Business Innovators Radio - Episode 32: It’s Lonely At The Top with Tom Reber

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Construction Executives Live Learn from passionate and inspiring business coach, trainer, speaker and champion of the construction industry – Tom Reber – as he discusses the importance of finding a community to learn and grow with. It can be lonely at the top of any business, but 2024 is the year you say yes to that event, coach, business group or training. Time to get uncomfortable in order to find the success that you deserve!In The Zonehttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/in-the-zone/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/episode-32-its-lonely-at-the-top-with-tom-reber

Welcome to In the Zone and Construction Executives Live, brought to you by U.S. Construction Zone, bringing you strategies for success with construction innovators and change makers, including In The Zone peer-nominated national award winners. Here's your host, Jeremy Owens. Hey there, welcome back to Construction Executives Live. I'm your host, Jeremy Owens, owner and founder of U.S. Construction Zone and three generations improvements out in Northern California. Happy New Year to everyone here. to see familiar names and faces. And hey, I just can't, I'm excited about 2024. I know we have some potential challenges coming up. We're going to talk about those on future shows. But I'm excited because of the great content and the great people that I've been meeting on this show. And we have another one today.

You know me that I like to highlight innovators, change makers, and professionals who do not mind saying the hard thing. And I got another one of those today. topics such as mental health, mentorship, uncommon, leadership, and today's topic of being lonely at the top. You know, if you have a speaker or a topic in mind that kind of hits at these levels, please put it in the chat for me or send me an email, Jeremy, at usconstructionzone.com. You know that I'm not afraid to talk about the difficult, uncomfortable sometimes in taboo subject to our industry.

So I'd like to continue on that theme. that's what I ingest content-wise. So naturally, that's what I want to talk about. So please don't hesitate to reach out to me with that topic or with that speaker in mind. Today, we're sponsored again by the great folks at build12, build12.com, automate your construction business into a revenue generating machine with Build 12 system. Hey, if you guys have never heard of Build 12, check it out. It's a great remodeling.

It's not just a CRM. It's really a lead management tool. and if you're like me in that small, medium-sized remodeling company who just is looking for efficiencies, I struggled with it myself. I lost a key man this last year. And instead of figuring out how to replace them, I've been trying to figure out how to be more efficient. Manage my leads better, right? Every lead is so valuable.

Treat those with more value. And the Bill 12 system really helps me with that. So check him out. Check out Les O'Hara. He's a good buddy of mine. and he'll get you all set up. So today our show is titled, It's Lonely at the Top. Learn from passionate and inspiring business coach, trainer, speaker, and champion

of the construction industry, Tom Rebert, as he discusses the importance of finding community to learn and grow with. It can be lonely at the top of any business, but 2024 is the year you say yes to that event, to that coach, that business group, or that training. Time to get uncomfortable in order to find the success. that you deserve. Tom Reber is the founder of the contractor fight. His training has helped hundreds of thousands of home improvement contractors

demolish mediocrity in themselves, at home, and in their businesses. The contractor fight community has given contractors a place to own their crap and bring respect and dignity back to the trades. Tom has had a crazy ride as campus minister, HGTV host, contractor, and United States Marine. Thank you for your service, Tom. his podcast, The Contractor Fight and Contractor Fight TV on YouTube equips and inspires home improvement contractors to step up their game. The Contractor Fight is the ultimate contractor business school.

Please help me welcome Tom Reaver. Tom, thanks for being here. Jeremy, what's going on, man? It's been a long time coming. We've been talking about this for months. Yes, we have, man. And I met Tom, I don't know, a year or two ago on his podcast. And I've been following and adjusting his content for years. so it's good to finally get you on here.

And, you know, tell us a little bit about your story. How did you end up here at the contractor fire? Oh, man. You know, I grew up outside of Chicago and a family of my dad was a tile guy. My uncle was a painter. Had some extended family in the trades. And really did everything I could to not go into the trades because most of the contractors I knew were, like I looked at my dad. He was tired, broken, dirty all the time.

and all my friends, they lived on literally the other side of the tracks and their dads were lawyers and doctors. But the problem was I hated school and every second of it other than playing football. So, but I worked, you know, for my dad and my uncle growing up and this and that and had a great work ethic. And I don't take anything away from my dad when I tell him that he was broke and tired and dirty, right? It's just that's the worldview I had of, you know, the average contractor, the guy in the trades. And so long story short, I'm in and out of the Marine Corps. I get out of the Marine Corps.

I start running a crew for my uncle's painting company and did that for probably four years, three, four years. Decided to take my next step. I ended up getting a sales job selling vinyl replacement windows for a company that ripped people off. I was the top sales guy for the first three months. Then I realized they were screwing people. quit. Ended up selling palettes of nails to framing carpenters in the Chicagoland area. This is the early 2000s.

And while I'm driving around, I'm just like there's so much opportunity here. This is probably 2001. And 2002, there's all this opportunity. And I had never in my life thought about starting a business. and one day I'm like, I think I'm going to start a painting business. Some guy at the church I went to was remodeling his house and I overheard him say he needed a painter. And that was like kind of the thing. I'm like, I painted for my uncle, right?

So I was in business within a couple weeks. And, you know, fast forward to what year would it had been. It had been 2012, I sold my half of the company. And, you know, at the time we were doing about 300 projects a year, give or take. And, you know, mainly residential painting, light commercial and stuff like that. Wanted to change. You know, my family, we wanted to move out of the area.

We just retired of being in Illinois at the time. And there were other things going on in life that just, you know, sometimes things just point to you need to change, right? And so different season of life was in front of us. And so we relocated to Colorado Springs. and, you know, 2015, I think it was. And, you know, we just had the in between. I didn't know what I was going to do. And so I started up, I hit record one day, started a podcast.

Next thing you know, you know, we're banging out, you know, show a week. And in 2017, we rebranded the name of that show to the contractor fight. You know, as you know, one of the biggest mistakes, any business owner does is you don't have a clear audience. You think you serve everybody. And at the time, I was doing coaching and speaking for just general entrepreneurship groups. But no matter what happened, contractors just kept reaching out. And what I found is I love working with the men and women in the trades.

They're good human beings. They're my people. And the other thing I love is you can help somebody make a two, three, three, five percent swing and change in something, and it can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars for them. So they get big wins too, you know, like I was coaching, I remember I was coaching a personal trainer once.

And, you know, in order for him to have a big financial win, we had to sell like 7,000 personal training sessions or something, you know, for him to make a dent in his, in his retirement and stuff. So, so, yeah, it's, um, you started the show and then didn't,

still didn't know what we were going to do with it. You know, I was just, just creating, content and I think it was 2016, one of my sons, Dakota, who's, he's like, Dad, you need to start a YouTube channel. Okay. And we left the first videos up and they're terrible. And, you know, it's, it just compounded into, you know, we have over 1,100 videos on

YouTube. We've got 1,000 or so podcasts we've done. We've, um, and helped, you know, tons of contractors all over the world, you know, get better, man. So totally blessed. You know, now we put on a big event every year in Denver. We have a coaching group, you know, and we do some fly-ins into Colorado Springs and, you know, workshops and all these things to help people get better and win more in life and business.

Awesome, man. That's a great story. I heard you say, too, that you never like painting, right? You know, it's just, I don't really like it. No. I like the game. I like the game of building a business. I believe craftsmanship is incredibly important.

I'm a business craftsman, not a craftman craftsman. So I just believe in let's make enough money to hire and train the best people and let them do their thing and get out of their way. So it's, and I'm not very good at it. I tell you what, it was funny. I had about a year and a half ago, we were having the basement painted and new Florida. put in here. We stained the concrete or whatever we called it. And I had to remove all the baseboards. And I was like, I was going to be the helpful homeowner. I'm like, you know, that guy you don't want him to help. So the day before the crew came to do the floor, I removed all the

baseboards. So I was crawling around on my hands and knees for three hours or so, removing all the baseboard. Dude, it beat the hell out of me, man. And it'd been a while since I've been crawling around. I'm 54. I'm like, I can't be doing this. So I hired my carpenter buddy Jake to hang them again. So when we were done, I'm like, I am not doing this again. But yeah, man, it's all the respect in the world for what contractors and trades people do.

I mean, take us away for a week. See what happens in the country. Yeah, no, exactly. I'm always a fan, a big fan of someone whose primary mission is to bring respect and dignity to the trades. And you've always done that on your platform. And tell us why you think that is so important in our industry. Well, you know, for me, it's, it's personal because I grew up, like I said, you know, we never made any money. The contractors did I knew didn't make, I knew didn't make money. I just saw them working their butts off. And what I realized is,

I mean, dude, I rode the short bus literally in grade school for two years and was in special ed. Thought I was stupid my whole life, never really applied myself in school, you know, name it. And what I, um, I was so affected, like, I'm ashamed to say, but I was so affected by like the lives that my friends growing up had versus my life. And, um, and we were a contractor family and we were always broke. We never going on vacations. Every spring break and Christmas break and summer break, all my buddies were going to veil and, you know, all these San Padre Island, you name it, they were always going somewhere.

We never went anywhere, never had the money. And so I think I just, it was what I've realized now is that I just didn't respect myself. I didn't understand that no matter what vocation you pick when I was younger, you can excel, you could be successful. I just thought we were pigeonholed that in the trades because no contractor I ever knew made money. So fast forward, you know, a couple decades, a few decades. I'm making some great money running a painting business and helping a lot of people,

hundreds of families a year. And that's when it began to turn for me where I've realized that the biggest reason that I've seen that the average contractor doesn't make more, why they have more debt, while they're reliving the same year, 20 years over, why every winter the guy says to his wife, baby, this year's going to be different, we're going to make money, you know, all this garbage that I used to do. it's really a how are you choosing to show up for yourself issue right and so um that's you know if you don't respect yourself first whether you're a hot dog stand owner a contractor or a garbage

man doesn't matter um you're going to underperform underachieve and not have the life that you want so yeah um so our our message is you know we called the company the contractor fight because it's the fight between your ears it's the six inches between your ears you got to you know if you don't like where you're at in life it's because of the choices you've made. So own your crap, look in the mirror, and do something about it. And everything we do, we believe success is an inside-out game. And so if you were to drop a rock into a lake where the rock hits, we call that a strong you, like get oxygen for you, take care of your mind, your body, pay yourself first. The next ring out is a strong home. And then finally,

it's a strong business in that order. And sadly, a lot of contractors, a lot of business owners don't have the success they want because they have it flipped. They're working on the business first, all in the name of taking care of their family and themselves. They steal from the people they love the most time, money, and memories because they're not working inside out. Yeah. I mean, it's so true.

I mean, you say some. I would say probably most do it that way. And it's, it's, it's, you feel like you're doing the right thing, right? I mean, taking care of all these families. And there's pressure. There's pressure on your shoulders all the time. I'm not going to make payroll. And, and, and I need to make them money first.

And then, and then the end of the day, you don't have a lot left over for yourself. Right. So, right. So, yeah, something's got to give there. And like you said just then, like you have said often that your circumstances won't change unless you make a commitment to respect yourself first. And so, you know, what that. that step, none of those other things are going to happen, right?

Yeah, and it's really even beyond the circumstances because most of us don't control the circumstances that we're hit with. You don't control what's happening in the economy. You don't control the weather. You don't control, you know, how other people react to things. But what you do is you need to choose to live to a certain non-negotiable standard each day. This is how I'm choosing to show up. I take care of me, my home life, then the business in that order, non-negotiable, no matter what the scoreboard says, no matter what the results feel like, no matter, you know, success doesn't care how you feel, doesn't care that you slept last night or not, it takes what it takes.

And I just think too many times we cave to outside circumstances and our feelings instead of, you know, putting in the work consistently, the unsexy mundane stuff that we don't want to do. Right. And that's how success compounds. Yeah, I know, and I love the name contractor fight. I mean, I'd like to kind of hear the origin story of how you guys created that name, but it just, it's perfect for you personally. Like it fits your personality, but that fight, that action word, that like, like, get into it.

Like, own your crap, you know, all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's just how I've shown up in life, you know. I mean, I think I've just, and this isn't meant to like be poor Tom, but I just think I've had a life. where I've had a scrap for a lot of things, you know, I'm not always the most talented, but willing to outwork everybody. And, you know, that's something I need to give my parents, my dad credit for. He gave me a work ethic, you know, he modeled it for me, even though he didn't make a lot of money and stuff. I watched him bust his tail. Right. And, and that was the way,

I, like, that was the way to my dad's heart was work ethic, you know, like, you were always in good graces if you worked hard. And so, I just think having that grind mentality as an athlete, as a Marine, in business. Like I, there's a lot of things I don't have control over, but I do have control over the fact that I can outwork you. And so it just was a natural thing. And what's funny is I was, the name came from my, my now CEO was my marketing guy. Now Neil is my CEO. He flew out here to Colorado.

hold up in a bed and breakfast or an Airbnb for a couple days on the weekend. And we're like, we got to change something because it's just the fight didn't exist. We had this podcast. It was called the strongpreneur podcast. And it just wasn't gaining ground. And the branding was inconsistent. We didn't know who we were for. Yeah. And he called me up. He's like, dude, I got to fly out there. Because also at the same time I had, I was co-founder in a company called the Contractor Sales Academy. So we were doing sales training for contractors. At the Strongener podcast, we had all this hodgepodge of stuff, right? And so he came out and a couple days later, we walked out of that Airbnb with the contractor

fight and it's been like hockey stick ever since, man. It's been crazy. And so that's, I always encourage people like, you've got to get massive clarity around who you are, who you're not, who you're for, who you're not. You know, remodelers, GCs, you know, they go, we do everything, right? Well, how about just being the best. bathroom guy. Right. Right. How about being the, um, you know, we remodel kitchens for left handed entrepreneurs, right? Like literally to that detailed. So, um, yeah, right. Yeah. So, you know, in our painting business, we found that one of our ideal client personas was, was, uh, business owners. Right. Like we, we marketed to business owners because they're busy.

They understand how money works. They understand that you can't always be cheap. They, they, they don't have time to get a lot of other bids and shoppy around because they're like, let's know. You know, Neil, my CEO, his ideal client, if you're familiar with a disc profile, D-I-S-C, his ideal client was a high-see. You know, the super detail-oriented people. Okay. Because he's a high-see, and that's how he communicates. He also found that if you had a cat, you were not going to be a good customer. you were going to be a total pain in the butt the whole time and dog owners are the best to work with.

So loyal. There you go, man. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of going back to that hard work thing. I think this is what we get caught up in, though, as owner is working hard. Yes, we've been modeled that. Yes, we've been doing that. And you work hard and years go by of your same mentality of, hey, dude, I am grinding.

I'm working hard. You're not seeing a lot of results. And like without changing your circumstance, without going to that meeting or figuring out, you know, whatever, getting around like-minded people that can help you grow, your circumstances won't change, right? So it's the biggest lie that I think contractors tell ourselves is that I work hard. Yeah. Well, if hard work was enough, every contractor, most contractors would be multimillioners. Right. So, you know, if you're working hard and not, don't have some fundamental things in place, the blocking.

and tackling a business, then it's like climbing a ladder that's leaned against the wrong wall. So, you know, and it's, you know, you got to, and sadly, you know, most, most of us got into the trades because we wanted some freedom. We wanted to do it better than our boss, whatever our reasons were. Sure. But there's really no contractor business school. There's no, and there's associations and things like that. But I'm talking like, you know, I think, and this is one thing I think we've done,

well in the fight is we've just tried to cut through the BS get right to the point and call you out call you out in your BS like you ain't making money because of the choices you're making homie so let's go raise your damn prices or quit right you ain't making a quarter million in your pocket after five years of running a business you got a problem because it's easy to make money in the trades when you block and you tackle right and um and so i think that's why we've been able to get so many people you know such big wins and i'm talking people that just consume our free stuff that aren't even in our program. You want to move faster, join the program.

But we have enough stuff out there that you can change the trajectory of your business and your family financial tree for generations just on the three stuff. And that was something that we set out to do. We just said, you know, I wanted to create a high value community that, you know, that, again, even if somebody never gave us a dime for our programs, events, whatever, they would still have value by being associated with the fight. Yeah, and my association, getting emails from you, one of the emails and articles you wrote was about a conference you intended as a young painter. And you would kind of describe how blown away you were with how engaged this group was. And you

figured it out why. You're like, because we're all owners and we're all lonely. And now we get together and we're like little chatter boxes because we didn't have anybody back at home to talk to about these problem. So, you know, that, that was kind of what, what topic reminded me like, hey, it's lonely up here sometimes. It's lonely at the top. And like, if we don't get around people who are in the same spot as us, who do we talk to? Well, when I started, it was a very different world. We didn't have Facebook. We didn't have social media. It wasn't what it is, right? And I remember going into the paint store. I was probably just a couple months into business. And I asked this painter in the store, he was an older guy, asked him a question.

about, hey, how do you do this or do that, right? I think it had something to do with, like, liquid mask because liquid mask had just kind of come out. And I was like, hey, how much time do you give to painting true divided light double hung windows or something, you know, or whatever? Just shooting the shit while we're having our paint mixed. And he just, he, he just treated me like crap. Like, why would I tell you that? Like, he was very, you know, scarcity-minded and trade secrets and all this other garbage. and that just stuck with me.

And then I don't know, it was probably a year two later. I went to this event, you know, in the painting industry. And I didn't know anything like this existed where people got together. And, you know, when you're running your own business, you're, you got all the things, the demands that are coming at you. You know, your family's not necessarily running it with you. Your friends don't know what it's like, you know, it could be very lonely. And I just remember it really stood out when I went to this event that, you know, I'm not alone.

There's communities out there that are willing to give to one another and abundance mindset. And fast forward now 20-something years, I really believe, you know, you teased it here in the beginning. It's lonely at the top. I actually believe the top is one of the most wonderful people. places to be because there is so much engagement with when you are at the top of your game when you're around people that are working on themselves and trying to get better you're elevated and there's so much more community up there in relationship because everyone understands what you're all going through so i actually think it's it's lonelier on the way up or lonelier at the bottom that it is at the top

that's what i've come to believe yeah i think i think you're you're right but you have to find that group that support you right so if you don't make that decision to be active somewhere. 10 years lonely as you want to be, right? But if you think about, hey, I'm a marketing guy, I'm a sales guy, you have several guys on your team that you can talk to about your problems, like how pissed off the core about the lead quality or whatever, right? But you don't have the same person to talk about these high level issues, right,

your team. So you have to spread out. And how is the contractor fight helped with that community aspect of this? Well, you know, we have a free group on Facebook. I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. We, when we start, it's got 16,000 something people in it now. We kick people out all the time for being d-bags because we started this thing where we wanted it to be unlike the other Facebook groups or everyone just comes on, posts a picture of something they're working on, and then 1,800 comments of people ripping on how they do it better. You know what I mean?

Like a lot of these contractor groups and all this, you know, people giving advice who don't have two nickels to rub together about how to build a business. And so as this, as our group grows, it gets harder and harder to moderate this. And, you know, we spend over, it's a free group. I spend over $100,000 a year managing the stupid thing, you know. So, you know, we miss some things here and there. it's how much you're really going to put into it, right? But we, for starters, we tried to just create a group that was different than all the other stuff on Facebook.

So when we first started it, within 24 hours of joining, you had to own your crap. You had to do a post, a video or a text post, where you shared like why you're not more successful in business. And it couldn't be like, I suck at marketing. It needed to be like, I have. been lazy when it comes to learning how to market my business, like a character issue that you had to own, right? Or I've just been a total wist when it comes to raising my prices, which is why I'm broke or I'm a terrible leader. You know, I'm too much of a hard ass and I drive everybody away

who's a potentially good employee and I need to get better as a leader. That's owning your crap, not this, you know, let's get to the route. So, and if you didn't own your crap within 24 hours, we gave you the axe. We cut, we removed you from the group. And that was going great up until probably three, three years into it. Facebook said that we were bullying and harassing people. So they were going to shut the group down. So we removed the own your crap. And that is really, and it was funny because it was a smaller group that was really high value because people own their crap. Well, now that they don't allow us to do that anymore, the riffraffs in the, there a little bit, but there's still a lot of good people in there that are, you know, and then

a lot of those people, you know, they're in there and they end up joining our, our battleground program where that's, that's like relationship community off the charts. I mean, just a tight group of people that have each other's backs and everything from marriage stuff to kids, to health, to business, to money. It's, you know, I think, you know, when you develop a certain level of confidence, you'll be open with other people, right? That's why we talk, it's an inside-out game. Like when I'm take care of me, I'm reading every day, I'm working out every day, I'm eating right, I'm disciplined. I'm going to be more confident and that's what I'm going to bring to my family. And then when I'm strong at home, who you are and what's going on at home, you carry with

into the workplace. Yes. You know, and that's how you bring respect and dignity back to the trades overall is you get better. Right. So, yeah, no, I mean, it makes total sense. I mean, the flip side and the negative side is we do have a lot of mental health issues in construction. We have a lot of depression and drug use. And there are a lot of stats that say that a lot of that is happening at the top. You know, I think it's probably because of the stress that we carry at the top. And so there's, you know, high turnover rate and burnout and, you know, all sorts of stuff that's going on. And then you mix in that social media shit and the VR and all this stuff that's making us more,

lonely and making us more, you know, we're not skin to skin is a little bit more weird for a lot of folks. Younger people have a hard time with shaking someone in the hand and looking in the eye. Like there's some issues with this. And so like that skin to skin, I know you do a conference every year, we can't, we can't replace that contact, human interaction with social media and all the other stuff. We have to be together. It's an edge. I mean, in today's world, being able to look somebody eye and have a conversation with

shake their hands, meet them, be confident like that is an edge in business. Yeah. Because so many people hide behind the keyboard and their phone. And I mean, one of our daughters has an interview later this week for a job. And she's 19. And she's terrified to pick the phone up. Like my wife told her, hey, can you call Fuzzies and order a cassidia for grandma? And she was like, well, I'll dial, but you need to.

talk to them. And that's kids. We have five kids and they want to text. And that's how people have become. So I think it's an edge when you can communicate with another person. And, you know, there's just a level of, of connection that we're lacking, which is why we put on the event and we try to do a lot of things in person. Yeah, it's more convenient to do stuff like this, you know, but, you know, I, I, you know, a lot

of good people out there just haven't been taught the skills of how to communicate, right? It's, you know, they've been, they've been allowed to hide behind their devices and, you know, but when you've got to look somebody eye and tell them the truth or what you're thinking, it's a different game, you know, so. Yeah, no, I've heard you say it a couple times. Like, why are so many of us afraid to, uh, to make the call, pick up the phone, answer the phone. When someone's pissed, when your customer's pissed, it happens to everybody, right? And we hit end. We don't hit accept. We hit end. We don't hit accept. We hit end. And we let him sleep on it.

Or the screenshot of like, how would you, how would you reply to this text with this customer or this prospect? And I'm like, you pick the phone up and you bring gratitude, certain tonality, a good spirit of the conversation. Like, hey, Jeremy, I just got your text. And, man, what do we need to do to make this right? Right. Because a lot is lost in translation. of text. Oh, yeah, forget about it.

Tonality and this and that. But when you pick the phone up, you're uncommon now. Again, it's about being uncommon. Most people are going to reply via text. Sure. I need you to itemize the bid 18 different ways from Sunday, you know. And, no, pick the phone up and go, hey, so that's an odd request. What are you hoping I can help you with?

Let's just be curious about it. Be open-minded. Have it. And sometimes when you're replying to a text, and you're not talking another human being. A lot of times you're making assumptions of what their motive is. I've actually had that where somebody was like, they wanted me to,

this long time ago, they wanted me to break down the bid labor materials and all this other garbage, right? Which we just didn't do. Yeah. And I picked the phone up and I said, I said, hey, I got your text. What are you hoping I can help you with?

Or what are you hoping to hear from me? Very open-ended. And they were like, now, what am I thinking? If I'm making assumptions, I'm like, they want to nitpick the bid. They're going to, you know, how much profit are you making on this? All these stories we tell yourself. And he goes, my, my brother has X amount of weeks off of work. He's going to paint his house.

And he was curious how much money I was spending on materials to paint my house so he can budget it. That was his motive. It wasn't to nitpick me. And I go, okay, well, you know, how big's his house? And we had a conversation, how many rooms? And I'm like, okay, you can tell them to expect, you know, to spend to buy this many gallons of paint. I helped him do a material take off over the phone. I told him to go into our supplier if he wanted to buy his own paint and use our discount.

They could call me and he'd get 30% off. And we solved the problem where, you know, most people, I've seen people reply to a text like that. And they're like, we don't itemize our prices. And they get all defensive. Right. So, you know, learn to communicate with curiosity and empathy and. you're going to make a shit ton more money. Yeah, I think it's all problems and build a better brand, right?

Exactly, exactly. I think the natural thing, and we have a lot of pride in our industry, and we have a lot of ego. And usually what happens is we get our ego brain on and we go like, you dig your deal with in and be like, no, I'm right. You know, whatever this problem is, you're right and the customer is wrong. And then who knows what it goes from there. Then before you know, one of them uses the,

stupid ass word attorney. And then you're like, oh, my God, this is a simple like $500 fix. Then now we're doing this. Most of the issues that I've seen that I personally had and that I've seen contractors have through the years is friendly fire. Most of the issues are friendly fire. They're avoidable because your ego's in the way. You get defensive.

You're instead of curious and empathetic. And I'm, you know, not 100% of the time. Sometimes people are just jerks. right but um you know i i think you know that and that's why we we put so much emphasis like in our in our battleground program on sales training we called it the shin fu it's our sales process and um it's it's really yeah it's sales training but it's communication training right it's really what it is right you know i'm writing a book that's coming out the book's done it's coming out in april called sell unafraid you know it's about how to connect with people at a deeper level most

salespeople suck at connection. They have no discipline to do the prospecting and things they need to do. And then they act like they're doing you a favor when you want something or have a question. And they lack empathy and not all, but the majority of the I deal with salespeople are terrible. That's why I wrote the book. So it's learn to connect. Yeah, totally. I mean, you're out there speaking. You're an author. You're a podcaster. You're an educator. What are some business owners in our industry? What are they struggling? What are you finding the most right now in terms of like, hey, hey, bud, I need help with this.

Well, this is, what, February 7th? So this time of year, you know, from late November to about the first or second week of March, it's all leads, man. Everyone doesn't have any leads, right? You know, it's marketing. There's always a dip. And there's a dip. there's outside circumstances in the world that create a dip, right?

Meaning it's cold in some places and you can't work outside, right? So lead flow is down. The holidays are here, whatever. Those are circumstances that just are. Yeah. But if I, you know, if I could wave a magic wand, it would be that people would get fanatical about building their brand. I mean, something as simple as, like I was talking about our free Facebook group,

somebody will be like, man, my phone hasn't rang in 18, weeks or eight weeks, six weeks, three weeks or whatever. And so me being the nice guy that I am, I go, huh. So I go to their profile, their personal profile. And there's nothing about their business there about what they do. Right. You know? And so like just start with that. Like you, you're not proud enough of what you do to put what you do on your personal Facebook or Instagram. Right. You know, like, um, because listen, newsflash, most people don't see the it you put on your business page unless you're paying. Yeah.

And there's less engagement. There's people in your community. We do this thing that we train in Battleground, people how to use social media. And we do this five-day challenge thing. We teach them do. Over and over and over, when our new members come in and they do the five-day challenge, they'll sell $10,000, $20,000 in a week like that from doing it on their personal profile. Because you have people that follow you in your area that don't even know what you do.

Right. And so just something that simple is probably, the thing that drives me crazy and I talk about it all year long saying, if you're not fanatical about building your brand, being your own biggest fan, and then you know, you got the contractors who, well,

I get all my work by word of mouth. Okay, yeah, I get that. But out of the other side of your mouth, you're saying you want to grow a $5 million business. You're not going to grow $5 million business as a handyman unless you're marketing and building your brand.

It's, you know, we all want word of mouth, right? But if you want to grow and scale and get out of you doing everything in the business and build a team, you're going to have to have a marketing strategy. You know? Right. Yeah, yeah. See, both of these things can't be true. Which one means more to you? Do you want word of mouth and stay small? And that's cool.

If that's success to you and you only want to make 80 to 100 grand a year and live in poverty the rest of your life and break your back, go for it. You know? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So anyway, it gets me all fired up. So that and then knowing their numbers, you know, we do a so much of knowing your numbers and just what it takes to break even. Yeah, break in. Markup versus gross margin and all that stuff, right?

Yeah. You know, with fact, we just recorded last week, was it, a new course that's coming out, I think, in March on knowing your numbers. And, you know, and I sucked at school. sucked at math until I started a business and you started putting dollar signs in front of the math numbers. And then I learned math real quick. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, there's, there's something really cool. I mean, I'm obviously, we're both very proud to be in the industry we're in. I think what I've struggled with and what I see happening to me at times is that I get comfortable. And it's pretty easy to be comfortable in the trades, right? You can make a good

living. There's, there's, there's, the calls are coming in. People need contractors, typically, right? But being, being comfortable as a blessing and a curse. And if you don't step out of your comfort zone, you're not going to get to that level you're talking about. You're not going to increase you're going to, you might circumstances like COVID when it went crazy. Yeah, I made extra, you know, one million dollars last year, but that's not. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I just had this conversation, I think it was last night with, yeah, a friend of ours, she's a top salesperson in a different industry. She's crushing it. I talked about when you're, when you're broke, when you're starting out, when times are tough, adversity's hitting you. It's kind of easy to be

hungry. Right. You know what I mean? Like, I got to find a way to win. Sure. And, and your, your necessity is higher. Right. Well, then you start winning, you know, and, necessity isn't as high because you could go a day without a sale and it's really not going to matter, right? And so we always talk about the true measure of the success you're going to have is how do you show up after you win? After you're already winning, how do you show up? Are you still as hungry? And so I do this talk and part of this talk that I do in workshops and stuff, we break it down deeper. Pull out my calculator here. I want you to think of a contractor that you know and what, I don't care what trade it is, what their average job size is. Okay.

So just store that in your head. Sure. Now, there are about 264 sales days a year. Okay. Take out weekends, holidays, blah, blah, blah. Okay. You know, you go into Google, how many working days a year are they? it's somewhere between 264 and 270, right?

Okay. So 264. Now, we've been doing the sales stuff for a long time with people. What we found on average, and I have, we've pulled people, I've done workshops, I've done private workshops with companies that have 10, 12 sales people,

and we get real. We talk through this stuff, my own experiences, my own companies. What we found is the average person who sells has about what we call two, mediocre sales days a week. Okay. A mediocre sales day is defined where I didn't check the boxes of the things I have control over as a salesperson. I can't make Jeremy, I can't make you buy

something today, but I can follow up, right? I can I can role play and get better as a salesperson. I could prospect. There's all these things that compound in one direction or another if you do or you don't do them. Right. So 50 weeks a year, times two days is 100 days. Mediocre sales days divided by 264. 100 divided by 264. That's about 38% of your days on average are mediocre sales days. Right.

So now, what was the average job size? Let's say 50,000. 50 grand. All right. So if I'm a sales guy and I got a $5 million a year quota, okay um divided by 264 days this is just how my brain works i got to basically sell 18 to 19 grand a day on average just to like yeah number right yeah times 100 mediocre sales days i'm costing myself two million bucks right there 1.8 million so that's how my brain reverse

engineers like things and i know it doesn't work out perfectly because a painter it could be a 7500 dollar job right right right right and whatever, but when I break it down into the daily number, now I might not sign a contract for that 18 grand today, but I will have taken the actions. I will have role played. I will, you know, followed up with somebody that, you know,

we do warranty calls. We do these things called unexpected intentional touches where you reach up to past customers and all these non-adogosables that are part of the sales guys roles that you have control over. When you compound that stuff, you're going to crush it. I got a GC in Milwaukee. So what we do, I'll tell your audience this. Yeah.

We say three times a day times 264 working days. It's 800 times a year. Right. Okay. In five to 15 minutes a day, let's say I built a garage for you last year, Jeremy. Yeah. I'm going to text you. Go, Jeremy.

It's Tom with ABC construction. Sometimes you can do a video. I like doing video because it's just clear. But it's text. It's not a bulk message. It's individual. Three people a day. Jeremy, I was just thinking about the garage we built for you last year. How's it looking?

That's it. Hey, we painted the first floor of the house last year or your kitchen cabin, it's whatever. And I was just going through some paperwork, saw your name and wanted to check in, see how it's going. You're not trying to sell something. You're simply with, it's an intentional, I care about you thing. Right. Right. Because most of us, we do the project.

we move on, we never think of them, we're on to the next lead. Exactly. What we have found is if you do that, rounded up to 800 times a year, we've been tracking this, we train this, about 5% on average are going to turn into projects. Yeah, that makes sense. 5% are going to turn into a sales conversation like,

hey, we were just talking about you the other day, or I was talking to my brother-in-law, and he's asked for your number and I forgot to give him, or, oh, thanks for reaching out. we actually sold that house and moved and we need to do work here, whatever it might be. Right, right. My buddy and Bob in Milwaukee in 2020, sold over $1.1 million additional just from doing this each day. Wow.

Okay. So this is one of those small stackable. This is what I mean by not allowing a mediocre sales day. Right. You know, it's setting a non-negotiable standard for yourself and your salespeople and just going, this is what we do. Yeah. Yeah. And that is uncommon.

I promise you your competitors aren't doing this. Oh, my God. No, I, 100%. That's why these little things are incremental. They seem minor. But when you stack it all up, you talk about your brand.

Like your brand becomes uncommon and very different, especially with contractors. Unfortunately, your competition usually, usually it's low price because they think that's all they can do. That's all the only value they have as a competitor is like, need to be the low-priced leader because I ain't doing anything else. Well, if you want less price resistance with the leads that come into your business,

start creating content that adds value to your ideal clients out there. Post every day on social, you open up a wall and you see something, go live on Facebook on your personal profile and educate us. Take the audio from that and have somebody write a blog post on educating somebody on whatever. Like we did this with our painting company. We were writing blogs about what's better, flat or eggshell paint because people go to Google. they look for this stuff. You need to be there.

You don't want all the third-party lead gen sites like Angie's list and this and that now. They have all these stupid college intern people that just got us out of school. They don't know anything about the trades. And we're writing articles on what shit costs. When the contractors aren't, we should be educating. And when you educate, you position yourself as the expert. And experts get more money. They can charge more.

They get less price resistance. you don't get shopped around as much. And that's low-hanging fruit. So it's, think of it this way. The content that you create that's educational and adds value to people is like a good golf shot that puts the ball right next to the cup. Right. So that the sales call is just a gimmie put.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah, they're already sold most of the way. So, yeah, I mean, what, going back to this thing of like this thing and do the trades and Why do you think so many contractors sell themselves short, whether that's professionally or financially or is it starting with the mentality of how you even got there? Like, you know, a lot of us maybe fall into it or maybe, you know, maybe we didn't, you know, like school or maybe we didn't want to go get the fort, whatever it may be. But do you start out in a negative spot and then you just keep rolling with that or like, why is it so common?

Yes. You know, I think it could be a few things. I could speak for myself. I grew up with a poor money mindset. Yeah. So I think your money mindset, how you think about money, how you talk about wealthy people under the roof of your home when you're growing up. You know, I heard like they rip somebody off. They're ogers.

They're if you're making money. I mean, dude, I do all this content on YouTube. I get comments all the time from contractors going, you know, you're ripping people off. You're a thief. And I'm like, hey, break the math down, homie. you're going to be a business or you're going to be a charity. And another wrong being a charity. If you're intending to be a charity, go be one.

You know, but so I think it's, I think it's money mindset. I think it's a lot of guys don't know it's possible because they grew up like I did, watching people in my life go, yeah, you figure up your cost, you add 10% and that's what you sell, sell the project debt, right? When we know that's the fastest way to broke is given a, what the going rates are. They have to be competitive. No,

you have to be, you have to differentiate and add more value and that makes you worth more. So I think it's a combination of all those things to be blunt, but that's why we do a lot of education

on the math. One of the first things that we encourage somebody do, if they're like, I don't know my numbers or they have head trash around raising their prices, I go, job cost your last 10 jobs.

Yeah. What'd you plan on making? What'd you make? That'll tell you the truth right there. Maybe you're in a good spot, but I guarantee you, 95% of the contractors at job costs their last 10 projects are going to have a serious wake-up call,

and they'll have all the motivation they need to raise their prices. Yeah, I mean, or they'll have all the most, maybe they're priced right, but they're not as efficient as they need to be in the field because they don't have the processes to keep the team accountable or trained and, you know, on track. And maybe you're, that was it with me. I was charging enough back in the day.

I didn't have the management in the field to finish shit on time. You know, and so I was bleeding on the back end of the job. You know, I was charging, right? But I was bleeding profits here. But you don't know that unless you job cost. Right. Or maybe you're hitting your budgets of man hours on a job. But and you're on budget.

So you're like, hey, I'm good as an estimator when it comes with time and stuff. But I'm just not charging enough. Right. I know what the problem is. Yeah, no, it makes total sense. I mean, I love the quote that you have on your website. I know you say it often, but it's something I want to, you know, reiterate.

I think we said it here is stop stealing from your family, what you're worth and build a business that serves you. And, you know, this is attainable for all of us, but, you know, I think it is it due to a lack of confidence or commitment or both? Like that we, you know, we hear that. We go, that makes sense. but, you know, I'm not willing to make the change, the commitment. I don't know what it is.

Probably pisses you off, Mr. Contractor Fight. Yeah. Well, listen, there's an old saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Ah. And for me, I didn't make chance. Listen, this could be my health, relationships, business, finances, personal budget. But I think for some of us, you just don't give a crap about getting serious about making a change until there's some pain, until the pain is great enough. Yeah.

And I find that the people that come into our paid programs in our community that win the most are those that have had the most pain. And they've been like a fly, you know, you ever see all the dead flies in a window sill because they were trying to get out the window that's closed? They keep banging their head into the glass thinking they can get outside when you can't hard work your way to get. getting through the window, right? You can't hit it harder. But if the fly were to hover back from the window and look around the room, maybe you're going to see a different way out of the room, right? There's an open window or open door. So I just think a lot of it is the pain, sadly, the pain needs to get great enough to ask for help. To ask for help to realize that, you know, the way I've been doing it just isn't working.

And I don't question like anyone's intentions. Nobody's trying to screw up their family or their finances or their life. They're just doing the best they know to do. And then I think the other BS thing people tell themselves is they don't have time to educate themselves. They don't have time for coaching or mentoring or reading a book or whatever it might be that's going to make them better. And it's funny because I work, I do other things in businesses I have and things like

that outside of the contract. contractor space as well. The contractor space in a lot of ways is still relatively new to coaching and mentoring. True. Like a real estate agent knows that you hire a coach. A mortgage broker, these guys drop six, you know, what? I know a lot of guys that are lenders and mortgage brokers, whatever you call them, that spend $250,000 a year on coaching for their company. Yeah. Right. You know, I know real realtors that get into the industry as a one-day-old realtor and they're paying a thousand bucks a month for coaching because that's the culture of the industry. Right. And I don't think that has made its way through the trades yet. So I think it's still relatively new to, you know, why would I do that? But, you know, every high performer in a sport in business, whatever, they have a coach. Right. They invest in themselves. And I think a lot of people, they also don't understand how fast that ROI can come.

Like I said earlier in the trades, right? You're operating. And if you're doing a $50,000 project, right? And I can help you raise your gross profit 5%. Right. What's that? $2,500, immediately like that. All right.

Well, our battleground. coaching programs like seven grand a year. I'm probably going to double the price soon. But anyway, it's like seven grand a year and you get massive coaching and help. So in, you know, two or three jobs, we can have this thing paid for if you do what your coach to do. And now you're now, now it's a true, it's like your own 401 invest four. 401k investment plan at this. Yeah, right.

So, I mean, I've had people come in where. they went through our first numbers course inside our coaching group and got on a call with one of our coaches on the very next project they sold a job for a hundred grand more than they would have right i mean and and we preach 50% gross profit so another hundred grand in revenue meant he sold it for another 50 grand a profit after one call and that's just not very common in the in the contractor world yet where they but you also got to be coachable too. Like I said, you don't, you know, this information has been out there for everybody for decades, right? But until you're ready to implement it, you ain't going to do it.

Right. Yeah, that's a good point. That's why, hence, if they're not ready, and they haven't tried yet, because they know they probably wouldn't commit to anything. Yeah, and it's, it's tough. Listen, I'll, I acknowledge, like, there's a lot of moving parts to run in a business, right? You know, we don't, as a contractor, we're not generally working, in a controlled widget factory, right? Where it's just, there's no outside conditions and the assembly line is moving. And I mean, you've got to be a shrink with your customers and with your team. You know, you've got to know how to sell and market and lead and know your numbers and all

and manage and delegate. There's so much to know that it can be overwhelming. And I think a lot of guys just don't know where to start. So they just go to what they're familiar with and do the same old, same old. Right, right. Which is why we always start with the numbers. then we teach you to sell, then we teach you to market in that order. You know, you got to know your numbers if you're going to sell right.

Yeah, no, no doubt. No doubt. Don't book more sales calls and don't book more sales calls if you don't know what you should be charging. Yeah, right. Yeah, that makes sense. That or makes sense. So besides the book that you got coming out, when does that come out, by the way? In April.

April. Cool. And then what else, what else you guys got cooking out the contractor fight? You got some new things coming up or what, what are you, I know you're in a lot. of spaces. So, you know, what drives you? We'll get you out of bed a little bit faster. Helping people win, man. Like, that's, that's, I'm all, I'm a coach at heart. I mean, I coached high school football for 17 years. I just, I love to help people win. That's what gets me up and drives me. Right. You know, we, we just got a new content studio that we'll end up moving out of

because it's not a final location. We'll probably build a place. But, you know, it's just kind of given more life to the content that we're creating for the podcast and the channel to educate more people. You know, in the fall, we have our big event in Denver, downtown Denver this year called Mile High Profit Summit. We'll have five, six hundred contractors in the room. Nice. And working on a great lineup for people.

And, yeah, I mean, it's a, it's funny. The longer we're doing this, the less we offer. Do you know what I mean? Because you find out. Yeah. Yeah. Just get, let's get better. better at, so like our battleground program, I call it our cheeseburger, right? Like if you could have the

best location, the best marketing, the best branding, the best audience in the world, right, restaurant. But if your cheeseburger isn't as good as it can be, you're never going to grow and have a business. So we always go back to the cheeseburger. How do we make the cheeseburger better instead of adding another shit to the menu? So that's a good point. I think that's a, that's a common thing that we do, right? Oh, we need to add more products. It's like that whole G.C. thing. I don't want to say that I can't do that, you know. But then if you suck at it anyways, then what it would be doing? You can cherry pick those things.

Like you could say we're a kitchen remodeler, kitchen and bath and that's it. That's all that's on your website. That's all you spend money and focus on when you create content. That doesn't mean that you're not going to get other calls for things or your past customers are going to call you and go, hey, can you do a garage for us or an addition or whatever it might be? Then you cherry pick those, but just committing to really. being tunnel vision around, you know, sniper type focus.

Right. Yeah, definitely. For my painting company, it was interior painting. Like, yeah, we did, if we did 300 jobs a year, maybe 40 of them were exteriors. Yeah. Where most painters are like, couldn't wait for exterior season. We hated exteriors because Mother Nature got involved. We had less control.

There's more tight issues. And now we got to like, there's more scraping and all that other garbage. We just wanted to get in, get out, get paid. Get in, get out, get paid. And that was the interior game for us. Right. At the exteriors that came, we sold them at a number that worked for us. And we banged them out.

Awesome. Yep. Well, Tom, I appreciate you being here. It's been a wealth of information, as I knew it would be. How do people get a hold of you? It's the contractor fight.com, correct? You got it. Yeah, contractor fight.com.

And then I'm active at contractor fight on Instagram and anywhere on social, man. but yeah, appreciate you having me. Yeah, thanks so much for being here, man. You got it. Keep slamming away, man. You're doing good stuff. I will. Thank you.

Thanks again for being here. Construction Executives Live. I'm your host, Jeremy Owens. I appreciate you being here. And again, reach out to me with any of that content or speakers that you would like to see. Just like Tom, I'm looking for people like that. Bring it. Bring the honesty.

Bring the value. And let's get better together in 2024. So thank you guys. Happy New Year. We'll see you next month. See ya. You've been listening to In The Zone and Construction Executives Live with Jeremy Owens. Be sure to subscribe to In The Zone and stay in the know with the best minds in the construction industry. To nominate an innovator or change maker in the construction industry, connect with your management peers, and stay up to date with construction industry news. Be sure to visit usconstructionzone.com.