What to Do When Your Contracting Business Goes Underwater

Every contractor hits a season where the wheels come off.

Maybe you're so slammed you haven't returned a call in three days. Maybe the bids are going out and nothing's coming back. Either way — you're underwater, and the old habits are creeping back in.

In this episode of Contractor Cuts, Clark Turner and James McConnell break down the two sides of backsliding that every general contractor, remodeler, and home builder faces — and exactly what to do when it happens:

• Why being buried in work is just as dangerous as having none
• How to triage a flooded estimate list without burning your best leads
• Why bad crews feel like a shortcut but always cost you more
• The client communication habits that protect your reputation when things get hectic
• How to re-engage cold estimates when construction work slows down
• The 3 things every contractor needs to do to stop backsliding for good

If your contracting business feels like it has a great month followed by a disaster — you're not alone, and there's a way out.

If you're doing $350K–$2M a year in revenue, coaching pays for itself. A 5% efficiency gain alone covers the cost — and that's before we even talk about growth. 

We help contractors stop losing money on crews, change orders, and inefficient operations — and start scaling. 

Ready to have the conversation? Set up a free call at contractorcuts.com

Contractor Cuts is a weekly podcast for contractors who want to build a better business — covering sales, operations, hiring, finances, and everything in between.

🔗 Book a free call: contractorcuts.com 

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Transcript

Speaker 0:01

Welcome to Contractor Cuts, where we cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of growing a successful contracting company.

Clark 0:14

Welcome to Contractor Cuts. My name is Clark Turner. And I'm James McConnell. Thanks for joining us again this week. So today we are diving into what happens when you backslide from where you were headed, right? There's kind of two different directions that guys come from when we're looking at backsliding, uh, especially when we're sitting down on the coaching side. It's when you have a game plan. You're looking, you know, right now it's it's April that we're that we're recording this. Uh people had a good game plan for the year, right? Come January, they came on the retreat. This is what we're doing. I'm gonna kill this. I've got, you know, quarter one, I'm gonna hit these numbers, quarter two, I want to hit these numbers. We turned the corner into quarter two in April. And there's two types of backsliding that I see, right? Number one are the guys that started with a little and have a lot, right? The the guys that came in and started selling, started running some marketing, started doing some ads, and all of a sudden, I've got 20 leads a week that I can't handle.

James 1:14

So what you're saying is they started from the bottom, now they hear? Now they hear, for sure.

Clark 1:18

But those guys, when that doesn't feel like a backslide, right? That feels like progress forward, but the backslide is in your processes, your growth, and how you're running things, right? So I've had a game plan, we came in. I'm just gonna collect all of this fruit right now because it's here, and I'm gonna say yes to everything. Forget my processes, I'll pick that up next year, I'll pick that up in a couple months when things calm down.

James 1:43

And what does fruit do when you gather too much and you don't have space to eat at all?

Speaker 1 1:48

Back to the fruit bowl.

Speaker 1:49

It gets rotten and gooey. And certain fruits like bananas, avocados, they have a very short window of when it's good to eat and when it's icky.

Speaker 1 2:00

Two to five days, most likely. Uh so that's kind of one side of the backslide. The other side is I came in with a game plan. I was gonna hit 200 grand month over month. Uh, and you look up and you've hit 80,000 month one, 40,000 month two, and you've got seven leads potential that you've bid, but nothing's landing, right?

Speaker 2:20

Yeah, everyone's still figuring out taxes. There's, I don't know, a war, um, you know, things that you don't have a lot of control over. Yep.

Speaker 1 2:29

What's funny is on the coaching side, we get a really good picture of kind of the US, where you can see regions where people are just killing it and expanding. You can see other areas where you know two or three guys in the same area are just all like, I've sent out 40 bids and I've got maybe two yeses. Yeah.

Speaker 2:47

What are the regions killing it?

Two Types Of Backslide

Speaker 1 2:49

That's a secret. I'm not telling. Uh so the we're gonna cover kind of both of those. They they're two opposite ends of the spectrum, yet we kind of do the same stuff when we go into them and some of the same fixes coming out of them. Um so we're gonna run through that and what we need to prioritize when that's happening. If that's you, if you've been through that season, listen, take some notes. If that's not you right now, you feel like you're doing great, awesome. There will be a season of this. Sit back and laugh. Sit back, enjoy the entertainment. James's gonna tell a joke at the end of this. It's a dinger. He's gonna prepare. All right, thanks to priority. So if this is happening, if you're like, man, I had a game plan, I've been smacked in the face one way or another, I haven't done anything else planning on doing. Really, what we want to do is first identify your rut, right? A rut is what you fall back into because that's just kind of the norm of how I do things. Those are the old habits, the I always just do it this way because that's naturally how I do things, and that got me to hear, and that's good enough. Yeah, right.

Speaker 3:50

And so to go back and reframe the first one being I got all this work, this is great. I have too much to do. So instead of pouring all of the energy into, hey, this is the new way I'm doing things, it takes a lot more of my cognition to like do the new thing and follow the process. But that is the whole reason that you started doing the new thing is because you didn't like the way doing it your way was going. Yep. But it's easier in the short term to execute like that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 4:22

It's the uh the the phrase I always say is we're really good as business owners running full speed through the force without hitting a tree. And so you go back to that, but you it's only gonna last so long. There's a reason that you're trying to change things right now because you have these seasons and then you have the valleys afterwards. Because you burn crews, you get a bad reputation, you're not looking forward, you're you're just reacting to what's today, and we're not planning out the next the pipeline of the next few months. Uh, there's there's a number of reasons that you have tried to put new processes in place, uh, but falling away from them is the is the quickest and easiest way to find more time in your day, right? I'm not, you know, I I've I'm taking my serio my software seriously. I'm going to open up every job card twice a week and I'm going to look at every job. I'm going to email every client twice a week, right? That's kind of one of the starting spots. I want Tuesdays and Friday mornings to be my office days, and I'm going to uh uh own that. All of a sudden I've got seven people that want an estimate next week. I got space on Tuesday. I'm just gonna do it then. And I'm just gonna go. And so there's the rut of just uh I'm just going to run through the forest and just shoot from the hip and whatever happens, happens, but I can handle this on my own without a game plan. I can just figure it out. All right. And so what tends to happen in those situations is number one, delayed estimate turnaround. Uh, I promised, over promise, under deliver to everybody. And so instead of, you know, I've got 10 estimates to do, instead of identifying it and and and really killing it on all of them, we end up giving each of those clients about 80% effort. Um, the the estimate that I said I have to you by Friday turns into three weeks from now, they're emailing me saying, What happened to that? Oh yeah, right, right, right, right. Or the, you know, the the estimate that I do create, I spent 15 minutes on when I should have spent 45 minutes on. I missed three line items, I missed price stuff. Once they say, hey, let's sign it, let's skip going, all of a sudden I've got a uh uh 80% increase in price because I missed so many things. Now it's a bait and switch, and they're like, Oh, these guys, right? And so there's on that end, when you're too busy, that's kind of what what starts falling away on the delayed estimate turnaround.

The Rut Of Abandoning Process

Speaker 6:33

So let me let me jump in here. There's I I've I've talked with a a couple guys, and I do this for myself when things get this way. You have to do a triage. You've got all these estimates, and the hardest part is the first part, and it's figuring out what is which are the jobs that I feel like are the hottest leads, which are the jobs that I think fit me the best, and those are your priority. Yeah. And you you basically come up with your list of ten and you prioritize those in order, and then you figure out where on your calendar you feel like you can get these done, and then you reach out to all of those people and you give them, you set that expectation. Even if you've already set a previous expectation, it's okay. You can follow up and say, hey, the week's gotten a little bit more crazy than I anticipated. I'm not gonna be able to have your estimate till you for uh for you until this date.

Speaker 2 7:27

Yeah.

Speaker 7:27

And then you you do that, but you give yourself the time that you need and you prioritize the jobs that you think are the hottest and best uh opportunity for you. Yeah. But that way you can service them, and the ones that might fall off are the least likely ones that are gonna be a good fit for you.

Speaker 1 7:45

I'd rather give six jobs a hundred percent attention than ten jobs eighty percent attention. Yeah. Uh and and that that's exactly right. Ranking these, how how do we rank them? It's looking at the lead source, right? It's a referral from a neighbor because we did a kitchen and now the neighbor also wants a kitchen. Bing. That's top of my list because they're there I'm I'm already in the door. If it's a, hey, I Googled you and I'm trying to get three bids, um, uh that's a lower because uh I'm bidding against people, there's no there's no tie for them to use me outside of reading some Google reviews. Um, that's gonna be lower. Also, how juicy is the job? You know, an $8,000 job versus an $80,000 job, obviously I want the $80,000 job. So that's gonna be a higher priority. Now, this doesn't mean I'm shunning those other people and giving them half effort because that also, well, I mean, we I I remember we got a review from someone who was like, they just didn't give me the estimate, like they pushed me off for a couple weeks or whatever it was of like we got a negative review because we didn't bid it in time or they didn't like our speed of getting to it. And it's like we should have just been up front with that person, right? We should have said in the front end, hey, listen, we are slammed and I've got we've we've got a lot of jobs going on. And like like when you become our client, all of our current clients that are under contract are top priority over potential future clients. And so we've got the next two to three weeks booked on on starting and finishing jobs and managing what we're doing. I would love to give you an estimate in three weeks from now. I I don't know what your time frame is, um, but I don't have the capacity to do to give you the service you deserve over the next two to three weeks. Do you have time for us to sit down in three weeks to look at this project together? That is so respectable from a client side where they're like, yeah, that's great. Thank you for being honest with me. Right. The the line I've used before is you know, I I would it'd be easier to say yes and get a deposit from you and not give you the service you deserve, but I'd rather risk not landing you as a client to treat you well than to go ahead and try to try to get a dollar out of you. So we're it I can't do anything for three weeks. If you're good with that, let's let's schedule time for uh the first Monday in three weeks from now. That would that work for your calendar?

Speaker 9:54

Yeah.

Estimate Triage And Setting Expectations

Speaker 1 9:54

Yeah, absolutely. Right. And so I'm actually landing all 10 of those. I'm just got six I'm gonna focus on now, and four that I've gotten three weeks from now. And they're all very happy with me. And if they can't wait for me to say, no, we're looking to get this done, we want to get moving, we got a graduation party coming up, whatever it is, that's fine. You weren't gonna be able to service them anyways. So let's not waste our time writing an estimate, let's not waste our time going out there. They can't wait three weeks for me to get an estimate back, then they're not gonna be a client for me because they're I I've deprioritized them to push them three weeks. They're they can't wait for me. I'm not gonna move things around to try to say yes to try to land them, right? So cool. Um I'm go ahead and weeding out the work that I was gonna do wastefully anyways, because I don't have to now service those clients. Um, so yeah, if you're del that's that's number one. If you if you're overwhelmed with with that sort of thing. Number two, that happens uh when when you're overwhelmed with jobs, uh we're giving bad crews more work. This is something I've seen, I see often from from guys is as we grow our companies, we have to be always adding vendors, subs, crews. That also means when we identify a bad one, we've got to cut them and we've got to get rid of them. Uh, this is really easy to do when you've got a boss, a general manager, that's like, hey, we're not gonna hire those guys, figure it out, find someone else. It's cut and dry. I'm not gonna cut a check to those guys. They're they've screwed us three times, they've stole from us, whatever it is, I'm not going, you cannot use them. But when it's a one-man show, I'm like, oh, Steve sucks, but I know I could at least get a body on that job and start some demo. Right. And so, guys, because when this is happening and you're underwater with too much leads or too much work or some fires happen, and so I'm behind everywhere. The the the shortcut is I'm gonna throw Steve out on this job site just to keep things going, and I'm gonna gamble that he doesn't screw me again. Um, or I'm I'm gonna have to babysit him, and that always turns into more work for you. Yeah.

Speaker 11:55

It always turns into I mean, I got here and I don't I'm not really understanding what we need to be doing. Also, the dog's out.

Stop Feeding Bad Crews

Speaker 1 12:03

I'm gonna need five grand extra for sure on this job. So uh getting identifying the labor you need and continue to grow your bench instead of just uh instead of just reusing the guys you know you shouldn't. Right. And so this is you know, uh I talked to a guy literally yesterday that last year he was literally he was doing about 20,000, 25,000 a month in revenue. We got him out of the truck, he's doing this month 240k, 250k, next month, the following month, and another 240 the month after. He's got really good pipeline. We've we've kind of shifted him into that, and and so I'm like, bro, you've uh 12x'd what you were doing, and you've added a few crews. Like, this isn't gonna work. And so he's overloading his guys, they're failing, there's fires happening on it. And so I'm like, I know this is gonna be so opposite of what you feel like doing right now. I need you to go hunt crews. I need you to go to Home Depot, I need you to get on Facebook, I need you to go like you. We have to hunt crews. He's like, I don't have time, I've got these estimates, I got this, and I got this other thing. Um I understand that you don't have time not to do that. We've got to find the right labor because that's the product we're selling. It's like having the grocery store and being like, okay, I've I've ran ads, I got everyone coming in here. We're doing a big grand opening. I don't have time to go find meat that isn't spoiled, but I'll figure it out on the fly. And it's like, that's not everyone's gonna come to your grocery store, turn around and leave right away. Like, that's not how you do it. You've got to have a really good product that you're delivering to people, and that's from developing these crews. It's from getting the right guys and labor and and tradesmen and and subs that are coming into your company. You're training with them, you're you're aligning together and partnering on these jobs, and you're taking them through your subcontractor agreement form and everything else, which we're covering in a week or two on a podcast about um uh some of that stuff. Anyways, what we wanted to what we want to uh what you the main thing that I want to uh press in on this is we want to make sure that estimates are getting out 24 to 48 hours, uh, and that we're not scheduling an estimate that we can't get to on time and write immediately. And so we're looking at our calendar. Again, we we were probably dubbed the calendar uh contractor cuts because that's all we've talked about a number of weeks, and it's because it's so important. If you don't use a calendar, if you don't look at your calendar, Monday sit down and say, okay, I know I got to visit this. I'm starting the paint crew at this this house. I've got to go meet this inspector on this day. I can probably do estimates on Thursday this week. So I'm gonna call these three people back, schedule those estimates. I'm gonna do three in the morning, then go home and write them. I'm gonna put them on my calendar and any other estimates I'm gonna push next week. Right. And so one simple 15-minute game planning on Monday of looking at your calendar and figuring out the week allows you to really service your clients well across the board. It saves you so many hours throughout the week of reactive uh to fires that are happening. Uh the last thing that that you start seeing also is unreturned phone calls and just dropping the ball everywhere. If you if you feel like that's happening, um that is where we say, okay, I I'm gonna get up an hour earlier, and I'm gonna have an hour every morning to organize. I'm gonna do my own meeting, I'm gonna sit in front of my uh computer, I'm gonna open up my jobs, and I'm gonna organize everything, I'm gonna respond to my emails. I can get up at five instead of six. I can get up at four instead of five. It's gonna be tough, but it's gonna be a season of a couple weeks. And then I'm gonna catch up, I'm gonna be good, and we're we're good to go. It's all about self-control at that point. You've got the time. You've can figure it out. And if you don't have the time, if you're getting up at four and you still don't have the time, we're pushing clients out. You said yes to too much. So we need to look at what's coming. We need to look at, hey, I can't do 400,000 this month when my biggest month in the past is 120. It's not gonna happen. So we got to push those jobs out, right? And so starting to be realistic and understanding not just saying yes to everything, but under using dropping the balls as kind of red flags that are like, oh crap, I haven't called that person back, I haven't done that. That's on the the side of being flooded. Um, that's on the side of growth or leads, and I've got I'm overwhelmed with work, uh, a crew I had to fire, and now I've I've I'm scrambling and my time is spent. The other side of this coin is what we talked about earlier, is I've kind of fallen off on work and I put all these new processes in place and where are the jobs? I've sent out a bunch of estimates, what's going on? I'm trying to fix things, right? And so on that side, you you start doing the same stuff, but out of different reasoning, right? The the old ruts are are usually one of two things. Number one, you're falling back into those old ruts, the uh, you know, the the delayed estimates or the just kind of shooting from the hip because you don't really trust that the that betting on yourself in these new processes and systems and trying to grow your company is actually hip working. You're you're getting feedback from one month, a few weeks of not getting jobs landed, and and and taking that and internalizing and being like, oh, this just isn't working. I'm just I'm just gonna go back to what I know I can make money doing. That's usually what it is. Uh the the other side of it is kind of a depression, a kind of a well, you know, like, where am I even going with this? Why am I even doing this? And it's just kind of an apathetic bury my head in the sand because I don't know what's gonna go, what's going on. Um, on that, it's the same thing. We're getting into ruts, we're just not giving the service that we want. We're not, we we've lost that energy, that spark of excitement of growing and building this company. Um, on that, it is a 30,000-foot reset. That's what we need to do. We need to, we need to start having uh a meeting with ourselves, not give up on our processes, but we really need to identify what's going on. Uh a good example, one of the guys I'm coaching, he, I mean, when we talked recently, he was like, I've got, I feel like I've sent 40 bids and landed three of them. And I said, Cool, let's look at, let's look at your intake to uh estimate uh part of the process because something's broken there. You're not selling it right, you're not selling yourself. You are exchanging in his spot, and there's a couple other guys that that I've seen this way, it's not that you're not a good salesman, it's that you're pitching this as an exchange of goods for money. And so you're losing every bid because you're not the lowest bid. And so we're not building the value of the relationship and what we can provide for the client for the price they're paying, right? If I can show a client the safety, security, the guarantee, the enjoyability of working with our company, they'll pay 80,000 over 70,000 from that guy that's you know, uh terrible at response, terrible at communication, took them three weeks to get the estimate back. If they're comparing numbers uh to each other, and it's just hey, here's my number, take it, let me know if you want to do it, they're gonna go with the 70 over the 80. Why would they pay more for you for a service that they don't even know about for the experience that they're getting? So you might intend to give them that service. Yes, oh, for sure. It's like I've got a great process. Once I sign, my pre-construction is amazing. Well, let's uh uh one of the big spots I start with, guys, client engagement agreement. We don't do that after signature. I try to do that as early on my dates as possible. I want to get that as early as I can ask for because that's a sales tactic to show them what we're doing. So, how do I get there? How do I start pitching that? The whole pitch on uh on on saying and trying to get them on that is hey, I've revised assessment. I got some questions on it. I also know that you got some other bids going, and I love that. I want to make sure that we are the right fit for you. I've got something called our client engagement agreement. I'd love to walk you through it. It's not an agreement that you need to sign today, it's something that you have to sign before we start, but it really shows you a really good picture behind the curtain of how we operate and how our renovations run. And it will kind of sets the bar of what we expect out of you as our customer and what you should expect out of us. So if you'd be interested in seeing that, it's usually helpful to make sure we're a good fit for each other before you make a final decision for anybody. So clients are like, yeah, I'd like to know more about how working with you would look. Right. And so you sit down and and and walk them through the CEA. And by the end of that meeting, they're like, This is my guy. This is my my company, this is who I'm working with. So getting the CEA early, like, and again, I'm I'm getting in the weeds with it, but when you are are missing on the front end estimates, that's often it. It's often a selling yourself on the front end, getting getting them happy with the experience and and and really enjoying the experience of working with you because he turned things around quickly. He was very attentive, very detailed. I understand what it's gonna be like working with these guys, right? And it's a numbers game. You do 30 bids and you land two, you're down. Next month you do 10 bids and you land eight, and you're like, oh my goodness, it's turned around, right? And so it's a numbers game. And like you said, it's it's based around so many different factors. A war with skyrocket rocketing oil, a um uh tax season, um different, yeah, there's a bunch of different factors that's gonna cause people to pause before signing. So it's having the the willingness to bet on yourself and have in your head, I can do this, and I just need to keep keep persevering through this low period with my plan that's in place. If you have a plan in place and you feel like it's not working, come talk to me. I'd love to have that conversation. James, where I would love to hop on a call and and talk to you about what you're what is your game plan for growth, and let's try to dissect what is and isn't working in it.

Own The Calendar And Turn Estimates Fast

Speaker 21:33

Yeah. It's a couple other things that uh you can do in this uh down season, if that's if that's the side of the coin you're on. Um investing in your high value relationships. So instead of putting all the eggs in the basket of I'm gonna I'm doing my marketing, I'm trying to get clients, I'm I'm I'm doing everything I can there, shift your focus slightly and create some fly. Flyers that you can email or flyers that you can drop off, real estate agents, architects, designers, people that are in your sphere of influence, they're in the industry in some form or fashion, and they have clients, and you guys can share clients. You all need each other. There's a symbiotic relationship there. Go after those clients, those relationships, because they might not bear fruit immediately. But while you're sitting here frustrated and twiddling your thumbs and not knowing what to do, build a campaign to go after those people just with the with the concept of I'm gonna create relationships. I'm just gonna invest in some of these relationships. Um and those are going to those are perennial plants. You don't have to plant those annually. Those are those will keep coming year after year and you'll be getting the fruit of that. Yep. That's right. Um what's the you're gonna probably, if you are on the second side of this coin, you're probably like, we gotta invoice something. We need something. And maybe you've got a couple jobs that are like these are going to start, but we're we're sticking to the process, we're going through the due diligence, we're we're not gonna invoice 50% up front. But what you can do is order all of your materials up front and map out how am I gonna use this money? The best way to use that is what is the total cost of my material? That's gonna go on my credit card because that's what I'm gonna be spending on. So we'll get our credit card down, and then we have whatever profit you have on there that goes into your cash flow, but you're still not going to rob from Peter to pay Paul. You you have to draw a line for yourself that that's not something that I do anymore. Yeah. Uh sometimes you've got a project, there's like, you know, a lot of material that needs to be purchased, and it all doesn't need to be purchased right now, but there is a lot going on.

Speaker 1 25:14

I'm making 20% on that extra 20 grand that I could I can go in and order. That's four grand of profits I I can take.

Speaker 25:20

And to put and to pay down any credit card or or uh uh credit accounts that you have. Yep. Because though that's what you're gonna actually use to purchase your materials. You're not taking that cash and going to buy it with that cash. Yep.

Speaker 2 25:33

Yep.

Speaker 25:33

Um shoot. Because of the oil prices and you know, everything political whatever. We saw this in 2020. The material prices went crazy. Yeah. So that's one thing I've kind of mentioned to my clients, not as a scare tactic, but hey, if you're open to it, I'd really like to rent a pod and purchase absolutely everything we know we're gonna need and get it in that pod because I don't want to come to you, you know, after permitting from now, yeah. Yeah, two months after we're done through the permitting process, we're ready to purchase material and everything's gone up 20%. Uh which totally like we had to go back through in COVID and reach out to people like, hey, this lumber package went from twenty thousand to thirty-two thousand dollars heads up, and that caused a lot of problems. So maybe we jump ahead of that this time. Yeah. We learn from our we learn from our mistakes, we learn from kind of not seeing what's going on around us and taking action on it. Yep. Um those are my notes. I love it.

When Work Dries Up

Speaker 1 26:46

Uh uh I would say really, what no matter what side of the coin you're on, there they're two totally different mindsets, but there's kind of three things that you need to be doing no matter what side you're on. Um and one, if you're on the on the I'm flooded with job side, to get these three things done, you just have to honestly look at yourself and have some self-control and find some space to do these three things. If you're on the other side, you need to get some motivation and and believe in yourself a little bit more and start doing these three things. Um, either way, no matter your mentality behind it, this is what we're doing. Number one, we're identifying your ruts. And that's that's sitting over a cup of coffee, saying, okay, when I was uh when I was shooting from the hip and things weren't working very well, but I was, you know, six months ago, a year ago, before I started developing some of these processes, what were my ruts? What were the things that clients will complain about? What were things that where balls were being dropped? And I'm gonna write those down and I'm gonna make sure those don't happen on a weekly basis. I'm gonna, I'm gonna uh double down my efforts against those things to make sure I don't fall back into that. That's number one. Number two, client communication. Whether you're in a rut, uh, I'm sorry, whether you're on the side of the coin where you've got a lot of work or on the side of the coin where you have no work, um, client communication falls off first. Um, because if you're too busy, I talked to him two days ago on the job site, we're good, we're good. He understands what we're doing. Well, I did tell him I'd do two emails a week, and now I haven't done an email in three weeks. Um, but he's fine. He gets it, he gets it he gets it. And then all of a sudden the client's like, I've never heard from you guys. I feel like you're avoiding me. This is not what I signed up for. And now we're ruining our reputation. Right. So client communication is number one. I that's the Tuesdays and Fridays. I need to sit down and email every job card, whether it's an open estimate or an in-progress job. I need to send an email to every client on Tuesday saying, Hey, check in on the estimate. Where are you at? What do you need from me? I know that you said you needed a week to talk through this, or hey, this is where our job's at. This is what happened last week, this is what's going on next week. If you have any questions, uh let me know. Here's the final, here's an invoice for the week. We need to be doing that twice a week every week. Um, that's when you're busy. When you're on the slow side, it's almost like this self-defeating I'll call, I'll I'll email them tomorrow. And it's almost uh a burying your head in the sand. So again, Tuesdays and Fridays, you're going to email every job card, even if you are demotivated and you're in your head about it. You you gotta act the way that you want to be. And we're gonna start doing the the consistency of this because consistency wins on all of this stuff. Um, so that's that's number one. Or number two was client communication. Number three is keeping that 30,000 foot view. Looking at this beyond this week, looking at it beyond this week and next week. Um we're building something and there's peaks and valleys. And if you stay in the valley, there's no one coming to get you out of it. You have to look at the big picture and say, okay, this is where I'm at. This is where I need to go. What do I got to do to get there? This is what, okay, it's April right now. What does May look like? All right, May, I got nothing. How do I get some jobs from May? I I I've got three jobs running right now, they're all closing out. Okay, let's look at May, and I'm gonna own May. I'm going through people, I'm doing what James was talking about with connecting with the right relationships. I'm starting to build the next few months, and I'm trying to look at what what big picture is broken in my systems. Yeah.

Speaker 30:17

Um email all your dead estimates. Yes, yes. Hey, uh do you got any do you have plans on doing any projects this year? And like a nice follow-up email, even though it went dead, like things change. People have new projects, people never did their old project because it was too much money from everybody that they got bids from.

Speaker 1 30:35

Yeah. Just reach back out, throw a net in the water. And if you feel like you've done all that, that's what coaching really is helpful for. I mean, I I I like I said, the guy that had sent 40, 30 to 40 uh bids out and feels like he's landed two of them. When you come onto the the coaching call, uh, the zoom and and your ER, it's like, hey, let's zoom out, like, let's look at where you've come from, let's look at where you're going. You're having a bad month, not a bad year. Like we're we're doing so, so like, yeah, you've gone four steps forward and then five steps back, and so you're worse than where you were at a month ago. But let's look at six months ago and let's look at six months from now. Let's go to 30,000-foot view and not be demotive, demotivated because I'm not getting instant um gratification hits from landing seven jobs this week. That's okay. I don't need that dopamine from this to keep going. I'm gonna be an adult, I'm gonna have some maturity, and I'm going to keep striving towards that growth in this bad time or in this busy time. Um, so that's it. Identify the ruts, write them down, don't fall back into them. Client communication, client communication, client communication. Uh, and then number three, keeping that 30,000-foot view while you're in it. So no matter what side of the coin you're at, if you're doing those three things, you're going to work out of it in a good way. You're going to start owning your calendar, slowing things down, executing, growing the company on one side of the coin, the other side, you're going to work out of that valley. We're going to get you uh consistently getting more jobs. We just got to land a couple, get some, get some wind in your sails, and we're going to be good. And you got to trust that and trust that part of the process. That is it on this topic. Um, if you have any questions, we'd love to talk to you about it. If you're in either one of these boats, we would love to have that conversation with you. We, you know, it every single person probably listened to this has been in both of those boats multiple times. And so the goal is that equalizer, the the medium heart rate to where when things are good, all right, that's fine. We're we're gonna keep going. Or things are bad, all right, that's fine, we're gonna keep going. I'm gonna be an equalized uh uh heartbeat for the company. Even if I'm a one-man show, I'm going to be very steady in the middle. So if you want to talk about what that looks like, how to do that, James and I will love to love to hop on a call with you. Go to ProStruck360.com or contractorcuts.com. We'd love to set up a free 30-minute consultation um uh chat with you about where you're at.

Speaker 33:06

You ready for my joke? I'm ready for the joke. What do you get when you cross a shark and a cow? What? I don't know, but I wouldn't want to milk it. That's good. That's really good. That's probably your best one yet. A five-year-old told me that when I was a kid counselor.

Speaker 1 33:25

All right, thank you for listening. We'll see you guys next week.