Entrepreneurial Mindset That Builds Million Dollars Companies | Scale Any Home Service Business

This is the Taklamakan Desert in Central Asia. It's the second largest desert in the world. 130,000 square miles. The name Taklamakan literally means place of no return. This picture that you see here is actually a colorized version of a photo of a gentleman named Hadeen. And Hadin was a lifelong archaeologist and explorer. And here's the crazy thing that he decided to do one day. He left a very stable, secure job as a professor in a college and decided that he was going to take a caravan of individuals and go map and explore this desert in search of a lost city. Everyone thought that he was crazy. They thought that he was losing his mind. To give up such stability and security and literally took him to the brink of death. I kind of feel like this, in a lot of ways, is a metaphor for what it means to be an entrepreneur. We decide to one day do something really crazy, which is leave a stable, secure job, probably, and go out and jump off a cliff, build a plane on the way down, do this crazy entrepreneurial thing. And we're kind of weirdos in that sense. A lot of people, maybe you've found this experience to be true. Family members, spouse, friends that you grew up with, where they kind of look at you and think that you're crazy. Until, of course, you make it. Then you know, wow, you're really lucky. Well, Hadeen, while he was exploring, when they were literally on the verge of death almost, it sounds like right out of a movie, they came across an oasis that literally saved their life right at the very moment it got him. Just the strength and energy that him and his team needed to kind of carry on. And I also believe this is a metaphor for these moments that you have in business where you have some point of clarity of exactly what you need to do. And the epiphany moment for me in my business, when I was very, very stuck in this DIY death TR for years, was when I saw a photo of another man who had a company just like mine. Window cleaning, exterior cleaning, and he had a fricking fleet, I could not even believe it. I grew up with a dad that was an owner operator with zero employees for 33 years. That was literally his career. But until I kind of saw what was possible and had a moment of clarity and then started getting really great coaching, like what roofing business partner offers. Then we started to grow, and we grew from zero employees to 70 employees over the course of the next five years. So this is my exterior cleaning company in 2018. And this business here I was working about five hours a week in the business. I had a director of marketing, admin, production and sales that covered everything. And I would meet with my directors once a week. I'll tell you right now, I'm a homeschooled kid, not go to college. I have no idea what I was doing in growing this business. I had to rely on people much smarter than me, including people that I would hire on my team that were much smarter than me. Better at production, better at operations, better at systems creation, better at task list. I'm the 88 entrepreneur that has a very hard time staying focused and I need to surround myself with people smarter than me that come in and tell me what to do. So as we kind of walk through each of these stages, I want to be not only sharing my experience, but I'm be sharing the experience of people way smarter than me. A lot of these concepts, I will say not necessarily original. They're really the repetition of success that you see every successful entrepreneur following. And the way that we've kind of broken this out are these five stages of growth that most companies grow through. Now, you may call these things different things other people may call them. You know, there's always a little bit different of a flavor or a spin. I came up with the acronym Oasis because it fit my little metaphor. And thanks ChatGPT. So, operations, admin, sales and marketing, building infrastructure and then strategy. Let's go ahead and talk about what it looks like. A lot of businesses start out owner on the field. They hire a crew, they get maybe a couple crews, they kind of expand out. Their org chart kind of looks like this. The way that you know you're still stuck in stage one when you're wearing all the hats you're wearing out in the field hat, talking to customers, setting up projects, maybe even being on the roof, going out and selling jobs, managing jobs, ordering products, scheduling deliveries, taking care of billing, taking care of payroll, literally everything. And a lot of business owners get stuck in stage one for decades. So the most important thing, if anyone is stuck in stage one, and maybe you're watching this now or maybe you're watching this later, the most important thing that you can be thinking about is when you bring people as crews, crew leaders, whoever it is, you want to train someone to be a lead. You want to be actually an assistant for one of those leads. So you're the grunt and you're having them direct exactly what to do on the project. And you're coaching and kind of guiding because you have to be Able to do a critical step, which is move from in the field to out of the field. Your business will never grow. In fact, you'll kind of cap yourself. You know, maybe you can do 600k, maybe you can do stretch up to a million, maybe a little bit more, depending on how crazy of a salesperson you are and how well you manage multiple, multiple different plates. But boy, are you going to be in a lot of pain. You're going to be stressed all the freaking time. It's chaotic in the office. You're missing quotes, you having a hard time following up with customers. You know, it's like things are slipping through the cracks left and right. You just can't find the time because there's so much work that needs to be done in order to build a $50 million company. It's a lot of bodies, it's a lot of systems, a lot of processes. And you can be stuck in stage one for a long, long time. Now how do we get out of stage one? We get out of the field, we get out of operations, we maybe bring on some people in the office to kind of help us with the administrat of the business. When you're in stage two, you're probably at this point a project manager, a salesperson, maybe coordinating some stuff. Maybe you're still doing some kind of production management where you're meeting with some leads or maybe you know, your foreman or something, but you're keeping your crews busy. You have someone in the office that's helping out. Other than that, you're still doing a lot. And these types of positions where you have an operations manager, this is how you start kind of growing into that next stage where you're focused more on your sales and marketing. You have the infrastructure needed to maintain your business. You have the, the operations side of the business covered, whether that's a sub model. You have project managers, project coordinators, working with your customers. You have someone in the office that's taking care of payroll and bookkeeping and scheduling and dispatching and then sales. Over on the sales side, you hire your first salesperson. So stage four, this is as we start kind of growing and developing and becoming a little bit more mature of an organization. You have your crews, maybe you have some middle layer managements, operation managers, coordinators, directors, project managers, your admin, you start building out your CSRs potentially. We have our salespeople, canvassers, you have your sales organization, maybe a marketing manager or a marketing coordinator to work with your vendors, that you're working with, your agencies, as well as manage some in house communications with, you know, lists and partnerships and other individuals with local businesses. This is really where you can start kind of like scaling. But if you're missing this infrastructure layer, all these direct reports are coming up to you. And if you as an owner have all these salespeople, all these canvassers directly report them to you, and you don't have someone that comes in and expertly knows how to build, build a sales team and has the systems and structure in place to be able to manage that for you to hire and fire, and you're the one that has to do all of that stuff, that may be a game changing position for you. Or if you have a lot of people with your project managers and operations managers that are all direct reporting up to you, that may be a key position for you. This infrastructure stage. Not only are we working on putting more robust systems in place so that things can run more smoothly without us now, you still have more room to grow. If you've done this in one market, you can do this in a ton of markets. And this is how these companies really scale that you see that are just doing these crazy numbers. They're not running a $100 million roofing company in one location. They're expanding. They have general managers that operate across lots of different markets. And in a lot of ways you may have kind of seen this company that has one location and maybe they get to like 5 million, 10 million. But in that process they become hardened. They have their systems in place, their processes in place, they have training programs. When they bring salespeople in, they do group interviews, they run through the process and then they get to a place where all of a sudden they can throw them into the hopper and they come out fully trained salespeople. And same thing with crews, same thing with project managers, coordinators. And that system is so dialed in and tight, they know exactly how much to buy a customer for that. At that point all they have to do is go up and buy up a bunch more businesses or continue to expand out and they duplicate and they're cloning in different markets because if it works in one market, very likely it's going to work in another without a whole lot of modifications.