The Home Service Expert Podcast - Building And Leading a High Performing Team

Episode Date: August 30, 2018

Troy Timmer is a registered corporate coach and business consultant at Certified Contractors Network. Troy is passionate about helping entrepreneurs become high performers by providing them with the r...ight tools, skills, and proven processes to run their businesses. In this episode, we talked about customer service, leadership, marketing...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. All right, home service experts. I'm here with Troy Timmer, and Troy has experience in the
Starting point is 00:00:39 industry that spans over 22 years. He's a home service contractor. He knows a lot about roofing. 17 years he spent in roofing. He used to be a sheriff. He played college football. This guy knows a lot of stuff. Now he's out just helping guys and gals like us that are trying to do well in the home service industry. So, Troy, if you could tell everybody how you got started and really what you've done.
Starting point is 00:01:03 Tell us a little, maybe a couple of stories about some. I appreciate you having me on. As you kind of said, about 22 years ago, I was a deputy sheriff in Bozeman, Montana, and I'd done that for a while. I got started in this industry through my father. He was a fireman for a time. And, you know, firemen, they work two days a week. The rest of the time, they have a business on the side. He did roofing on the side. So I was working for him to make money. It didn't take long to figure out I could make a lot more money doing this than I could in law enforcement.
Starting point is 00:01:38 And so I made a shift and I started my own roofing company. I was like a lot of people to get into this industry. You know, I don't really know how to run a business. I don't know how to put the products on. And I did the best I could. And I did that for 17 years. Then it was time for me to use my skills and knowledge to help other home improvement contractors and help them improve their business and that's what I do now today I work for a company based out of Washington DC certified contractors network and I coach contractors every day so tell me a little bit about your business and what caused you to go over
Starting point is 00:02:23 to the network switch over the country business and what caused you to go over to the network. Switch over to the contract. I started a roofing business in the 2000s. We were in a boom until about 2009. Things were good. I was in Bozeman. It's a town of about, I don't know, 45,000 people in the county. There's 70,000.
Starting point is 00:02:43 Yep. And, you know, we started out doing some new construction work, but what we learned that where you really make your money in that industry is through replacement. I worked with homeowners. And so we got big into re-roofing. We did a lot of high-end roofs, mopping unit, family roofs, re-roofing, new construction, and then new construction up in
Starting point is 00:03:06 a ski area called Big Sky which is about 45 miles south of Bozeman and also Yellowstone Club which is the largest private ski resort in the country that's very exclusive high end. We did quite a bit of work up in there so you know I really wanted to position
Starting point is 00:03:22 myself as a leader in the market as the professional by the work we did, how we treated people. But at the same time, you know, I had to go through a lot of hurdles and a lot of hoops to learn how to run my business effectively. Yeah, there's a lot to it. I mean, every day it seems like there's a new struggle. I mean, I'm in the middle of it, and I love what I do. But we just got done with the manager. I flew all my guys out from 10 states, and we discussed a lot of the problems.
Starting point is 00:03:55 And I think the biggest challenge that most businesses have, and you can tell me you've been doing this, you've been training a lot longer than I have, it's really getting great help, but it's also being a leader and making them into an a player and really knowing how to recruit because it always seems like i'm a slave and not necessarily me but it seems like most of the guys that i know they're like i just can't get out of the field i need to like we've got too much business especially the economy is getting really good and great people are hard to come by. So what do you think the biggest challenge is and what do you think about this whole recruiting process?
Starting point is 00:04:33 I think labor and labor shortage are a huge problem for our industry, finding qualified people. But I also believe that you have to keep the people you have, right? Right. And to do that and to be an effective leader, one is you have to empower people to grow. And that means that you've got to meet people where they're at. And you probably know this, Tommy, but you've got to meet people where they're at and you've got to figure out
Starting point is 00:04:59 what's their developmental level. And then you're going to have to apply the appropriate leadership style in order to make them succeed in their job or help them exceed in their job and ultimately succeed in your company. But I think a lot of times we lose good people and they don't leave your company because they're going to get paid $2, $3, $4 an hour more, $10,000 a year. They leave because the way you made them feel. And if you don't manage and lead people appropriately, they're not going to feel good. And they're going to go somewhere else and try and find that. And I think that's important. The other thing is most of us or most contractors
Starting point is 00:05:41 are not equipped and they don't have the tools or the skills to hire people, right? So when you do that, I think you ought to use maybe another company, a recruiting or hiring firm that can help you find some qualified people. So what is the good and the bad about a recruiting firm? Because I've tried them and in my opinion um they're very expensive right and one is one thing is you gotta find a firm that understands our industry you know if you're just going to look for a corporate hiring or a headhunting firm or recruiting firm they may not understand our our industry and so they just take their knowledge of what they have for
Starting point is 00:06:27 that different industries corporate world and trying to plan that sometimes doesn't work so if you find it you know company that focuses on our industry that that makes it a lot easier and also in the setup process make sure that they understand exactly what the job entails and what the skills are that you expect from that person. And they can be very expensive. But at the same time, you look at the flip side of that, Tommy, let's say you're hiring a salesperson, sales manager. Hiring the wrong person can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's lost sales and future sales. Yeah, it's something I've had to learn over time is pay more,
Starting point is 00:07:12 give benefits, try to do more team building events. We went to a baseball game, a spring training game here in Arizona this past weekend and took them to the casino afterwards. And everybody's really happy. I mean, it was a great weekend, but we're kicking back up here. We're just like, look, we got to go ahead and get out there. And we need to hire about 20 people here in the next three to four weeks. And to do that, you know, I've got a full-time recruiter, but I'm bringing a second recruiter on because, you know, if we're going to continue to grow like this, the people are where it's at. But you've got to be able to train them.
Starting point is 00:07:47 And so many people think you just come into our location in Arizona, you spend two to three weeks here, and you come out a pro. And then my managers call me up and say, hey, they don't know this like you said they were going to. I'm like, nobody's going to retain three weeks' worth of 100% of 12-hour-a-day information. So it's an ongoing process. What kind of advice do you have? Because so many people think, hey, I train them for a month. They should be pros by now. I just think it's an ongoing, systematic thing.
Starting point is 00:08:15 You have to have an onboarding process, and it's a process where you kind of cross-train them, right? If you're going to hire a new salesperson, you're going to bring them on. You're going to obviously train them in the things sales-related, but they should also go out and spend a day with each of your production crews. You know, they need to spend a day with the admin, the office people, or maybe the finance people. So they get a much better idea of how the whole company culture is, how everything works, what's,
Starting point is 00:08:45 you know, what is required, but it's, it's continual training. And it's also, you need to sit down and set out some expectations and kind of a goal or track for them to follow. And then as they're going through that, you always got to be measuring what you expect, right? So you got to be talking to them about how they're doing. Are they meeting expectations? You know, what needs to happen?
Starting point is 00:09:09 You're going to have to change. It's not like a one size fits all. And a lot of times we ask our employees to train other employees and our employees may not be equipped to train them. And one of the best things you can do within a company is go through some situational leadership training. And what that does is that allows your managers and the people who are going to be managing other people to understand that you need to apply the appropriate management style
Starting point is 00:09:40 or leadership style to that employee based upon their developmental level in what you're asking them to do. Because if you don't, you don't manage them right. You don't manage them properly. They're not happy. You're not happy. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:09:57 So tell me a little bit more about that management styles. I'm curious to hear what you have to do. It's task based, right? So you're going to look at an employee and you want to meet them where they're at, which basically means you want to talk to them about what you're expecting them to do, what the expectations are for the job or the task and kind of lay it out for them and make sure that they understand it. And then basically people are going to go through four different developmental styles in situational leadership.
Starting point is 00:10:31 It's D1, 2, 3, and 4. D1 is they have a high commitment, which means they have high confidence, high motivation. They're excited about the job, the task, but their competence is low. They don't have the knowledge or the skills they need to do that task well. But as they progress and learn, now their confidence is going to come up. So they're going to have like low to medium or moderate confidence. But typically their commitment goes down because then they realize, hey, this is work. This is hard.
Starting point is 00:10:55 Hey, I don't know as much as I think I know. You know, so the commitment comes down and that's in the D2 level. They go to D3 now, their confidence goes up, their commitment may not be as high, and it's usually variable. And a lot of times that depends on their motivation attitude. But as they get really good at their job or their task, they go into the D4, which is they have high commitment, high competence. And there's four different leadership styles that you want to use when you're to apply to those different developmental levels of employees. You got delegating, which is for the D1 person.
Starting point is 00:11:34 You got coaching for the D2. You got supported for the D3. And then, excuse me, direct is the first one. Then the last one is delegate for the D4. So somebody that's new, you've got to be more directive. You've got to tell them what to do, when to do it, how to do it, when to get back to you. And then it just kind of goes from there. It's a fascinating thing, but it's very effective in giving your people that you expect to manage others the tools and some skills in how to do that.
Starting point is 00:12:06 Yeah, I agree. We do a lot to get the right people in the door to start with. You know, this morning we sent one of my managers that was trading for another market. We had to send him home. He just didn't have the physical capabilities to handle the job. He was out here for several weeks. It was kind of hard because you invest all this money into somebody but it's a lot worse if they get out there and they can't succeed so that was one scenario then we've had ones that we really work on training somebody to the next level up i had a guy on a podcast a while back that said hey it's really hard to find a players it's a lot easier to find c players and manage them up to A players. And I totally believe in that.
Starting point is 00:12:45 And I will say, though, the interview process and doing personality profiling and making sure you're doing a thorough background and having different managers do an interview with the same person to get the vibe for that person and really having a clear set of expectations before they start and define their role properly is probably the biggest, hardest part because so many people, I don't know about your experience, Troy, but mine is we kind of fill seats when we absolutely have to do it,
Starting point is 00:13:17 and it's never the right person. It's like a warm body. And I've done it too much. I've hired a warm body, and it's so tough to hire when you absolutely need people. It's easier to hire when you're like, well, I don't necessarily need somebody,
Starting point is 00:13:31 but I could probably use somebody. That's what you should be thinking, especially during the growth. Yeah, I agree with you, Tommy. I think you should always be looking, right? You talk about your ABC players. Yep. Always be looking.
Starting point is 00:13:44 You could be always replacing the bottom 20%, right? your ABC players. Yep. Always be looking. You could be always replacing the bottom 20%, right? Your C players. Yep. And unfortunately, a lot of owners in this industry, they're quick to hire and slow to fire. And it needs to be the other way around. You got to be a little bit slower to hire and you got to be quick to fire because it just doesn't get any better. And sometimes I was this way in my business. I mean, I wanted it more for my employees and they wanted it for themselves. You know, I wanted them to succeed at what they're doing more than they did. And that's hard. Yeah, that's tough when you got an owner that just does not want. I think that goes back to passion.
Starting point is 00:14:26 And if you don't have passion, it kind of gets lost. I think one of the first articles I wrote for Forbes was it was titled Passion. And it's just what do you see? I mean, you see a lot of entrepreneurs. You see a lot of business owners. Tell me your take on the, you know, there's some people that have a will. There's some people that have the way. What are your thoughts? We all have, you know, there's some people that have a will, there's some people that have the way. What are your thoughts?
Starting point is 00:14:45 We all have, you know, our strengths and our weaknesses. And when you're running a company, starting a company, understanding your strengths and weaknesses is very important. Because as owners, we wear a lot of hats, especially when we're starting, right? And so we wear a lot of hats. And because we can do it the best until we get some people in place. And then you got to start expecting other people to do certain things within your company. As you grow, you're going to need managers at certain positions in certain departments, right? But if you don't understand what you like to do and don't like to do, you're going to spend most of your time on what you like to do. And the other things are going to,
Starting point is 00:15:24 they're going to lack. You're not going to spend the time there. And it's going to make your company unbalanced. And what happens then is the owners who wear too many hats like that, trying to do too many things, they become the bottleneck within the company. And having the owner as a bottleneck just keeps the company from growing and being profitable. So sometimes if we understand what we're good at, we can get out of the way, let some other people do those other things, just manage them, and then as an owner you focus on what you're good at. Yeah, I think that's a big problem that I've really had to grasp is I've actually brought on consultants that are much better than me at whether it be organization, whether it be, you know, right now we're going through Lean. And we're just really, there's a place for everything. We got rid of the cleaning crew. We clean our own bathrooms. We clean our own stuff.
Starting point is 00:16:31 And we just go back to this process of where can we get more efficient and how do we make people stand out on their own more? And I'm really enjoying the process. And I think it's going to be a game changer for our company. And I just really think that it's hard to ask for help and it's hard to trust people. But that's probably the biggest thing that gets in the way of an owner or entrepreneur is that willingness to say, I think I can do it better. Which you did do it better at one point because you started a business and hopefully you're successful. But when you get bigger, so many of my guys at one point, Troy, we used to just all be wearing a lot of hats.
Starting point is 00:17:09 And it's hard to convince the whole staff, look, you've got to stop wearing a hat. You've got to have a rifle shot rather than a shotgun. It's one hat now. You need to be darn good at it. So how do you do that whole shift as you start to grow? If you recognize the fact that you can't do everything, and as your company grows it may go beyond your skill level and i think you know humility plays into that
Starting point is 00:17:32 understanding yourself and you know that's hard for some people but at some point you're going to get sick of it right you went into this business you started this business you're going to make a lot of money you're going to have a lot of time freedom and then you wake up one day and realize that you got a lot of problems you spend your time putting out fires and it's no fun so you have to get out of the way and put in some processes because what wears people out and what's frustrating Tommy is when you're managing people. You know, in a lot of companies I see that I work with, they may have some sort of kind of processes, but really they have people.
Starting point is 00:18:16 People are doing things. Right. And to use a metaphor, let's say your company is a wagon, right? Well, what's happening is you have all your employees running around the wagon trying to fix the wagon because your wagon has square wheels. It's not very smooth running. It's not efficient. And you just have people running around trying to fix things, but nobody's doing anything. Your wagon's not moving. So you have to put in a process that people can follow, and then you manage that process. And that's how you're going to create efficiencies within your business.
Starting point is 00:18:52 It's how you're going to create happy customers. And ultimately, you're also going to have happy employees. And that's when you're going to really see your business grow. And if you're going to scale your business and grow, you can't just put people in the locations. Yeah, you got to have a great plan. I totally agree. I think you really got to sit down and get your, your whole processes in place. And a lot of it is, it starts with your warehouse and your office. And you know, all my doors have their clear windows on the doors and uh you can see in
Starting point is 00:19:28 so you can see if we're busy you can see if we're not and everybody can see everybody there's not this i used when i moved in this office there was huge cubicles you never knew what was going on right so i think that that's a mistake so it goes into this this planning phase and you've got to you know i think it all starts with a business plan and an organizational chart. And a business plan is not easy to do. I mean, especially if you haven't run a business to try to work this stuff out is really difficult. And I do think it's good to get some support, whether it's a consultant or maybe a captain or somebody that's done it before, a captain of the team. I mean, either way, I'm all about coaches.
Starting point is 00:20:08 I've got a golf coach. I've actually got a ping pong coach. Anything I do, I try to get help because I know I could get to the end of the road a lot faster if I ask for help. And I think it's a good idea. What do you think the biggest mistake that catches most entrepreneurs off guard when they're trying to scale? Like you said, not having a plan, right?
Starting point is 00:20:27 Not truly understanding the numbers and what it takes to run your company. So to have a business plan, you've got to have a budget, right? You've got to have your annual budget with the different revenue centers. You have to have a sales forecasting plan. And you've got to have a work installed plan right how much revenue can you produce in a day and you have to understand those things you know what are your sales goals for the different areas by having a plan what that does is that creates that track for your people to run on you know you set the goals for your different departments, for your salespeople, your production department, you know, and then you have to share that with your people, share the goals with them.
Starting point is 00:21:11 You have to be able to have scoreboards so that they can see the goals throughout the year, right? And so when you're going to scale your business, basically you need to have that plan in place and how you're going to execute it. Have the processes that you use to run your company. That's all part of your plan. And then you're going to take that and put it into a location. Or even if you're scaling in the same location, just getting bigger.
Starting point is 00:21:40 And then you've got to put the people in. And you've got to train them on the process. You've got to make sure they understand the goals and what their responsibilities are like you said setting those expectations for them and then as you go through the year you have to be measuring that plan measuring your processes all the time you know and we use the total quality management meeting to do that that's how we would evaluate our process and say is it working are we profitable on our jobs are our customers happy you know our employees happy how's our communication things like that what is that meeting that you call it management meeting or a tqm meeting and really okay what you're doing is you're going to look at the jobs you did the
Starting point is 00:22:27 month before, right? And it depends if you've got a lot of jobs, you can't review all of them. So you may have to have two of these meetings a month, but you're going to pick certain ones that you're going to evaluate as a team. So what you do is you bring in your sales, you bring in your production, your admin, and you set a meeting agenda you know exactly what you're going to talk about all the jobs are job-costed you've got the jobs you want to discuss figured out and that's part of the agenda so people can bring an appropriate paperwork
Starting point is 00:22:55 be able to discuss it and then you're going to look at okay were we on budget over budget or under budget and why why did we go over budget? What was it? Was it pricing? Was it estimating? Was it the way it was sold? Was it the way it was produced? Things like that.
Starting point is 00:23:13 If it went under budget, why? Why was it more efficient? Then you can have sales evaluate production through the eyes of the customer. How did production do on that job? You know, speaking to the customer afterwards, rating a one to five. Production can rate sales on their estimate, the quality of the scope of work, information, things like that, how happy was the customer. And then you talk about feedback from the customer. And then the whole idea is to look at the things that are going on, and then your team figures out how to tighten everything up. And the beauty of it is once you get this started, really,
Starting point is 00:23:52 then you want to let your team do the meetings and the owner just steps back and lets them handle it. No, the owner doesn't want to be a buffalo. They need to stay out of it and use the collective intelligence of their team to run that meeting and to figure out how to solve these problems. Because we all want employees not to bring just problems to us. We want them to bring solutions. Well, that's your chance to have them figure out the solutions for the problems within your business. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Starting point is 00:24:19 And I think that that's a good road to go down if you could get there. What do you think it takes to be a solid leader? Give me some input on releasing control and really empowering other people. You know, for one is, you know, what are your expectations as an owner in the business? What do you want to do? Are you getting out of it what you want out of it? You know, what are your goals? And then finding the people that you can trust,
Starting point is 00:24:46 you know, and that's always the thing, right? How do I find a person I trust? Well, you have to work hard at and do some things we talked about earlier, you know, with hiring people and managing people. But really, you have to empower people to do a good job, and you have to step out of the way and let them do their job and major it. If at some point they're not doing their job, then you can find somebody else. But if you realize as an owner that I want to grow and scale this business bigger than what it is now, I can't do it myself, so I need a team. And you've got to build a team and do some of the things like what you talked about too for team building and things like that and let your team go you know I always felt in my business homie that I wasn't the smartest guy there that my people had the
Starting point is 00:25:38 answers and all we had to do was talk about it, and they would come up with the answers. And if you do that and let them come up with the answers, they're going to apply it. They're going to do it. But if you're always telling them what you need to do, they're not always going to do what you want them to do. Yeah, yeah, that's a tough one. I do agree. You know, it's hard when you've got a big company that's in 10 states or whatever it might be. And to give complete control over to separate, there's not enough unity. You
Starting point is 00:26:13 know, it makes it tough. And if you want to have a huge company, there needs to be the same expected results over and over. So I do think there needs to be some type of corporate structure to make sure that each person is doing things the same way. But while at the same time giving them the freedom to expand their horizons and try different things, what's the easiest way to keep that kind of in the middle and keeping up with the other one? Creating some unity within the different departments? Yeah, unity, but you're also letting them try new things i mean there's a kind of a tango it's right one before the other what you have to do is you have to find good people to run that location right some qualified people that have experience and it
Starting point is 00:26:59 may mean that you're going to pay somebody more than what you want, but to get the good people to do what you want, you might have to pay them more. And as your company grows through different locations, it's bigger, you're going to lose some of that small company feel. But what you have to do within each location, create that family, that unity within that location through team building activities, through doing community activities. And, you know, a lot of times it can be community or nonprofit things that your employees have an interest in. Right. So there's more buy in from them local and more buy in your team. and then probably once a year bring everybody together to have something fun where you know
Starting point is 00:27:47 it's a maybe it's a vacation you know or it's a two-day event where you do some training a lot of different team building activities and then just have fun i think people are their happiest when you hire them to do a job and you let them do that job and you manage them appropriately. And they feel like you believe them from the ownership perspective. Yeah, I think that also what really helps grow that is keeping track. And a lot of owners, you know, it starts with a CRM and they want to know how they're doing. A lot of people, they want to know good or bad. They want to know what their job's measured on and if they're performing it.
Starting point is 00:28:29 Because so many of us go around and we don't tell people what their real job is supposed to be. And then we don't tell them how they know if they're doing a great job or not a good job. And you could take a manager in two different markets and show them, you know, these are the seven KPIs we're looking at. Both of you could probably learn a lot from each other based on these numbers that we've evaluated. So tell me a little bit about that. You know, having a CRM company-wide, especially at different locations is pretty important for checking up on the different locations and seeing how they're doing. But again, it's like, you know, if you have a manager that location or different managers,
Starting point is 00:29:08 you wanna set the expectation based upon the goals, you know, your overall company goal for revenue, for sales, for work, install those types of things, but then it's broken up amongst the different locations, right? And it could be different, but making sure they clearly understand what you expect for them from their position and how you're going to measure it is important because people want to
Starting point is 00:29:31 know how they can measure how they can stand up if they're doing a good job or not and that involves you know feedback continuous feedback whether it's through evaluations used to do a performance evaluation once a year and a merit evaluation once a year, right? Because you don't want to think every time that you have an evaluation that a raise could be at hand or could be an option. But then you've got to give them other types of feedback, and that's on a weekly basis. But you have to measure what they're doing to make sure that they're getting done what's expected. Are they on track to hit the revenue goal for the year? Are they on track to hit their sales goal for the year? Things like that. And then it's letting people know that they're doing a good job. And a lot of times it doesn't have to be anything really big. It might
Starting point is 00:30:22 just be a phone call saying, just call and let you know, I think you're doing a great job. Keep it up. If there's anything I can do to help you, let me know. And that type of feedback and that type of appreciation goes a long ways in keeping people happy and keeping people doing a good job. Yeah. The more I've been learning about this lean concept is the owner reaches out to basically each person in the whole company once a week. And you try to say something motivating and you give a compliment. And there are times where, you know, if you set the structure up correctly, the people should know if they're not performing because they're lower than everybody else. And they've got the metrics and the KPIs to identify that they're not doing it. Right.
Starting point is 00:31:10 So, you know, when it comes to hiring, I want to go back to this because I think it's so important is tell me a little bit about what you would do if you had to hire 10 good roofers here the next month. I mean, other than get a recruiter, I mean, what do you think is the best, most effective way? Is there something outside of just Indeed and Craigslist and ZipRecruiter and things of that nature? I would put an ad on Facebook, all right? And a lot of times, you know, as a business, you may have a business page, right?
Starting point is 00:31:43 And you might put a post on your business page that you're looking for whatever position right no what you need to do is an ad and with like the facebook ads you can they're pretty inexpensive but what you want to do is you want to do an ad that is going to attract the type of person you want so they're going to want to hire some people for in the field so you're going to want to hire some people in the field. So you're going to have to put together an ad. It's just like marketing for your company, right? And it has to be about them. This ad can't be about you and your company and how great that is.
Starting point is 00:32:15 It's got to be about that person and what are they looking for? What do they want? You know, continuous work, your benefits, your pay, some of the things that you do. So you put together an ad that's focused on that person, not necessarily on your company. Then you can go in and you can set the demographics to match the people you're looking for and put that out on Facebook. And what's going to happen now, that ad's going to show up on those people's timelines. You know, the chance of them ever seeing a post off your business page is pretty small. But by doing a targeted, directed ad, you're going to go on to their timelines
Starting point is 00:33:01 and they're going to see that ad and say, oh, this company's looking to hire. And it may be that it's the spouse, the wife or the girlfriend that sees that ad and tells them you should check this out. Well, don't you want to target, wouldn't you want to hit a certain demographic now that Facebook allows you to take all these targeting concepts? I mean, wouldn't you want to hit? I don't know. Let's say you're looking between 21 and 40 years old
Starting point is 00:33:29 or whatever you might be looking for. What do you want to go after certain people that you know so you're not spending as much money? Facebook allows you to set those demographics. So it's like what geographical area do you want this ad to be in? What's the age group? What's the income level, right? And then you can also put in there the type of careers that they're doing.
Starting point is 00:33:51 This would be construction, you know, roofing, siding, windows, whatever it is. You can get pretty specific on the demographics, and it really narrows it down. So it's going to go on the timeline of your target audience, so the target people you want to put this ad in front of that may want to come work for you. Because there's a good chance they're not happy where they're working. Right? Yeah, there is a good chance. They may be looking.
Starting point is 00:34:15 We can't assume that just because they've been with somebody a while that they're happy there. Maybe they just have a lack of options. Yeah. What do you think? So you think it's good to try to poach people? I mean, I don't consider it stealing employees. They get up and leave on their own,
Starting point is 00:34:37 but do you market towards people in the home service industry already? Absolutely. Because that's your target, right? So if you're going to do the targeted facebook ads and we've some of the uh contractors i've worked with have had good success by placing the ads on facebook a lot more success than they had for doing the indeed or you know monster or craigslist or whatever okay Okay. Well, I like that advice.
Starting point is 00:35:06 Let's kind of switch gears a little bit. I love to talk about marketing and sales. Marketing and sales are my two big passions in life. And referrals and getting reviews is a good part of marketing that we forget about. What strategies do you recommend for business owners that are struggling to get referrals? Because it can be the lifeblood of your company. You know, and then you have to look at why you're struggling to get referrals, right? And is it because the customers are not satisfied, not happy?
Starting point is 00:35:35 And really, Tommy, in our society today, with it being so fast-paced and everybody having a smartphone and all the apps, we have to go beyond just having a satisfied customer. Because satisfied customers are really not going to talk about you. They may not do referrals. They may not go online and do reviews. So you have to have customers that are like, you give them a wow experience, going past the
Starting point is 00:36:06 satisfied to a raving fan type customer. And so then you have to look at how that customer contractor relationship is throughout in order to give them a wow experience. And you've got to go beyond what you're doing now. And for most people, for most customers, I mean, to really give them that wow experience is you just have to go beyond the expectations that you set for them
Starting point is 00:36:33 and do more than what you say you're going to do. And let's face it, for some contractors, they have a hard time just getting satisfied customers. There's always little problems here and there and the other thing you can do is up front is tell them you know this is what we're going to do for you we're going to do this project for you this is how we're going to handle it throughout the process we're going to make sure that you're 100 satisfied at the end so you know what to expect from us, but this is what we expect from you as our customer, right? That
Starting point is 00:37:10 you will communicate with us to let us know how we're doing, give us feedback so we can improve it if we're not being 10 out of 10. When the job's over we expect you to pay us the way you said you were going to pay us, and also we expect to get free referrals from you when we're done. So it's all about setting those expectations up front. And then communicating it at several points throughout that relationship with that customer. It starts with sales, right? Set those expectations, communicate them.
Starting point is 00:37:43 Then it goes to production when that job is passed from sales to production. So if you do a pre-construction meeting, you're going to talk about it again. This is what we're going to do. This is for you. We're going to do all these things, but this is what we want from you. And you just reestablish those expectations. And if you do it several times, now they know that's expected of them, right? And that's what customers want. They want to know what to expect.
Starting point is 00:38:14 So you got marketing, you've got accounting, you've got hiring, you've got all these different facets of a business. When you walk into a business, where do you usually have to start? The finances. Does that, you know, where is that company at?
Starting point is 00:38:33 Does that owner know his numbers? You know, how are they financially? And so when I start working with a company, what we do is we look at a couple years' worth of profit loss, the balance sheet, and to see what's their gross profit like? What's their net like? Where do they want to be? Do they understand those numbers? Are they setting their pricing based upon what it costs to run their company? See, I see a big disconnect there in our industry, Tommy, is you have owners who are not very strong financially.
Starting point is 00:39:09 Their talents are geared towards sales, typically, because we're all a little ADD. We all like to do the sales or marketing. Or maybe it's more towards production because you kind of grew up in the field doing the work. But they don't understand their numbers. And so we have to make sure that they understand their numbers and things look accurate. And how do we need to help them adjust that? And are they using that for their pricing?
Starting point is 00:39:36 Or are they just setting their pricing based upon what, you know, don't tell me in quotations, what the market bears or how they perceive their position in the market, things like that. And that's a big disconnect, because if you're not pricing your jobs to pay for your business, a lot of times you're operating on cash flow. Right, right. Well, tell me about the problems when you start operating on cash. benefits for the employees. You don't have enough money to get people raises. And a lot of times the owner is not making enough money either. And then what happens is see a lot of companies or a lot of people get into debt. Yeah, I see that all the time. You know, one of the things I wanted to tell you is we used to do all the Home Depot garage store work in Arizona. Not every single Home
Starting point is 00:40:45 Depot, but a lot of them. And when it came down to it, we found out we were losing money when we analyzed the numbers and we dropped it. And a lot of companies would go, well, you had all that business coming in. And the thing is, if you really understand your numbers, you would know that a lot of times those contracts don't make sense. And it's hard to believe because you think, wow, you got Costco, you got Home Depot, you got Lowe's. But that's, you know, one of the things I look at when I buy out companies is all their revenue coming around just a couple of sources. Or do they have a ton of customers? Because the more you can spread out the risk,
Starting point is 00:41:26 the better. Tell us a little bit about that because I'm sure a lot of the people here are baby boomers, probably looking to retire in the next 10 years and tell me what your thoughts are on getting ready to retire. I think, you know, you're right.
Starting point is 00:41:39 You have to, you can't have all your eggs in one basket, right? You got to have a couple of different, what we call profit centers you know is it going to be roofing siding windows or is it garage doors is it decks is it you know different services that can bring money into the business and you have to treat each one of those as if it's a separate little business within your company right and that's understanding the financial numbers the cost for each one of those and then how they make up the whole and then
Starting point is 00:42:12 setting your goals appropriately and you know the thing a lot of times in our industry we don't have a lot of repeat customers right right? Right. They might have one or two projects in their lifetime. So it's all about that lifetime value of that customer. And then that goes beyond just their projects, but it goes on to their referrals. And so you have to be focused really on the customer, providing that wow experience for the customer to make sure that you continually have leads coming in more and more. And as people get older and like the baby boomers retire,
Starting point is 00:42:55 they may be fixing up their own homes, but they may be fixing up homes to give to their kids as well. You know, if I understand what your question was there, but you know, there's going to be a lot of work there. There's a lot of focus on millennials these days. And that's a huge, millennials is a huge group. But the thing is a very small percentage of them actually own any homes right now. And that's going to change in the next 10 years. And as that changes, you know, we're going to have to change
Starting point is 00:43:25 our approach a little bit to attract the millennials and to work with the millennials. Yeah, that's last year was the first year I believe that the millennials out did the baby boomers and home purchases. So it's starting to happen and it's a paradigm switch and it's Yelp, it's Angie's List, it's Facebook, it's Instagram, it's Pinterest, it's a different sales market. And it's, I believe it's Google because, you know, 70% of all services are found online and 70% of that is Google. So half your marketing should be aimed towards some type of Google search, whether that's organic, local, or pay-per-click. Tell me your take on that.
Starting point is 00:44:10 I think Google is the king. You know, the other search engines have a very, very small part of the market, and there are certain social media sites that do pretty well. But those are changing all the time, right? And, you know, it was Facebook, and then it was Instagram, and then Snapchat. And then, you know, Pinterest is basically a search engine. But Google rules that mark. And so you have to focus your advertising and things on Google as far as pay-per-click and they just you know the search things and things like that
Starting point is 00:44:50 and also on making sure that you get good reviews on Google as well yeah tell me a little bit about the best way to get good reviews because that's I guess you know we've got about 500 reviews on google about 400 on yelp and we're still five stars how do you recommend going about that well it's asking um what it's you know i guess it's understanding your customer and the age group of the customer the younger customer i think is more open to going on and doing reviews online. Some of the older, like the baby boomers, may not be. And I guess part of that is setting those expectations as far as doing it. Some companies will have a, like a customer service person,
Starting point is 00:45:36 customer service manager. It's just a person that's going to manage the customer relationship all the way through from the time that they buy a project over time you finish right and using that person to help people you know get those online reviews done can go a long ways because let's face it we're all each creature's a habit right and if we're not don't have the habit of going online and buying things or posting things or posting reviews or things like that you can't expect that you're going to have a happy customer just do that when that's not something they normally do so we have to help them and a lot of times we don't do it because we don't know how or we don't feel comfortable in doing it right we might make a
Starting point is 00:46:23 mistake there's that little fear there so having somebody in your company that can help manage that will go a long ways towards getting those online reviews yeah those things are powerful because you rank a lot better in the search engines with reviews it's called user content, and it's a game changer. So definitely want to reach out and get as many reviews as possible. So what do you think one of the problems that we have with communication is with our employees and sometimes our customers? I think we assume too much, especially with our customers. As contractors, we assume that they know about how home remodeling projects work, or they understand how contractors work, or we assume that they know we're busy. And that's just not true.
Starting point is 00:47:18 Most homeowners don't understand what it takes to actually qualify and hire a contractor, right? Most all of them don't answer questions questions they really know what to ask is, how much is it? When can you start, right? The problem is, you know, a good contractor can answer those two questions, but so can a bad. How do you tell them to get a part? So we can't assume they know how to buy projects, how to buy contractors.
Starting point is 00:47:42 We have to communicate with them from the very beginning and making sure that it's it's quality communication not for communication and it's the same thing with employees right we talked about the big three Tommy and it's the big three is the three main reasons why any home remodeling contractor will have a problem with a homeowner. A lot of times it applies to your employees too, but the first one is lack of communication or poor communication. The second one is not setting the proper expectations. And the third thing is additional work or unforeseen work and how you handle it, right? And pretty much every dispute or problem will come back to,
Starting point is 00:48:26 in some way, to those three things. And so to improve the communication, you have to address those three things throughout your process, from when sales is talking to the homeowner, and they buy it, to the communication coming from your company after they've bought the job, through scheduling, through that communication and that time from when they bought the job to when you start the job. How you communicate with them right before you start the job in a pre-construction meeting, the communication throughout the job and then at the end of the job, right? And it's just communicating to the customer in a way that they want you to, right?
Starting point is 00:49:08 And making sure that you set expectations, reset the expectations, make sure they understand those expectations. Because if you ever let the homeowner set the expectation, you're going to lose. Because they don't know what those are. So they set totally unrealistic expectations. And that should never happen. So you just have to address those three things. And a lot of times within our companies, that lack of communication, poor communication, and not sitting right
Starting point is 00:49:35 in expectations causes problems with employees. And so we have to become masters at communication. Yeah, I think that that starts with our employees as well. And some of the time it's just we talked about this a little bit, but it's pumping them up. It's giving them great feedback. And if you give somebody good feedback all the time, it's not hard to tell them they're not doing good and feel bad about it and say, look, I really want you to focus on this. So I think that that's really where it all gets
Starting point is 00:50:11 started is with the employees and happy employees equals happy customers. I just had a new class for CSRs. There was 12 of them. And I spent an hour doing a little orientation about who we are as a company. And I said, listen, we've got a great open door policy. If you guys, this is what you do all day. We're here to help grow you as well as you'll grow us. And it's working together that's going to help everybody. And I know answering phones doesn't seem like a great, fun job, but you get to take breaks.
Starting point is 00:50:43 You get to set records. You get to have competition. you get to take breaks you get to set records you get to have competition we get to have weekly uh we have this thing where it's a potluck i'm getting a bag so we play bags in the back everybody takes an hour out different times of the day and plays around and if you could create an atmosphere where yeah it is a job but you know what tiger woods has to hit golf balls all day long every day he's got a job yeah playing in tournaments is fun but it still becomes a job you got to go to work it's a job so if you can make it as as fun and team building as possible i think you have something there that most companies
Starting point is 00:51:19 don't so tell me a little bit about you know we're wrapping up here a little bit but you know i'm curious to maybe hear some things that i might not ask the right questions about like maybe something that you really like to teach about that maybe i didn't get to have to have processes for your people to follow right like you're talking about if you give your employees a track to run on and some incentives incentives and the tools that they need and give them the feedback, they're going to be happy, right? And as a company and as a company owner, if you do that and give them those tracks to run on, you have that process to follow, you set those expectations, and then you measure them to see how they're doing and you adjust accordingly. It's going to make your employees happier. The customers are going to be happier. Your company becomes more profitable and you as an owner are going to be happier.
Starting point is 00:52:19 And you're going to feel like if you don't own your job, then all you're doing is handling problems. You're going to start running your you don't own your job, then all you're doing is handling problems. You're going to start running your company the way that you pictured it when you started that company. And I think that's key for a lot of contractors. The contractors I start working with are really disillusioned or they're stressed out or things aren't going the way they want. And really, that's how your company, once it gets to that point, that's what you really want. You know, we talked about a lot of things, but, yeah,
Starting point is 00:52:53 at the end of the day, you've got to focus on the customer, too. And keeping that, you just can't have satisfied customers anymore. You've got to have raving fans. Yeah, I've got a book right here, actually. It's called Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. It's a good book. It really just talks real simply how to create raving fans. And it was a good book for me to read.
Starting point is 00:53:18 And tell me about some of the books that you recommend to our listeners out there. In this industry, one of the books I read several times was The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. Yep, that's one of my favorites. The E-Myth for the Contractor. And I thought that was a great book. Then another one that I highly recommend is by Jack Canfield, The Success Principles, How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. And then one of the books that we use in our training sometimes is Who Moved My Cheese, you know, the parables.
Starting point is 00:53:57 Peaks and Valleys is another one by Spencer Johnson. Those are good books for contractors. Peaks and Valleys. We got Who Moved My Cheese? Success Principles. The E-Myth for Contractors. One of the books that I always recommend is The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. That's a great book.
Starting point is 00:54:17 And then one of the guys I had on the podcast, his name was Al Levy. He's got The Seven Power Contractor. Kind of takes you through the seven steps to be successful. And knowing your numbers is a big one. So great advice. If somebody wants to get more of you, Troy, they want to get to know you more, what's the best place to connect with you? Either on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Starting point is 00:54:40 Okay, so tell me exactly what your LinkedIn is. Is it just Troy Timmer, T-M-M-E-R? Yeah, that's what it is. Okay, so connect with you there. They're looking for some type of coaching. Is there a website that they would go to? Yeah, they can go to contractors.net. It's the website for Certified Contractors Network.
Starting point is 00:55:04 Okay, and just look for you on there at Troy at contractors.net perfect well Troy is there any final thoughts that you want to leave us with before we end here I appreciate the opportunity Tommy to sit here and talk with you today
Starting point is 00:55:20 I love talking about this stuff and you know I just, if anybody needs any help, they're really struggling, they can give me a call. But really, I just appreciate what you're doing here for the contractors, and
Starting point is 00:55:35 thanks for letting me be part of it. Hey, Trey, I really got a lot out of this. I think the audience here probably learned a lot as well, and we'll get you back on here in a few months. Thanks so much for being part of it. And you have a great day today. Thank you, Tommy. You too. All right. Thanks, Trey. This was the Home Service Expert podcast. Now listen up. Do you want to dominate your market, triple the profit you make without working those long 12 hour days, seven days a week?
Starting point is 00:56:03 If the answer is yes, my team and I are opening up some new time slots to help you solve your biggest business challenge. Just go to home service expert dot com for slash discovery and book a free 30 minute call with our team today. I will repeat that home service expert dot com for slash discovery and book your free call today.

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