[00:00:07.370] - Chris
Welcome back to the Head Heart and Boots podcast. I'm Chris
[00:00:10.830] - Brandon
and I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead.
[00:00:17.850] - Chris
I don't know what you think.
[00:00:19.220] - Brandon
It was kind of serious.
[00:00:21.150] - Chris
Should we laugh?
[00:00:25.870] - Chris
This was maybe three or four weeks ago, and I just wrote it down as a note. It's something I've been mulling over my shower time and my drive time. But anyway...
[00:00:33.390] - Brandon
The last time you did that, you talked about the toilet time, I think, was where you. So it's good we've advanced beyond the John into the shower.
[00:00:40.580] - Chris
I don't remember talking about that publicly, but thank you for uh...
[00:00:45.130] - Brandon
I made that up.
[00:00:46.190] - Chris
Thank you for introducing that. So you and I have an office downtown here, and it's a big historic kind of building house thingy. With I don't know, there's four or five of us tenants in it, and it has the WiFi door locks keypads. So we just have a code. We don't have a key. Anyway. One of the things that happens to me is I'm all anxious. I'm in a hurry. I get to the door, I punch the thing, and one of two things happens. One, I either fumble it and I punch in the wrong code, and then I'm sitting there for like, it feels like 25 eternal seconds for it to reset and go back to where I can enter the code. Right? Or I click the code. And that's right. But there's this pause there's like this three second pause that also feels internal where I wait for the little check Mark where the door is actually unlatching. Well, if you preempt it, it stops the unlocked process, and you got to wait the 25 internal seconds to then do it all over again. So when I'm in a hurry and I most need the door to open right, if I get too hurried with it, it makes me wait even longer, like it doubles the process.
[00:01:55.440] - Brandon
Right.
[00:01:56.070] - Chris
And somehow, as I'm walking up the stairs to our suite, this one time, I was just reflecting on the analogy there. It's kind of in that same category of tripping over dollars to pick up dimes, right? It's like how often in our haste in our aggression in our drive do we end up actually slowing ourselves down because we didn't have the patience. And I just thought that might be an interesting analogy and kind of word picture for us to dive into a little bit because I see this in myself. I create message for myself and my speed. In my haste, I end up creating messages sometimes when I just hang back a few more seconds or for more minutes or take a little bit of time before I jump into that conversation with somebody. Whatever the situation is right, I could have avoided that mess, or I could have been maybe more efficient with my execution.
[00:02:53.250] - Brandon
Et cetera, et cetera.
[00:02:54.110] - Chris
Does that make sense? Yeah.
[00:02:54.920] - Brandon
It totally does. It's like the inevitable thing where the more in a hurry you are. It feels like everything else is taking longer. Like, have you ever it's dumb stuff, too. But I just imagine to myself, like, I'm trying to get from one room to another, let's say at the house and I'm in a hurry. So I'm like, I'm going to grab these four things since I'm going that direction anyways, because I'm in a hurry. Well, then you just basically fumble, drop, repeat up, bundle, get frustrated, set something down. Literally.
[00:03:23.920] - Chris
And now the winter for these, you might break something along the way, too, slamming your shoulder into the hallway wall.
[00:03:31.140] - Brandon
It's so ridiculous. But it is true. It's like you feel that pressure of being in a hurry. And then it just seems like mistakes get made. You trip over yourself, whatever you're dropping things that slows you down back in the army days, if you will. We used to do training around kind of this urban warfare. And so the idea was this concept of you're clearing buildings. Right. So you have a target that your unit is approaching. And there's everything from establishing a foothold. And then you're just basically in this very methodical way, you're moving through this territory and securing space, if you will. And one of the things that happens in this chaos is that in your mind, you're thinking, okay, the faster we go, the more likely we'll take the enemies by surprise. Right. And so in your mind, before you actually get this experience and this exposure and you train, you're just thinking, okay, it's brute force. It's rush, rush, rush it's fast, fast, fast. And what we learned right out of the gate was the thing that our cadre would teach us prior to this training beginning. And they would say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
[00:04:39.450] - Brandon
And you would see it before because they would let you really screw it up.
[00:04:43.320] - Chris
Right.
[00:04:43.610] - Brandon
So they would kind of give you the basics, the concept. And then they would allow these young teams to go try this room clearing. You would just see us fumbling all over each other and tripping and doing these things. And then they would just slow everybody down and they hit reset. It's like, look, slow, smooth and smooth is fast. And basically the concept there is it's the whole crawl walk run. And it's this idea that the teams need to slow everything down to a crawl, learn the methodology, establish the strategy, create depth and understanding of how it works and why it works. Then do the process in a slow, methodical fashion, and you get faster as you become more skilled and more smooth in your execution of that process. Right. So the speed actually does not come from brute force and grit. It actually comes from a comprehensive understanding of the process. And so I think about that a lot in terms of our businesses. It's like, how many times, right. How many times do we get stuck in this repeating cycle of we have an issue, we have a service delivery problem, but we're busy.
[00:05:54.910] - Brandon
We have a lot of work coming in the door. The calls aren't slowing down, but we see this inevitable issue. And so what we keep doing is some hurried version of fixing the problem, which feels just like what you're talking about, right? We punched the code in 15 more times, and it's done nothing to actually speed up our process or remove friction or to create a long term strategy for that problem. We just kind of keep doing the hurried version of it because in our mind, we don't think we can slow down long enough to fix it correctly. And so we just suffer the consequence of it. Right? So that is something that kind of always I've had that in the back of my mind, even as a GM, even when I was doing that, because I'd love to say that we were so great that I never dealt with that. But I did like I was in the Gerry. I was stepping over myself. I was doing those things, and there would be this thing in the back of my mind hearing some cadre say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I'd be like, oh, damn it.
[00:06:54.770] - Chris
I like that. I like that. Well, you know, it makes me think, too. And I think probably a lot of people listen to this will relate to this. I certainly can. And I think you can, too. We had a client we worked with a while back where we, as a consulting company, struggled to get movement and progress, because every time we would bring a new behavior or a new process that needs to be implemented, this business owner was moving so fast, they would essentially Chuck that new initiative over their shoulder. They had a team in place. This is not a small I mean, a top line revenue. Great. These guys know how to sell. They do good work. And so business was coming in. But it was chaos. Everybody's hair was on fire. The owner was sort of scurrying around, like dealing with everything as it came up. And the owner had the presence of mine like, we need help brings us in. And they really struggled, though, with the adoption, because they didn't want to slow their pace down at all to do what you talked about, which is okay. Let's look at this. First of all, let's look at why this thing in our business is a problem, really understanding it.
[00:08:00.420] - Chris
What is really going on here? What is this new process that we're implementing slowing down long enough to sort of explain it presented to the team in a calm, sort of intentional manner. No. I mean, this guy was like, I can't stop. We can't stop taking jobs. There's no slowing down. We just kind of Chuck things away. Hey, just listen. You need to know anything. Just call Chris and Brandon, and ultimately, it wasn't successful. And it wasn't successful because we did anything wrong. It wasn't successful because this person was inherently doing something wrong, or there's a character issue or there's a lack of desire. What there was a lack of was a willingness to slow down long enough. Just long enough, not slow down forever. You and I are not slow movers. But we did. I feel like that's one of the things you and I learned, even just a couple of years into working together, like the value of hitting pause just long enough to delegate. Well, I mean, I think there's another whole track there. We tended to again Chuck things over our shoulder and just, hey, I got good people figure it out, right.
[00:09:06.190] - Chris
And I think you and I have realized long ago now that it doesn't work.
[00:09:10.050] - Brandon
And what's screaming in my ears right now is this idea of on the job training. And I think this has come up in different ways, obviously with different topics. But that's a perfect example that all of us really are susceptible to. And it's this idea that, yes, in trade work, in work, service businesses. Is there a substantial amount of training that happens through on the job training? Yes. Right. But OJT, like actual on the job training and throwing somebody in the cab of a truck and expecting them to gleam day to day enough to actually become proficient or competent in something. Those are not the same thing. So, yes, I understand the value and on the job training for service industries, but most of us aren't doing that well. Because of this, we feel that sense of urgency. We're hiring people because we're behind. We have the work. There are things happening. We've probably already been dealing with a crew that's not quite as full as it should be. And so we get a new prospect. We throw them in a truck and we throw them out in the field. And then what we end up doing, and this is where it costs us is that instead of understanding that that person may not be super productive for, let's say, 30 days, what we get is a half a production for a year.
[00:10:28.130] - Brandon
Right. So what we end up having to do is for the first 30 days, nobody knows. It's all going smooth and not smooth. It's all going fast. And we have these little excuses. Well, they're new. They're getting used to the process. We've been really busy. We haven't been able to do X-Y-Z, whatever. And this goes on for another month, and then another month, and then we end up in some place where we've got a prospect who now has been on our team for 60, 9120 days. They're about 70%. And we're now growing more frustrated over the fact that they're not 100% productive yet. And they in turn, because of a lack of clarity and living in chaos. They don't know if they're doing well or not doing well, and they're getting frustrated with the experience.
[00:11:12.470] - Chris
All right, let's take a minute to recognize and thank our MIT Rest O Mastery sponsor, Accelerate Restoration Software. And I'm fully aware, by the way, that when I say those last two words, restoration software that instantly creates heartburn for some of you out there, right. Because we probably all fall into one of two camps. When it comes to software, we've either cobbled together kind of a version of free website tools and spreadsheets just to make our business work, or we're in the camp where we've adopted one of these existing restoration platforms, one that has all the bells and whistles and supposedly does it all. But we can't get our team to consistently adopt it and input information to it.
[00:11:57.310] - Brandon
Yeah. And that's really where Accelerate has honed their focus. They've created a system that's simple, right? It's intuitive, and it focuses on the most mission critical information, I. E. Guys, your team will actually use it.
[00:12:12.280] - Chris
Let's talk about sales. Right. After years of leading sales and marketing teams, the biggest trick is getting them to consistently update notes about their interactions with referral partners and clients. And the essential piece there is. There's got to be a mobile app experience. And in our experience, the solutions that were previously out there were just too cumbersome and tricky to use.
[00:12:35.730] - Brandon
Yeah. Imagine, guys, how your business would change if your entire team was actually consistently using the system. Do yourself a favor. Go check these guys out at xcelrestorationsoftworld. Com MRM. And check out the special offers they're providing to MRM. Listeners.
[00:12:55.550] - Chris
All right, let's talk about actionable Insights owners, GMs. You can't be your business expert on all things estimated. You might have been three years ago when you're writing sheets in the field, but the industry is always changing, and so are the tools. If you're the smartest person in the room when it comes to Xactimate Matterport, how does that scale you're the bottleneck. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but this is where actual insights comes in. They're a technical partner that can equip your team with the latest bleeding edge information and best practices and then update them with webinars and training resources when the game inevitably changes again. For this reason, we recommend actual insights to all of our clients.
[00:13:35.780] - Brandon
Yeah. Three of the kind of big things that stuck out to me when being introduced to AI and their team. First off is this consistently updated training. I mean, at the end of the day, these guys are the experts. They're out front all the time. They're constantly learning new trade secrets and ensuring that your team's got access to those things. A 3700 plus page database of exact amount templates. I don't know what else to say here other than don't reinvent the wheel. It's already available download it, copy it, use it. Bam database of commonly missed items. I think this is huge. So many of us can change the numbers by just moving the needle a couple of points, and those commonly missed items can make all the difference in the world. So go check them out at value. Gitinsights. Org. Fcg.
[00:14:29.210] - Chris
Not only that, but of course, the other dynamic is not only do they have skill gaps, but there's a good chance that there was some bad habits developed. Oh, sure. There was some broken process that they interpreted, right, because nobody was actually walking them through the mitigation process, outline or the best practices or the standards of the company, all that kind of stuff. And Ironically, I think part of the motivation, especially with smaller companies, is they don't want to burn payroll on classroom kind of setting or job shadowing where that person is not productive, especially, I think, to now, too, is probably even more at risk of that because we're having to pay up.
[00:15:03.270] - Brandon
Oh, yeah.
[00:15:03.940] - Chris
I mean, it's like all of us are sort of reeling from. We might used to have started our technicians out at 15, 1415, $16 an hour. Those days are gone. Many of us, depending on the market you're in, are paying up $22 to $25 plus an hour for technicians. And so even more so that Bell is ringing in our ear. I got to get them productive. I got to get them paying for themselves, get them out in the field all the while we end up that money just is like.
[00:15:32.410] - Brandon
Oh, and at least right. Yeah. And then that's the thing I think that we lose grasp on in your example, is the opportunity cost. Now, how many jobs is that technician going to do at about 85%, whether that be proficiency or extent of what we could be billing for or tracking right or interactions and impressions with the customer. Right. Huge. Right. First impressions. How long are we going to fight? Crappy documentation coming in, which short extends our billing cycle, which affects our cash flow.
[00:16:03.290] - Chris
Reduces our overall profit. All of it.
[00:16:05.380] - Brandon
Here's the thing this reminds me of man, and you and I were kind of talking about this a little bit earlier. So going back to this whole concept of urban warfare fighting, one of the things that they would have to really drill into is this idea of trying to get your mind to not take the path of least resistance. Okay. And the reason we would train on that initially because what happens is when you start to do things to form muscle memory, which is the backbone to military training, is that we're susceptible to all the same mind games that any of us are susceptible to and your body. Your system is designed to take the path of least resistance, meaning it doesn't want to climb over the chair or the couch or go through the blocked door, or do this it wants to just run down the open hallway or turn left because there's a pile of crap to the right. Like it wants to go the path of least resistance. And ultimately, what's happening is if this team has done their job well to defend their sector, they're going to use the path of least resistance to funnel you into what they call the kill zone.
[00:17:09.130] - Brandon
So the idea is that I'm going to put crap in the battle space that channels you and your team into a zone that preemptively has been set up for kill. Right. It's where there's a crossing sector of fire. There's all these things that come into play, and it sounds so dramatic. Right. But the idea is not very unlike what we experience in our own businesses. So what could for potentially be harder work to get through this objective and around this corner to get a good sector of fire established, I may inadvertently go this path of least resistance and end up paying the price long term. And I think we do that in our businesses, just like you said, it's like instead of us slowing down long enough to establish the training or the process out of the gate, we defer it in a hurry, and then we end up ultimately paying a price much larger than hundreds of dollars in payroll. That 1st 30 days someone's on the ground with us. Right. We end up getting funneled because we took the path of what felt like the least resistance in the moment into the kill zone, and then we end up suffering way higher consequences for that lack of preparation on our part or our lack of willingness to slow down long enough to establish a process.
[00:18:21.520] - Brandon
Right?
[00:18:22.100] - Chris
Yeah. That is a Rad analogy. And I just find this military talk. My juices were like, slow, and I'm like the kill zone, the diversions.
[00:18:31.130] - Brandon
But it's true that's one of the things I really appreciate about military training is they are very good at taking someone from zero experience and turning them into someone that is operating at a very advanced level, even if they've had no exposure to it. And it's because they understand the value that that training provides long term for those units, not just in safety. They are in the business of getting wins. Right. Like the military is in the business of being successful in their area of operation. And so they want to win. Right. And so they're teaching their players how to win. And I think we have a lot to learn as business owners to remember that cadence, that pace that the military is willing to take because that's come on the back of many years of learning. Anyway, I love that analogy, and it's stuck with me in a lot of different ways and different endeavors that I've had.
[00:19:20.680] - Chris
It's good.
[00:19:21.800] - Brandon
All right, man, is that a quick fire down and dirty?
[00:19:24.740] - Chris
I think it's down and dirty.
[00:19:25.830] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:19:26.070] - Chris
Hopefully. The next time all of you go to your little punch code. Door lock. Right. You'll remember this concept of say it again. What's the phrase?
[00:19:35.650] - Brandon
Oh, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
[00:19:39.240] - Chris
There we go.
[00:19:42.410] - Brandon
Right, gang.
[00:19:43.090] - Chris
Excellent.
[00:19:45.230] - Brandon
All right, everybody. Heath, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart and Boots.
[00:19:49.710] - Chris
And if you're enjoying the show, but you love this episode, please hit follow path only known to subscribe. Write us a review or share this episode with a friend. Share it on LinkedIn. Share it via Text whatever it all helps. Thanks for listening.