How to get off the tools?
or how could you trust them to do good work when you're not there to keep an eye on them?
This video I made for Stephen Hornby, he's in Builders Talk Group and he posted
this very question, I've got it word-for-word in the Builders Talk Group.
So how many people have run their own company and have lads working for them
but you trust them to do the jobs for you so you can step back a little and have a bit more time to yourself?
I don't mean completely come off jobs, I spend all my time on jobs
and I work after work doing quotes and materials and whatever else
so I was thinking once or twice a week to leave them to it and recuperate
good or bad idea.
Fair question I think. There was the usual mixed bag of responses from everybody
ranging right from "you're an idiot, of course you can do this"
through they always take the piss to some good advice about supervising
but not being there all the time
and about getting good people and hiring supervisors or at least one.
And there are a few people who've been burnt trying to do such things and grow a business like that
and said you shouldn't do it.
Now I'm a business coach and I help people do exactly this and I help people break through that barrier
of how to get off the tools and build a business.
And the real answer is you're not an idiot for posting this question.
It's a real frustration that everyone has to deal with.
Every trade business owner who wants to grow comes up against this issue.
And the grumpy critical dark guy who said you're an idiot for even asking because of course he can,
he also has a point.
It is possible, it's not doomed to failure. People successfully grow businesses all the time.
Look at Layton's and Hutchison's and Pimlico Plumbing
and people like that. Whatever you think about my examples,
people are building larger scale trade-related businesses all the time successfully.
Employees aren't all sh*t
and if you're one of these people who
has or has had sh*t employees either you did something wrong or you were unlucky.
Simplistic fixes like paying people on price work are not the answer.
Better people
hiring better.
Hiring supervisors and splitting your time between supervising the other business growth work
kind of heading in the right direction but they're not enough on their own.
The truth is there's no single answer. Good employees are great and a great start
but if all you have is some good trades people that's all your business will ever be, kind of a collection
of people in the same shirts. They'll do things their way, to their standards they'll be governed by their moods,
they'll make their mistakes and they'll have they're off those. You won't be a consistent business.
Good employers and good supervisors are great but if you would just rely on having some good people,
they leave.
And if they've gone, you've got nothing. You haven't built a business, you've built a temporary
where you've locked into even a temporary alliance that's working at the moment.
So surprise, I think you need systems and structure.
Boom! It's a watchword for me - systems and structure isn't it? So you need systems and structure as well.
You need systems for how you hire good people. You need systems for how you do this job.
You need systems for how you supervise this job.
So I'll focus on the work, the trades work and document it this way. This is the way we do this job.
That's what a system is.
So you guys do a job consistently, a procedure, a written procedure
so your guys or your girls do this job consistently all sort of the same way.
This way you're more than just some nice people or some good trades people,
you're all following the same procedures or processes.
Once you've got a system, you need to train everybody in it, you need training so everyone understands
what the system is and what they've got to do.
You need accountability tools. I really mean checklists
but not necessarily on a clipboard like this.
It's checklist so they can't forget to do all the things in the procedure
and you need someone to check
that they followed the procedure, to check the checklist, to check some other jobs and you need to check a lot
until the new procedure is bedded in and everyone's used to it and then you can step back a bit
and you can check and supervise much less.
When the new way start to become our way, your way,
the business way, the way we do things around here if you like,
when the systems are bedded in, that's when you can step back some.
That's when you can start to scale your business and focus more of your time perhaps on hiring more people
and more supervisors and winning more jobs and doing your marketing better.
That is how you scale and grow a business. And a scalable business
is a systematised business. It's made systematic.
I can help, that's my job.That's what I do. I'll help you and I'll hold you accountable.
I'll help you make the systems and I'll hold you accountable for making the systems
for the work of your business but also for admin and for marketing and how you do sales
and for how you hire good people and for how you manage them as well.
All that stuff is important, so to answer your questions, it's all that stuff that I just said.
Now of course that's what I help. I coach people for a whole year. It's not a quick process.
You don't just come like that with a quick answer and Facebook isn't the answer on its own either.
Business coaching takes a long time, lasts for a while and you're going to implement long term
changes into how you run your business if you want to grow it to that next level.
If you want me to help,
you need to book a 10-minute chat and we'll talk about whether coaching is right for you
or you need to come to the next Tools Down Workshop
where I'll explain that system, that system and that structure
of how you grow your trades business over a two-day period.
See you later.
you