Welcome to another episode of the "Builders Business Success Podcast". In fact, it is episode 87. My Lord, we're creeping up on the triple figures. Now, the "Builders Business Success Podcast" is a construction business podcast or a building business podcast. 

If you've never met me before, if this is your first podcast, I'm Mick Hawes, and I'd love to be your construction business coach, or what you might call builders coach. And the purpose of this show is to overcome, give you solutions to overcome many of the common and costly problems that pretty much every builder experiences. 

The one that we're talking about today in fact, is a mistake of hiring, a mistake in hiring. Some weeks ago, we did a show called the fateful eight, and it's the eight mistakes, the eight most common mistakes that pretty much all builders make when they're trying to overcome the problems in a building business. 

They're looking for a solution, and on the pathway to their solution, we've found that there are these eight common mistakes. And I think this is number three, I think it's number three. And it's the mistake that builders make when they're hiring. 

And in this episode, we're gonna talk about a few things that you need to do, that you should do. You should not hire another person until you do these things, because you will waste your time, you will waste your money, and you won't be happy with the outcome. 

So there are much better and more effective ways or things that you can implement prior to hiring another person. And that's going to be the focus of today's podcast. And of course, we got the idea of the week, just to give us an opportunity to show you a shot of our floating light bulb. 

Why else would we have an idea of the week? And the idea of the week is something that can reduce the pressure on you and your to-do list every day. If you ever get stressed out 'cause you feel like you've got too much to do, the idea of the week is gonna be super beneficial. So let's get on with it. 

*Transcription of the show*

As I mentioned, the topic of the main part of the podcast today is making the mistakes of not checking a few things before you make a hire. And I guess why we're motivated to make a hire, put another person on the team, is that we tend to be overworked. 

If we've got a lot of stuff on, we tend to be overworked, and we just feel like we need help. I guess if we're honest, sometimes we just want another person to do the crap that we don't want to do. 

So we get to a point where we just don't wanna do that stuff anymore, and so we wanna duck shove that along to somebody else. But as a rule, it's mainly we've got that much work on, we need more people. 

Now, the reason that that I wanna share this with you in this episode of the podcast is that that can be a very, very costly and expensive mistake if it's not done right, and if we don't look at things that can actually make it so you probably don't need to hire that person at all. At the moment, you need to get some things right first, and then you can hire that person, and then it will be very, very beneficial. 

But without these things, it can be very, very expensive because it takes time. So you've gotta think about this, the time that you are putting into trying to find a person, that's time that you are not doing either work on the business or work where you could be being paid for. 

So it takes time to find people, it takes time to train people. Even if they're an experienced trades person, for instance, or an experienced person in your office, it still takes a little bit of time for them to get used to your environment and the way that you do things. 

And then when you bring another person on, a lot of people think, "Well, that will free me up." Well, that might be the case, but it might not as well because it takes time to manage people properly. And if you don't put the time in to manage people properly, it will take time away from you in other ways, such as mistakes and other problems that will arise, that could have been avoided by doing some effective people management. 

And then of course, this ugly word called churn, or turnover, people turnover. You've put all of that time, and effort, and money into bringing somebody up to standard. 

And again, it could be, and most often, even though that we don't wanna admit it, it could be that it was the quality of the management, the environment, the leadership was creating, that has caused this person to wanna look over the fence and where the grass is always greener. 

And they end up leaving you, and all of your investment has now gone over the fence, and now you've gotta do it all again. So doing the hiring thing incorrectly can be very, very costly, and at some stage we will do a podcast episode on hiring and the right way to go about it. 

But this episode is really about just hold on and don't hire at the moment because there are a bunch of boxes we need to tick before we get there. One of the first boxes you need to tick before you hire another person, is what's making the decision? Is it just you and your frustration, or you're overwhelmed with the amount of work, and you just think that you need another person. 

If that's the case, I'd like you to sit back and have a look at profit first. Now, if you haven't implemented profit first, you need to implement profit first. But I'm assuming that you've already implemented that. And profit first should be making the decision. So you need to look through profit first and find out what effect that is going to have on expenses. 

And if you put another person on, are you able to increase the revenue and the profitability of that revenue to more than take care of this new person? 'Cause it's all well and good to put a new person on. 

But as we've discussed in previous episodes, as a business that has fundamental flaws and it starts to expand, as it starts to grow, as you start to put on more people, profit goes down more often than not. And so you need to have an approach where you're looking at profit first, and you can see that when I put this new person on, it will increase the profit. 

You've gotta look at yourself and every single other person in your business as a profit center, you're not a charity. There's no point just putting somebody on because they need to do the work. 

You've gotta figure out how they will contribute to the net profit in your pocket. And very few people look at that, which is why the big majority of the time, almost all of the time, as businesses start to grow, the profit goes down. And the reason that they are trying to grow is to increase their profit, but it doesn't, it goes down. And another reason is that, "I want more time." So I put somebody on or I grow my business. 

So I've got more people to do this stuff, and you think that you you'll get more free time, you'll get less free time. So the two main reasons that you did this for, they're not gonna be delivered. So we've gotta look at how we're doing these things. So number one, ensure that profit first makes the decision for a new hire, but there, there is a bunch of things that we can do that may make this new hire unnecessary just yet. 

I'm not saying at all, in any way, shape or form, don't hire people, I'm not saying that. I'm saying let's just get our shit together first and take up every opportunity for potential productivity and effectiveness gains before we just fall into this hypnotic state that we just need another person. 

So the options that you need to explore, and probably in this order, and if you're in the ToolShed, I did a post on Monday that kind of outlined what I'm talking about now. So you can go grab that and have a look at that. And it's in writing, in black and white. One of the first things you need to do is look at your personal productivity. 

The reason I suggest that you do this first is if you look at team productivity first, and you really haven't got your act together in this space, it's not gonna work very well. You need to know how to do this personally. 

You need to experience it personally, so you can have the conviction and be congruent when you're talking to the team about measures that the team can implement to increase productivity, increase, effectiveness, increase efficiency. 

And just before I go on with this, I would like to just unpack the meaning of the two words, efficiency and effectiveness, because I think many people get stuck on efficiency. We need to be more efficient, and yes, efficiency is good, but not if it's not heading you in the right direction. 

And effectiveness is a much, much better word, because cause efficiency means doing more things in less time. Effectiveness means doing more of the right things. 

So effectiveness is focusing on the specific activities that are directly connected to your preordained goals and objectives for your business. And you can see the direct connection that's moving you forward. Efficiency quite often is just, there's this stuff I need to do. And a lot of the stuff, as we'll explore in a minute, is stuff that maybe you don't need to do. 

Maybe you've just hypnotized yourself into believing that it's important, and you've habituated yourself into just doing that stuff. And instead of exploring whether I need to do it at all, you figure out how can I do it faster? How can I do more of that? 

But you're literally on, no, literally, I hate it when people use the word literally when it's not literal, I was about to say, literally rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but you'd have to be on the Titanic to literally do that. 

So it's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. You're just doing stuff, and it's not really contributing to the forward movement and progress of your preordained goals. So what we need to do is work on our personal productivity first. 

And I suggest you do that through a quality personal success ritual. In our blueprint program, that is one of the very first things we teach. Is a personal success ritual that makes every single day that you perform this ritual, it makes it significantly better, significantly more enjoyable, and significantly more productive. 

Now, many, many, any moons ago, as I wrote in the article that I posted earlier this week. I used to just fly around the country. I was working for a company called Day-Timer, fly around the country, teaching time management skills, and mindset and stuff like that. 

What we identified was the basic implementation of these ideas would at very minimum increase the effectiveness and productivity of an individual by 18%. The instant that they implemented these ideas, the day that they implemented it. I've stood back from that, and I feel that that's very, very conservative, but just if we go with that conservative figure 18, even 20%, I still think it's conservative. 

If you think about that, and if you have five people in your team, and you are one of 'em, and you've got four others, and together you implement these basic ideas, such as a personal success ritual and a thing called a prioritized daily action list. 

All of which we teach in our blueprint, the Blackbelt Program, straight away, it's the first thing, because we want to get you under control, and we want to get you in charge of your day and be able to get a whole lot more of the right things done, and make space for things that you know you need to do, but you never get around to. 

That's why we do that first, and it's super powerful, and it makes a huge impact in a very short amount of time. And if you think about it, as I said, if you were 20% more effective or productive, and then you taught four people in your team to be 20% more effective, does that mean mathematically that all five of you together, just by getting this, what I say, conservative improvement in productivity, you're replacing the need for a sixth person? 

You've just created a hundred percent more activity or productivity because I improve 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, that's a hundred. And just that simple thought process and the implementation of a simple personal success ritual. 

And in particular, a prioritized daily action list, can be absolutely profound. And also think about this, that each of these people in the team are gonna be significantly happier, significantly less stressed because they've got more control, and the business has just avoided the cost of that sixth person. 

And I'm coming back to the start again, saying that 20% productivity gain is super conservative if you do it right. If you've got the quality personal success ritual and the quality prioritized daily action list, this whole thing takes around about 13 minutes a day. So is it worth the investment of 13 minutes a day? 

And let me just say, I don't even need to follow you around with my clipboard and my white coat on for a week to find out that you waste time, I just know that you do. And I would estimate you would be wasting a minimum of two, perhaps four hours every single day. 

So wouldn't it be a good idea to implement this 13 minutes a day of this very, very simple, yet super powerful and effective process, called the personal success ritual and the prioritized daily action list. Once you've done that, so that's just step one, is getting your act together. The next step, and the reason that you need to do it first is so you can own it, 'cause you can't sell what you don't own. 

So if you are going to start to encourage other people in your team, and this could be subcontractors as well, to follow in your footsteps and implement these ideas, you'll start to improve the productivity of other people that are involved in your projects, your direct employees, plus your subies and so forth. 

And then in a addition to that, to improve team productivity, I suggest you do a daily direction meeting. A daily direction meeting, we teach that as well, and it has a choreography and an agenda that makes a powerful difference, a powerful difference. 

In fact, the story that can comes to mind about that, and this guy isn't a builder because it was back in the day, when we were kind of general business coaches and not just focusing on builders. This guy owned a motor mechanic workshop. It was super disorganized when I first met him, wasn't very profitable. 

He was massively under the pump timewise, didn't get a lot of time for himself. And he just started to subscribe to some of our information back in the day. He didn't get any personal coaching. I just knew him because he was local and we used to get our car service with him. 

Long story short, over a couple of years, he moved into some new premises, implemented the stuff he'd been learning from these ideas, such as the daily direction meeting. And I tell you this story because he sold the business a number of years ago, and before he did, he told me his story, that he didn't really do everything that I suggested, but he did implement the daily direction meeting. 

And what he was able to do was build a business that he only really to turn up for the daily direction meeting each day. And his daily direction meetings went a little longer than the ones I suggest, they were about 20 odd minutes, but he did follow the choreography that we taught, and he basically eliminated himself from the business. The problem they end came up that he was bored. 

And so he thought, "Well, I'm going to duplicate this business." So in a couple of suburbs along, he opened up another workshop, and within 90 days had built another business that was generating the same turnover in profit as the origin business. And he had been able to exit from that as well. 

So the daily direction meeting can be super powerful if it's done right. And then of course, we have the weekly WIG sessions, which is a session with the team focusing on the WIG, which is the wildly important goal. Super powerful if you do that every week, and then we talk about it every day in the daily direction meetings. 

So that's the second step, and then implementing procedures and systems, which can also be identified in the weekly wig session. So you've got your team talking about procedures and systems that can be implemented that make things more fun. And when we're having more fun things go better, we just naturally become more productive. 

So basically don't hire anyone until you've ticked these boxes. Have I implemented my personal success ritual and my prioritized daily action list? Have I started to have daily direction meetings with my team, and weekly WIG sessions with my team? 

And do we have a focus on the implementation, measurement and refinement on procedures and systems in our business that we talk about every week and every day in those meetings? 

Tick those three boxes first before you decide to hire, if you do that, you will have improved the quality of the business model that you're subscribing to. Then when you do make a hire, you'll bring someone into an amazing culture, and it will be very, very profitable, and very valuable, rather than the opposite that I spoke about earlier. 

That if you don't have these things in place, and then you just go and hire someone, it can cost you big time. So get all of this happening before you hire another person. 

Idea of the Week

The idea of the week is in cahoots with what I was just talking about. And focusing on that personal productivity, I thought, I love this idea. I subscribe to this idea, I know it works. 

We teach this idea to our Blackbelt members. I want you to know it as well. And if you want to become more productive, if you start doing your prioritized daily action list, you'll start to notice that there will be recurring activities, you will have recurring activities. There are things that you need to do every single day, and things that you'll need to do every single week. 

And so here's the idea, I suggest that you list all of those activities. List all of the things that you need to repeat, not one off activities, but things that you need to do in your business, whether it be on site, whether it be the administration of the team, whether it be in the administration of the office, whatever it is, there's all of these different areas of your business that there will be reoccurring actions. 

Then I want you to go through that list and highlight all the ones you hate, okay. For some of you, you just might go, and highlight the lot, but there might be some things you enjoy doing. But what I'm asking you to do that for is so at least you've got motivation to get this activity off your list. And so there are four ideas that you apply to each of these reoccurring activities, and starting with the ones you hate. 

And please do it in this order. The first one is dump it, that means don't do it anymore. If you ask the question, what will happen if I never did this, you will find some things, there will be some things that if you never ever did them again or nobody else did them again, we just don't do them anymore. 

We don't delegate them or anything, we just don't do them anymore. There are things that you do right now that if you never did again, would make zero to little difference. And even if they make a little difference, it doesn't mean you should do them. 

Because if you are doing these things that make a little difference, and you're not doing the things that make a big difference, Well, shouldn't you say no to the things that make a little difference, and say yes to the things that make a big difference? So step one, look at it, can I dump it, ask that question. Step two, can I automate it? 

We use a bunch of things. I guess the foundational one is active campaign, which is a customer relationship management software. The cost is, I don't know, 20 bucks a month or something ridiculous, And we can automate a whole bunch of things. We can automate communications to our prospects, to our clients. We can automate reminders for us to do things. 

There's a whole bunch of things that it can do that we used to do manually, and for $20 a month, it happens automatically, sounds like a good idea. So if you can't dump it, can I automate it? That's the second question. If you can't find anything to automate it because it needs some sort of human interaction to do it, ask yourself, can I outsource it? 

There are virtual assistance all around the planet that you can get to do amazing quality work for pennies in the dollar. You don't have to manage them. You don't have to pay super, and sick leave, and all of that sort of stuff, so it's super cost effective. The only thing you need to overcome is this attitude that, "Oh, I couldn't give anything that I do "to a virtual assistant" that is horseshit, that is such bullshit. 

In Blackbelt, for instance, we've got a number of our members who have been able to get over that mindset. And they're now using virtual assistants. They sing the praises of these virtual assistants. Some of them are at the point where they've got multiple virtual assistants that are looking at different areas of the business. So at least open yourself up to the possibility, and create this list. 

If you need a hand with it, you know where to find us if you've got questions about that. So number one is dump, number two is automate. Number three is outsource, number four is delegate. 

So you can get it off your list and to somebody else that is in your business. If you've got a procedure or a process that you can give to them to follow, so they can do it effectively and efficiently, it gets off your list. 

So that's the idea of the week. List the recurring events, highlight the things you hate, and then look at each of them and go, can I dump it, can I automate it, can I outsource it, can I delegate it? 

And if the answer is no to all of those questions, you are stuck with it. But I really, really believe that the majority can be gotten rid of off your list by asking one of those four questions. 

Wrap Up

So just in wrapping up, I just wanna remind you, if you are part of the ToolShed, are you using the Tool Shed to the best of its potential? 

Are you sitting back and listening to the podcast, and reading the articles, and going, "That's good", and then doing nothing? What I want you to do, and now when you come into the ToolShed, there is a question, and it says, "This isn't for lurkers." 

This place isn't for sitting back and just absorbing. This is for being engaged. Ask questions, ask for help, make comments, share your wins, share your lessons in the ToolShed. 

Because if we all get together, and share, and ask, and support, and cheerlead, and inspire, everyone is gonna move further faster. So I just wanted to give you a reminder of that, to make sure that you are engaging, and this isn't just another bloody app on your phone that has notifications that you just ignore or delete without reading. 

The reason that we went from Facebook into the Builder's ToolShed is so we write the rules, and we will be building a group, an environment, a community of engaged people. So be warned, that we do have the ability in the back end of the app to see who's engaging and who's not. 

And over time, we will be giving you a reminder to do this. But if you continue to not engage, ask questions, get involved, comment, you will be removed from the ToolShed, and you won't have access to the podcast. And you might think, "Well, who cares?" Well, if that's your attitude already, you can jump out all by yourself. 

But we are committed to helping you, and we cannot until you put your hand up and ask some questions, and get involved, and contribute to the discussions in the ToolShed. So to that end, if you want help with anything that we've talked about, there's a bunch of ways, a bunch meaning two, so more than one. 

You can go to the get personal help on the menu in the ToolShed. And that will take you to a form, tells us a little bit about you, we get on a call. We find out where you wanna go, what's in the way, and point you towards the best pathway to get you what you want as soon as possible with what's available to you right now. 

So there's gotta be a pathway for everybody, and it's not all the same. So we need to tailormake that for you. And then the other thing is you can just jump in the chat. You can jump in the chat, and send a message to me, and ask a question, and if you need help, we're gonna help you, that's what we're here to do. 

We're here to change the industry. We wanna get rid of the dodgy. They're not dodgy, but they're destructive practices that most building businesses use. And it makes it really hard to enjoy and build a profitable and sustainable building business. 

In fact, one of our friends of Builders Business Blackbelt sent me a text just the other day saying, "106 builders have disappeared, "have gone broken in the last in the last 90 days." 

And it wasn't because they made too much money, I can guarantee you that. It would've been they were too stressed, They had not enough work, they weren't profitable enough. They're the reasons that they disappear, and we can help you eliminate the possibility of any of that happening in your business. 

And we want to, we want to make your business more fun, more enjoyable, more profitable, more sustainable. 

And I don't care if we need to do this one builder at a time, but we are doing it. So we need you to ask the questions, get engaged, let's have a chat, hit the personal help button, send me a message through chat, let's get into a conversation. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of "Builders Business Success Podcast". 

We'll be back again next week, 10:00 a.m, Tuesday, Sydney time, with another episode of the "Builders Business Success Podcast". I'm Mick Hawes from Builders Business Blackbelt. That is it, bye for now, have a great day.