. And that's like 10 bucks a month. So that's another fantastic way to just get your intro into AI Because I find once you get start just working on a single project then you start having that like Further ideation. Well, maybe I can do this. And you just ask Strategy pd can you do this? It'll recommend a tote tool rather than being like I need to make my entire business AI based, like my entire business is an AI based. We're launching a software and an AI platform for implementation into local businesses next year. And my business is still not all AI based. Right. It's, it's, it's a process that you have to go through. And I can tell you though, from what I've seen from some of the conferences I've joined and masterminds is like if you're not incorporating AI like starting in 2025, you're not too late if you haven't yet. But if you're not in 2025, you are going to get smoked by your competition. It's going to be. Yeah, it's kind of scary to be honest.

There's so many people who are doing it and I appreciate some of the great use cases and the simplicity that you put it in. Dylan, you know, I see a lot of potential for. As an example, you know, you talk about trades companies or you know, companies who deal with a lot of inventory. So whether it's, you know, your trades guy, you've got your electrician, you got pipe and conduit and couplings and you know, screws and all the different things that you need to conduct that business. So someone needs to track inventory, you need to make sure it's there. There's a manual count process. But okay, now could you see trends? Could you see trends and then also match that as an example with how you're quoting jobs and then when jobs come through and relative to the quoting, what do you have on hand versus what you need to order. So like there's a lot of things that can be done there to help, you know, start build things. I think for people in those, in those smaller businesses where there's probably tools for that that the big, the big companies have in place that maybe the little guys don't have necessarily. There's so many key advantages. One of the ones that really came up for me as you were talking is you know, most people, again in a service based business, they often are very focused on, you know, what's the current job and the next job. They're managing people. There's always someone who's the go to like client service individual. You know, there's frontline people that spend a lot of time with clients or front facing and often they can get burned out on knowing what to do and dealing with client issues. And so if you had an AI agent that can start handling some of those immediate things, addressing frequently asked questions, pointing people to a resource, you know, learning how to nurture some of the oncoming leads from like Google reviews and things of that nature. Those are all little amplifiers that allow that frontline person to spend more time with already paying customers and less time, you know, dealing with phone calls that come in randomly that can, that's, that's not replacing that person. It's actually amplifying their capacity to grow your business.

Yeah, very much. I'm a big believer in that aspect, I think. And be really transparent, right? Like you go on a lot of websites and you're talking to the customer service, you're like, this is not, there's something off, right? It doesn't feel like a human. And then you go on other websites like, hey, I'm a, I'm an AI bot and my job is not to replace, you know, your conversation with a person. It's to make sure you talk to the right person to get the right answer. There's nothing worse than going on a website or going to a, you know, chatting with a service person. And it's like, here's a bunch of documentation that's completely irrelevant, but you pinged a keyword. It's like that, I hate that. And like, as you said, you can have these tools, but on the other side too, where a customer service rep or a project coordinator is completely lost because they're tired, they're burnt out, whatever, and they're, they're completely lost to what do I do next? Well, if you can train them to, to then use that tool, that second brain, say, hey, I'm working on this project. I'm, I'm lost. Like, where were we? What were we? What was I trying to do? It can really help kind of rekindle that, that like creative brain, get things fired up, get you that person working back on, rather than doing what I call like the, the slack chat, where we use slack in our business very deeply. But one thing I have to train people really well when we hire a new person is slack. In other, Instant messaging does not mean your first task when you can't remember or can't find something is to ask someone else is to go through like, okay, where, where is it? Because that interruption, you know, interrupting people's thought patterns is a huge, huge loss of productivity. And, and, and it's just frustrating at the end of the day really. So having that set up so people can Think and talk to something else and like have that wash we even do with our clients now where in one of our courses we're piloting the knowledge base is the AI bot is trained on knowledge base. So people are like, hey, I watched video, you know, six, I don't really understand. Minute three, what Dylan was talking was kind of confusing. You know, I'm not, I'm not, not a numbers kind of guy. Can you explain it and the bot will be able to train explain it to them. The benefit for me is I don't have to explain that thing for the 500th time, but it also allows me to have more time to bring on more clients, which means I can lower my prices. I think that's the way to do business is if you can bring on and service people with a high quality, you can lower prices because you have a bigger scale. Not everyone believes that, but that's how I believe it and that's how, you know, we're really like loving using AIs is it gives, you know, you can have one hour of my time a week, which is what we do now, but you can have unlimited amounts of time, of AI time, which is really cool. There's these great answers in there, like maybe one day it'll replace me. I hope not, but you never know.

Well, onward and upward with the AI revolution. And more importantly, I think some things you identified is ultimately the time savings, the cost savings potential that AI can provide, especially for a service based business. The ability to actually create more value for customers I really think will improve our human relationships because we're going to have AI doing so many things for us. We're going to want to spend a lot more time with other humans finding out how we can serve and help them even more. And you've been with service to us today, Dylan, for being on the show. Thank you so much for that. For those of you tuning in, stay tuned for next week's important episode when we continue to unpack the incredible future that tomorrow brings as we innovate and overcome.