(upbeat music)
-: Hello and welcome back to The Sharpest Tool
where we take the sting out of marketing
with everything that we're bringing to the table.
Fire it up, round two here with Al Levi
who is back in the booth with us.
Welcome back to the show, Al.
Thanks for coming back.
-: Well, what I always like to say is
you can fool 'em once, but if they invite you back twice,
well, that's something special.
(laughs)
-: Just a quick recap for who Al is
and a few takeaways from the prior episode,
Al's a business consultant, a teacher, an author,
and a former contractor who worked for 25 years
in every aspect of growth of his now fourth generation
Long Island, New York based plumbing,
heating, and cooling and electrical business,
and Al now runs consulting,
especially with the 7-Power Contractor,
seven powerful principles for any entrepreneur
to implement into their business
to find success and have a whole lot less stress.
So just a few takeaways from what we talked about
in our prior episode, we were talking a lot
about Al coming up in the business,
those different points where he found
that he was really struggling with all the things
vying for his time and how he found solace
and success in really implementing
some powerful standards and policies
and structures into his business,
as well as some of the experiences
that he's learned and taken away from that
and now he's giving back to businesses
across the country to help them improve their life
and improve their business.
So if you haven't checked out episode one,
definitely take a look at that, that aired last week,
but we're gonna dive into the seven powers today
in a lot more depth.
So buckle up for safety, because we're about
to get some real meat into this episode.
So why don't you give us a quick overview, Al,
for those who may not have heard from the prior episode
of what the 7-Power Contractor is
and how it came to be?
-: Yeah, how it came to be is that like all contractors
and just any businessperson, I woke up every day
thinking there were seven million things
I had to do to get this right, 'cause it was just crazy.
Crazy is the only way I can describe it.
And the reason that, like you mentioned,
less stress, more success is my tagline
is because I was really struggling for both.
Now, the good news is I was making a lot of money
as I had mentioned, which is really good,
but you can't really spend it as well if you're dead.
That's what I was told.
So I did not want to go down that path
and I realized I had to pull up and get things straight.
And so really from the multiple businesses
that my family were in I had learned
that businesses were more alike
and what I really needed to do
is if you think of a pyramid,
if you want to have a big, strong, everlasting pyramid,
the better the blocks at the bottom,
the longer it will last, the bigger it will be,
the stronger it will be.
Well, what are those blocks?
And I really settled on the seven powers,
and the seven powers are really those blocks.
-: So what are those seven powers?
Why don't you outline 'em a little bit for us.
-: Yeah, so planning power is where it all begins.
If you don't have a plan, then your plan for,
just everything that hits you everyday is just,
a friend of mine that was a contractor said
sometimes I feel like I'm in an ocean
and the waves just keep smacking me around.
(laughs)
And so if you don't have a plan,
that's really kinda, now, people will go,
yeah, I got a plan.
Well, how specific is your plan?
Could you show it to somebody who's not
in your business and they would understand?
So that's really what I mean by a plan,
but really the main objective for planning
is create a master project list
which is the top of the funnel,
that's all the great projects, habits,
ideas that you would have that are gonna be like, okay,
this is gonna move me in the direction I want to be.
And so that's when they go to wait.
So think of it as airplanes on a tarmac
waiting to take off.
They have to wait their turn.
Because there's no shortage of information,
and the reality is the next person you talk to,
the next seminar you go to, the next workshop,
the next affinity trade group that you're in,
there's gonna be no shortage of great ideas.
And you're gonna be struck, how do I get this in?
We all get overloaded.
So think of you can park it on the master project list,
that's a big, big deal.
Now, how do they move from the master,
so come down that funnel for a minute,
the goal is to get to the top 30.
So if Josh and I were working together,
come next year, what projects or habits
did we get in place to really change this company?
And the way they do that is they come down
through the filter.
They either fix the biggest problem or challenge
or greatest chance to grow and be profitable,
and that gets them to the 30,
they've earned their way there.
But we can't work on 30 things,
although everybody would like to
because we're in a big rush and I get it,
I get it, I get it.
And all you will do is get stuff in place
that will fall apart as soon as it reaches,
or what I call, take a rubber ball,
throw it against the wall,
it's coming back as hard as you threw it.
So then you need to use those same filters again,
biggest problem or challenge solved,
or greatest chance to grow and be profitable,
it gets to your top five and then every week
you have to work on it.
So that is what planning power is.
-: What's your view, I'm just curious,
what's your view on multitasking?
(laughs)
-: I love it.
I love, I love it.
Because I always felt this way,
but, of course, thinking, oh, you feel this way
but then you need third party proof,
and so, of course, I've been watching blogs
and everything, and it's a myth.
It's a myth.
And what it really is is when you're young,
you feel like you're multitasking
because your brain acts so quick,
and you can flip from things,
but it's really a series of on and off switches.
So you're doing something, you flip the switch off
to go do the other thing.
What they have found is if you work in concentrated time,
you still do better.
I do have a time management class,
which is not meant to be a plug,
but that is one thing we are short of is time.
-: Sure.
-: And so time, really three things in the universe
is time, energy, and money,
and that applies to us as contractors.
And money seems like a tight thing and I understand it,
but you can borrow money, you can be nice
to your mother-in-law, you can do a lot of things
to get money.
But as far as time, time can be created.
Your energy is really important.
So I have a quick story about this is
we moved from an awful, awful place,
which was office, it was in a bad area,
they had stripped through the cars
and we actually had to chauffeur people in
because we were in such a bad place, the location.
The thing that did the trick was they drove a truck
through the side of our building and I said,
you know, brothers, it's time to go.
(laughs)
And so we found a model shop and we did all of these things,
but it's really, I get to the model shop,
want to show everything that he can clean,
and somebody does not shut the light or the fan off
in the bathroom.
And I go chasing through the building
to find out who this criminal is.
And as I'm chasing around I finally stop
and I don't know why, again, it's an intervention,
and it just said, is this really the right thing?
'Cause I looked at my wallet and I said,
you know what, I woke up today
with only so many emotional dollars,
where am I gonna spend it?
And this is what I was doing.
And as soon as I let go of it,
this is what immediately came in my head
is I could put a sensor in there that turns on
when I walk in and it will turn things off
when they walk out.
And so once you let go of this emotional awful use
of energy, it's amazing what solutions open up.
-: Sure, you mention a lot in the planning power aspect
it's working on the right things at the right time
in the right way.
-: Yes, yes.
-: Can you describe a little bit about that,
why you came up with that?
-: Yeah, I'd love to say that's what I went into it,
but it's what I realized afterwards.
Because everything says, hey, work on me, work on me.
So imagine there's an audience, a auditorium,
and out there are all these projects
and habits and things that want your attention.
How do you focus on them?
You can't.
So the goal is to work on the right thing
so it's worked its way down that funnel.
Master project, the top five,
to get to that status and go, okay,
no matter how crazy I am this week,
I'm gonna work on this.
That's how it's earned its right.
Now, if there's a fire in your building,
God forbid, go put the fire out.
But otherwise, yeah, you promised
that if you put the manuals in, if you put some systems
in place, if you got QuickBooks straightened out
or if you do whatever these things are
that are gonna make a world of difference.
If you change your sales model,
or you add a new product or service,
or you do some more in the way of training,
all of those things are gonna get better.
But you have to do it in an organized fashion
because your staff will not tell you the truth.
(laughs)
They hate when you go to a seminar,
webinar, or one of these trade groups,
'cause when you come home there's more junk
that you dragged with you.
Hey, hey everybody, I know the last time I went
I promised that this would make it better
but it really didn't, but this time's
gonna be totally different honey.
And it's not.
'Cause every idea that hit you
just becomes like a knee-jerk reaction.
To me it's akin to driving your car without GPS.
And so what is leadership, what is planning?
Setting a destination, trusting your GPS
to get you where you need to go.
-: Yeah, so step number two, operating power.
Tell us a little bit about that.
-: So operating power is your truck is not clean.
Well, I think it's clean.
That stuff's not on the right shelf.
I think it is.
And so we just get on an opinion-based crazy conversation.
Whereas, well, when we finally decided
that we would create the model truck,
every truck is pretty much set up the same way
so that whether I put a young apprentice
they can go find the material, which helps a lot.
Every tech is set up the same way.
You can jump off your truck with your hand tools
and go into the next truck.
So it's systematizing.
That goes to how you answer the phone,
that's how you dispatch, how the tech runs the call,
how they get all the information back.
Your accounts payable person, how they pay the vendors,
how they pay the taxes, how they pay the payroll,
all of those things, accounts receivable,
somebody's got to count the money
and gotta know how old the money is.
So all of these things take manuals.
And as you grow your company
and you decide that you've earned the right
to create a field supervisor,
they were not born field supervisors,
they were techs that now said, hey,
by the way, you're a good tech, go be a good manager.
Well how do I do that?
And so there needs to be training
to be able to go up to these things
and so they need a field supervisor manual.
I go to a lot of shops,
and especially the big ones you were talking about,
and they go, I gotta get my managers motivated
and they have to have manuals,
and so what do you think?
And I go, I think we should get the bottom manuals handled,
because a manager's job is really this,
your job as a manager is to know what's in their manuals
that everyone who reports to you,
and get them as good as they can be
in the box they occupy today.
And then I have a few more tasks for you,
or a few KPIs, known performance indicators,
whatever you want to call 'em, metrics that are clear.
Not a million of them, typically I have four to five
that really move the needle in one direction or another.
-: Yeah, and most people you find
presumably don't have those boxes necessarily identified?
-: Oh, no.
And even surprisingly, big companies don't.
I mentioned I worked with a condo company
that never built a condo, up in Canada,
and so I usually ask for some stuff before I go.
I said, could you send me your orgchart?
And he sends me pages of the orgchart.
Well, 'cause he was 85 million
and now he was down to about 35 million.
By the way, this is all stories that he shares,
I'm not sharing anything out of school.
And so I look at this thing and I call him back up
and I go, if you want me to work
with your thousand vice presidents,
that's not gonna happen.
I'm gonna be working with you
and we're gonna make some progress.
So in the end of the story is first day I arrive there
he goes, I have a surprise for you.
I said, what's the surprise?
He said, I fired all those vice presidents.
(laughs)
and I said, well that wasn't what I said, one,
but, okay, what's happened?
He goes, you won't believe what happened.
And I said, they were hiding the truth from you?
And he goes, yeah, you knew that?
And I go, yeah, 'cause that's their job,
but I don't blame them, I blame you,
'cause you didn't focus on the boxes it takes
to run a company and how you would judge those people
as fitting the boxes.
And basically what happens, Josh,
is all businesses, all businesses,
when we get crazy busy, we throw people at it.
So it's a moving bus and we just keep sacrificing people
in front of this moving bus to help it, to slow it down
at least, instead of thinking about systematic,
and my good friend, Ellen, who is a consultant,
she came up through the restaurant trade.
And so she really related to what we did together,
a good complement.
She said, you know, when a bus pulls up
to my diner that I'm working with,
I don't throw out my systems, I lean on my systems.
And you would think that's how other people operate,
but it is not true because as, emotions, we freak out.
So guys who know to clean up their truck
don't clean up their truck,
but now they're stepping over the trash all day,
and they don't work and they're not restocked
for the next day.
So you have to watch your own human habits.
-: What types of recommendations
do you find yourself giving business owners most often
to get them to think more in terms of systems?
Because it definitely seems in my experience
that that's really a mindset shift
for somebody to look at a problem through,
how can I systematize this,
versus how do I just solve and put a band-aid on it, right?
-: Sorry for laughing, 'cause that's a really good question.
And it took me back to immediately,
so, again, I was not born enlightened.
So I don't want anybody to think, oh
(laughs)
I just was enlightened.
No, I've stepped in every hole,
and what I tell people, I've been in every hole,
you don't have to go in that same hole.
And if I give myself any credit, Josh,
is when I dug myself out of the hole I go, that hurts.
There are more holes out there,
I don't need to keep falling into this one.
And unfortunately there are many people who do that.
They get out of the hole and they fall back
into the same hole again.
So I was riding in a truck, okay,
everybody, hang on, this is a little history training,
and so I'm in the truck and my good friend Dan,
this industry writer that was with me,
he was nice enough to run calls which was amazing
because he was the best guy in heating
around the whole country.
And so there's a telephone that's ringing for me
and I'm gonna say it's the size of a bread box.
And it's a two-way radio and they're looking for me
and the pager on my belt is going off,
he looks over to me and he goes,
you think that's normal, don't you?
(laughs)
And so, 'cause he held up the truth mirror to me,
and then I said to myself, these two things,
yeah, I think it's normal, and I hate all of you
for doing this.
And then I said to myself, I'm indispensable.
(laughs)
And so I realized what I had done
and allowed to continue, Josh,
was I liked being the rescuer.
I liked getting on the horse and coming to the rescue.
So if there wasn't something to rescue,
I would make sure that it accidentally happened
that I could rescue.
I liked being a fireman.
I was a kid, grew up like all of us,
I wanted to be a fireman.
So I was good at putting out fires.
In many ways I probably was setting fires
'cause I never put the systems in place.
And then the last thing is I like being a guru.
And I've learned too many New Yorkers
who don't like being a guru.
But anyway, so I like being a guru
and it was like Josh comes to me and asks a question,
I go, really Josh, you don't know that?
'Cause I do.
Would you like to know, Josh?
-: Here, let me teach you.
-: Yeah, let me teach you.
So I had to get over those three identities
of being the rescuer, the fireman, the guru,
I was gonna make any progress.
And when I work with owners,
I ask them and I share that concept with them
is that if you are attached to this forever,
even though you brought me in here
and you want these better things,
this will undermine your behavior
and desire for what you want.
-: Yeah, absolutely.
So, moving on, next power, dive right
into financial powers.
It's one that I know some business owners
don't like talking about a lot,
but what is that and what's the principle behind it?
-: You know, financial power is what I was talking,
is basically tax accounting is important,
the stuff that your accountant does
and your bookkeeper and the rest of it,
because you do have to count the money,
you have to do taxes, reports, and the rest of it.
But it doesn't help you make good financial,
so it doesn't help you solve your cash flow problem today.
You could have money or things that are owed to you,
which are assets and great,
but you gotta make payrolls today
'cause people lose their sense of humor
when you don't pay them.
(laughs)
And so there's things that you need to know,
and that's what I call real world accounting.
So the difference, as my friend describes it,
who's a financial maven, is imagine you're in your car
and you're waiting for monthly reports
for what happened last month, last quarter, whatever.
It would be like driving your car
by looking through your rear view mirror.
Whereas real world accounting is looking
out your front window, and that's really what your goal is.
It's not one or the other, you really need both,
and so you want to get to what Ellen
calls known financial position, KFP,
so that you know what you're operating with.
And that dictates what price you need
to charge for the things you need to do.
Most of us as contractors, including yours truly,
years ago we would buy a motor for 30 bucks,
we'd pay the guy $30 and we go, all right,
there's like 40 bucks here.
And the answer is, no there isn't.
(laughs)
Because the first time we did a budget
we found out all the things that we did not account.
You know, the cost of our building, utilities,
the insurance, gasoline, everything that goes on
whether you did a job or not.
And so this indirect cost and direct costs
are very different, and more of your costs
are tied up in the indirect costs.
Now, I am not your financial guru, but I am not stupid.
So I had to learn how to read a balance sheet
and the rest of the stuff,
but there were some great people out there.
If you think you need a controller,
think about it, it was very funny
'cause I've gone to a lot of companies
where I had to get rid of controllers.
I one day said the word slow enough
that I actually heard what I was saying.
Controller, it's a bad term.
It's a very bad term.
Now, if you're a controller out there
and you're a good person, I apologize,
but you don't need this super high level for most companies.
You need some level of sophistication,
you don't need all the CPA titles,
but you do have to be able to work
in these financial things.
You have to deliver stuff in real time
that you can make good financial decisions.
-: Yeah, let's talk about sales power.
We mentioned pricing, which feeds
right into sales naturally.
What's sales power and how do we take advantage of that?
-: So being a tech and being so bad at sales,
I would say that because I was so bad at sales
but my nature of my personality
is I don't want to stink at anything.
When you quit, I'll be going.
That's the one attribute I will give to myself.
And so I created a five step sales process
that was a lot like my idea about
if I was to run a air conditioning call,
a plumbing call, any of the calls
would be systematic so I didn't skip any steps.
So it's really five steps about how I arrive at the door,
what three questions I ask,
'cause you don't get to ask me a hundred questions.
You may have a hundred fascinating questions,
but I didn't sign up for the inquisition today,
I really just came here to get my stuff done.
So what three questions you ask
and then getting permission to do a survey.
Look at everything, because customers will take you
to what they see as the problem,
but good contractors know that the problem
that they're showing you isn't necessarily
where the problem exists, it's somewhere else.
So that's like pointing to my finger hurts,
but really a good doctor are to check your heart
and blood pressure, because the reason it hurts
in your finger could be something else.
Well, we are the doctors when we go to these calls,
so there's a sales process for that.
Getting to ask good questions, listen,
affirm that you're doing it,
and provide the best solutions for them
so that we can move forward.
And that ends up in really good sales,
but the essence of it is great communication.
-: Absolutely, listening more than we're talking.
-: Yes, that's the classic one,
which is when I teach sales to all different,
small, different, big ticket guys or even techs
is basically I said is, if you're talking, you're selling.
If they're talking, they're buying.
-: Yeah, I love, say that again.
That is awesome, say that one more time,
because that is so critical and it's such a pithy way
to put it.
-: So if you're talking, you're selling.
If they're talking, they're buying.
-: I love that, I want to stamp that
and put it everywhere because that is powerful.
-: I think I have a paintbrush I brought with me today,
we could paint it in the hallways.
-: We should paint it all over the place.
-: All the hallways.
-: That's incredible, I love that.
That's the first time I've heard it.
I really, really appreciate that statement.
Sales and marketing, often confused,
very, very different things.
-: And it's very funny that you mention that
because, again, my friend Ellen,
hopefully you're not sick of hearing this,
but Ellen and I have had a lot of inane conversations,
and she firmly believe that marketing comes first.
And I go, marketing is important,
but if you stick at sales, your marketing
doesn't usually get better.
So what I mean by that is if you are my ideal customer,
Josh, I have to know what makes you tick.
Because if I do and I know how to serve you better
than anybody else, then my power of cloning is,
how do I speak to a hundred, a thousand,
a million of you, a hundred million of you?
And that is when you can apply it to great marketing.
So they're really like two sides of the same coin
is how I see sales and marketing.
-: Yeah, so let's talk about marketing,
let's talk about the marketing power, dive into that for us.
-: Yeah, so got to the three rights, is the right amount
of calls at the right time from the right customer.
Because if you can't service those customers,
all you're really gonna do is just tick 'em off.
So you need to build your infrastructure,
and we were really great at getting more calls
that we can humanly do in a day.
Now, I will say, don't share this with your customers,
is that I try to tell, 'cause the more
that you can make more calls than you can humanly
do in a day, then you get to set the price
rather than the market or the customer setting the price.
Your goal, using, and all the mechanisms you can,
is to create more good calls.
Now, not just volume of calls,
but from your ideal customer,
which I identified as Josh and others
that will listen to it.
My marketing guru told me years ago
is say something to somebody
or you risk saying nothing to everyone.
So everybody goes, well, everybody could be my customer.
And the answer is, no, they can't,
nor should they be your customer.
You've got to be really focused in on that.
Now, what I preach is really having
a marketing plan in writing.
I'm a systems guy, how would you not have plan?
You said you want to grow to this size,
you have to break it out.
You have to put in writing your ideal ISP,
ideal selling position,
the unique selling position, sorry, USP.
Have to build a USP.
And then also the target audience.
Now, you may have multiple target audiences.
We did residential, commercial, and industrial,
and they are three different,
my residential customers couldn't care less
what my commercial customers had to say.
And my commercial customers couldn't care
what the residential had to say.
So you had to market to them in the way
that they wanted to be talked to
and how they needed to be identified.
So it's in this marketing plan,
which is basically a, hang on, a manual.
-: Yeah.
(laughs)
-: And so it defines all these things,
so if somebody, and you're the marketing manager,
you have marketing vendors, you have marketing people,
you have things, and they need to know
how you're going to market.
And so then it's the marketing allocation,
which is the marketing drivers.
There are only a billion ways,
you can't even push your shopping cart
down the Fry's or any place that you shop
where you don't have, and you're bombarded by advertising.
So not all advertising is what you need to do,
so the question is, what is gonna get
the majority of your time, energy, and money?
Remember those terms, time, energy, and money.
-: Absolutely.
-: So the three main drivers,
what's the biggest bang for the buck?
So whether it's acquisition, referral marketing,
obviously SEO, PPC these days.
All of these things are all valid.
You have to put the money, time,
and energy into those three to really drive those.
And so that doesn't mean you wouldn't do a few more,
not saying that only do the three,
but three have to get the primary.
And then do the thing that most people don't do, measure.
I have a quick story with,
so I was working with two guys,
really nice, and one thing in marketing
that you do that was really, really impactful,
and they go, well, we had this big giant festival
and we used to give out ice cream,
and we would get so many calls.
And I go, well, how's it going, it still working?
They both looked at each other and they paused
and they smiled and they go, we haven't done it
in two years.
(laughs)
So the idea that it doesn't have a life of its own
is that you have to come to this last thing,
so there's a marketing plan,
there is this marketing allocation,
and then the place that most of us fall down
is a marketing calendar.
So that marketing calendar is year-round
and it's proactively driven.
So when I talk about the right amount of calls
at the right time, if you're not working
that marketing calendar backwards, backwards,
to have stuff going all the time,
you're gonna be, and what I help clients do is,
especially they're a seasonal business,
is their marketing calls fall off the cliff.
-: I was just about to ask that.
-: Yeah, so my goal is to get it
to like you're stepping off a curb.
And so if you do multiple services,
you're not as sensitive to it,
'cause some of them are not tied to that thing,
but that's what really makes a difference.
So when we're addressing the three rights to marketing,
that marketing manual that encapsulate all of those things.
Also, if I'm the marketing manager and I'm not here,
it still goes on.
It's got to be somebody's job,
so back to the depth chart.
They have the manual, they've been trained on it,
they can keep stuff going.
-: Awesome, let's move on to the next one, staffing power.
This is probably one of the most challenging things
out of listeners, of staffing power,
what is it and how do we take advantage of it?
-: Well, it's really working on three things
is to fill the holes in your existing people.
They all have holes.
And how do I know they all have holes?
Because I said I was the boss's kid,
I would talk customers out of doing certain repairs
that I was not confident in.
(laughs)
That is the boss's kid, Josh.
You can only imagine what everybody else did.
So they were always trying to hide their holes.
So we had to learn, and this was tough
for a bunch of New York guys.
-: Oh yeah.
-: Including the service manager,
we just finally said to him,
said, you know, from here on out,
because we have manuals, we have a training center,
hands-on training center for everything we did.
Whatever you don't know is now our responsibility.
We're gonna show you.
And then you're gonna demonstrate that you can do it.
And from here on out, then you're expected to do it.
So when you don't do it, it's no longer a training issue,
it's a compliance issue.
And so it really changed, you could just see
everybody's emotional guard begin to drop, in a good way.
So that was the first obligation.
And part of the thing too is, it was actually a customer
of mine who said it, he goes, I get it, Al,
I know what I need to do now that you've been teaching me,
staffing power.
And I go, what is that, Rob?
And he goes, while they're on my watch
I either have to get 'em good or get 'em gone.
And he didn't mean it in like a vicious,
it comes across that way,
but you don't want to leave people floundering.
It's not good for them either.
So that's the first obligation.
The second one is to have better testing
of the people that you hired that quote,
unquote, are experienced.
We were so not reactive, basically here's
how we got a notice.
Sometimes we were lucky we got two weeks.
Sometimes we got a week.
And sometimes we had to go find the truck
before we had GPS tracking.
(laughs)
So we were everything, my brother Marty
was a bit of a wiseguy, and so he referred
to our hiring as the mirror test.
And it's M-I-R-R-O-R, 'cause I say it with my accent,
a mirror.
So what he meant was if you could fog the mirror,
you got hired, because we were always reactive,
never proactive, but once we got on this always recruiting,
always hiring, always hiring, always training,
always retaining.
And guys go, I'm pretty staffed up
and I go, okay, here's what I can tell you.
There are two knuckleheads on your team
that you are just dying to get rid of
but you don't have the guts.
But if you had people waiting in the wings,
you would actually hold your standards and do the things.
And so that really gets to the third one,
which is actually my brother and I
finally got disgusted about trying to rewire people.
You don't get the pieces you want, you get the whole person.
So if you are desperate to hire skilled people,
you have to take all of what they bring with you.
So we decided to go with willing people,
and when we created manuals and we created training
and we did the hands-on, we were allowed to build people
and provide the skills.
And they are the ones that started,
the young apprentice, even at my own company today,
they're the service manager, warehouse manager,
install manager, top sales guy, running branches,
and this has repeated now.
Zoom Drain, which is the franchise that I'm involved with,
we do the same thing not just
all across the franchise board.
And I work with other franchises,
of which I will not name,
but guys will bring me in because they know
that they need this too.
They need the manuals, they need the training,
they need the training curriculum.
They need to build these guys,
they need to get them better,
and get 'em consistent so that they can perform their work,
I will name drop, when I go around the country
there usually is in my right hand a Starbucks.
Now, people, I tell them in the seminars,
like I don't think Starbucks is the best coffee
that I've ever had, but here's what I know,
it tastes the same in Iowa as it does in Oregon,
and I value that.
And your customers value the ability.
So when you have manuals basically it says,
doesn't matter who comes to your door today,
we've all been training on the manuals,
pretty much do it the same way.
And the same thing that's the unwritten thing here is,
Josh, if you don't train people,
oh, guys will tell you this, basically what it is
is they're called on-the-job training.
Which means I'm at your house today learning my job,
thanks for paying.
(laughs)
So my guys would go to the door and go,
we're not coming to your house today to learn our job,
we've already been pre-trained at our training center,
and they had their own training certificates.
-: Yeah, do you find a lot of businesses that you work with,
find it challenging to work with millennials,
and what advice do you give them?
-: Well, here's what I'm gonna tell you about millennials,
I don't like them, I love them,
I love them, I love them, I love them!
And for anybody who's 40 or 50 years old or more,
get over yourself, because the company I was based in,
Zoom Drain, is nothing but millennials,
nothing but millennials, and they are fantastic.
Enormous energy, they really need to do,
the difference I would say though,
to be clear to someone who's 40 and up,
the days of saying do it because I said so,
that's sailed, it's not gonna happen.
And millennials in particular, if I can generalize,
they need to know the why.
They want to know why they're doing what they're doing,
not just here's a box, go.
And so this, again, is where the orgchart comes home,
here's where you start, here's where you can go.
You control the destiny, you get the money that you want.
You're never gonna exhaust us,
and here's why we do what we do.
And here's what makes us different.
What's interesting about the millennials today,
because they're so online oriented,
is that my partner Jim is very careful
about Glassdoor and about how he's reviewed and perceived.
He is always amazed at how well prepared
this generation is when they come to interviews.
They have been thoroughly on the website,
checked you out, and know incredibly a load
about your company.
Problem is most people doing the interviews,
unfortunately, are not as prepared.
They don't have a system.
They don't know what questions to ask,
they don't know what skills to check for.
They don't know the things,
and they don't know how to paint a picture
that says even if I have a job, I want to work here.
-: Exactly, yeah.
-: And so that's why they fall short.
-: Wow, yeah, hiring is one of the biggest challenge
I think for a lot of our contractors.
I mean there seems to be what they would qualify
as a tech shortage, we don't have enough people
to satisfy all the jobs that need to be performed.
Do you ever get into conversations about that,
and what are some advice that you have?
-: Yeah, yeah, so that's one of our prime drivers for me
and a little secret, 'cause maybe you can't handle
7-Power concepts, I'm gonna help you out here.
(laughs)
That's actually very funny because Tony Robbins
did a 30-day program thing,
and he said, I'm gonna change your life in 30 days,
you don't have 30 days, okay, here's seven days.
(laughs)
So there's two things, there's only things
you need to focus on as a contractor,
which is make more calls.
So goes back to, again, is make more calls
than you can humanly do 'cause then you get
to set the price on where you go
and how you expand.
And the other one is make more techs,
and what I mean by more techs is if they're a tech,
they can talk, do sales, they're operationally efficient,
and they're technically trained.
And so there are more trucks out there rolling
than there are people in the office doing stuff,
that's what always makes for a profitable company.
So more techs and more calls.
So how do you do that?
Well, in some places you're kind of forced
to try and get experience, so it just becomes a bidding war,
and I call it dollar hopping.
Which is I left my job because you were
gonna pay me a dollar more.
As soon as somebody else is willing to pay me a dollar
I'm gonna go to them, so what makes me unique to go to you?
Back to the orgchart, back to the system,
back to the field supervisor where you can run your own team
and have your own company here without all the headaches,
that's attractive to some people.
I feel that, again, you will exhaust that.
It's a little like trying to get lightning in a bottle,
and so acquisition sometimes helps
because you can acquire customers and acquire staff,
but there is no slavery in this country,
so they don't have to stay with you.
The way that it is I feel is if you can provide skills
and willingness is what you want to do
and you want to build your farm team.
Now, there is some restrictions,
'cause there's a lot of states that are pretty tough.
So what that means is you still might have
to go to a tech school where they have
some time on their clock for licensing,
but they're still not trained to really go out and do it.
So you want to be on the front line of that
and make sure that they know that, A,
when you come out or even now get started here,
I got a career for you.
So this is the classic at the end of it is,
what made me the employer of choice
is I offered a career, not a job.
And I teach every one of the people that work with me
to say the same thing, now they got to make it real.
And that's really something that every contractor's
better served that they get this idea.
Sometimes it's the case, again,
going back to they need to be the other person
rather than themselves only.
I wear glasses, and so it's really easy
for me to look out my glasses,
but once in a while I have to take 'em off my face
and be in the other seat.
I used to do, let's talk about getting better in sales,
so I was struggling in sales,
and one night, fortunately it was at night
and nobody else was left in the building.
I had decided that I have to sit in the other person's,
so I physically got out of my chair
and sat in my brother's chair
and acted like the customer.
So I go, Mrs. Smith, you need a new heating equipment.
And I get up and walk over in that chair
and Mrs. Smith says, it's working fine now.
And then I had to get back to chair,
and until I could answer and handle the questions,
but this physical getting out of myself
is really important, and tying it back
to this staffing thing is if you had a good job,
sometimes you should read your help ads.
I don't care if it's on Indeed or anything else,
I want this, I want this, I want this, I want,
well, it's great that you want all that,
but I've got a job where I've got other prospects.
Here's where they disconnect, if I may, Josh,
that they may be great marketers.
They know how to get their ideal customer.
They know what that customer is
and they know how to get more of 'em,
and all of a sudden they throw that out
when it comes to recruiting.
Well, what is recruiting?
It's marketing.
You need that ideal person that you talked about,
you need to know where they are,
how to go get them, how to get their attention.
It's exactly the same as marketing.
-: Yeah, this segues pretty smoothly into power number seven,
sales coaching power,
we've talked about providing a career path,
being able to develop and embody those ideals,
let's talk about sales coaching power.
What is it and how do we take advantage of it?
-: So if I need your truck to bring me 250,
300, whatever that is, I have to coach you on that process,
I need to be able to get in your truck,
do ride alongs, set up some mystery shoppers
to find out what you do and don't do.
Keep you on the ethical right side.
But ultimately I gave you a sales system
doesn't mean that you necessarily absorbed it
or that you decided that you were actually
gonna practice it.
So I've got to go through the coaching aspect of it.
I've got to keep it in the culture,
and then there are the key stats.
So whether it's billable hours
or labor, percentage of sales,
which measures your efficiency.
Your average ticket, which is important,
how many calls did you run, and how many callbacks?
So most people talk about callback ratio
being part of sales coaching,
sounds like, well, wait a second,
well, if you just let me go out there
and sell, sell, sell and set fires
and let everybody else clean my mess up,
I'm gonna look pretty good on sales only,
but I've sabotaged the rest of the team
and I'm gonna ruin your reputation in a heartbeat.
So there's a consequence,
so it's not all just carrots,
there's a little bit of consequence here.
And the consequence is you can only have so many callbacks,
and the callback has changed from when I was a tech.
If I went to your job, and you had no cooling,
and then you call back and there's no cooling,
well that's a callback.
Well, today's it's, what I use for a callback definition
is if a customer calls you for any reason in 30 days,
for any reason, then it's a case
that it's a potential callback,
'cause it isn't necessarily a callback,
so the CSR, remember we talked how that works?
They're on the front lines,
they would generate a report,
send it off to the service manager,
and then the service manager needs to figure it out.
So if you have a sales system
and I call up the next day to complain about the price,
there's a good chance I shortcutted the sales process
or I didn't prepare the person that I was with
for their significant other to come home
and go, what, you paid 500 bucks?
So that's a sales process shortcut.
If you're not complaining about the price
and you're air conditioning works today,
the bad news is I broke your screen door
with my toolbox and I didn't want
to wear those shoe covery things that you make us wear,
so I left my footprints all over your white carpet.
Well, that's an operational issue.
And then the last one I have no cooling today
like I had no cooling the other day,
and by the way my husband and I,
we both took off time to babysit with you today.
The thing that contractors think is,
oh, customer's only interested in price,
and I would say maybe,
until you take that out of the equation.
They're interested, if they have two good jobs,
which is your ideal customer,
they got a job that the two of them,
before you showed up today, fought like heck
to figure out who gets stuck to hang out with you.
And they're not going to enjoy doing it for day two.
So they have a vested interest for you to show up,
be responsible, do the job right,
convince them that you know how to do it,
'cause that money is still cheaper
than what they are losing today by not being
able to do what they want to.
-: Absolutely, you have a bonus power that you throw
in there, leadership power, tell me
a little bit about that and your philosophy on that.
-: Yeah, so this goes to the line again
about any road will do if you don't care
where you end up, and you can tell I'm pretty determined.
I care about where I end up.
And so if you got in your car and you just start driving,
that's fine, but if you really wanted to go
from California to New York,
it'd be a good idea to set that in your GPS,
knowing that you'll drift back and forth.
But the same thing for a company is
you need to have a vision of how many trucks,
how many dollars, how many things you're gonna do,
what kind of different services and marketing
and that has to be committed to a manual
called a leadership manual.
And that really sets the direction of it is
and then you have to break that down into pieces
of how do you want to do it.
I also like to incorporate in leadership,
so I was born into the business,
I mean literally born into the business,
and I did have a silver spoon,
but mine was covered with field oil.
And so I never really had any thoughts about leadership
except that, yes, to take control of my own company.
But when I went off to do this business,
so another piece of this leadership was
I finally did the 10 golden rules for my personal life
and my 10 golden rules for my business life
and it fits to this consulting.
So I always do a free 30 minute
and I have guys who come in and they go,
they're a million in sales and they want to be 25 million
in two years.
I love big goals.
But there's gonna be some work between a million
and 25 million in two years.
So I get on the phone and they go,
well, but I don't want to have to give up
my surfing lessons and I want to be able,
well, you're welcome to do what you want to do,
but it's gonna be pretty hard.
So the point of this is I created 10 golden rules
for my personal and 10 golden rules for my business life,
and if they don't mesh, there's always friction.
And so I wanted to come live in Arizona,
I wanted to play golf three times a week,
I wanted to go to the gym.
I wrote down these things,
and then my business serves those goals.
Now, in some ways things are better.
I go to the gym more than that,
sometimes I don't play a lot of golf
because I'm not working and I like work.
So it's not like it's a bad thing, things will change,
but there are always the guideposts to drag you back.
So in the leadership manual besides the company goals
and specifics about it, they have to be very specific
and the timeframes have to be it.
We don't like to write our goals down.
This is the tricky part.
-: Yeah.
-: Is we don't like to write our goals down,
'cause if we never write 'em down, we can never be wrong.
And we can never miss our goals.
So when I do like the top five and I coach on that,
every one of their top fives has to have a timeframe.
Because a goal can never be missed
if you don't have a timeframe.
So I put model trucks together as a goal,
because the problem is every time they go out there,
they don't have the parts, they don't know where,
they're running these calls, they're an hour from the shop,
there's an issue.
-: I just want to piggyback on some of these goals
and just future insight that you have,
not just business wise but I want to take it
a little broader, industry-wide.
Do you have any thoughts on the future of home services?
-: I think it's an incredible time
and that's one of the nice things about being around.
We were at the forefront of acquisition,
my dad and my uncle,
if they had not acquired companies,
'cause we were under urban renewal,
there would have been no business
by the time third generation showed up.
And so we fell in love with this whole concept
about how do you use and how to leverage it
and do the rest of it, and so now it's back en vogue.
It's been back en vogue in the '90s
and back in the rest of the stuff,
I think that there's certainly AI
and there's a lot of information
that's coming downstream that's gonna make
the job different, and you cannot be anymore
unable to work with a tablet.
You know, paper is finally going.
They've been promising that for 30 years,
but paper is really going.
So you're the level of a tech,
the level of a tech is really starting to fall apart.
You have to be a higher level.
The ability to read, to understand the technology,
all of that has to be, it's non-negotiable.
And as a broader concept here is,
I think the companies that own this concept
of more calls, more techs, will be the winners.
I don't care if Google Home Services
or Amazon home services or any of the other big rollup.
I was always competing with my competition
being utilities, and I won that game every day.
Because ultimately people want to deal
with people they trust
and that can serve them on their schedules.
-: Do you think the biggest adoption
that our listener should be thinking about
would be the technology piece?
-: I think that's, it's a tool in your toolbox.
The technology can't fix a structurally broken company.
So, again, if you don't have an orgchart
and you don't have these systems in place,
there's an old expression, if it doesn't make sense
on paper, it doesn't make any more sense in a computer.
And so, yes, fix your company and leverage,
leverage, leverage, gonna say it again, leverage,
-: Leverage.
-: technology every way you can.
And that even goes back to my father,
he was always on the cutting edge of that kind of stuff.
We had, sorry, don't try to laugh here,
but we had mainframes way before
people were doing that stuff.
And then we went to individual computers
and we just every time that we could see a,
it's technology with a purpose
is the best way to describe it.
-: You know, you mentioned a little earlier
about your book being an Audible,
and I'm curious of your take on Audible,
podcasts, why is it important for home service professionals
to listen to podcasts?
How are they valuable in particular in this industry?
-: Yeah, like I said, I felt I was pretty smart,
I had a really good experience.
I only got smarter by hearing and listening
and reading other people and meeting other people
along the way.
Well, that's what podcasting is.
The best, the brightest, there's really good information
out there in a way that's chewable.
We are stuck in our trucks or in office
more times than not.
We work incredibly long hours.
So turn off the radio and plug into podcasts
that are good podcasts, get connected up
is my best advice.
And that's why when I first wrote my book,
I told my editor who helped me, I says,
it's got to be two to four hours of reading,
'cause we are really super busy.
And I'm happy it ended up.
But a contractor called up one day and he goes,
hey, you know what, Al,
it's a nice idea to read,
but I am in my truck all the time,
you gotta do Audible.
And so Audible is another great channel for this
if you're in your truck.
I don't think it replaces all of reading
because, it's very funny, I worked with a podcaster
who was 35 years old in Australia,
and I was talking about, you know, Audibles,
this, and he goes, stop.
And I go, well, what do you mean?
He goes, they can listen to Audible,
but then they have to get the book
and yellow highlight it because there's information
they have to go back to.
But at least if you listen to the concept
and you kinda connect, you can take it one level down.
So even like the notes that you put out
and all these others things that go with it,
they're really good.
You have to have clarity on how they all fit together.
One thing I do caution about is you can't implement
everything at the same time,
you're just gonna drive your team crazy.
-: Yeah, absolutely.
Well, Al, this has been awesome, again, round two,
7-Power Contractor.
Where can people find out more
about the 7-Power Contractor?
-: Yes, my website's the best place,
which is number seven, power contractor, .com.
-: Number seven power contractor, .com.
-: Correct.
-: Awesome, well, Al, thank you so much
for sharing all the insight,
look forward to future conversations
on this podcast with you.
-: Love it.
-: Awesome.
And for everybody listening, definitely check out
7powercontractor.com, and hit that subscribe button
wherever you're listening to the Sharpest Tool at
so you can get more of this awesome content.
Until next time, we'll talk to you then.
Thanks.
(upbeat music)