Contractor Cuts
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Contractor Cuts
A Contractor's Guide to Success in 2025 Episode 2: Building Organization
This episode emphasizes the significance of organization in contracting businesses and presents strategies for personal and operational organization. The discussion explores email management, task tracking, client communication, and the necessity of due diligence, all while underscoring how structured processes foster successful client relationships and project execution.
• Importance of personal organization and effective email management
• Utilizing technology for task and email organization
• Establishing internal processes for efficient operation and communication
• The role of due diligence in project management
• Strategies for maintaining open communication with clients
• Estimating costs related to organization and administrative work
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Welcome to Contractor Cuts, where we cover the good, the bad and the ugly of growing a successful contracting company.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to Contractor Cuts. My name is Clark Turner, I'm James McConnell. Thanks for joining us again. So we are on part two of a three-part series. We are covering the three tenets of growth that we kind of foundationally lay with anyone coming into coaching or growth for their company. Last podcast we covered time management, how to manage your time all based around. We talked heavily about calendaring, how to utilize your calendar and how to manage your time and own it.
Speaker 2:Today we're talking about organization, how to organize your company. What should you be working on as a sole one-man show versus when you're getting ready to hire? How do we organize outward facing towards your customer facing versus inward? What's important to be focused on? And the next podcast is going to be our number third, about finances. We're going to be diving into what finances you should be looking at, how we manage those, what you the levers you pull to look at different data to make decisions in your company. So that's going to be the next podcast, but today, organization, james Clark. How are you? I'm not great organization, james Clark. How are you Not great man? Okay, because you're unorganized. How dare you? Sorry.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:So organization, what are your identifiers when you feel unorganized? Let's start kind of generally Like organized as a person, like inbox jobs, all of that thing, and then we're going to talk into kind of systems and processes after this. But for you, what do you do to keep yourself organized? What do you do, how do you tell when you start slipping and how do you catch yourself from that?
Speaker 1:I think my indicator is probably similar to a lot of people's and they might not know it yet, but when my flagged emails gets out of control, I try and use my flagged emails as like they should only be flagged for one day, but it grows to 20, 30 different things and I lose track of why did I even flag this one. Half of them probably don't need to be flagged for one day, but it grows to 20, 30 different things and I lose track of why did I even flag this one? Half of them probably don't need to be flagged. So when my flagged email gets out of control, when I've got, you know, 20 or 30 of those in there, I'm like I have an issue, and that's when I need to pull out at 30, get 30,000 feet and reorganize, reassess where I'm sitting Instead of just grind it out.
Speaker 2:Man, get through it, put your head down and just go get some of it done, some of it won't get done, and it is what it is, yeah, yeah. Well, one thing, also kind of backing up from that, is what we always try to tell you when you're out in the field, when you're a one-man show running around, is email management. How do we do that? And so what we always say is, when I touch my keys, I'm checking my emails. Every time I'm getting in my truck or getting out of my truck, I'm going to check my emails beginning of the day, end of the day, and what I want you to do is I want your email box to be empty, and so when you get there, if I can respond to an email in 30 seconds or less, shoot off the email response, even if it's hey, I'm going to handle this tomorrow, hey, your estimate's coming by Friday. Whatever it is, if you can answer it, answer it. If you can unsubscribe or block, unsubscribe or block, and if it's something that you need to spend time on, flag it.
Speaker 2:We organize. We use Gmail as kind of our email base. I like the priority box I think it's called where it's all of your unread up top, then you're flagged in the middle and then everything else below it. Mine's the same way. I love it, great. So all of the flagged emails go up to the top and so, like you, my goal is to have no flagged emails.
Speaker 2:Now that goal slips often, but talking basics of organizing your day in and day out, getting behind on emails is what kills you on the communication side, and when you're not communicating with your customers, that's when the fires start and that's when the phone calls and additional emails and why are you ignoring me and bad customer service aren't happening. So, baseline, we're getting organized through your emails and communication with texts, emails and phone calls every time I touch my keys, anyway. So that's what you're talking about. On that, you can tell if you're slipping, if that's getting filled up, if you've got a ton of flagged emails that you're not getting back to people. You've got 1700 text messages because you know you got to get back to them. Once you read it, you got to answer it. What do you do at that time? You're just time blocking at that point.
Speaker 1:Hey, on Thursday I'm going to take an hour and get all the squared away add a little layer of complexity for myself, because the calendar is great, you can look at everything. But as far as a um, when you have, when you have a million things going on, it's not always easy to look at the calendar and say what do I need to do, look at all this stuff or even go down to one day. It's hard, hard to, it's not always good to just like get really myopic and just look at that one day, because there's other days that need to be accounted for in what you're doing, because everything we do is, you know, prognosticating, like what's the next thing? How do I, you know, how do I make sure this ball doesn't drop or this person doesn't drop that ball? So what I do is I pull out a Google, a Google doc, and I write down and actually have my wife do this with me now, because she's really good at what's the word.
Speaker 2:Making everything concise. Concise, filtering down clear.
Speaker 1:She filters through my chaos concise, filtering down, clear. She filters through my chaos. So I'll just read her off the emails and tell her like I got this that I need to do. I got this estimate I need to work on, I've got this stuff I need to do with permitting and she'll put it into like an organized, you know format for me and I could do this myself. It would just take a lot longer. But then I go into my emails, I copy the link and so some people probably don't even know what how to do this because, like David doesn't know how to do this I pull up the email and I just go up to the url and I copy it. I go into the google doc and I link it to that like a word in like my to-do list.
Speaker 2:So if it's a an email from the insurance company needing renewal information.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it would be like Austin insurance and I'll link that email to the word insurance. So I'll go through the entire list like that. Now I've got a document, that is all the emails are linked. I can unflag everything because it's all living here, and then I just exit everything, pull up my to-do list, click the link and it'll pull up that email and I'll go one by one and then if I get stuck somewhere, I can highlight it and comment on it. Got stuck here waiting for a call back from environmental health about the septic. Yeah, great, I can follow back up with that. I don't need to keep. There's no further. I can go here. I don't need to keep banging my head up against the wall. I can move on to the next thing. Yeah, but if you don't have, like, this list in front of you, it's easy to get like obsessed with this thing. I've got to solve this or I can't go on to the next thing.
Speaker 2:Now as another way sorry, was I cutting you off? No, Now another way, like for the guys out there running jobs a lot more that are less management and more in the field project management. The way we always suggest doing this is there's a two-way sync with the software, with ProStrux360 in your email, so it pulls in and if it's about a job, it pulls onto that job card. So what I always coach guys on is I want to set up my next client contact or my task list for that job, and it all comes to your task list in your software. So on your dashboard maybe I've got three emails coming in on three different jobs and I say, okay, this job, I need to get back with Granite. On this other job, they're waiting on a revision on the estimate. And this third job, I need to send an invoice because they just confirmed that they're ready to move. Whatever it is, I am in my software saying, okay, I'm going to set up tasks for these two. I'm going my software saying, okay, I'm going to set up tasks for these two, I'm going to go and do this third one right now. And then it's on my task list and it's linked to the job. So all you got to do is click on it, I open up the job and I can execute it. So what James is saying with what you're doing, because it's outside of insurance and other things.
Speaker 2:But having an organized way to get the answers back in a timely manner is what we're aiming for. That doesn't mean I have to get back today. It's amazing what an email back to someone saying hey, sorry, I'm slammed right now. I've got a full day booked tomorrow. I got some time on my calendar Monday to put this together for you. If that's okay, that in and of itself saves you the face, saves face with the customer. It allows you to set a spot on your calendar and not deal with it till then. So I think that's right. Like understanding, I need to get all of my emails answered. I'm flagging the stuff that I need to get back on, but I'm also got my task list in the software. I'm organized and working off of that. If I do these things, I can close my computer. I can be done for the day. I can go to bed knowing that everything's. I'm not going to wake up in the middle of the night. Oh crap, I didn't send an estimate. So that's stage one. That's kind of the personal organization Part of organization. Two is the calendar management, which listen to the last podcast about that. That's how we stay organized personally. That, combined with what we're talking about with emails and email management, text management, meeting management, that sort of thing, is how we have to stay organized personally.
Speaker 2:Going into the company, we've got processes and procedures. Now there is a lot to cover. We can go 17 different ways on processes and procedures and organizations of how do you organize what you do. I can think of 20. I can think of 21. I can think of 21. Go ahead, Okay.
Speaker 2:Now there is outward facing processes to keep organized, to show the customer, to help them understand the customer service and the renovation that you're doing or the new build or whatever you're doing for the customer. How do we organize that communication? How do we organize the job site? How do we organize our crews as they're executing the customer? How do we organize that communication? How do we organize the job site? How do we organize our crews as they're executing the work? So that's kind of the outward facing organization and the process that we have in place for those.
Speaker 2:Then there are internal processes and procedures that are how do we manage our insurance?
Speaker 2:How do we keep our paperwork? How do we keep accountability, especially as we grow and we're hiring people? How do we do those type of meetings? We call them PAL meetings, but once a week, the project manager action list meetings, where I'm meeting with my project managers. How do I keep them organized and make sure that I can keep account without micromanaging them? So that is a bigger conversation than what we can have right now in this podcast, because that is our 280 point checklist. In growing your company, that's part of everything we do, but it's bite by bite that you have to do in getting that stuff organized. So, James, not on a level where the companies are, but if you were stripping this down to one man, show what is the most important organizational things that you should be doing on running a job site to where stuff doesn't fall through the cracks, right? If you were giving someone advice on that, how are we looking at job sites to organize them, the execution of it, managing the vendors, managing communication what would you say is the most important couple of things?
Speaker 1:Honestly, I'm going to talk about due diligence. Is that fair? Yeah, that's good. Due diligence is something I started doing I don't even know how long ago, but we charge for it, depending on the job. Like sometimes charge a pretty decent amount for it. Then, depending on the job, like sometimes charge pretty decent amount for it. Yeah. But uh, part of due diligence is okay. Yeah, you're going to pay us money. You're not going to pay us 50% upfront, but you do need to. You do need to pay me for the work I'm about to do. Yeah, so once we've gone through the estimate process, I'll detail out in due diligence as a line item on their estimate.
Speaker 1:We're going to we're going to have the uh engineers going to come on site. The architect's going to come on site. I'm going to have the framer come out. I come on site. The architect's going to come on site. I'm going to have the framer come out. I'm going to have the plumber, the electrician, the HVAC guy come out Pretty much everybody else I can give drawings to and they can estimate their project off of that. But I need those you know, five, six different trades to come in and I need to manage all that.
Speaker 1:I'm going to start the permit process. I'm going to meet with the county. I'm going to do that. I'm going to, we're going to start building out your Gantt chart as information comes in. We're going to start building out your selections workbook. So we we basically tell them this is all the stuff that needs to happen before we can start your job. Um, I even add a separate line item for, uh, the pre-project walk. So, after we have the permit, after we've, estimate is now a quote. We've, we've vetted it out and it's now a quote. This is what we feel comfortable saying. We can do this project for. Um, what did I just say right before the last thing I said?
Speaker 2:that you build out the quote. This is what we can do the project for yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, the pre-project walk is and I mentioned this in the last episode or the last talk where are we going to cut? Is there a cut station? Yeah, because if it's a full house renovation, you know they're probably going to be out of the house and it doesn't really matter all that much. We're doing a master bathroom. Where's the tile getting cut? Where's the tile getting cut? Where are we putting up wall protection? Where are we putting down wall protection? Where are we putting down floor protection? Because we're going to be coming out of the bathroom through the home to the dumpster. Do we have? Are we staging material? Can we have the garage? Can we have half the garage? If we're going to have half the garage, are we going to build up a false wall so nothing falls over onto the porsche?
Speaker 1:Um, where are we dumping out paint buckets? Because you've seen it a thousand times. You walk on site and there's a white bush big white circle in the front or, my favorite, the louver doors that get laid on the grass and they spray it and you've got stripes. Um, down to septic. Do they have a septic? Because we've gotten in trouble before. Someone that was like you poured paint down our thing and the septic people said that that's not okay. Okay, that's something that we need to put on the checklist. Are you septic? Because if so, we need to take everything off site.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know well, let me zoom out for one second.
Speaker 1:Or are you done Well?
Speaker 2:what I was going to say is, I think, what all this is talking about, and and the most important thing that you're doing is the mindset that people have to have. I am not selling a new bathroom to you. What product is Clark selling? What product is James selling? We are not selling paint on a wall. We are not selling new tile. We are not selling a new kitchen cabinets. We are selling putting together all of the moving parts, organizing planning. That's what a general contractor is and that's the biggest step for these guys that are out in the field swinging a hammer doing the work. They're selling paint on the wall.
Speaker 2:What we are selling, and how you grow and scale a company, is I'm selling me, my brain, my knowledge, my experience, all of the crews that I trust, that I've been working with, and all of the organization and planning. That is the product I'm selling. I'm selling my customer a really good experience on getting their master bathroom renovated, on getting the addition put on, on getting their new home built. That's the product I'm selling. The addition put on on getting their new home built. That's the product I'm selling. And so the mindset that you're talking about, with all of the organization stuff, that's the stuff that the guys that are failing at business, that are out there swinging a hammer and just in the same spot, they don't think through having that part of their product. That just kind of happens as they go yeah, I guess we got to get a plumber, I'm going to get the plumber out here. Oh, yeah, we got to get plans, and so it's all reactive and it's like almost almost an attitude of okay, I'll get that done, I'll get that done, that's another tour on my. No, that's what you're selling, that's the product that we're selling. So the if you're also on site swinging a hammer, that's a separate product. You're selling them two different things.
Speaker 2:What you've done and this is one of, I think, the best things that you've done and what we've implementing with all of our contractors and in the coaching is let's start telling them exactly all of the busy work we're going to do for them and let's charge them for that, and then also mark up the stuff that we're doing on top of it, because there's also labor once the job starts.
Speaker 2:But let's pull all of that stuff out, all of the thinking out, and instead of doing it on the fly, because y'all are ready to us, for us to start putting paint on the wall. We're not ready. Phase one is planning phase. It's the due diligence to make sure that we can do what we say we're going to do. And it's going to take a week and it's going to cost you three grand because I'm going to spend all the time doing everything here. So let's have a line item just for that stuff and approval for just that, a signature and a payment for that, and let me do the job that you're hiring me to do, which is the planning side of it.
Speaker 1:The great example for this is I'm working with a guy right now and there's a. He's got a HELOC, so he's got some cash. He's also doing a bank loan, yeah, and there's about five bank documents that need to be filled out, about five bank documents that need to be filled out, but there's literally and still counting probably 20 documents that need to be filled out for the county, and I've done this a couple times. So my client hasn't and he's like I really need this bank stuff filled out and it says in the bank document that you need to have this stuff, like they need this ASAP. Well, the stuff they need ASAP is a vetted scope, a permit, a you know, the plat, the septic, all that. I'm like actually, I hear you, I need to get all this stuff done and organized before I submit it to the bank, because as soon as I submit it to the bank, they're telling you now they're okay with change orders, they're not okay with change orders. I'm going to have to fill out all this information. I'm going to have to edit all of my documentation based on the change orders that we already know we're going to anticipate. If you want me to submit right now, I'm not going to do that. You need to trust me, yeah.
Speaker 1:The only reason I have that trust with him, though, is I'm consistently returning legwork, so like we get through a week and there's not anything that he's really seen, and then he gets an email from me with like five documents that have been received by the county, submitted, accepted transactions, that have happened, and it's like okay, it's progressing, we're getting there.
Speaker 1:That have happened, and it's like okay, it's progressing, we're getting there. If nothing, if I wasn't returning anything, you can bet he'd be on my butt about submitting the stuff to the bank like he wanted. So that doesn't happen overnight, though. Part of due diligence is I'm going to connect with the city or the municipality that we're working under, because there's always some random one-off thing that needs to be done that you weren't prepared for, didn't think through, forgot that that was part of the process, and when you are reacting to something like that, these things don't happen. Oh, I need a survey done. Okay, that's not happening in a week. That's gonna take three weeks and it's gonna cost you four thousand dollars and if I tell you that ahead of time, you're cool with it.
Speaker 2:If you're like, hey, I need that, well, give me three weeks. They're not cool with it if I'm reactively getting to them, but if we've laid out what they have to do right, and they ask.
Speaker 1:They ask you in the beginning. Everybody does. What do you think a timeline for something like this is? And I always lean into okay, well, it's going to take us. It's going to take me probably two, three weeks to get through the first part of my due diligence, and that's getting with these crews, getting with the city. And then we have to get a survey. That's going to take three, four weeks. We have to get architectural drawings. That's probably going to be six weeks. We have to submit for the permit, we have to submit for the septic application. That's going to take two, three weeks. So you start showing them all of the things that have nothing to do with construction. That's going to take three months of the project. And they're like oh well, how long is the project going to take? Probably five or six months after that.
Speaker 1:I'm not trying to win this job based on blowing him out of the water with my timetable. I'm trying to set a realistic expectation and say that like and this might not be it, like there might be other things that pop up during due diligence. I'm not perfect, I'm not going to capture everything and this might be the first time I'm working with this county or the first time I'm working with this city. Capture everything. And this might be the first time I'm working with this county or the first time I'm working with this city. So I'm very open and honest and upfront about how this is going to lay out and where my blind spots are. It's okay to have blind spots and if your client's not okay with you having blind spots, don't work with them.
Speaker 2:Well, this is what you're saying without saying it to to the customer is saying I know how to do this, I know what I'm doing, and if the other guys that you're talking to to bid this aren't thinking through this stuff and they're telling you they're ready to get started, you're already screwed. You're already screwed and you don't have to say any of that Like a customer that's got enough money to do a $200,000 addition on their house is smart enough to be like. I don't know why, but this guy feels comfortable. Who who feels like he's got my back? And this other guy is trying to get me to pull my pay and my my checkbook out and says he's going to start demoing next week. Yeah, so something doesn't add up here.
Speaker 1:And so, who does it? Benefit more to lie in this situation?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, and so, backing out from large scale stuff, let's say a smaller, smaller project, you can still do due diligence on those. If I'm doing a one off paint job where we're painting the main floor of a residential house, we're not doing a two thousand dollar due diligence period, but I still want to set aside, even if it's a zero dollar line item. This is how this I got to ask you these questions. We're going to do a client engagement agreement item. This is how this I got to ask you these questions. We're going to do a client engagement agreement. I'm going to ask about where we can set up, where we can park, where we need a petition off to, where the guys don't come. Where are we entering? Where are we exiting? What do we do? Do you have dogs? Do you have babies? Who's going to be in the house? What's nap time look like? When do we? When can we show up? When do we have to leave? But all of those things are part of that due diligence.
Speaker 1:Even if you're not charging eight grand to go through the full due diligence process, I would. I would say, though, that part of your process and organization, like this bathroom job that we're talking about last week, um, I didn't think that we'd be able to land the job with an additional thousand dollars of due diligence. Small project we do need due diligence. So I didn project we do need due diligence. So I didn't put it in the line item. We talked through what what that would look like and we said we're not going to ask you for 50% down, but I am going to ask you for us. We need we need some skin in the game, because there's a lot of legwork we're about to do. That is you're going to benefit from, regardless of whether you go with us or not, so I am going to charge you for that. But, like, the project is, you know, $38,000 and we're going to charge $1,000 for due diligence. I'm just going to take it out of the other line items, but I'm going to get paid for it.
Speaker 2:And I always say like I do 80% of my work as a contractor before we swing the first hammer on site, because I'm doing all the due diligence organization and if I do my front 80%, the 20% is only 20% because it's just execution. All my ducks are lined up so now all I got to do is knock them down and get the job executed. So if you bring the customer into that conversation, say so, this is how we organize, we're going to set it aside, we're going to do this. I'm going I need a thousand bucks. I'm not going to charge you 80% of the job, even though I'm spending most of my time here. I'm going to spend 10, 20, 30 hours on your project before we even show up on site. They don't know that, they don't understand that. Yeah, once you identify and build that value for them to say oh, that makes sense, thank you, yeah.
Speaker 1:Here, here's the here, and you charge in again like you were charging for it and that's. I think guys get, guys get hung up in the the battle for all of the bids. Right like right now. It's pretty slow in the construction world, so guys are very competitive with their pricing. Everyone's trying to land work, um, but if you're landing work without the requisite profitability that you need, it's not helping. It's not helping. It's hurting you twofold. Yeah, because you're not making the money that you need to make, but you're spending more time than you need to spend, yeah.
Speaker 1:So one thing, and this is like really far down the road in internal organization, and maybe not, maybe you have the mind where you can actually do this quickly.
Speaker 1:I can't, but the way you come up with how much does due diligence cost? Because we're talking about my time, we're not talking about this crew or that crew, which they're contract guys. I know what I need to pay them, how much is your time worth, and there's an actual formula that you can, that is available, that you, uh, you know what is your salary, what is your um insurance rate. You need to think through gas. You need to think about phone overhead, overhead costs, through all of your overhead costs. But then you also need to account for um, like your, your drive time, like you can't assume that a hundred percent of your time is going to go to working, like 30% of that is travel. So there's just some like some minutiae in that type of formula but you can come out with. I need to pay myself, you know, $200 an hour for my time. You might not present it like that to the client, but you're thinking through due diligence and you're like I'm going to need to charge him $3,000 for due diligence.
Speaker 2:Spend a half a day on this to this week and next week a full day by going to meet with the city. Yeah, and so the.
Speaker 1:The biggest uh uh friction people have with the thought of all of this handholding and committing themselves to this level of front work is I don't, we're not making enough money for me to spend all this time. Charge, charge for it. Go, like, start presenting your clients with what it is that you're going to be doing and show them all the work that you're going to put in and see if they take that bigger price.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like you're going to lose bids, but the ones that you land are going to be really worth your time and those clients are going to get a great product from you, and so those are the people that are going to tell their friends about you, even people that don't go with our bid. I have had many people they don't go with our bid because the budget or whatever the job fell through. But you guys did such a great job. You were so communicative. I felt really comfortable with the whole process. I told my sister to give you guys a call. I told my dentist to give you guys a call because they're looking to do a renovation. You'll get referrals based off of not even doing work for somebody. Yeah, like that's worth a lot, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and if someone's like, hey, this other guy's not charging a thousand bucks for due diligence, can we just knock that off and get going? I would say absolutely. Now, if you're building a house and the other guy wasn't charging for blueprints, and then halfway through the build, things fall apart, are you? Is that okay? Like, what I'm charging for is to ensure that the, that the job itself goes well, and I'm not going to be hitting you with change orders like that guy's going to be doing, cause I'm going to plan ahead as opposed to reactively do your job. And so you're. You're going to get what you pay for, and this is as cheap as we can do it, and I also kind of split it out, like I'm not charging as much for different line items to pull it out of here, just so you can see what you're paying for. So you know that's. It's okay to push back on customers when you're not apples to apples with someone else like that and you need to because they don't know your.
Speaker 1:They don't know your industry. They don't like you're not telling them how much they need to charge for insurance or how much they should charge for MSRP on a vehicle.
Speaker 2:So zoom, zooming back out the what we're saying. So, zooming back out what we're saying, the external look we've got a 10-step project management process from first contact to final invoice that we give when you start coaching with us, of every step of the way, of what the experience is going to be for that project. And so what James is talking about is this is probably more passionate, because this is something that we harp on so much that the more we've done it, the more it's been eye-opening how great it's been. But there's processes before this and processes after this that we can dive into and spend the next 10 hours going through takes how we write up estimates, when and how we return them, how we do the due diligence, the pre-construction phase, the construction phase, the invoice, all of that stuff, the follow-ups, all of that stuff we have written down as a process. When you come into ProStruct for the coaching side, we give you that process and then we help you build it for your company. We say, okay, well, how does it work for you? How do you do this? What if you did it this way? Can you change this around?
Speaker 2:Every company has a different process. You just have to have one that's bulletproof, that works and that you can repeat, because you can't hire someone until you can teach them a process. I can't go hire someone and be like James manage this project manager. Hey, watch how James does it and just do what he does. That doesn't work. You're hiring a personality to run your company. You're not hiring someone to run your organization and your structure.
Speaker 2:So in a business I think it was the E-Myth that says processes run a company, people run processes, and that's what we're trying to get at is most contracting companies that we see that fail or that just are kind of stuck in a rut is because it's people running the company, not processes running the company, and it feels dumb to say but you have to have that process and train people and even you yourself go through those processes to execute on the job sites and so organizing from start to finish. This is how, when and where we invoice. That's part of the due diligence is. We're walking them through the client engagement agreement, explaining the whole 10 steps of the process and explain to them what they can expect and how they can expect it, and then we have a game plan to execute. So that's kind of the bigger picture of what we're talking about, of the client facing how we organize job sites.
Speaker 2:We're not going to touch a ton on internal organization today because we're running out of time, but the internal organization is how we run our HR side, how we hire, what you do, how we find. I mean, I think it's also 10 steps of how we hunt, how we find, how we interview, how we onboard, how we train and how we keep them happy. On the HR side Again, unless you're a large construction company, you don't have someone in charge of HR. You're looking at them right Like you're the HR person for the company. So how do we do that? What's that process? What's the process of how we keep our QuickBooks right? Quickbooks interacts with ProShark 360, where you don't have to do a lot, but there is some management that you want to do in terms of materials, in terms of how do I tie different materials to jobs so I can do job costing in the software?
Speaker 1:Yeah, If you're not like I think a lot of folks downplay the QuickBooks. I got to keep everything I need to know where the money is, but I'm not going to spend all this time getting cute with it. I think people need to get a little bit more cute with QuickBooks and lay it out in a way that makes sense. Whoever's keeping the books, whether you have an accountant or you're doing it yourself. Work with your accountant on laying out the actual profit and loss the way that it makes sense to you. Your categories.
Speaker 2:Your categories, your categories.
Speaker 1:Don't have a bunch of random shit in there that you're like, why did I put this in here? What goes in this one?
Speaker 2:That should never be a question Three that say travel, two that say car and one that says automotive. It's like what?
Speaker 1:When you have multiple office managers that come through the company. You're going to have that. You're going to have all this random stuff, but you can't go back and use that as data If you're not keeping it. Well, how do I know how much money are we spending at Home Depot versus Lowe's and who am I getting better returns from? Yeah, or maybe it's not a matter of that. It's your. You're balancing different credit accounts and that's not part of the equation. But it might be significant enough of a difference to be like why are we doing any with Lowe's? We should be doing everything with Lowe's or vice versa.
Speaker 2:We'll dive into that next week.
Speaker 1:on the finance side, no no, no, let me keep going.
Speaker 2:Well, this is not going to be a four-hour podcast, but I think that's where I think one of the biggest things and we'll talk about this next week, like I said, but with what you're saying, one of the biggest things that I didn't realize was the amount of money we were wasting on financing costs and interest rates, where I'm looking like, holy cow, I can hire someone for how much we're spending on these loans that we've got. Let's get these paid down right. And so it starts opening your eyes. We'll talk about that next week on how to assess finances. But on the organizational side this is part of it. I need to be organized in my QuickBooks. I need to be organized in how I'm keeping my employees accountable. How do I do that? What's those meetings look like this, probably.
Speaker 2:If you haven't done much of this, this podcast probably feels pretty overwhelming of how much you have to do. It's not complicated, it is a step-by-step, one thing at a time, and so everything we've talked about on the processes going outward to your customers, organizing, coming inward to you in your office, how we do that all of that is you don't have to. You got to worry about today are these four things. Let's work on these next month when we get together, or next coaching session that we get together on. Can you have these four things done? Great, We'll sit back down here the next five things. Can we get these five things done? And so it is. What processes are important to work on now and what are we going to start tweaking? And so all of that comes with assessing you as a client, because some clients are really good at the financial side they're just mathematically minded and they don't need help with that, but when it comes to organizing crews and customer care, they're terrible. So let's start on those processes that we need to build up for that person. The next person is a great salesman, great with people. He doesn't know how to add two plus two, and so that let's focus on how do we organize the financial side of you.
Speaker 2:And so every single person that we're coaching or that comes in, or, if you're not in, either of those you're working on your own, start identifying what you're good at and what you enjoy doing and what you're bad at. Let's start building processes around the stuff you're bad at first. Then we can introduce what you're good at. How do you do sales? Let's break down. You're really good with customers. So, James, let's break down how you interact with them and let's start building processes around those and let's assess okay, you're really the due diligence stuff. Let's put a process around how we do that, because I think that's super helpful and the customers love it.
Speaker 2:I remember last year we were big on educating the customers. Let's start. How do we implement more education for the customers to where they understand and they get what we're doing before we do it and they're not just sitting there scratching their heads? Why didn't we show up on Thursday? So again, all of that being said, outward process, inward process we need to lay those out. And when a lot of guys say, when am I ready to hire? You're not ready to hire until you have both of those spelled out, written out. This is how we do it, because that's what you train people on.
Speaker 2:So when we're talking about last week, we talked about building time blocks, having space to work on your company, this is the stuff that you're going to be working on in those time blocks.
Speaker 2:Whenever we see guys coming in like, yeah, I try to, every Monday, work on my company, what does that mean?
Speaker 2:I get back to emails and I write some estimates usually Great.
Speaker 2:That's not working on the company, that's working in the company.
Speaker 2:And so let's build time blocks on your calendar to work on the company.
Speaker 2:And once we have that time last week that we talked about with time management, once we can start building in time blocks to work on the company, now let's talk about how we build the organizational side of the company step-by-step during those time blocks, so you have traction moving forward throughout the year and the end of this year you're going to be killing it, not in the same spot you are right now. So that's why we focus so much on the time management than the organization. Next week we're talking about finances. We're going to dive deep into that and kind of what you started running down with QuickBooks software you know what we use in ProStruck versus QuickBooks and how do we do all that and what number should we be looking at? All of that data retention is how we make decisions, how we make hiring decisions, firing decisions, investment decisions hey, it's time to buy a truck decisions All of those things you don't just do because you need it. You do it because you've planned for it and you've got it spelled out how it's going to happen.
Speaker 1:One last thing please, if you're running your own thing. I have a tab on my main Google sheet, that is. I have a tab on my main Google sheet. That is it's like a cut sheet of passwords and information that I consistently need access to that. I don't want to have to go like EIN what's another one, like your EIN. I keep passwords and accounts because they all change and I know everyone has like the quick key where they can like your computer saves it. Yeah, for whatever reason, I feel like mine always changes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but we also like ours is password protected and me and you have access, so like if I change a password, it's not you know, you're not locked out of the bank account, all of a sudden Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:So keeping things like that, like you know, just quick access stuff because when for me, when I hey I need this, for me to stop what I'm doing and go into the right folder and find the right document, to find the right number, really frustrates me and like takes me off of what I'm doing, takes me off my game. But when I have that quick thing, yep, that's it, boom, I'm doing, takes me off my game. But when I have that quick thing, yep, that's it, boom, send it over to them. It's very helpful to have just a quick cut sheet with that information. It's really accessible. Yeah, love it.
Speaker 2:All right. Thanks so much for listening. If you've got questions about this or want help with doing some of this stuff, reach out to us. Go to the contact us on pro-struct360.com. Love to have a conversation. Even if you're not ready for coaching and all that stuff, we love to help. We probably have five or six companies coming on the retreat that are just coming for the retreat and we're hoping that throughout this year they're going to grow and by next year they'll be in the coaching program. If not, great, we'll just come and learn and get some knowledge and help on the growth path. So we're here to help. We kind of a holistic view on companies where we want you to grow and not spend money with us until we can actually until you can afford it, until we can build that value with you to where it makes sense that we can partner up and do some of this stuff together. So, all of that being said, reach out to us. We love interacting. I'd love to hop on a phone call myself with you. We'll see you next week. Bye.
