5 Things Tradespeople Must Track to Stay in Business w/ Doug D'Aubrey

So we cut out the finance bonus and we give them fish and chips on a Friday. They loved it. The boss went and bought them fish and chips on a Friday. What's happening is you're saying, I really appreciate what you do. I'll go out of my way to do something for you just to let you know that I appreciate what you're doing, which is very different to just dropping 50 quid in the wage packet. If you're not doing stuff on a routine basis, then you get a big pile of admin to do. You're like, oh my God, I can't confront that. But if you just did a little bit, an hour a day, then you wouldn't have such a big pile of admin to do that you can't front doing that's now gonna take you 5 hours to do. But as a fundamental basic, you want delivery time, you want sales and marketing time, and you want—

This is the Field Rocket Podcast. I'm your host, Tulloch Priest, and today we're joined by Doug D'Aubury. Doug is a business coach who specializes in helping business owners achieve their personal and business goals. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Tulloch. Nice to be here.

Yeah, it's great to have you here, Doug. It's not the first time you've been here. In the past episodes, we've spoken about personal goals, business goals, pricing, and a lot more. But in today's episode, we're going to be talking about all about managing your time as a sole trader or a small team. In a sentence or two, why should people care about this conversation?

Well, um, if you don't manage your time, if you're not careful about managing your time, you can actually, uh, end up losing a really good opportunity for, um, producing whatever it is you produce that you can then charge for. So you can, you can actually go down rabbit holes and waste a lot of time. Best example I can give on that is for anyone who's on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or any of these things where they've got various reels, you can start looking at reels and an hour later, you're still scrolling to the next one. And that is a waste of time, let's face it. But if you can get tied into stuff whereby you are going down a particular route and you're wasting a lot of time when actually you need to be putting your time where it's productive and where that time is going to generate the necessary income and growth for your business.

Like when you first start out in business, you do anything, anything that looks like a bit of a lead, you jump on it, you go for it. But how do you actually know, you know, okay, when you're working on a job, you know, you're actually making, you're making money, so that, that's nice and straightforward. Um, but how do you actually know that you're actually doing the right things at the right stage? Because that, that I would just kind of frame it slightly, because if you look on the internet, there is a just a whole range of business advice, which is great, but doesn't seem to have that context. It doesn't say when you're at this stage, this is the right thing you need to do.

Right. Okay. Difficult question to answer, to be fair, because everyone's going to be at different stages of their business and depending on where they're going and what they're trying to do, the stages will be different for them. Depending on how well connected you are, how big your network is, what kind of referrals or opportunities those leads you're talking about are going to come at different, different times and different places. But as a general rule, when you very, very first start, the first thing you've got to do is get yourself known. You've got to be out there making yourself known because if people don't know about you, they can't buy your services. So I would say that ultimately you've got to start doing that. Now, from a time management point of view, there are key things we've got to be doing. So we've got to be doing the delivery. We've got to be doing the sales and marketing to generate new customers. And we have to do the administration, which is the raising of invoices, the banking, the making sure that all the necessary admin stuff is done in the background. Those three things are key.

Because you kind of, you have to do those things, but you like when you first start, you actually have to set the systems up. You don't know what you're doing and you were just busy doing stuff, but it takes a while to actually work out what you do, what the right stuff is.

Yes, absolutely. And what I would say is, is to begin with, your marketing is going to be your, the key thing. So when you, when you start a business, you have to have a product or a service you can offer that you can charge for. If you haven't got that, then what are you marketing? What are you promoting? So the first thing is, what is it? So if you're a gas engineer, you've done all the necessary exams, you've done your apprenticeships, you maybe you've been working for someone else, you decided to do your own business, you know what you're doing, you've got the ability to go and deliver. Now, you have to decide what it is you want to offer, what's your business going to be offering, because there's a whole slew of stuff you can offer as a gas engineer. You can be doing the annual checks. You can be putting in new boilers. You could be doing the— is it LPG for catering? And you can be doing oil. So are you going to do all of it or are you going to focus on some of it? You've got to make a decision as to what you're going to offer and what your offering is going to be.

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That has to be at the very beginning of the planning of the business, what you're going to do. Because if you went out there and just did anything and everything that people throw at you, you will run around like a chicken in a coop, just doing whatever's available, scratching whatever you can scratch at to try and make some money. Eventually, what will happen is your real, I don't want to do that anymore, I don't like that, or I'm not making any money on that. And you will naturally come down to that. But if you've thought about it beforehand, that's really useful. If you're doing that and you've not thought about it, then I'd say take a breather and sit down and work out what it is you want to take your business, what direction you want to take your business to begin with.

I would add a little bit to that because like if you're a tradesperson, you're essentially geographically locked. And what I mean by that is you can only travel so far. So you need to look at what your local environment is. It sounds quite straightforward, but if you're Like, for example, if you're a gas fitter and you live in the countryside, you're probably going to offer oil, you know, do oil. But if you're in the city, you have more choices. And we've seen, like, the most successful companies we've seen, they have decided to either focus on servicing or the installs. With the servicing, the nice thing is that, you know, it's a much lower risk. You can do a whole lot. And especially if you get into the letting agents, you can do like a whole lot in a, you know, in a row, same block, et cetera. So yeah, it's just a couple of things I wanted to add on to your thing about what you're going to do.

Yeah, definitely. And then in line with that, you know, the LPG stuff, if you're out in the country, there's probably caravan parks and what have you that would give you a good living by going and doing those on a regular basis too. So you need to, you know, you're going to go that route, make— get your necessary exams done or whatever and be in a position to be able to do that. So yes, absolutely right. Based off of where you are, your location, what is the best service you can be offering out there? So having understood what that is, you can then go out there, but then tell people that's what you do. Because if you just say, I'm a gas engineer, then it's too big a thing. People are like, well, okay, he's a gas engineer. And they may not go, oh, well, if he's a gas engineer, they don't think about him doing the heating because they're actually looking for a heating engineer. Whereas actually, you could be doing that. So be careful in terms of understanding what your offering is and then start promoting that as an offering. So, in time-wise, you would start off doing sort of 70% of your time marketing yourself because you haven't got that time to do the delivery because you haven't got the delivery in. You then start building your delivery up. As your delivery increases, the amount of time you're spending on the job doing the job, you have less time to do marketing. So there's a natural change of the more work I get, the less time I've got to do the marketing. Now, what I would highly recommend is don't stop doing the marketing. Allocate some time to that marketing, because once you've done the work you've been doing, then you've suddenly got no work and you look around and go, oh, I need to do marketing. And now you've got to build some customers again and you'll have a roller coaster in terms of your, your, your business coming in. If you, if you market and then deliver, then go back to marketing and then deliver, you end up in a roller coaster. And your income levels will roller coaster. So you've got to continue your marketing. At the beginning, you're going to do a lot of marketing because there's not enough delivery. If you're not delivering, you should be marketing.

So if in summary that— well, that's a good— that's a really nice little summary. So if you're that first stage starting out, you should be doing marketing or delivery, and then that's where your main focus is.

And you're probably doing your admin on a Saturday afternoon or something just to make sure you're keeping that up to date. So it's not affecting your delivery. Yeah. As you start to grow, as you start to get more customers, you're going to find that your time is being pushed more and more into the delivery. Of course it is, because that's what you're doing. So you have less time to do marketing. But I would say also you don't need to do as much marketing because you're generating customers and you're going to get repeat business and so on. But don't stop the marketing. Your time allocation, you must still do that. And it could be that you need somebody to help you with your marketing. Find ways of doing it successfully, find ways of doing it. If you're, if you enjoy doing the marketing and the social media and the, and that sort of stuff, you can actually do a lot of that and schedule it to go out. So you could spend one day a month, do all your marketing activity for your social media and schedule it, and it will then just drip out. But you do need to then keep on top of it so you can respond and react to what anyone else is saying.

We have seen, um, this is a bit of a tangent, but we have seen companies that have been quite successful in just taking pictures of their work. You know, like electricians, they finish the job, take the pictures, put it on social media, you know, basic kind of, um, you know, titles, etc. Nothing too much to it. So it's only like a tiny amount when you're actually on the job site, but at least when the customers kind of view it, you are proud enough to put your work on the internet.

Oh, most definitely. Yeah, but get it out there. Yeah, find ways of marketing that it can be done easily and quickly. Look, if you're not continually marketing, people forget you're there. And that sounds weird, but it's not. If you take some of the big corporates, they spend billions on marketing. You know, the McDonald's of this world, etc. They're constantly, they're on advertising on the TV, on the radio, billboards, you see them everywhere. Why do they spend billions when we already know that? We know McDonald's. Why do we have to keep being told about McDonald's? Because if we don't keep hearing about it, we stop thinking about it. And you'll probably notice that the likes of Burger King don't do anywhere near as much marketing as McDonald's. Well, they're not as big and they don't get as much. And how often do you think about Burger King when you think about fast food? You automatically think McDonald's because that's the one that markets themselves all the time. You've got to stay in the forefront of people's minds, otherwise they forget you're there. Because guess what? You're not the most important thing in their world. Probably the most important thing in their world is their own survival and what they're doing. So if you're not marketing and you're not keeping telling people you're there, they will soon forget you're there. And then we've had situations where we've contacted company. I've been working with a client who'd got a load of opportunities, leads and so on that they hadn't followed up on. And we started contacting anyone who'd who'd been around for a year, in the last year made contact. And on numerous of the calls, they go, oh, you still in business? Because they hadn't heard anything. So they assumed you'd gone out of business. So you have to keep that marketing going. And when they suddenly say, no, no, no, we're still— oh, well, in that case, yeah, we want— it was a windows and doors company, actually. They didn't want to go ahead with it at the time. And then they have never bothered to follow up on it. But when they did do the follow-up, it was like quite often they were, oh, you're still in business. I don't know why they assumed they weren't, but probably because they hadn't heard from them.

I hadn't seen them around.

Hadn't seen them around, hadn't seen any marketing, hadn't seen them on social media, therefore they probably don't exist.

So what's the next kind of stage after this? Would you call the next stages like when you employ the next person or the first person?

So as you're starting to grow, you're starting to then having to really consider about your time because there will be more admin to do and you'll need to make sure that that marketing is happening. And now we've got to manage the finances and we've got all of these other things to do. My recommendation is, well, the best time management tool ever is at school, secondary school. So you have secondary school as 5,000 students or 3,000 students, a large secondary school, they have to get everybody through the curriculum. They have to get all the stuff taught and then they have to get them through the exams at the end of their 4 or 5 years at school. And the way they do that is they allocate time and they have, they have a planner, school planner for those who are able to remember back to when you were at school, you had a school planner and you'd have Monday morning, we were on English and then we'd have a break, and then we were on PE, and then we'd have a break and we'd have lunch, and then we'd come back and we were on geography, and then we were on history, and the bell would ring and everyone would move to the next class. The teachers could only teach for that time they had. If you look at your business, the key things you need to do, so again, you've got your sales, your marketing, your delivery, and so on, you can actually allocate time. So you can say, right, every Monday morning, I'm going to do my admin. And every afternoon, every afternoon I'm doing delivery, but Monday mornings I'm doing admin, Tuesday mornings I'll do more delivery because I've got lots in, but on a Wednesday morning I'm going to do some, I'm going to do marketing each week. So you can allocate time and you don't have to say what you're going to do, it's just block out time. Now, if you get a sales opportunity comes in and it's your marketing time, well, go and do the sales opportunity, but It's a framework to work with, but then that makes sure that you're actually allocating your time to the various key things that you need to do through the week or fortnight, whatever it is. And if you're managing your finances and you're doing them on a monthly basis, you're raising all your invoices at the end of the month or whenever you're doing them. You've got time for that. If you're going to do it on a daily basis, then at the end of the day, between 5 and 6, you get back home from what you're doing and you raise your invoices and you put your expenses through, whatever it is. Just allocate the time and make it a framework so that it's always the same. You get into the habit of doing all of the bits and pieces you'd need to do. So as the business grows, you have to be more careful with that time management.

So you're actually being intentional about where you spend your time and you have like a default or set kind of times each week, that marketing doesn't get dropped when you get busy.

Yeah, absolutely. Because otherwise, if you drop, you know, you've got to spin plates. If you drop one, then it all goes, you know, it becomes a mess where something else drops and then something else drops because you're focusing on just one thing instead of all four or five things. So you've got to spend the necessary time on that.

I find business quite interesting because it's a bit like a chair. You have to bring up like multiple legs at the same time. For it to actually work. You can't just do delivery, you can't just do marketing, and you need that balance and ratio between them. But that changes as you— as the business grows.

As you grow, it will change. And then when you start employing people, whether they're— you're having a bunch of subcontractors or they're on the payroll, it doesn't matter. You're still having more people working with you because you can't do it all. Then you've got to put time into management. You've got to manage, you've got to have some management time and you've got to put some time together whereby you get everyone in there Monday morning and go, right, this is what the plan is for this week. And you organize what's going to go on and you set them all off. And then at the end of the day, you want to know what's happened. So you've got to have a bit of time allocated to receiving everyone back in. I did this with one of my clients who's a, they're actually a lawn care company. So they're not garden maintenance, they're lawn care. So they go and put the chemicals and stuff on the lawn and make sure there's no weeds and it goes lovely and lush and green and all that stuff. But every day, they had a route that they would have to be allocated a route to go out and make sure they delivered. So there's two guys in a van. They had three vans altogether. And what was happening is that they were struggling to get these guys to be really productive. So all we did is we put a morning meeting in. It was 15 minutes in the morning where they would get handed the stuff they needed to do, make sure they knew what they were doing, they'd got all the kit and they would set off. And then in the evening when they got back, they'd spend half an hour with them making sure that they picked up any messages from clients and this, that, next thing, made sure the vehicles were cleaned down and prepped for the next day. And by allocating that 15 minutes in the morning and that half an hour at night, okay, so that's 45 minutes of the the time every day. But it increased productivity dramatically in this business. So sometimes when you think of allocating the time to manage, oh, that means I'm not out earning money. Well, actually, what's happening then is that 2 or 3 people are out earning money instead of you. So there's more money being earned. But you have to manage the time. And you have to manage the individuals. So as you start to grow with a smaller team or a couple of extra people, you must put that little bit of time into the management, otherwise they're not going to be performing properly.

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So you're going to have less time on your, on your, on delivering. But instead of just it being one person delivering, you're going to have 3, 4, 5, however many you grow. So don't get hung up on, and so many people who love what they do, love to do it. And then, A, nobody can do it as good as me. Well, that's questionable. Nobody does it in the way you do it, but that doesn't mean to say it's not as good as you. If the customer is happy, then the outcome is being produced. The customer's happy, then they're going to pay. Might not be quite the way you do it, but it's good enough to provide that service. So that's one of the things is you've got to allow people to do it. So long as they're getting the outcome, that's what you want. And they may have to do it in a certain way to make sure it's being done properly the way you want to do it. But then you have to also train people to make sure that they know what you want them to do. So management then becomes part of your time management. You have to allocate time to do the management. But the result of that is you're going to get a much bigger inflow of income into the business. And hopefully, if you've done it properly and you charge them properly, you'll end up with a profitable growth as you go.

Okay, so it's just all about just, just being conscious of where you're spending your time. And actually ensuring that you're actually covering all the different areas.

Yeah. And I would say, you know, as we said, as I said earlier, in terms of that old, you know, school planner thing, plan your week, plan your fortnight, if it needs to be a fortnight. Some things you'll only do once a month, just plan it in so that you get into the routine of doing it. Once you're in routines, it actually makes life a lot easier because you don't backlog anything. If you're not doing stuff on a routine basis, then there you get a big pile of admin to do. We're like, oh my God, I can't confront that. But if you just did a little bit, an hour a day, then you wouldn't have such a big pile of admin to do that you can't confront doing that's now going to take you 5 hours to do. So little bits, constant little bits of stuff, manage your time to a point where you're able to do all of these bits and pieces. But as a fundamental basic, you want delivery time, You want sales and marketing time and you want admin time.

Okay. And those ratios will just adjust as your business matures.

Yeah. And really the thing I'm trying to say is that as you grow and as you start putting teams in place, your productivity side, the delivery side is going to ramp up. Don't forget to do the marketing and the selling and the admin while that's ramping up. Easy for me to say, sat at this desk, much more difficult to do on the job.

Yeah, especially if you're trying to juggle customers, etc.

And then you only need a customer that causes a problem or that's upset or that something's happened and you had 4 jobs scheduled and actually you've only done the one today because it was a big problem and you had to deal with it. So now you've got to reschedule the other ones and time management becomes a nightmare because you're trying to juggle everything back in.. But if you have your basics in, even that can be managed going forward.

If you're kind of talking about that, if you're on site and the customer says, while you're here, could you do—

Ah, yes. How many times have we heard that? Oh, yes. Could you just have a look at this for me? Look, I've done it. I've had people come into my house to do— electricians or problem. I've got, I've got a bit of a loose, um, plug over here. Would you have a look at it? Uh, and of course they're going to say yes. They're not— no one's going to go no. Um, but what I would say is, is that if you are in that scenario, you just have to make sure that you are upfront enough to go, yep, it wasn't on the original schedule. Look, if it's just a loose plug and it's going to take you 2 minutes, not such a problem. But if it's something any bigger than that, you've got to say, I'm going to have to charge for that. So make sure that your time is being charged for.

Because there's also a knock-on effect of your, you know, if it's the first job of the day, you've got all the other jobs. And then if the first job is late, you know, the impact is quite—

It becomes a domino effect. Yeah. And the worst of all is when you end up traveling from one job to the next and you end up in a traffic jam or whatever, and it just puts you back 15 minutes, half an hour, and it's like, God, that was time you're never going to get back.

Yeah, it's not time you're getting paid for either. On a bit of a tangent, when you get to the stage where you have employees, so you've grown a little bit, how do you actually have like a, or build a good culture with them if they're out in the vans all day?

What I'd say is actually what I was referring to with regard to the lawn care company. If you're touching base with them and you are making sure that you speak to them on a daily basis, or it could be depending on your business, it could be every couple of days, and they know what you're doing and they know they need to come back in and you're actually turning up where their garage is, where the vans are coming in and you're making sure they've cleaned it, they are not going to take advantage of it. If you are never checking on them, if you're never there for them to be seen, they will take advantage. Because human nature is, I'll do as little as I can for as much as I can get paid. It's not malicious. It's just the way humans are. So if you think, oh, they're just doing that to me, no, that's what goes on in life. So as a manager, and if you're taking people on, you just have to be making sure you're visible, making sure you're in contact with them. They will work really hard for you if you know, if if they know you are interested in them. If you're not interested in them, they're not really interested in you, as long as they can pick up a pay packet. But if you show interest in them and you are spending the time, and it could be just a phone call, 'How did today go? Was that all good, guys? Is there anything you need?' And it could be that, you know, a bit of equipment has broken or they need some more boots or whatever it is you provide for them. If you're speaking to them on a regular basis and staying in touch with them, making sure that you're supporting them in what they're doing, then you will get a much better result in terms of performance from them.

And what I like about that example is that you've actually got this structure and the system in place so the manager doesn't have to remember, oh, it's the end of the day, I need to catch up with people. If you get that, you know, that pattern, that habit in, then, you know, things happen without sort of having to remember.

That's right. And it is about how— it's about patterns and routines that make the time management better, and it makes the performance of your staff better if you're employing, even if they're subcontractors. So some people will be doing as a subcontractor, some people doing as employees, doesn't matter. Count your subcontractors as employees, look after them as if they were employees, and you'll get more from them every time, you know. I often talk about from a management point of view, which is a whole nother podcast which we can do at some point, Tulloch Priest, and that is, is that most people think of management as a triangle. Managers at the top and it comes down to all the staff at the bottom. It actually should be the other way around. The manager should be at the bottom of the triangle. It should be— the triangle should be upside down with the manager at the bottom and the staff at the top. And the manager should be supporting the staff so they can do the job.

So enabling, getting things, getting roadblocks out of the way.

Yeah.

Sure. They've got the tools, the vans working. Yeah. All the basics.

Yeah. So instead of the manager going, they're working for me, it should be, no, I'm working for them because they're generating income for me.

Yeah. So how can I help you?

Exactly. So that whole customer service you do with your clients, you should be doing that with your staff. Yeah. Obviously, you don't let them take the mickey, but you do support the ones who are performing really well. And you make sure if they're performing well, they get looked after, they get supported. And as a result of that, they will generate good relationships with your customers. They will generate good money for you. Because you have charged them correctly. And if you want to know more about that, have a look at one of the other podcasts. But you charge properly for them and then you'll be generating income off the back of them so that they are the ones that are doing the work. You need to look after them so they do the work and you get the benefit from that.

Yeah. And the employees feel seen and heard, appreciated. And then in turn, they would do the same for the customer.

Yeah, absolutely. One of my clients, he, if they'd had a good month, he would, he would give his staff a £50 bonus if they'd done a good month. And he said, I don't get it. They moan about it, that it's not enough and so on and so on. So I said to him, I said, right, if they are doing, if we have a good week this week, I want you on Friday to buy everyone fish and chips for lunch. And he went, well, what I want to do that for? I'm going, we need to start looking after them. So we cut out the finance bonus and we give them fish and chips on a Friday. They loved it. The boss went and bought them fish and chips on a Friday. They felt really valued. And the fact he went to the fish and chip shop and brought it back and give it to them, they thought that was fabulous. Well, guess what? That cost him £7 each instead of £50 at the end of the month. And they appreciated it far more than the 50 quid.

That's quite interesting. So what's the difference between the two then? As in, I'm not talking about the actual money side, but it's that, is it the appreciation that is the difference?

Yeah. Dead easy for me to just put 50 quid in your salary and I, whether I like you or not, whether I appreciate what you do or not, it's 50 quid and you look at 50 quid and it's like, where am I going to spend it on? It's sort of, goes in your pocket, it's watered away. But for me to go through the time and effort to actually go to the chip shop, get the orders, go to the chip shop, buy the chips, bring them back and go, there you go, lads. Yeah. What's happening is you're saying, I really appreciate what you do. I'll go out of my way to do something for you just to let you know that I appreciate what you're doing, which is very different to just dropping £50 in the wage packet.

Yeah, that's a really nice idea.

And at the end of the day, it's cheaper anyway.

It is cheaper, but you also get the benefit of, you know, the team together, you get the bonding. So yeah, very nice idea.

It's actually about making sure that your staff know that you really appreciate what they're doing, as opposed to thinking that, oh, I'm obliged to give them a bonus because we'd had a good week.

Yeah, no, that's a very good idea. Thank you very much for that. Doug, we really appreciate you coming on the show. As always, it's good to see you. And yeah, some very good insights. Thank you for coming.

You're more than welcome. Very happy to share and hopefully help some people out there that take a few golden nuggets from what we're talking about.

And if anyone's interested in hearing more from Doug, he has his own podcast and details about how you can contact him in the caption below and feel free to get in touch with him. So thank you very much, Doug. Really appreciate your time.

Thanks very much, Doug.