[00:00:00.000] - Chris
Wow. How many of you have listened to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast? I can't tell you that reaction, how much that means to us. Welcome back to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast. I'm Chris.
[00:00:11.240] - Brandon
And I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. This new camera angle makes my arms look smaller than yours.
[00:00:20.970] - Chris
I'm noticing that, and I really appreciate it. I thought you did that on purpose.
[00:00:24.040] - Brandon
No, I don't. I didn't, and I am not happy with it.
[00:00:28.460] - Chris
Be here now.
[00:00:29.520] - Brandon
I am here now. Present for-Who said it?
[00:00:32.360] - Chris
I got this right on the tip of my tongue. The one who said present is better than perfect. She was the shame researcher. Why can't I think of her name?
[00:00:40.320] - Brandon
Oh, Brené Brown.
[00:00:41.100] - Chris
Brené Brown.
[00:00:41.780] - Brandon
I don't think that's a Brené Brown.
[00:00:43.240] - Chris
channel Brené Brown. Okay. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast. I'm Chris.
[00:00:49.000] - Brandon
And I'm Brené.
[00:00:51.040] - Chris
I guess we already did that thing. That's our newscaster.
[00:00:54.160] - Brandon
Yeah, our newcaster.
[00:00:55.320] - Chris
This show is brought to you by Slate Ultra Protein. Was not paid, but it's fueled by it.
[00:01:03.000] - Brandon
Big difference.
[00:01:03.840] - Chris
Big difference. Slate, if you heard this, you know what to do. We talked about your end plan, and we're coming into Q4.
[00:01:12.160] - Brandon
Yeah, it's screaming.
[00:01:13.760] - Chris
We had a meeting with our consultants this morning, and we were going through a framework and preparing for client planning and so forth. I just got off a call with prospects, not yet a client. Well, actually, they are a client, but from our Commercial Sales Master course, and we're looking to maybe engage in sometime in the new year. They were just talking to me about what this year has been like. They hired a new sales manager. They had a different outside consultant they engaged with. They just walked me through how the year has been playing out and how they're looking at next year and so forth. I just thought, God, this is a good topic. I think it's on a lot of people's mind. I think for some people, it's been a really good recovery year from last year for others.
[00:01:53.580] - Brandon
More face smacking.
[00:01:55.110] - Chris
Not so much. But certainly, regardless of what year people have had, I think the smart ones are thinking about planning and what are we going to do differently this next year to make next year different?
[00:02:06.680] - Brandon
It's so funny because I think we say this a lot. We'll start to get keyed in on a certain initiative or topic, and then this theme, it just seems to keep getting hammered on. I've been on huge Tommy Melo kick. It's going to get maybe more obvious over time why that is.
[00:02:23.200] - Chris
Yeah, you and Wayne both were just loving on him. I wanted just to be the to be like, I personally, I hate Tommy Melo. There's really not much to hate.
[00:02:36.230] - Brandon
No, it's hard to hate a guy that's winning at spades and does it through intentionality. Helping other people win. Helping thousands of other business owners make it. But part of the magic sauce, I think, of Tommy Mello is, one, he's, I mean, probably bar none, the most prolific home service business founder, Currently, right now, out there, actively still building and scaling a company. I don't know who else I would point to. It's also super interesting because he's created a massive following of business owners that are keyed in on this idea of creating a business that's a platform for others to succeed in. It's easy to become a fan of Tommy Melo because he has built an organization and scaled an organization to crazy size. I think their run rate somewhere in the north of 250, 250 million a year, in route to 300 and something. But my point is that he's done it all from this very focused position of, I build a platform and others succeed. The byproduct of that is great customer service, great experience, a brand that's trusted and recognized. Anyways, my point, catching it to what we're talking about now is, when you listen to his story, he'll go back from the beginning and he'll talk about at three million bucks.
[00:04:02.320] - Brandon
What was happening? And of course, he's like 99% of the rest of us, absolutely frustrated with the current state of his business. But it was in that moment that he made this shift mentally. And he talks about how he stepped away for a minute and just wrapped his head around what he wanted to build. And he landed on this, I have to build a dream big enough for others to fit inside it. And I think it's pretty epic. But it was this stopping and a pulling away from the business and then creating a new vision and really understanding what it would require from a company for it to be the company that he was proud of, that he was enjoying the experience he was still passionate about. It's interesting because that, granted, he had to do several decades of hard work to actually bring that thing into fruition. But what a major turning point to go from years of running home service businesses, being frustrated, being three, four million dollars a year in revenue, hair on fire, to slowing down long enough to create a new vision for where he needed to go. It literally changed the trajectory of that business forever.
[00:05:11.780] - Brandon
Now it's the business that you look at and go, holy cow, if only, right? I think this annual planning, this strategic visioneering of your business is so undervalued. I think we get so caught up in the busyness of what we're doing that we forget how important the plan is. We undervalue how much time and commitment should be given to that process of planning and mapping out the following year. For whatever reason, we treat it like another box that needs to get checked. I think we totally miss the fact that everything else is a box. But if you slow down strategically and give this thing the time and attention it needs, it could literally change the face of your company, not just for the next year, but forever.
[00:06:00.000] - Chris
Yeah, I totally agree. Well, and I think we've lived that out at Floodlight this last year in particular. I think we've certainly always had an orientation around planning, but we took on a very particular strategic planning this last year at the same time. It made all the difference. You and I are going to give a keynote here, not next week, but the following. Yeah, it's coming quick. It's going to be really fun. We've got a fun idea around how to deliver it. But I think one of the interesting things about our story is we've been in a of scaling ourselves. And part of that, I think most business owners watching this, there's two ways to scale. You can take on debt or you can bootstrap. And when you bootstrap, in a lot of cases, one of the trade offs you're making as you grow is, I'm planning to lose money in the short run so that I can leapfrog where we're at in the medium term or the long run. For us, it was a seven-month play. We knew we were going to lose money probably the first half of the year. If we got really We're lucky, maybe not so long.
[00:07:01.600] - Chris
But according to plan, we knew we weren't going to make a profit till August because we were reinvesting very strategically with hires, with technology, with advertising and so forth, our whole plan. We watched that play out in full color. Sure enough, August hits, boom, we're in the green and moving forward. It was just a really fun validation of what we've always taught people. But the consulting business is a different It's a different game than running a restoration company. It was really fun to validate that inside this business. But dude, do you mind if I lead us down a little road here?
[00:07:39.720] - Brandon
Because- It depends. Well, I feel like there's a couple of ways we could talk about year-end planning.
[00:07:44.360] - Chris
I think maybe this even becomes a two-part episode. I don't know. Sure. Because certainly there's plenty to talk about in that way. But I'm still really hanging on some of the conversations we've had in the last couple of days. Now, of course, as needed, we're going to remove any names. We aren't dealing with any libel and slander lawsuits. But there's just been a lot of things, and this is always how it hits, is that themes tend to come in waves. As I think about long-term plan, or excuse me, like the year-end planning, strategic planning, One of the things as I talk with teams relative to the sales side is many teams, in fact, almost the more they try to professionalize themselves, the more mired and frustrated they get in the CRM management, the tracking, the KPIs, the accountability holding, and everything else. I'm saying this, I'm holding this in a certain amount of tension because I think in order... You talk about Tommy Mello. I think he would probably validate this. In order for the KPIs and the tracking and the measurements to have meaning, you have to have a very, very clear mission. Like he said, that's big enough to engage the whole team.
[00:08:57.260] - Chris
Because if your mission is just for you to make a million dollars profit next year? Yeah. Well, good luck selling that to your team. Yeah. There's not much motivational for the W2s to really latch on to, right? It's like you need this mission that's full of meaning for the entire team. But you don't put KPIs and measurements and accountability in place to fuel the vision, the KPIs enable the vision. I've just been thinking a lot about this, and I think this is something worth wrestling with. Maybe over time, our measurements and our accountability tools can become cumbersome. I think maybe it's true that for some of the bigger companies listening is that at times, I think we need to look at our measurements and say, is this helping us drive more top line, drive more employee retention, drive more bottom line, or is this thing just become another thing to track? You know what I mean? Sure. I think sometimes that's a tough dance to do because data is powerful. The more data we have, generally speaking, the better decisions we can make. But as I was talking to this team just in the last hour, they engaged another consulting company.
[00:10:05.280] - Chris
To simplify the conversation, it's become analysis paralysis. They become so consumed with a particular way of filling out their CRM and reporting during their one-on-ones and their team meetings and everything else, that what they're seeing is the team is spending less time knocking on doors and more time in their home office or whatever preparing for their meetings. Like the internal meetings, not client meetings. Now, of course, I think there's some degree of exaggeration there, making their point, but that's a problem. I think that's probably something that a number of people listening to this can relate to, maybe at different times with their business, where it's like you Try to do a really good thing, and then it almost takes over from the really important work.
[00:10:49.990] - Brandon
Yeah, it reminds me of political positions.
[00:10:52.580] - Chris
Okay, sorry. You're going to get us off track, bro. Come on.
[00:10:54.960] - Brandon
Coming back. We are down that rabbit hole last week. No, No, I think you're spot on, though, dude. Something that triggered me when you say that is there's also, I think, a recognition of the... I'm going to use the word competency. I am not saying that as a value statement of somebody's intelligence. But when we have leaders learning new things, new skills, new concepts, new ideas, new ways to lead. Sure. Then a lot of times in service companies, when we start identifying KPIs in these leading measures and things like that, that is a level of sophistication often that the business hasn't been living in, and then likely their staff, to include their downline leadership, probably has never been exposed to it as well. There's a high chance that they have it. No question, no. What happens in these scenarios as well is our company might get excited about adding these layers of sophistication, and all of it has value in terms of steering the ship more concretely in the future. But we need to be cognizant of the fact that you can't go from zero to 15-year data veteran just because we decided it's important.
[00:11:58.480] - Brandon
What I think I see teams do often as well is they go to an event, maybe even an event that we're a part of, where we talk about the possibility of things, and they immediately go from, I've never tracked information, to now the new mission is to gather every ounce of data that the company can get its hands on. I think the reality of it is the leadership, even if you gave them that, they don't understand what to do with that information anyways. Absolutely, it becomes a distraction. Then it's complicated. It starts to take their time and energy to maneuver the data and gather the data and look at the data, and yet they really don't understand most of what it's saying, and so they can't use it to actually make concrete decisions or change their behavior. I think part of it, like what you're referring to is, one, I think that we need to understand the current competency of our team, and we need to incrementally introduce these measurables and make sure that we prioritize the kinds of measurables that yield the most impactful information. As we get rad at that, almost going back to Alex's more better new, once you get really rad at the baseline data gathering and leverage, well, then we can add layers of sophistication as the team becomes more calm.
[00:13:11.560] - Chris
The thing that I started to think about, relative to that is, what do you select as the... Well, I think thinking, what is our end goal? When I'm thinking about sales, I'm thinking about two primary things on a restoration sales team. You could say three, but let's zoom all the way up like 30,000 feet. I want new logos coming into our business at all times, meaning this is a tech term. Can you do the logo? It's a tech term. New logos is just simply new, fresh business. Brand new company we're servicing, new company name We're opening a new door. I'm concerned about new logo growth because that's like fresh blood into the system. It's no oil into the pipeline. Then I'm thinking about penetration into existing accounts. I'm saying, okay, so awesome. Awesome that we got that one hotel and they sent us our first loss. Super rad. But have we done the due diligence? Do we understand our book of business to know that there's 14 other hotels within that same management company in our service area and/or in that portfolio of ownership, which means, my fuzzy math, that we're only at 6% or 7% penetration in that customer account.
[00:14:25.220] - Chris
Well, that's a massive untapped opportunity because we're not going into that account as sales rep in the same way that we did to go acquire that new logo. We're going in as an existing vendor, which is an easier conversion. 100%. I think those are the two lagging results that we want as a business. If that's true, then I think part of what we're talking about here is saying, Okay, what are the two, three, maybe four key behaviors that need to happen in the field and internally in order for us to achieve growth in those areas consistently across all of our branches, all of our sales reps, etc. That's the mentality that I'm approaching it with. As I was listening to these folks from a relatively large company, these guys do like 30 million bucks a year. They got multiple locations. Like many other companies of that scale, they've got a whole matrix of KPIs that they're asking their people to track all kinds of very nuanced qualifying steps that they're tracking their prospects through. Listen, I'm not saying that that can't be a good solution. I think some of it has to do with the sophistication and/or personality of your team.
[00:15:43.200] - Chris
I think in some cases, it has to do with what they're selling. I think you're probably going to do more of that, generally speaking, when you're working residential referral partner routes. There's a lot of nuance to that and tracking where your routes are effective and where you need to drop people off and monitoring some of that data and stuff like that. It really depends on what business you have. But boy, by the time I got to the end of the conversation with these guys, I could hear them sighing with relief as I walked them through this because I just reacquainted them with, Okay, but isn't this the goal? If this is the goal, aren't these the two or three behaviors that we need to make sure are happening in the field? They're like, Yeah. Then if we just did that, those three things, a whole lot more, do we think we'd probably see better results than we're seeing right now? Yeah, probably. Well, some of these people are inexperienced and some of these people need to be trained. I said, Absolutely. Yes, we need to train our people. We need to teach them qualitatively how to do those three things really, really, really good.
[00:16:46.800] - Chris
But in terms of what we're asking our people to track and measure, and I think that's the task, you're among us, you're the CEO figure. I think for you, this is all really native, but the way I'm thinking about it as chief sales guy is I need to find the simplest measures for my people to focus on as I possibly can. Then as we move up in terms of how we're monitoring it, what are the things that an operations manager is going to need to watch and follow within their little book of business? Then what is the owner, GM, or the COO, the CFO, what kinds of things that they need to track? I think my experience so far being exposed to the C-suite is that the C-suite also generally has three or four critical path metrics, core metrics that they are following. When one of those is out of whack, then they investigate the data and look at all the other KPIs and all the other casks gating information to identify the real problem and the source.
[00:17:48.900] - Brandon
To get to the root cause.
[00:17:49.880] - Chris
But they're not at all times actively engaging 17 different metrics. A CEO is not doing that because they'd be very ineffective. But they're looking at this. They've identified, what are the three or four most important things for me to be seeing on my dashboard and keeping a pulse on every single day? Then when they or somebody else on the team identifies, whoa, this thing is out of whack, What's that about? Then we use our data analysis to deep dive. Then I think potentially I was talking with Wayne about this because Wayne was hammering on one of the operations leaders that he was working with, coaching, about the three things that he needed to be focused on. I thought what he said was really interesting. He said, as leaders, our job is to find out what we should be watching in the different seasons of our business. There's going to be times where we're hyper-focusing on a particular KPI because we found a problem in it. But then once that problem is fixed, we have a new discipline in the business. I don't necessarily need to track that thing anymore. Until we have another red flag pop up.
[00:18:52.920] - Brandon
I think there's a differentiation here that's important. I think there's a difference between identifying a way to track and gather versus spending attention on. Okay. Okay. So like example would be, let's say broadly, what I need to know is that my mitigation department as a whole is operating, I don't know, let's come up with a number that everybody probably can agree with. Let's say 60% gross margin, GP, at the division level. Okay, let's say. Well, underneath that is all sorts of data that together creates our understanding of our GP, labor rates and material consumable rates, and all those things. Those are data points that have value, and they help us do research to solve problems, but they're not things we need to keep in front of us all the time. From a dashboard perspective, am I going to look at the 15 different subcategories that drive the gross profit margin on a job? I'm not going to look at them all the time, but I do want to have a system, a backbone somewhere that's collecting information that allows me then to dive in and do some research. When I've identified that those 3-5 fundamental KPIs are off track, something's wrong.
[00:20:06.020] - Brandon
When I identify there's a gross profit margin with the department, well, then I have these data points that I can go in and dig in. It's like, if you don't budget projects and you don't job cost, well, then understanding the gross profit margin for that department is impossible. You're not going to know what your labor rate is. You're not going to know what you're spending on consumables. You'd have no way to solve that problem even if you wanted to. Sure. I think that's part of what What we're trying to convey here is that often the thing that we use to gather information is gathering lots of information once we determine that it's important enough to have a thing like that. That could be your project management software, it could be the partnership with your financial suite, whatever. You're gathering all this information, but we're not going to keep it up in front of us all the time because then you're overwhelmed and you get analysis analysis or analysis process.
[00:20:56.650] - Chris
Yeah, and I think part of what I'm thinking of, even just let's take it all the way down to the BD rep or the sales rep. In a lot of cases, your most successful sales rep, there's outliers that are very organized, but I think both of us would agree. A lot of your well-producing reps tend to have a bias toward relationship and exploration. They like finding new business. That hunter person that loves to go knock on doors. They love to meet new people, they love to just find where the opportunity is. I want to get a new one. Generally speaking, the Yang to that Yin is that they tend not to be very detail-oriented. They tend to feel slowed down by tracking information. It's a flaw. It's a flaw in the system, but it just is. It just is. It's annoying to all of us. But I think the point there is that if that's the reality that we're dealing with, we're probably going to get the most production out of that person by giving them a very tight mission and focus of go find this and then minimize Minimizing the amount of administrative back-end and overhead that they need to do.
[00:22:04.120] - Chris
Minimize it. Now, it's still like when we talk, we have a 100-point system that we use with our sales reps that basically they report on their week, it's a form that they fill out, they submit it. It's less so about us being exact. It's more so that the owner of the company and the people that pay their payroll deserve to know how they're spending their time. It also creates a file for us to look back at. If we're not seeing the results we want, it's like, we've had this pattern of behavior for the last three weeks. Let's tweak these things. Let's get this back online. It helps us more troubleshoot the simple behaviors that we need them doing out in the field. But the behaviors we're asking them to do and focus on, need to be as simple as possible, I think, to get the maximum results out of those people, because more we start distracting them with, Oh, I got to remember to take that note and do this in that system and put that in the job management deal and email them this at the end of every day. The more we do that, the more we take them out of the present moment, we need them engaged in thinking about opportunity and seeing the businesses they're passing by as they drive.
[00:23:09.840] - Chris
I need them, when they're in a networking event, to be fully engaged with the person in front of them, the person walking down the aisle, the person in that booth, right?
[00:23:17.060] - Brandon
Yeah, I agree. It's a dance. I think what we see happen more often than not is that we over leverage the, Oh, I've got so much admin time that I'm required to and it's taking me out of the field and it's removing my focus. The reality of it is that more times than not, what we're asking to be accomplished is just basic professionalism where you're documenting your effort. You know what I mean?
[00:23:44.480] - Chris
Dude, I love I love this man because this is the real life yin and yang between ops and sales. It is. It totally is. It is. Are you a business that's under 5 million in sales, and you're just now getting ready to try and scale your company up and hit some of those targets you've always wanted to hit, but now you've got to build a sales team, or maybe you just hired your first sales rep, but you don't really know how to manage them. How do you manage, lead, train, develop a sales rep? Floodlight has a solution for you now. So we can actually assign your sales rep a turnkey VP of sales that will help them create a sales blueprint, their own personal sales plan for your market. They'll have weekly one-on-ones with that sales rep to coach, mentor them, hold them accountable to the plan. And they'll also have a monthly owners meeting where they'll meet with you or your general manager and review the progress of that sales rep, their plan to actual results, what performance improvement they're working on with them. Also let them know, Hey, you might they're doing really well.
[00:24:39.820] - Chris
Maybe we should think of hiring a second sales rep. They're going to have that one-to-one advice for you as an owner or senior leader on the team as well. How great would that be to have a bolt-on sales manager for your one sales rep, and it's only 2,500 bucks a month? If you're interested in talking more about that, reach out. Let's grab some time and let's talk shop. Our floodlight clients this last in 2024 generated over 250 million in revenue, supported by, advised by an industry expert who's owned and operated a business just like you. So take action. Don't kick the can down the road. Start with our business health and value assessment, and let's unlock the next This is the chapter of your success story. We have a figure on our team that was a very high-level sales executive at one of the enterprise companies. There are different levels to this stuff. In terms of if we were talking about how we manage a region of salespeople, well, at that scale, there's different things that we need to keep tabs on. There's different systems we have to put in place.
[00:25:37.080] - Brandon
And your role changes what you're keeping tabs on.
[00:25:38.480] - Chris
The role changes of what you're monitoring, what you're influencing, and so forth. But again, for a lot of our audience, I think oftentimes we can prematurely overcomplicate our system to the point where we start to distract our people away from the real stuff we want them doing. Anyway, I didn't necessarily I don't want to take our whole thing there, but I think when you're thinking about sales planning and building out your sales team this next year, and if you're unhappy with how your sales team has performed this past year, it is one thing to look at. It is, are there things that have maybe gotten in the way of them being who they naturally are and doing maybe what they've done in the past? Are there complications or distractions we've introduced to the business over this past year that we can potentially remove to refocus our team on the stuff that they do best and the stuff that's most valuable to us? It's worth a reflection.
[00:26:39.120] - Brandon
Part of what I think I'm hearing you say here, and it's certainly something that's been coming up more as we, ourselves, are getting ready to move into the final year planning and obviously getting a jump on next year's planning, is I think for the health of the business, I think there's two things. One, first, we undervalue the planning, and I think we touched on that a little bit at the beginning here, and we're going to beat that dead horse some more, is we undervalue the stopping, slowing down, and creating a plan of what and how you're going to attack the the coming time period, whether it be Q4 or be next year. But I think the other thing that we do is once we create those plans, we begin to hold... It's like, well, you finally got me to admit I need to plan, and now I've made a plan, and now I'm holding on that thing with a death grip, meaning that any deviation or change or modification means the plan failed. I think part of what you're referring to is, look, most of us are a business in transition or growth or change.
[00:27:43.260] - Brandon
We're learning, we're growing, we're adapting as entrepreneurs and business leaders, and so our companies are growing. Well, we're going to do some planning. We're going to identify some initiatives. We're going to identify some things that we want to focus our attention on. I would just encourage you to monitor how it's going. Ask yourself some really good questions. Did this change in the business give us what we wanted? Is the result a happier, more consistent, and motivated team? Well, if the answer is no, well, then it's okay. That wasn't a waste of time. That was you, again, stepping away, doing some planning, identifying a thing that you thought would work, and you executed on the thing. Most of what we try won't work. If that wasn't business 101, everybody in America would be a successful entrepreneur. It ain't that easy. I think part of what I just want to encourage people, too, is, look, some of these plans are going to suck, and you're going to spend time and energy, and you're going to identify a number or a performance expectation that you need to monitor. You may learn over time, that didn't give you the end result you were looking for.
[00:28:52.920] - Brandon
Don't be afraid to bag it and tell your team openly, Hey, we operate off plans here, and those plans, sometimes require a modification. We thought this was going to be a benefit to you and to us as a team at large. We learned that epically this was a number that didn't really produce a lot of meaningful result for us, and so we're punting that. That's okay, too. You know what I mean? Not in any way in conflict with what you're saying. I think it's just a good reminder as you guys approach your Q4 and get ready for next year. Just remember, it's like planning is great and it's a high priority and you need to get good at it.
[00:29:26.660] - Chris
Yeah, and it's designed to serve you in the business. That's It's like a living thing. It's a living thing. We laid out this plan. It was very specific, it was very concrete, and we had some pivots along the way. That's right. It's like the pro forma did not play out exactly as, but it was close enough that we were able to shoehorn some things in and switch some things around, all to the aim of still living out the plan. It pretty much has played out more or less the way that we intended it to do.
[00:29:59.720] - Brandon
Well, Well, and one of the things that we did to make that a reality is that every month we do a minimal review of how are we doing in alignment with the plan. Then obviously quarterly, we do a real deep discussion on what didn't work and is it something we want to continue to press into and press on with, or is this a time for us to punt that and maybe re-engineer the focus going into the next quarter? We certainly did that several times as well.
[00:30:26.180] - Chris
Okay, so I want to continue to take us in a slightly different year-end planning conversation. Because look, I mean, it's like- Just to be clear, this isn't the framework for how to do it. No, we're not giving you the playbook. No, I mean, look, one, you can hire us, hire somebody on our team, we'll help you with your end plan. All of our consultants are engaged in leading our clients through your end planning. You guys have all know all the books, right? Go read EOS, go whatever, Gazelles, Rockefeller. We know where to get the information. I think what I want to focus in on is a little bit more of how we maybe should think about how we deliver these new plans to our people, how we package them in with mission. I want to talk about the thing that came up yesterday the last couple of days, and we'll just see how it comes out because I think it ties in. I think it's actually really important Because part of yours and I's passion for the last several years is not only helping professionalize the industry and helping companies grow and scale, but helping instill this mindset within the industry that, look, anybody can go start a restoration company, just like any Joe, any Janet can go get some money from their uncle, go get an SBA loan and start a service company.
[00:31:38.140] - Chris
Anybody can do that. But you and I have had this conviction for, gosh, years that it's more about how we make people feel. All of us are getting bombarded with all this AI stuff and what is this going to mean for service companies and stuff like that? I think what it means is we are going to become customer service organizations, and some are going to be better than others. The better ones are going to win more than the others. Along those lines, you and I got into an interesting conversation with an industry friend, let's call it, and they were talking about just some really ugly internal culture stuff. Like, sick and disgusting old-school garbage behavior that we don't need to go into all the details of it. All of you can just put, fill in the blank, toxic stuff that somehow has continued to perpetuate and prevail over the decades, even to today. I got to tell you, bro, I left that conversation not only being just disgusted that there were still business owners and executives that function that way, but you know what else it made me want to do? It made me want to crush them.
[00:32:48.540] - Chris
It made me want to find the competitors in their markets and try to help them crush that competitor.
[00:32:55.800] - Brandon
I think at one time yesterday, you used the term decimate, I think. In the conversation.
[00:33:02.120] - Chris
You and I, we've lived off some of that energy. It's not a name-calling energy. It's a, Hey, I'm seeing something that's gross and disgusting. And somehow, in spite of all of that, you're still financially succeeding. And I'm angry about that. There's other people that deserve the money more than you do. I think in a lot of cases in our market, some of you all, you have some competitors. Again, this is not about bad math and our competitors. It's about recognizing bad behavior where it lies and offering something better. Not only something better in terms of an experience for our people, come into a culture that is safe, that does resource and equip you, and does create a pathway for you to succeed outside of the nasty politics and behavior that exists in some other companies. But also, what are we creating and offering to our clients? It's offering them a better product and helping them know and understand it. Okay, so where I'm going with You and I, we had breakfast yesterday in between meetings, and I was talking about this framework I've been working on with some of the sales teams we're working in.
[00:34:08.640] - Chris
It's just how to think about mission in the context of what we're equipping our sales people to go out in the market to say and do. I think sometimes as owners, we get so focused on the metrics of and even, how much money they're going to make. Helping them understand their incentive pro. If you just make this many sales calls and this and this. I think a lot of times we miss a real opportunity. Do our salespeople care about money? Hell, yes, they do. Of course, they do. For a lot of salespeople, it actually isn't the premier driver. And especially in our industry, there is absolutely a real thing that a lot of us, we want to win the day. We want to save the day for people. We like being the white night that gives somebody something better, takes them from a crappy situation a poor service level to a better one. I think a lot of us in this industry resonate with that and sure, we want to make as much money as possible. And this thing is that thing that really stirs us. The fact that someday maybe we have that new Corvette or we have a second home or we're the CEO and we make $400,000 a year, whatever some of those things are, that's just that's dreaming.
[00:35:24.520] - Chris
But I think the idea of helping people and giving somebody something better is what stir us. It keeps us, it keeps a sales rep engaged to make one more sales call. And so as I was thinking about this really shitty company experience that this person had, I was like, it Loosely, it ties back to the way that we teach people how to sell, which is, help me understand what your current experience is. Yeah. Right? And so I started to just think through, okay, trying to simplify. What are we asking our people What is it? Then how do we as a company do that thing for the clients? It comes down to, okay, I need you as a sales rep to go out and turn over every rock you can find. We're in a fairly unique business in that, sure, a lot of us are focused on particular verticals. We know we have a real competency in. But at the end of the day, damn near every building and home at some point is going to have a damage event. We're in a really cool business that way. It's true. We can cast a pretty wide net.
[00:36:29.560] - Chris
This A simple directive is, I want you to go turn over every rock you can find, and I want you to engage that person or those people in discovery. Find out what their real experience is. If they're having a rad experience with their current provider, let's not shove ourselves down their throat. Let's move on and let's turn over another rock. Until we find that there's pain, there's unmet preferences, there's annoyances, there's irritations existing in their current vendor relationship. Then let's take the people, processes, and systems that we've carefully constructed inside our business and tell them how those things are going to solve for those problems. Now, in the early stages, some of you, you don't yet know exactly what your people, process, and systems are. Call floodlight, right? Come hire one of our Ops partners.
[00:37:19.260] - Brandon
It can be part of the battle.
[00:37:20.500] - Chris
Yeah, we'll help you drill into that and figure that out. But again, it's a simple deal. It's not fancy. It's just like, Hey, this company is not communicating enough. Okay, well, how do we put a system in place our PMs are. Then we do it every time over and over and over again, right? It's like, go turn over every rock, find out what their experience is, bring that back to our team and tell us what the customers want. Then as a leadership team, as an operations team, we say, how can we build a system or a process? Or how can we hire the person that can help us do that thing? Then we freaking execute. We do the thing. We do the thing with pride because we're doing the thing Because this is what the customer told the sales rep they need and want. You just look at those five things. Go turn over the rocks, get in a discovery conversation, then find out what they need and want, bring that back to the team, team builds the thing that customer wants, and then team executes. We try to get better and better and better at better in executing so that our customers love us.
[00:38:25.080] - Chris
Then when we go talk to prospects, the sales rep has their lips loaded when When I hear a certain pain, Oh, my God, listen, I'm sorry that you're having that experience. We're not perfect either, but can I tell you about what our team does for that?
[00:38:37.960] - Brandon
Yeah. Well, and I think big picture, what you're pointing towards is- Then we take as much business is possible from the crappy companies that are unwilling to put their attention on that.
[00:38:50.420] - Chris
Yeah.
[00:38:50.920] - Brandon
I think that that's where the crescinda of that is. Is that how you say that? Crescendo of that is it's the idea of translating into something that shapes the effectiveness of your company. I think as we're just thinking from a broader end of year, whatever, planning, I think this is that space that we don't really struggle to do things like come up with a financial goal next year, come up with some key hires, come up. I think a lot of us are capable of doing some minimums in terms of looking at the next year and understand that we need to have two, three, four things figured out before the next year. When the ear starts. I think part of what you're talking about is this collective growth of the entity based on a clear direction of where we want to be going. I think that that's part of what can get lost. At least the way I'm thinking about what you just said is to deploy a pain solution selling process or consultative solution selling, whatever you want to call it, we can do that. We can decide as a sales team, this is a very good methodology to deploy, and we're going to go deploy that sales methodology.
[00:40:01.820] - Brandon
But if that's not rooted in a plan for the organization, well, then it's very difficult for me and you to agree that a silo between operations and sales doesn't work.
[00:40:14.610] - Chris
Yeah. Can I stop you, though, dude? Maybe. I got to stop you. Because no, what I'm actually pointing at is something that's hardwired into you, which is, how do we get our team fired up around a common mission that every single person from top to bottom feels in their guts?
[00:40:32.180] - Brandon
Yeah, we're saying the same thing. You just said it more like I would have.
[00:40:35.540] - Chris
That's what I was encouraging you to lay into because you are. That's something that's really native to you. I don't know if some of that you were just born with or it came from your for me days or what, but it's like, it is. It's like for me, it's one of the reasons why we've loved working together. Because this is what we see leadership as. Then the numbers and everything else, that's just to support us. We're not hemmerging money on the bottom. It's like we get everybody rallied up to go sell and go deliver awesome service. Then if you're hemorrhaging money on the bottom, it's like, well, shit, what did we... Oh, God, that's painful in its own way.
[00:41:11.360] - Brandon
No, you're spot on. It's where I was going with that is that we have to rally behind these things that unite the entire organization. Again, I think what you really got hammering on yesterday was this idea of, okay, pain solution selling is a great methodology, but there's a missional element to it, which was and is, is that if there's a ton of companies doing what we do and they don't take good care of the clients and they don't create great customer experiences and they continue to make bloated invoicing and they create friction for us that want to do the job right to even get our fucking job and build the way that we want to build. If those companies exist, which there's bad seeds in every basket, then it's our mission to deliver a level of service that's better than that. We want our salespeople to believe in that and that their team can do that. It's their job to go save the world from shitty contractors. We don't ever have to talk bad about anybody. No. Because it's not the point of the conversation. We're not talking about what they do. We're talking about what we do and how we solve problems to create solutions.
[00:42:21.400] - Brandon
No, you're spot on. I think it's funny, man, because I think even yesterday when we were talking about this, one of the things I've ran into who, literally over and over and over again, is very capable entrepreneurs. I can't tell you how many times I've been intimidated by my own clients. Because there's a lot of grit-filled, badass MF out there starting companies and doing the grind. There is no shortage of radically action-oriented entrepreneurs that have found a way to overcome problem after problem, create businesses that are creating revenue, independent, all the things. We're surrounded by them all the time. In many cases, I'm never doing anything that makes an entrepreneur all of a sudden more entrepreneurial. If anything, I'm trying to round off some of the edges of the entrepreneurial nuts and bolts and grit, and I'm saying, Okay, let's bring some sophistication so that you don't have to shoulder every ounce of movement inside your company. My point in all of that is, I am commonly around people that would work my ass into the ground that are faster at decision making. They're actually maybe more strategic. They're brilliant entrepreneurs. They're horrible at communicating what's in their head to a group of people in a way where then group of people goes, I like that idea.
[00:43:49.040] - Brandon
I'm on board to row in the same direction with you. You have these brilliant business owners that because they've never created time or invested in the competency of business planning and visionering, they don't know how to get people excited about what in their brain makes sense. It's actually the stuff they're coming up with is actually rad, but they're frustrated because they're the only person that cares. They're the only person that can work as hard as them, all the things. I think part of what you're talking about is when you're thinking about your annual planning and you're designing this map, this map that will take you to the place that your business needs to go, you probably You need to spend some time in a relationship, training, whatever, so that you become more effective at communicating what this map means for people. You said this to a certain extent about the million dollars and more profit. Well, who gives a shit if you don't explain why that profit makes sense for your staff? Yeah.
[00:44:49.920] - Chris
How does that affect them positively?
[00:44:51.340] - Brandon
Because the story in their head is going to be, oh, cool. I made you more money so you can buy a third house or get a bigger boat, or now You'll get the mid-engine Corvette. You can tell what sports cars we tend to like. All these things, and that's not going to motivate a single person on your team. I think that part of our visionary, part of our annual planning, we've got to slow down and say, am I clear on what it is I'm trying to build and do I understand the value for my people in wanting to participate in that plan? I got to tell you, honestly, if you are Let me see how I can say this. I'm going to call myself out. There is something in me that naturally is a team player. I want to be surrounded with people in terms of doing this thing. I want it to be a wee engagement because I is not very fun for me, personally.
[00:45:46.140] - Chris
Sure.
[00:45:46.880] - Brandon
And though, you would then assume in that that I'm the master of sharing financial assets and resources and all the things. In the reality, I'm not. I often can struggle with clearly identifying where living in abundance actually is the winning play. I'm just being fully transparent. I believe it. I believe, principally, it's sound. I'm going to consistently engineer my path of growth towards leaning in on that more and more and more. It's why I automatically really love a lot of what, for instance, Tommy Mello is about, because principally, I get it, I love it, I'm aligned with it. But when no one's around and I'm stuck to my own spreadsheet, I have to go through these moments moments where I'm remembering short term sacrifice for me could mean long term success for us, which when us is winning, I'm winning too. I'm just being really, very real.
[00:46:41.400] - Chris
Financially, your default behavior is be self-protective.
[00:46:44.120] - Brandon
Yeah, self-protective. What does this mean? How do I control that?
[00:46:46.640] - Chris
We can't give up this. No doubt, childhood family of origin stuff that all of us are impacted by. Absolutely.
[00:46:53.120] - Brandon
I think as business leaders, many of us, I don't think I'm abnormal in that. Part of the motivation for a lot of entrepreneurs is just basically learn how to take care of yourself in that level of independence. I know how to get mine. Sure. I'm not saying any of that's bad. But part of, I think we have an opportunity as leaders right now is in this visionary, in this slowing down and thinking about the business that you want to create, take a fresh approach, and I'm going to be required to do this. We have things, we have irons in the fire, and some of this will become more clear over the next couple of months. But even I have to slow down and think about some of these future moves and go, how would have I approach this in the past? How do I intend to approach this now? I think if this year, if your business, 99. 89% of us, didn't look exactly the way you wanted it to look. Slow down for a minute. Before you start checking boxes and doing your annual planning, because many of you already do this consistently, ask yourself a question before you start.
[00:47:57.980] - Brandon
Am I about to plan to do similar things that I've done before? If so, did I like the result? If you didn't like the result, let's pause for a moment. Take a breath. Come up for air, go for a walk, pull your head out of your own business for a minute, and maybe try a different approach. Here's the approach that I am convicted, and I'm going to say publicly now, and you will hear this more over the next several months. I'm 100% convicted that I want to visioner a company that is built on a big enough dream that other people's dreams fit inside it. That's Tommy Melo language. I'm stealing. I just don't believe that I've physically engineered a company from that principle. I've skirted it, portions of it, versions of it. But for me to stop as a key leader and say, No, that's a different vision. That's a different vision when you start with your people as the focus and your inability to communicate what's in it for them, our inability to know which things we need to focus on. There's a strong chance that part of the reason you're struggling with that is because you may not be very clear on why it is that you're even doing what you're doing.
[00:49:13.560] - Brandon
I'm probably getting a No.
[00:49:15.380] - Chris
Well, I think the other thing, too, that enters a lot of business owners' minds, especially in the early days, he was at 3 million when he had that revelation, right?
[00:49:25.800] - Brandon
Small, right?
[00:49:26.780] - Chris
Small. For those people that are listening to this that are at 30 million, they're like, Yeah, it's small. But the guy or gal that's doing their first 750K in their truck, to them, it's like monster. It's like, Oh, that'll be great when I have three million and I have an office manager full-time and all these things. But I think that the other reason why sometimes it's hard for owners to get their head around that is because they're not yet secure themselves. They're still working to be able to take a full paycheck and all that stuff. I think they're still in Tommy Mello's mindset, because I think in probably a lot of cases, if we adopt that mindset of how do I build this in such a way that I'm creating something for everybody around me, you're probably more likely to get to 3. 5 million faster because your people will feel that. I think there's something material there for no matter what size of business, does that mean you all of a sudden start sharing your profits when you haven't even taken a full salary and stuff? No, that's not That's not necessarily what that means, but it's a part of how you communicate the dream and the vision and what you want to create and what you are envisioning for them.
[00:50:38.720] - Chris
You can start that with your very first part-time helper in terms of how you talk about the business and what it's for, what your vision is for the business. But if you don't ever stop to think about it because you're too worried about paying the bills, you may always be worrying about paying the bills. One other thing I just want to say, and I almost feel like this is like an anniversary reminder because I'm pretty sure that you and I end up talking about this every year around this time is, I think that part of year-end planning for an owner, and really it's probably a total power move to engage your whole leadership team in this, is asking ourselves as leaders, looking back over the year and saying, Are my personal behaviors and interaction with my colleagues and my downline team, reflective of the type of culture, the type of company that we say we want to be? Are my My personal behaviors and my interactions with people, customers, downline staff, frontline staff, colleagues, partners, reflective of the person that I say I want to be and we want to be as a company? Because Because I think you and I saw this, and I certainly felt this internally in hindsight.
[00:51:48.080] - Chris
I wasn't always tuned into it in the past, but I can see very, very clearly at different intervals in my career, both owning businesses and being a senior leader, that I was often in these periods of self-deception. Sometimes it was even when things were going really well. You just get loose, you get a little cavalier about some of your behaviors, things you say, things you don't say, things you do, things you don't do. Then you step back and you look and you're like, Man, I've been taking a lot of owner advantage here in terms of my behavior, in terms of the way that I talk to people when I'm upset. I just think year-end, this is an important thing because you can have a great mission and vision for the company, but if you're not aligned in the way that you're living your life, people aren't going to believe you. Yeah, that's right. They're not going to want to follow you. They're not going to trust you. They're not going to give it all up to follow you and latch on to your vision because they won't trust you. They may say they do. They'll likely never, ever tell you that to their face because you're writing their check.
[00:52:51.460] - Chris
Only you get to really determine where that alignment is. But I just think that's such an incredibly powerful part. It's as powerful and important as the numbers you put in your pro forma.
[00:53:03.280] - Brandon
It reminds me of a story, Tommy Melloing out here. He talked about what happened. He had had this moment at 3 million bucks where he's like, Dude, I'm all about my people. I'm building the vision that's big enough for everybody, really started to shift his attention, his focus, what he allowed, who he allowed to be on the team, all the things, pay. They had been doing this for several years, and it was clear that A1 was beginning stand out amongst its peers and its competitors, although he doesn't really believe in competitors, which is awesome.
[00:53:36.540] - Chris
Because now he's buying all of them because he's just playing at a game they can't.
[00:53:41.080] - Brandon
But he talked about week one of COVID when COVID started shutting down all these businesses, and a lot of us in the construction side ended up becoming mandatory essential workers. So there was this weird hiccup, right, several times. But in the very beginning, there was no PPP plan. Nobody knew what was going to happen. He said he rolled in the next day, basically after everything had been shut down, mandated shutdowns, and there was a line of employees in the shop in front of his office, so down the hallway, lots of employees. He's doing the mental gymnastics with himself in terms of, what the hell are we going to do? They just shut down America, all these things. He's like, now he rolls up to the shop and he's got all his employees lined up and he's just thinking to myself, I mean, these are people that are going to tell me they're going to leave. They're scared. What am I about to face? He said he sits down, he walks through his office and drags the first person in with him and sits him down and he goes, Okay, what's on your mind? Employee after employee were there to volunteer and ask how they could help to keep Team A1 in fucking forward motion.
[00:54:53.540] - Brandon
For those of you not watching video right now, both Chris and I got teary-eyed thinking about this because I I don't think we fully, unless you're one of the companies that's had a scenario like this, I don't think many of us know exactly the level of intentionality, personal sacrifice, aggressive action.
[00:55:15.730] - Chris
Integrity.
[00:55:16.470] - Brandon
Integrity, discipline that it requires to create a company, blue-collar business, where the first thing that your employees do in the moment of terror like that is line up to ask how they can help. Dude, we're talking about people saying, I will defer pay. I will take a pay cut. I will volunteer. I will do this. I will do out. What can we do? What can we do? I think The reason that stands out to me is so fucking brilliant and meaningful, guys. It's going to go back to this entire conversation. We didn't give you any framework today. I don't fucking care about framework. There's a million different places for you to dig up framework. You could just text us, call us, we'll help you with framework. Framework can lead us to check boxes. This is an opportunity to not check a box. This is an opportunity to slow down and say, are there business owners or operations that I admire that are experiencing something that I have yet to experience in my business? Is there a way for you to cash a new vision for yourself and the entity that you want to own and lead?
[00:56:31.200] - Brandon
If there's a way to do that, then there is a way for you then to proceed in building the thing that you've envisioned. There is a path. People do it around us all the time. Dude, can you imagine walking into your company and having your employees lined up asking how they can make sacrifices on your behalf to save the company? Bro, there's a reason he's doing 225 million. It's not because he's just good at sales. There's a story there. That's all I'm saying.
[00:57:01.400] - Chris
I can make some guesses. I can't do it. His book is in the mail. I'm actually, I should get it tomorrow. Yeah, it's epic. I hope this has been helpful to other people. It's been helpful, actually, for me to just... Because look, we're just like you. We're no different than you. We're building a company. We're building a brand. We're serving people. We're trying to help people that have problems and needs and provide them what they need. We're all in this. These are the things that we see as we work with companies and we see it within ourselves. It's As we go into year-end planning, sure, have a framework that you're adopting. It's thorough, it's professional. But think about these higher things. Think about these higher things. Look at the business and say, are there things that I'm asking my people to do that are slowing them down or slowing the business down? Let's look at maybe removing those things or modifying those things. Then looking at the integrity of the business and your leadership, are there things that are out of balance, out of integrity with what I convey about who we are as a company and then what I'm living maybe even privately?
[00:58:01.240] - Chris
I think that's one of the mistakes we make as owners sometimes is we think that the things that we do in our personal life are unseen by our people, and it's just utter nonsense. It's nonsense. It's just nonsense. That may be your thing in this season of planning. But yeah, hopefully that gives you some direction and insight.
[00:58:20.340] - Brandon
Go forth and prosper, as they say.
[00:58:22.980] - Chris
Till next time. All right, guys.
[00:58:26.840] - Brandon
All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart, and Boots.
[00:58:31.380] - Chris
If you're enjoying the show, you love this episode, please hit follow, formerly known as 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.