Blue Collar Culture

Business Results the Old Fashioned Way

Ryan Englin

Digital Sorcery Doesn’t Work With Ryan Redding

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BCC 49 | Online Marketing Strategies

 

Any marketing strategy cannot beat excellent and reliable customer service. If you cannot satisfy your target market’s demands and expectations, there is no form of digital sorcery that can save you. Ryan Redding explains to Ryan Englin and Jeremy Macliver how well-targeted online marketing strategies focused on customer satisfaction will always spell out success for any business and leave a lasting impact on everyone. Have you ever wondered how some companies thrived even in the middle of the pandemic? Stay tuned as Ryan reveals the answer and discusses the importance of learning continuously and closing the bottom of the demand funnel for blue-collar trades to flourish.

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Digital Sorcery Doesn’t Work With Ryan Redding

We’re going to dig into a little bit of marketing. I know for a lot of home service companies out there, marketing is one of those things that everybody knows they need to do. They know they need to do it better. They need to get better results, but sometimes they’re not quite sure how. Our guest has been a marketer for nearly fifteen years. He works a lot with HVAC and plumbing companies. He’s been a frequent speaker at colleges, universities, industry groups, and is even a consultant for Oklahoma State University. I want to introduce Ryan Redding to the show. Ryan, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Everybody’s got an opinion about marketing. They need to do more and they need a better ROI, or whatever that may be. Help me understand, what is one of the biggest myths from your perspective about your industry?

That’s tough because I feel like, starting off cold, most people think that most marketers are just selling snake oil, but they’re full of crap. They’re saying promising the moon or whatever to close the deal. I’ve got to tell you, there are those guys. They exist, but there are some good people and smart groups out there who are doing solid work to help guys grow. One of the biggest myths is that it’s all scam because that sucks for everybody.

That’s going to lead me to my next question. I know a lot of people that have been burned. How do you separate the guys that are selling snake oil or the scammers from the ones that aren’t? What are some warning signs people can look for?

When uncertainty hits the fan, the best of the best steps up. Click To Tweet

This is going to sound awful because I don’t know about you guys, but for us, we don’t find our clients. Our clients come to us. We work with plumbing shops, HVAC shops, and have a handful of electrical contractors. They’re all blue-collar trades guys and they get bombarded by emails promising page one listings, sales calls, or everything under the sun. There’s a whole lot of people selling a whole lot of things. We do the opposite. We do good work for the clients we work with, which in turn gets us happy people, gets them to refer other people to us. We take the approach of the best marketers don’t do a whole lot of harassing you on the phone to get you to call. They do the good work. That’s their focus and that’s how we think about it at DP.

They let the results speak for themselves. I love that. I know that you work with guys in this space that are all levels of business. Maybe they’re still in the truck. Maybe sometimes they’re in the truck and sometimes they’re out of the truck, or even maybe they got a leadership team that’s helping them. You work from small companies all the way up to some of the larger ones. In your experience, what’s the one thing that you’ve seen holding most businesses back?

I’m going to come out and say this is going to sound cheesy and cliché. I’m going to say leadership. Especially in this era of COVID, it was fascinating. Let’s start here. COVID was tough for everybody across the board. It hasn’t been fun. There are levels of uncertainty that I’ve never seen. The companies who were able to not just survive but thrive through all that uncertainty weren’t necessarily doing better marketing or tactics or whatever. They had better leadership in place and they were flexing the muscles that they’ve been building on for years. I would say the difference between a good company and a great company is hands down leadership, and that might sound corny and cliché, but whatever. That’s where I’m going to hang my hat.

Can you paint a little bit of a picture of a situation you saw that was great leadership through this and maybe one that you saw that was a little bit stronger and have gotten more out of this?

There are tons of examples. Chances are, the guys and gals reading this probably know of examples in their own market space. Right when the lockdowns started happening, to rewind the wheel because everyone knows their own unique experience as it relates to COVID. There was no uniform federalized response. It was left up to local governments to make these decisions. We saw this piecemeal response from a marketing standpoint. Whereas certain states, counties, and cities would go on various types of lockdown. We would say market demand change.

BCC 49 | Online Marketing Strategies
Online Marketing Strategies: Most people think that most marketers are just selling snake oil, but they’re full of crap.

 

Consequently, the businesses within those markets would respond differently. The companies who did well didn’t hide from it. They enhance their marketing. They use this as a chance to increase their market share. They doubled down on deploying technology, so they had tools that would allow them to virtual service calls. Everyone’s afraid for their life, but yet, stuck at home. These companies are able to run calls with their tech in the driveway or at their shop and keep the customers completely safe. They were investing in things like how to provide customer experience virtually when there’s no direct contact and your sales process would have to change.

These companies thrived. In the midst of all the chaos, they did fantastic. Other companies did the exact opposite. They scaled back their marketing, started letting guys go quickly. They maybe started getting paranoid about how they were running certain calls. We saw some guys who wanted to pretend like none of the chaos existed and their customers pushed them aside because of it. This was a time where companies who had exceptional Google reviews forever leverage that momentum. The guys who didn’t have a good reputation online struggled. It was this night and day change. We saw a lot of guys that we worked with had record revenue months all through COVID. We have other guys who we’ve worked with who struggled to get their mindset above surviving in the chaos. The mindset of growth versus survival did paint that two different outcomes.

It has been interesting watching all of that because we definitely saw some of our clients have their best years ever, while we watch some of their competitors drowned. In fact, one of my clients’ huge wins was their large competitors fell out of the marketplace due to COVID and somehow, they were picking up momentum and picking up steam. The two things that you say there was one was leadership teams that were strong and healthy. They were aggressive and they knew how to push forward in the market, but they also had adaptability. They’re aggressive and adaptable versus real stoic and they got cinched down and fearful. Some got bold and some went backward.

It’s the old expression that smooth waters never made a skilled sailor. When the economy is going well, it’s easy to make money. When things are stable and customers are good, it’s easy to make money. When uncertainty hits the fan, customers are anxious, and everything is confusing, that’s when the best of the best step up. That’s where guys who want to become the best start putting their heads above the rest of the crowd. It was fascinating to watch from a marketing standpoint.

One thing I want to push into right here is you said that you get most of your clients to come to you versus you reaching out to them, which is an interesting thing to know from a marketing person who most of us are looking to hire somebody to go proactively out in the world, too. How do you explain that to someone that says, “I’m doing great work as a plumber. I got a good reputation. I’m not getting the leads?” How do you help with that versus going to the SEO and all the other stuff and doing whatever marketers do?

There is no replacing good old-fashioned customer experience at its core. Click To Tweet

It’s funny, one of the pillars that we build on is reputation. There’s a joke in marketing that great marketing makes a bad product fail faster. If a company has poor service and they don’t know how to take care of people, there is no amount of digital sorcery that will make them succeed. All we’re going to do is drive them to the scene of the crash faster. A huge focus for us is excellent customer experience because of the influence that has both on customers being able to refer to other potential customers, but also things like Google Maps rankings, Google Local Services, and SEO rankings organically. The influence of reputation is hard to exaggerate in this day and age. Even though yes, we do recommend traditional SEO, local SEO, pay-per-click, and things like that, there is no replacing good old fashioned customer experience at its core. That never changes no matter what the medium is.

I love that conversation about experience because I’ve seen it happen where you do a great job for somebody and you hope they go tell the world. You might have to do that for 10, 12, 15 people before one person hears about it, but on the bad customer experience, that one person is going to tell 10, 15, or 20 people. I see that a lot where guys are struggling to get good reviews online. They’re like, “People that have no problem leave me the bad reviews.” Getting good ones is such a challenge.

It’s funny, I disagree with that point. Not to knock on this certain fast-food restaurant, but it seems like every time I go to a certain restaurant in our neighborhood of their kids, they always come up and say, “If you go to the bottom of your seat, you’ll get a $20 off your next meal,” or whatever. I’ve never done it. I don’t know one person who’s ever done this like, “Go online and fill out that survey and you’ll get something in return.” People don’t care. However, I would say that people want to generally help people. If you took care of the customer, wowed them with your experience, and you honestly said, “It would mean the world to me if you would take ten seconds and leave a review for us on Google. You have no idea how important those reviews are for us in this day and age. It would go a long way. Would you do that?”

Those customers have no problem wanting to help, but once you get in your truck and you’re going on to the next job, that customer is going to get distracted. They’re going to get dance recital or football practice or whatever else is going on in their life. It doesn’t mean that they don’t care about you and they weren’t impressed. Life happens. The way you ask goes a long way, but you have to make it seem like it’s meaningful and personally important to you. Not just going through your script that you’re supposed to do when you’re closing out a deal.

I can see some of our readers are thinking, “I love that, Ryan. How do I get my text to do that before they got back in the truck?” Diving into that would probably be a whole episode in itself.

BCC 49 | Online Marketing Strategies
Online Marketing Strategies: The companies who were able to survive and thrive during the pandemic weren’t necessarily doing better marketing or tactics, but had great leadership all along.

 

That’s a fun topic, too.

I want to get back to something you said about COVID and what you saw with the different companies. You saw some that said, “I need to pull back. I need to feel safe.” That’s what I heard. I don’t know that you use that word. “I need to feel safer about my business. I’m going to let some people go. I’m going to protect the revenue that I had.” You saw other guys that were like, “Floor it. Let’s go.” The ones that floored it when COVID hit, they’re all of a sudden taking market share and are doing great. I know Jeremy mentioned this. I’ve had some clients who had their best year ever in 2020 because they didn’t get scared and they pushed through it. As a business owner, even a business leader, if you’re in that mindset of comfort like, “I need to protect the business,” how would someone break out of that? What are some of the things that you’ve seen work for breaking out of that comfort, be willing to take that risk, and push your business forward?

I would probably make an argument that most leaders only respond to fires and chaos. If something goes wrong, it jumps to their attention and they will do whatever they need to do to put out the fire, but sometimes, there are no fires. Sometimes, things are smooth. There’s not a problem. There’s not a squeaky wheel. In that case, I would make the argument that good leaders set fires. They create a problem that needs to be extinguished. Sometimes, that can be a little like, “The way that we’re deploying our technologies is worthless. We need to do better. We need to do better about the customer experience. We need to do better about how we answer the phones. What we’re doing is insufficient. It was good two years ago but it’s no longer sufficient.” The best leaders even in little things, when things are smooth, are going to create a fire. This also creates unity with their teams because now all the team can unite around putting out this one fire because the leader drew attention to it. It’s interesting. There’s always a case for a fire, to exist in a fire, and be extinguished as a team. Sometimes, it’s completely good if those fires are self-created.

I’m thinking of a couple of clients I know. When things get too simple or things are working too well, the owner will come in and he’ll be like, “What can we break? I need something to fix.” He’ll start his own fire. I love the way you explain that. For those people that don’t have that natural inclination to start fires, I know that you’re a big fan of learning, fluency, topics, and those kinds of things to enhance their skills. What are some tips or recommendations you have for our readers who don’t naturally go, “Everything’s looking good. Let’s start a fire so we can get better?” How do they overcome that?

Most leaders only respond to fires and chaos, especially those they create themselves. Click To Tweet

To the larger point there, I do encourage and recommend any continuing education, formal or not. If your background, for instance, is in plumbing. You’re a good plumber and you built up this business. Now you’re the owner of a plumbing business and you’re not turning wrenches anymore. Learn other skills that are complementary to help your business grow or at least the concepts. Take night classes at a community college to understand financial accounting. Push yourself to that so that you understand how to hold other people accountable. It doesn’t mean that you’re expected to be an accountant. That’s nonsense. Get yourself to the point of learning to find opportunities through hardship. That means flexing muscles that maybe you’ve never flex before you didn’t even know you had.

Sometimes, it means cross-training like going from plumbing to HVAC or some plumbing to accounting. Sometimes, that means getting an entirely different exposure. If you’ve been out of a truck for a while, get back in a truck for a week or two. Get an idea of what that’s like. It’s almost like the Undercover Boss. Get in the actual shoes and face your customers again head-on. That experience can go a long way. Eventually, you’re going to get yourself either the courage or the insight to either see a fire that you didn’t know was one or to create a fire where you didn’t know needed to be one. One of those two will happen if you push yourself to new boundaries.

Do you have a couple of real practical things that they can do to start that journey? It’s not that big part and not go back to continue education or anything, but 1 or 2 things that you’ve seen some of your clients use to break through and start that journey.

Generally speaking, one is to get involved with these trade groups online on Facebook. There are dozens of them. It doesn’t matter if you’re a roofer or if you do window sightings or if you do plumbing or HVAC. There are tons of groups online of guys like you who are always sharing best practices, things that work in their market, and things that they’re struggling with. It’s a great way to get peers around you. Two, get a part of a trade association that more formally does that training. There are tons of groups. In our space with plumbing and HVAC guys, one of the giants has a group called Nexstar. They do fantastic coaching from CSR training to sales training to inventory management.

They help make you become not a plumber, but a business owner and they help you transition to that road. I know that’s a lot of the work that you guys do with helping these guys build your business acumen and take the business up a notch so that the business isn’t running them, but they can run the business. Find people who’ve been there, who’ve been in your shoes, and have gone down that road before you and let them feed into you. Ask them the questions. Running a business of any type is lonely and exhausting. You don’t feel like you have anyone to talk to about the struggles you’re having or the fears that you’re facing.

BCC 49 | Online Marketing Strategies
Online Marketing Strategies: The way you connect with customers has to be meaningful and personally important to you, not just as if going through your script.

 

There are other guys who feel just like you and they’re willing to help and engage. Use common sense. My recommendation is don’t try to talk with people in your same market space. That could be awkward. Find people in a larger group who don’t live in your area and let them help you. Those are easy things. That will require flexing muscles that you probably don’t know you have. There are other things are maybe more formal. For me personally, I took the route a few years ago of getting my MBA. That is not for everyone. It’s not at all. It was a way to formalize some training and some exposure and skillsets with various sorts of skills and expertise. Otherwise, I wouldn’t use it on a day-to-day, but it makes me a better business owner and it makes me help have more grounded business decisions.

Those are some great tips. A big thing in all of that was peer support. People that have been there already. You own a marketing company, so you probably know a thing or two about marketing. Isn’t that fair?

Sure.

One of the things that you’ve mentioned is these guys that pushed into marketing and how marketing can move the needle on the business. There’s this belief, “If I invest more in marketing, it’ll generate more leads, it’ll give me more sales, the business will be awesome, and everything will be great,” but then you have this line here, “Great marketing makes a bad product fail faster.” Contrary there, marketing isn’t always good. I know you believe that digital marketing can move the needle on your business, especially if you’re in that place where you’re looking to get out of the truck or you’re looking to get more trucks on the road. Help us with that a little bit. What are some ways our readers can use digital marketing to move the needle on their business?

I don’t want to get into the whole concept of it, but there’s an idea called a conversion funnel. Every person goes through this. Whether or not you’re buying a pair of shoes or a bike or a house or a toaster, it doesn’t matter. The idea is that people at the bottom of the funnel are ready to make a decision. For much of the trades in the blue-collar space, people aren’t sitting around their couch on a Thursday afternoon going, “I wonder what electrician is around me because I’m curious.” They don’t do that way. They only look for an electrician because something’s wrong. They need a solution now. There are some exceptions like in remodels, they’re going to take their time making a decision.

For the most part, a lot of the blue-collar trades are bottom of the funnel. Your customers are making a decision. That’s why you’re engaged. First off, tighten up the bottom of the funnel. If the bottom of the funnel has holes, your website doesn’t rank, your website doesn’t convert, and people can’t find you on Google My Business, if they do find you in Google My Business and your review suck, there is no step two without addressing those things. Those things have got to be dealt with. Otherwise, you’re going to pour good money after bad and it’s going to be wasting it. Tighten up the bottom of the funnel.

Find people who can help you navigate through your blind spots and become better. Click To Tweet

Once the bottom of the funnel is right and you know when people are looking for you, they’re finding you and once they hit your website, they’re converting. Once they find your GMB and they’re impressed with your reputation, then you move up the funnel. Start flushing out things like social media and start doing things like email, both cold email strategies and repeat nurture strategies. Try to find ways to stay in front of customer’s eyeballs. If you have a product or service, it’s a long acquisition process. I mentioned remodeling. Nobody is making a decision on a bathroom remodel tonight. Nobody’s going to do it. They’re going to take their time and look at different examples.

Hit them with the display retargeting ad. Keep these things in front of them. The whole bottom line is when you’re at the bottom of the funnel, which tends to be the problem, and it’s broken, it doesn’t matter how many billboards, TV, direct mail you run, or times you canvass a neighborhood with flyers. When people are trying to make the decision and they look for you, the tools and mechanisms in place will fail, hands down. If they fail, you wasted all that money. Make sure to focus on the bottom of the funnel. When you do that, it’s much easier to move up the funnel and that is when you start seeing those massive ROI impacts year over year.

What you said was to understand the way that your customers are making a buying decision. Nobody decides to remodel a bathroom tonight. If you’re running ads to get them to convert tonight, that’s probably not going to happen. I know if my toilet gets clogged and starts spilling out everywhere, I’m going to make that decision quickly. I’m not going to be shopping too much. Know your client and then focus on the thing that is going to convert them the quickest, which would be the bottom of the funnel. I love that. I want to go back to the two takeaways here that I got. I want to sum them up. The first one is to break out of discomfort. If you’re in a discomfort cycle or if you’re a little nervous about what’s going on in the economy today with COVID and other things, get involved in trade associations, peer support, and education. Improving yourself is what it is. Work on yourself, and then get the support you need. Is that accurate?

Yeah. The idea is that we all have blind spots, but you don’t know what they are, so you need other people around you who are better than you, smarter than you, and further down the road from you to help make you better. They help you see your blind spots in a way you can’t.

I love that description. The second one is if I want to use marketing to improve my business, don’t go into it thinking, “There are all these things and I’m going to do all of them.” It’s figuring out the way that your customers making the buying decision and focus on results there. Once you’ve got that good, then you can move up the funnel and start working on more of the longer-term staying in front of them and those kinds of things. We’ve talked about a lot here and I know there are some people going, “This sounds awesome, Ryan. I love your ideas. I love your thoughts, but how do I do this?” If they want to get ahold of you, how do they do that?

BCC 49 | Online Marketing Strategies
The Book On Digital Marketing: For Plumbing & HVAC Contractors

It’s easy. You can go visit our website at DPMarketing.Services and there’s a giant green button. Hit Schedule A Call and that will take you right to our calendar. We can get you on there and make an introduction and see what’s up in your world.

We’ve talked a lot about plumbing and HVAC, but you also work with home service companies in general, correct?

Yeah. Plumbing and HVAC is definitely our sweet spot, but for any crisis-oriented low trust business, we’re right up the alley. Nobody looks forward to having to call a plumber. Nobody looks forward to having to call a pest control guy. Any of those businesses that meet that low of the funnel, crisis mode, and don’t trust you from the get-go is our sweet spot.

For those readers that are willing to take you up on that learning recommendation that you gave and getting a little bit more knowledge about the business or marketing, you’ve got a free giveaway for them. Can you tell us about that?

We are giving away only ten copies. Here’s the deal. I wrote The Book On Digital Marketing: For Plumbing & HVAC Contractors. You’re welcome to pick it up on Amazon. For the readers of this podcast, we have a giveaway. If you go to our website, DPMarketing.Services/bcc, you’ll be able to sign up. The first ten people who sign up will be able to get this in the mail. There’s no pressure. It does walk you through check marking of how to set up your website, how to set up your ads, and how to go through social media planning. It is a tactical book to guide you through how you make decisions. If nothing else, I know a lot of our guys use it that we work with to fact check these marketers who talked to them because there’s no BS, crap, or snake oil. It’s process, science, and methodology. Use it as a guide to making sure you’re not being sold a bunch of crap. Use it to grow your business or whatever you do. For the first ten people who sign up, we got that on the house and we even cover shipping.

Thanks, Ryan. If you’re reading this and you want to know more about this marketing and being able to fact check the guys that are already calling on you or if you even want to get ahold of Ryan, go check out his website. Ryan, I want to thank you for being here with us. I’ve learned a lot and had a great conversation. I know that our readers are going to think that this information is relevant and valuable. Thank you.

It was my pleasure. Thanks for the invite.

Thanks, Ryan.

Mentioned in this episode:

About Ryan Redding

BCC 49 | Online Marketing StrategiesThere’s nothing more deflating than sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. You know that to get more customers you need more leads- and to get more leads you need better marketing. The problem is you’re not a marketing expert; you’re an HVAC or plumbing pro.

Sure, you’ve heard people talk about things like SEO and PPC, but you don’t really know what any of that means, so you feel a bit insecure and inadequate. You may have tried some things or hired someone to help, but you’re just not seeing the results you want.

I get it. That’s why I’ve developed a proven process that helps dozens of HVAC and plumbing contractors 8x their revenue. Let’s get you more leads so you can make more money.

Putting Professionalism Back Into The Trades With Dennis Gehman

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BCC 1 | Increasing Professionalism

 

On today’s podcast, Ryan Englin and Jeremy Macliver talk to Dennis Gehman about the importance of industry associations and increasing the remodeling industry’s professionalism. Dennis comes from the design and remodeling industry, and he’s the president-elect of NARI, a well-known industry association. Don’t miss this episode as Dennis shares how NARI is helping to increase the professionalism of the remodeling industry. He also reveals the biggest myths about industry associations from a business owner’s perspective and talks about the advantages of joining NARI or any national association.

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Putting Professionalism Back Into The Trades With Dennis Gehman

I’m excited about our guest. He’s been involved in his industry for a lot of years and I’m going to let him talk a little bit more about that. He comes from the design and remodeling industry. He’s the president-elect of a well-known industry association. He’s got a lot of certifications behind him. There are a lot of things that his company is known for, and he’s very involved in the community and in the industry. I want to welcome Dennis Gehman of Gehman Design Remodeling. Thank you, Dennis, for being here.

You’re welcome. Thank you. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Help me out with this. We’re going to talk a lot about NARI and industry associations. What is one of the biggest myths about industry associations from a business owner’s perspective?

The biggest myth is that people think they’re going to join and they’re going to have all their questions and problems solved right away. It’s not the case. Our industry at least is ever-changing from new products, new laws, new OSHA regulations. The reality is most of us have come up through the trades. We were a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, and then decided to venture out on our own. Generally speaking, we know the trades well, but we don’t know the business side. Many people weren’t the best students in school, which may be why they got into the trades. Therefore, they’re not real avid readers and taking the time to get on podcasts, webinars and that kind of stuff. It takes time.

Because I’m looking at the association and you told me I’m not going to get all my problems solved right when I joined, what are the advantages of joining NARI or any national association?

I’ll speak from the remodelers’ side. Our association is NARI, an acronym for National Association of the Remodeling Industry. What you’re going to get is we’re fortunate that we have a staff headquartered outside of Chicago. We had people there that are staying on top of current education, top of new products, new laws and new OSHA regulations. That information is put out in a number of different ways. Some are through local chapters. We have 43 chapters across the country. They’re not everywhere. Also, there’s a weekly email newsletter that comes out every Wednesday and that is packed full. I have to admit, I don’t always get time to read it all because there’s too much information, but I can see the headings. If there was something new and something I haven’t learned about before, I can jump onto that.

I used to run a structural steel company and I was a part of a national steel association, Steel Erectors Association of America. Being with other people and learning that they had the same problems that I had, and they were in the same challenges that I was in. They were overcoming them in different ways. One guy would have a good strong ability to manage a safety program, while another one was stronger at the bid package. Being able to collaborate with people that were intentional about their businesses, it’s a huge value of the association. All of the stuff that’s going on and them helping us through the steel excise changes, all of those kinds of things. It sounds like that’s what they’re getting from being a part of NARI.

As much as I value the education, the good speakers, the webinars and podcasts, to me, the best value is the opportunity to get to know some other remodelers. Many times, at local chapter, they might be your competitors. One of the things that I’ve learned through NARI is that I’m okay with a good solid competitor. It’s Chuck in the truck with his dog that I don’t always see eye to eye on, and who doesn’t know his own value so he’s not charging enough for what it is. That opportunity to network and since I’ve been involved so long, I have friends all across the country. Unfortunately, we’re not doing a whole lot of meeting in person. I still know that I can pick up the phone and give people a call and shoot out an email. We have mastermind groups where people join. That’s a group of 8 to 12 contractors who are not direct competitors. They meet on a regular basis, typically once a month. The group that I’m a part of that has been going for several years now. We have a lot more interaction than just once a month. There are texts going back and forth or emails several times a week.

Being a part of a mastermind shows you that other people are going through the same business challenges. Click To Tweet

Tell us a little bit about the masterminds because that’s an exciting and unusual thing to see in associations. It’s impressive. I’d like to know a little bit more about some of the takeaways that you’ve had from being a part of that mastermind.

It’s very much like you said. It’s knowing that there are other people going through the same challenges in business that I am. Sometimes it can feel lonely. You don’t feel like you can always talk with your employees about it. My wife works in our business. She’s a good person to bounce things off of but it’s nice to have that outside perspective as well. We have a facilitator for the mastermind groups. Each of us commits and puts our signature to a confidentiality agreement at the beginning that we’re not going to go telling everybody else about the woes, the good or bad of the people that we’re talking with. We were planning to get-together in person, but because of COVID that didn’t happen.

Some of us have met at various trade shows or that kind of stuff. The camaraderie is very good. Somebody who is looking to hire another salesperson said, “Before I do this, that I’d like to probably revise the job description. Does anybody have one?” Within a few hours, 3 or 4 of us shot our job descriptions off to him. We copied everybody. Now, we all have these things and I haven’t yet had time to read through in detail the others. I think there’s some good information there that I can tweak ours and make it better too.

When I was 25, I joined a mastermind group for the first time. It’s a trade-based one where it was a whole bunch of collision center owners all across the country which is noncompeting. The guard goes down and all the numbers flow. You’re exactly right. You got people inside your own business and stuff that you can chat about to a certain level, but there’s something about having an outside influence. It’s more than just an outside influence. It’s a consistent outside influence from the same people that love, know you and care about you. They don’t sell you nothing. They don’t pitch you nothing. They’re your friend in business. That completely transformed several of my views of the way business works and learning what other real entrepreneurs were doing. That’s amazing that you guys have those throughout your association there.

It’s a cool benefit. I think one of the biggest values for me is that at the end of every session and we do a Zoom call, it’s an hour and a half. We’re always asked, “What are your takeaways and what are you going to do as a result of it?” Those are all written down. We know that when we come back the next month, we’re going to get asked what we did about it.

We spend all day long holding everybody else accountable. Even though as entrepreneurs, we do our best to be accountable. We say to our employees that they can call us out if we didn’t do that. The reality is sometimes they’re not as forthcoming as we are to them, even when we tried to create that open honest culture. I love the masterminds. That’s amazing that NARI has that. You’ve gotten to experience all this through the association. You’re seeing different businesses interact, how they function and stuff. What is something that you see that holds all the businesses back? What’s a major thing that you’re like, “I see a pattern in this?”

It is a skilled labor shortage. I know that’s not unique to the remodeling industry, but it’s a pretty big deal. Most people that I talk to, we could be doing more business and more volume if we could find the tradespeople to produce it. That’s not something that’s going to get fixed overnight. Those conversations need to happen with our local schools, probably starting at the middle school, junior high school level, and realizing that college is not for everyone. I don’t have anything bad to say about college. I did one year before I dropped out. It was a good year. I don’t regret doing that at all. Life took me in a different direction.

I have spoken for the last few years at Arizona State’s career technical education conference. Due to COVID, it got canceled. I was on the docket for being one of the main speakers there. It’s challenging the school system to look at college a little bit different. Let me get on a soapbox for just a second because I’m not against college at all. In fact, I think it’s done a lot of great things, but the numbers are the numbers. I can’t speak for the whole nation because I live here in Arizona and I studied Arizona to prepare for these speeches. When you look at high school graduates that don’t go to college and high school graduates that don’t finish their first year of college. Those two categories make up about 70% of the population. What I’ve pushed for years is to transform our messaging that just because you’ve chosen a different route other than college, it doesn’t mean you’re destined to dig ditches for the rest of your life.

BCC 1 | Increasing Professionalism
Increasing Professionalism: The biggest myth people have about joining industry association is thinking they will have all their questions answered and problems solved right away.

 

I don’t believe that every student that performed at C level or below is not intelligent. I believe that the school system wasn’t designed for their intelligence. What I mean by that is some people are very hands-on and tactical. I’ve been out there working with guys in the field. They look at it and draw something with a chalk on the ground fast. They say, “If you did this little thing, this connection will hold that. It will slip and it will fall into place.” They got Geometry, Physics and all these complex things. They could never in a million years articulate that in a textbook. They just look at you like, “This easy.”

They pull out a piece of chalk out of their pocket and scribble it right on the concrete out on this job site. It took Trigonometry and I don’t know what all those other big things to figure it out. I love that you’re passionate about that. I believe that we’ve undersold many people and we could increase our potential in the market. When I run the steel company, we started working with the high schools and attracting a lot of kids out of it. There were a lot of kids that didn’t have the ambition. They didn’t see college as the way to go. You can make a real good living in the trades.

A lot of the work I do is working with employers to help them attract good people. Sometimes it is kids right out of college. I know that there are a lot of arguments on both sides about why kids are not getting into the trades. There’s a lot of promotion from organizations like Build Your Future and these local co-ops to get kids attracted to the trades. One of the things that I want to suggest is a lot of what’s going on and the difficulty, I feel that business owners have done it to themselves. They haven’t kept up with the times. The unfortunate truth is, Dennis, I don’t know about your area but out here in Arizona, whether you want to believe it or not, Amazon is a direct competitor of the trades when it comes to hiring good people. I can make $15 an hour and I can sit in an air-conditioned living room and answer calls. One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen with a lot of businesses in the trades is that they haven’t stepped up and said, “We are now competing against Amazon for talent.”

One of the easiest things we can do is realize that almost 90% of job seekers are online looking for jobs. If they can’t find our jobs, we’re going to have a tough time recruiting them, whether it’s an apprenticeship program or it’s just general labor or even the skilled craft worker. I’d like to ask, what are some of the things that you’ve seen around that? It sounds like you’re very passionate about the skilled labor shortage and helping businesses overcome that. What are some of the things that you’ve seen work and some of the things that you have seen not work that we need to stop doing as an industry?

Some of them are what you guys have already talked about. For the most part, it’s going to start with local. It’s grassroots. Each of us as business owners of a small blue-collar industry should get involved in our local schools and the trade schools as well to get the word out there. I hadn’t thought about Amazon as a competitor, but you’re exactly right. What I think about in our area. We are in the biggest meat-packing area for that kind of industry East of the Mississippi River. Both pork and beef are local here. They got big banners out front that are telling you that you start at anywhere from $17.75 an hour to $24.50. They’re herding for employees too, but they’re doing their part to put it out there.

One of the challenges at least in the home improvement industry, few people are interested in growing their business all that large. Some of that is because by and large, we don’t have the leadership skills and management skills. Many of us want to continue working with the tools and that somewhat limits us, unless you want to hire a general manager or somebody to take that on for you. That’s one aspect. How do you learn those skills? First, you have to have interests. You’re exactly right, Ryan, that if they don’t find us online or by some other method, how do they even know that it’s a possibility or that it’s an option? Just the thing of talking to the young people at my church, we got three young men who are working with us now.

They go to our church, but that’s the way it is. Most of us connect with people who are in your circles in some way and going outside of them. The local chamber of commerce, letting people there know that you’re looking for people. Getting involved like Jeremy talked about there in Arizona. I imagine Pennsylvania has something similar, but I’m not aware of it because I haven’t been involved. Career days at the local high schools and the tech schools. It’s getting the word out in that way.

One other thing that I’ve seen that held a lot of the trade businesses back in this recruiting effort and the war on talent is they’ve struggled to communicate the why behind going into the trades. Some of that almost sounds white-collar-ish. Other organizations have clearly communicated, “We’re going to do this.” I’ve worked with a lot of different companies to establish, “Why on Earth are you even working here? What are you doing?” One particularly I think of is another steel story. I was driving with a superintendent and we’re riding along here in Phoenix. It’s a large spread-out town. He started telling me, “I helped build that.”

One of the challenges, at least in the home improvement industry, is that few people are interested in growing their business. Click To Tweet

Finally, he’s sharing all these stories. I was like, “I helped built Phoenix.” There’s some pride in that. Forget this stupid job. When we can connect that person to something, they can become passionate about it because people are looking to belong to something. I find it in the trades all the time like, “We are transforming the way that plumbing supply chains work.” I have a client that’s working on that. That’s what they’re doing there. They’re not just selling plumbing supplies. They’re transforming the way plumbing supply chains work. That’s their goal. They can rally a team around it. They can pull people in and they’re like, “No, I get $15 at Amazon. I get $15 here, but here we’re going to make a difference.” My boss is helping me and they’re transforming it. It’s so much more fun. I know that work is not about being fun, but we do need to be clear about why are we doing this? That’s one area that I see that the trades has struggled to articulate.

I’m thinking outside of the box. I have one guy that works with us for years. He went to college for three years. He didn’t finish, but he was an art major. He didn’t know which field. Is that going to be painting, drawing or ceramics? It turns out the medium that he does that gives him an opportunity for his artistic creative is doing remodeling work. He does beautiful finished carpentry work and cabinets. Letting people know that they have that opportunity. On the design side, on the interior design schools and so forth, that’s another way of showing your artistic ability. For some people, they want to be able to work with the tools. Once they’re introduced to them, it takes off from there.

Summing up this because we had some good conversation here. There are several points for our readers out there that you can take a look at your recruiting efforts and say, “Are we doing everything we can?” As Dennis said, “Are we involved in our local communities, schools and our circle of influence? Are we active in an association where we’re learning best practices, job descriptions, or right things around that? Are we communicating the why behind what we’re doing? Are we making sure that it’s visible online and areas that they would spend time in? Are we comparing our ads to those of equal salary compensation and not just our trade?”

Look at your whole entire recruiting effort from that perspective. Maybe you’ll find some areas that you can go and take it off to the next level. What I’d like to do now, Dennis, is we’ve challenged you in a lot of different ways. We asked you a lot of different questions. I would love for you from the association perspective to say what’s something you would love to challenge our audience to go do, to take action and to review?

The core purpose of NARI is to increase professionalism within the remodeling industry. Unfortunately, in most states, the ease of becoming a remodeling or home improvement contractor is pretty easy. I do sincerely believe most people know the trade that they’re going to be working with, but they don’t understand the business side of things. That’s what gets them in trouble. That’s why some contractor from our industry ends up pulling 20/20 or 60 minutes every year as the contractor who took people’s money and didn’t finish the job.

BCC 1 | Increasing Professionalism
Increasing Professionalism: The best value for being a part of NARI is the opportunity to get to know some other remodelers.

 

Unfortunately, we can’t change what everyone does. NARI teaches people how to be good business people, how to treat your clients and employees fairly, and put systems and processes in place to be able to do that so that you don’t have to work night and day. Being a small business owner shouldn’t be a 24/7 thing. There is life outside of work. You’re a better person when you realize that. You have hobbies and have time for family and to give back to your community in doing that kinds of things. When you get to the point where hopefully you’ll be able to retire financially, you don’t have to think about what you’re going to do because you have some other things rather than saying, “I don’t know. I’ve just worked all my life. I guess I’ll just sit here.” In my mind, that’s a recipe for somebody who soon passes away.

I hear that challenge is saying, “Go out there and figure out what your passions are.” Particularly for those that are in the remodeling industry to restore professionalism back to it. Normally, we let the challenge just sit there and let the audience do it. I’m going to flip it back on you just a little bit here if that’s okay. How is NARI helping increase the professionalism of the remodeling industry?

The first thing that people be aware of when they submit an application for membership, part of what you need to put your signature to and commit to is a code of ethics that says you’re going to do the right things. I don’t have these memorized but if people want to see any of this information, they could go to NARI.org. It’s all there. There’s a consumer side as well as a contractor side to that. We’re doing it by putting the information out there. We can’t force people to read it, to take the webinars and those kinds of things. There are lots of great information. We have our fall educational conference. It’s going to be virtual. This is the first time we’ve done that. Typically, that’s an in-person meeting somewhere in the country. There’s still time. People can register to that even up to the last minute if they want to.

As I said, head knowledge is good, but you have to put it into action. When you go to a conference, there’s no way you can ever put everything into action that you learn. Pick 1 or 2 items and then focus on those. The next time you come back, you hear maybe some new things or you hear something again. It’s a work in process. You have many years in business. We have a lot of good things going for us here. There are still areas for improvement. Some of that is because I have a thick head and I need to hear things a whole bunch of times. Too often, it’s learning because we lost a lot of money because we did it that way. If we change how we’re doing things, hopefully that won’t happen again.

The best mistakes to learn from are other people’s. Unfortunately, that’s not the ones we typically choose to learn from. What I hear is NARI’s goal and mission is to increase the professionalism of the remodeling industry. They do that through conferences where you’re going to get tons of great information too much to even absorb and execute all of it, but you’re going to get tons of that. You have weekly newsletters. You have industry involvement and industry best practices. You even have a mastermind to pull a lot of that accountability into the real world to change them. It’s all compiled around the code of ethics and making a difference in the remodeling industry. Is that how you see it?

You summed it up very well. Thank you.

For everybody that’s out there reading and is in the remodeling industry, I’m going to put it passionately. I know Dennis probably wouldn’t say it as strong as I’m getting ready to say it, go to NARI.org and join up because we do need to change the way we look at the trades. If we change the way our professionalism, if we change the way we act, if we changed the way we communicate, it is going to help us to solve that biggest problem that’s holding us back and that’s hiring. Dennis, it’s been good having you. I’ve enjoyed this. I look forward to anything in the future.

Thank you. I’ve enjoyed it as well. I appreciate your time.

Mentioned in this episode:

About Dennis Gehman

BCC 1 | Increasing ProfessionalismFounder of Gehman Design Remodeling, Dennis Gehman brings over 30 years of experience in the construction industry. When you meet him, you’ll instantly feel welcomed, respected, and understood. You’ll connect with him immediately. Humble and mild-mannered, Dennis focuses on the big picture as well as the small details on how to best serve you. As GDR’s President, Dennis’s role requires him to wear many hats. As a Remodeling Consultant, he listens closely to your needs, wants, and ideas to translate, through his design and construction experience, into a project that will meet or exceed your expectations. While ultimately the buck stops with Dennis, he’s grateful for the team members who do an excellent job in handling things so that projects can continue without needing to wait for him. Working at GDR is an absolute joy for Dennis as he enjoys interacting with clients working with the experience of our team to achieve the goals for each project. As GDR continues to embrace its “green” journey, so is Dennis. While some are going green for the cost-saving and environment-preserving benefits, Dennis believes this way of life is simply a way to show his gratitude toward being on this earth. “To me, being green reminds me of how God has blessed us with beautiful earth to live on and take care of. The least I can do as part of my worship to Him is to be a good steward of what I have control over.” Dennis is the husband of wife Glenda, proud father of grown sons Elijah and Aaron and daughters Kaela and Teesha. He is a charter member of Bucks-Mont NARI (National Association of the Remodeling Industry) and a member of the National Kitchen and Bath Association. Dennis devotes a significant portion of his life to giving back to the community, as he served as a past board chair and is currently a building committee member for Spruce Lake Retreat and a board member for Greater Philadelphia Joni and friends. In 1986, Dennis and his wife Glenda became founding members of the Covenant Community Fellowship. He is a graduate of Christopher Dock Mennonite High School, attended Eastern Mennonite University in Camping, Recreation & Youth Ministry. Outside the construction industry, Dennis worked as a Christian camp counselor and a Program Director at a Christian camp. When he’s not at the office or volunteering his time for an important cause (multiple ones in his case), Dennis can be found reading, camping, and motorcycle riding.

Make A Wish To Change Blue Collar

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BCC 2 | Blue Collar

 

Growing up, we are pushed towards pursuing certain professions in college that often stigmatizes the very idea of working with your hands, of being a blue-collar worker. Helping change that mindset, Ken Rusk, a blue-collar construction entrepreneur, takes us to his mission of changing that mindset, discussing the lucrative business found in America’s supply and demand environment and how he is helping others change their lives through his company. He then talks about his leadership style, hiring process, and book, Blue Collar Cash. Join Ken in this episode where he empowers those in the industry as he follows his journey to make a change to blue-collar.

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Make A Wish To Change Blue Collar

It’s not every day that we get to have a conversation about getting started in the trades or what it takes to run a successful business. We’ve had a lot of amazing guests on the show that have talked about their story and their journey. Our guest has a bit of a different approach to what it takes to get out there and be successful in the trades. He went to college for a few months and decided it wasn’t for him. He came back out and now he owns multiple construction companies. He’s got a tremendous wealth of knowledge in this area. I want to welcome our guest, Ken Rusk. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

You’ve been on a journey here that’s been solid over your professional career. As you’ve grown these construction companies, as you’ve worked with other construction company owners, what would you say is the biggest myth about the industry?

It’s the stigma of working with your hands. In this day and age of this almost forced-college path where all the high schools have suddenly turned into college prep schools, there almost became this, if you weren’t going that path, you were doing something less. I can tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. Working with your hands is not only honorable but it’s lucrative, especially in this environment of supply and demand, and the problems that we face with supplies of American blue-collar workers.

It is a push there through the high school growing up. I don’t think it quite starts in high school. I think it starts in kindergarten that they started talking about the college push and showing that college has to be in that destiny if it’s going to be anything close to it. You’ve not found that to be the case, is that correct?

That’s true. I don’t know if it was intentional or unintentional, but it seems somewhere in the ‘70s and ‘80s they decided to get rid of shop class and they filled those rooms with computers. I’ve always said that we need to learn computers. That was important, but I never thought it was a binary choice, meaning one had to substitute for the other. We eliminated the potential discovery of the trades by millions of kids, because they went right into these classes after these shop classes were eliminated. That has paired up with the fact that technology gives us these cell phones and iPads that instead of building a tree fort in our backyard, we build it on Minecraft on our screens. We don’t get to discover those types of things. I agree with you 100%. We’re in a position where we could use a lot more education as to the lucrative careers that these paths can take you.

I know you’re on a mission to change the mindset around blue-collar, working with your hands and working in the trades, whether it’s at this executive level of owning your own small business or it’s just working in that. Tell us a bit about what you’re doing there to help change that mindset.

Working with your hands is not only honorable, but it's lucrative, especially in this environment of supply and demand. Click To Tweet

In addition to writing the book and putting it out there, what we’re doing is we’re trying to get the word out to the kids before they get into that almost corral of no return, which is their 9th, 10th, 11th grade, and they’re thinking, “I’ve got to prepare myself for college.” We’re trying to catch them in the early stages and talk about the benefits of blue-collar work, the honor in that, the control of that, and the money that you can make doing that. We’re talking to people in as early as 6th and 7th grade about what the benefits are in these fields. Anybody can understand supply and demand. It’s a powerful force. If everybody’s going one way, then the contrary thinker would go the other way, because as we overproduce college graduates with nondescript business degrees, we’re underproducing people who can do things with their two hands. If the supply is there and the demand is high on the blue-collar side, then the money is naturally going to follow that path.

I love that you say we should go the other way. It was something that we all see. Unfortunately, the herds don’t see that in any situation. I’m thinking of Warren Buffett. He was asked how he always knew what to invest in. He said, “When everybody was running one way, I always ran the other way.” That was an investment strategy. It’s proven fairly well. When you’re saying this about going in the path that not everybody is going, “Everybody is going to college, let’s go the other way. Let’s look at how do we do it with our hands when everybody is doing it virtually.” You’ve been on this journey and I know that you’ve seen some amazing results and changes. Tell us about 1 or 2 of those that you’ve seen that have inspired you and your work, and inspired you to communicate that to the rest of the world.

I’ve had to hire a lot of people. We started with six people, and now we have 200. That caused us to have to hire a lot of people. I almost became an involuntary life coach during that period of time. I enjoyed it because I saw that a lot of these kids weren’t prepared out of high school to deal with the real world. What would happen to them is they would get out of school and the parents, the teachers, the society in general would hand them a hatchet and say, “There’s the forest, start chopping.” After five minutes, they would turn around and say, “Where am I going?” The best answer they got was, “I don’t know, keep chopping.” As if they were going to stumble across their success path. It’s a lot different than that. I believe in some of the age-old theories that you’ve got to begin with the end in mind. You’ve got to believe that you have a path to getting there.

I used a lot of real simple techniques where people can visualize what they want their life to look like, and we get them down on paper doing it. We get them with poster boards and crayons or markers or whatever they want to use. We have designed what they want their life to look like, what their version of comfort, peace and freedom might look like. That can be anything from how you want to live, what type of house, an apartment, a condo, in the city, in the suburbs, in the country. What vehicle they would see themselves driving, a car, truck, minivan. What their hobbies are, what their pets look, what the names of those pets might be, what their giveback moment is, what charity they would support. We try to get them detailed into those drawings so that they understand that they’re in control of making that happen. What I love about that is the more clearly they have that picture, the more they look back at me and say, “Ken, thank you for the training. Get out of my way and let me go get it.”

Isn’t that a little foolproof for blue-collar?

It’s not, because when you ask somebody, “What are your next six months going to look like?” they have no idea how to look back at you and answer that question other than, “I’m living for Friday.” We like to take a good long-term interest. If you’re looking to cut down on turnover, and everybody knows that turnover stinks. It’s expensive. It takes a lot of time. You train these people, and they don’t come back. I’ve always believed, and I’ve said this hundreds of times, I can’t get what I want, nor can my company get what it wants until all of you get what you want first. We better have a clear idea of what it is that you want for yourself, because I want you to believe you can build your life with and through my company. I work a lot on retention and building corporate culture. That’s one of the first exercises that we talk about. Believe me, it is effective. I don’t care what walk of life you come from. You should give us a shot.

I threw you that question. I don’t believe it’s foolproof, though but it sounds like it is. They think, “The construction guy, they will never take this.” In my own businesses and getting to understand, “Why are you doing all this? Where do you want to be six months from now and not 300 years? What’s your dent in the universe?” We’re not there, although those are important. I’m talking about six months from now. What does that stuff look like? One of the support team has said this, one of my clerical people at the body shop, when I dug into what she was wanting, why she was working. She wanted to own her own home.

BCC 2 | Blue Collar
Blue Collar: One of the biggest myths about the industry is surrounding the stigma of working with your hands.

 

“How much do you have to make to own your own home?” We worked it out, figured it out, thought it through, and it was going to be a lot more than what she was making. I said, “Let’s figure out a path to get there.” She started working on learning stuff and getting better. There was a purpose to her job. It wasn’t putting invoices. It was getting a home. She owns a home now and has a great life. That’s because we get real with that stuff. By no means is that soft. We’re all going out there and striving for something. Getting that real is important. Too often as leaders, we’re not getting there. In all of these great successes that you’ve done, all these cool things that you’ve gotten to see, what’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?

The best mistake I ever made was realizing that I didn’t have to know it all. I didn’t have to have all of the answers. I didn’t have to be the Shell Answer Man. For me, letting go of this title of President or CEO or boss or owner, I don’t like any of those terms. I always say that if you put me in the parking lot with all 200 of the people that work on our team, I wouldn’t want anyone to be able to pick me out of the group as, “There’s the boss, that’s the owner, that’s the guy.” When we build our buildings, we do them campus style. We don’t do them 3, 4, 5-floor style, because I believe that that tradition is out the window.

The best thing that I had done was I let go of me thinking I had to drive these companies. I got a lot of feedback from the people within the companies and said, “What do you guys want to do? How far can we go? If we get there, what do you want for doing it?” They look back like I was from Mars because no one had ever talked to them like that before. We had this huge collective effort that was driven by not only what they thought they could gain from the company at the end of the year, at the holiday season, but they each had to have a powerful map of what they wanted for themselves. That took me a lot further than I could have taken it myself. There is power in letting go of that and allowing people to do what they want to do in a big collective way.

How did you come to that discovery? That is not the age-old way that has been broken down. How did you come to realize that?

I wore a lot of hats and I know a lot of business owners out there wear a lot of hats. I said to myself, “What am I good at? What do I like to do? What needs to be done, but may not be my best skillset?” I thought, “If I could find people to help me with those skillsets, would the results be better than if I did it myself or attempted to do it myself?” The answer was yes. In every case, when I shed something that I knew was important, but maybe wasn’t in my wheelhouse. First off, you have to let go, and that’s important, and that’s okay because your ego doesn’t want you to do that. You let go, you get people in place to do these things, and I guarantee you your company will go further than if you try to do all those things yourself. I don’t know whether I got tired of doing a mediocre job at some of these things, or I gravitated too much towards where I knew I was good at. Building a support team is the best thing you’re ever going to do.

When you’re saying that about letting go of things, I had some body shops at one point. The painter position inside of a collision center is like the unspoken leader of the body shop. In every body shop that I’ve ever been around or worked, the painter has the upper level in a lot of areas. Picking a painter for your shop is critical. I remember I was on the journey of discovering letting go of all these things and letting others do it. I’m not fully there, but I was in the discovery path. We got down to two phenomenal painter choices, top notch. There was one. I thought this guy is it. He’s got energy. He’s going to bring some drive and momentum to the company. The other one is qualified and it seems he’s going to do good work, but he’s not the same as this first one.

I had begun to work with the team on these kinds of things. I let the actual team that was going to be working with him in that shop to make the final call. They picked the one that I didn’t want, and unfortunately, they told that guy that too, which he continued to rub in my face for years. It turned out they had picked up on him and how great he was. You don’t always get to know that you made the right choice, but on this one, I got to see the end of both decisions. We got a painter that was a solid, steady, driving force of our company and did amazing stuff.

You’ve got to begin with the end in mind. You’ve got to believe that you have a path to getting there. Click To Tweet

The other one got us on his email. We got connected to his emails at 3:00 in the morning. Let’s just say we shouldn’t have been connected. We got some emails and like, “We would not have made the right choice with that one.” That was letting the employees who get to see a little bit more of the real. You said you don’t want to be that boss or that owner when it’s all 200 of you there. Even when you are trying not to be that, they’re putting a bit more of a show on for you than they are for their coworkers. Letting them go to that spot where they’re there with their people. Those are the ones making a decision, it’s a better team.

At some point, I realized that I have to have the knowledge that I and the company need to run all the different facets of it. In my experience, it seems like it’s never been that important what I know, as much as it has been important what they know and how they execute that. I didn’t want to have to plug myself into any one particular position. I wanted to be able to touch every position in the way of motivating and helping create life plans and long-term vision plans for the people doing those things without having to perform any one of those things individually myself. You always hear about the word empower. It made it so much better to give them the keys of operating these certain parts of the business. Tom Golisano in his book, he’s the Founder of Paychex, calls them entrepreneurial employees. What he was talking about, which is important is people feel they own and run their little departments or divisions, even though they don’t own the company. Those divisions are directly connected to their financial well-being. If you can get that mindset going, your company is going to go a lot further than you’re ever going to take it on your own.

Every human being wants to make a difference and wants to be a part of a team. By being a leader, our job is to supply those to them and the direction for that. That’s where we went when we give them those. I know you’ve written the book, Blue-Collar Cash, and you’ve gotten to work with lots of different business owners and employees. What is the biggest thing holding back a business from breaking free? They’re right there and they keep almost making it, but you see it and you’re like, “If you just did this.” What is it?

It’s getting people together, asking their opinion, what they’re capable of, and then putting a plan together to do that, and then rewarding them at the end. It comes back to how we see ourselves. Do we get to go home at night and when our wives or our girlfriends ask us, “How was your day?” Are you going to come from ego where you say, “I answered all these questions. I solved all these problems?”

I talked to a lot of business owners in the blue-collar space that struggled with letting go. A lot of it stems from their holding onto some of the past hurt of hiring someone they thought was amazing, giving them the keys to the castle, and then watching them burn it down. They’re skeptical of people going forward. Trust is something that they don’t use openly with their team. In a lot of the work that we do in building the core fit hiring system for these companies is to help them overcome that and put objective tools in place so that they can take the emotion out of it.

It sounds to me, you put a lot of your success on the team that you’ve built. You started with six employees, now you’ve got 200. That doesn’t happen overnight and it wasn’t easy. What are some tips or maybe the number one thing you’ve learned when it comes to finding these people? What’s the one thing that you would tell our readers, “Here’s how you find the person that you want to delegate this stuff to. Here’s the way you find the person that you’re willing to trust and you’re willing to step back and let them take it over?” What’s 1 or 2 things that you could share?

I’m glad you asked it because this one came to me while I was realizing the whole letting go thing. It seems that in this day and age especially with technology, there’s so much demand out there. If you drive from my office a couple of miles to the freeway, there are twenty signs that say, “Hiring.” They have the ability to job shop you six ways from Sunday. When you’re in the interview, it used to be the boss man would sit behind the desk and say, “Why should I hire you?” That’s flipped a bit. Now, the people on the other side of the desk are looking back and saying, “What’s in it for me to work here?” That might be off putting for some potential bosses who are used to things the way they were. If somebody says to me, “What’s in it for me to work here?” I’m intrigued by that.

BCC 2 | Blue Collar
Blue Collar: As we overproduce college graduates with nondescript business degrees, we’re underproducing people who can do things with their two hands.

 

That’s a positive for me because my question is going to be, “What are you looking to accomplish with this job? Tell me about what you want your life to look like. Tell me about your six months, your one year, your five years. Tell me something beyond next Friday’s paycheck. What does that look like to you?” If I get a good answer there, I’ve got a good prospect. I would rather have somebody that’s working for themselves through your company and with your company, than you having to micromanage every move that they make. If I got a guy or gal that’s strongly driven as to where they’re going, I’m taking a chance on that person for sure.

People are better at motivating themselves than letting someone else drive or hold a carrot in front of them so that it motivates them. When you were talking about that, “What’s in it for me?” I call that with them. It’s a marketing term. We realize the roles have flipped. I talk to employers all the time. They’re like, “I can’t find good people.” The question I always ask is, “You can’t find people or you can find people, they’re just no good?” It’s always the latter. They always can’t find good people. When I ask them what good means, they want people that give a damn. That’s how I sum it up. They care. That’s been lost on the industry, “This person is a cog in my machine. I’m going to treat them like it. If they don’t work out, I’ll put a new cog in the machine.” The modern workforce is not having that. They don’t want to be treated that way. When they’re looking for good people, they’re looking for people that give a damn, that have goals and dreams, that are willing to wake up and trade their paycheck for a purpose. They’ve got something that they’re aligned to.

There’s an important point to add to that. In the book, I talk about the difference between the somedayers club and the todayers club. Those are two different clubs that you can belong to. One of them where you live in perpetuity of, “Someday I’m going to make that happen. It’s going to be great. I’m going to get there and it’s going to be awesome.” The other club is, “I’ve done this. This is how I’m doing it. I’m repeating that successful path. I’m going to create steps and make this happen. I’m going to show you my results.” The difference for me is, when I’m interviewing somebody or I want to know about their future, I’m going to ask them what they’ve already accomplished. I’m going to also ask them of the things that they’re looking to accomplish.

What are the steps involved in that? “Do you have a path? Do you have steps? Do you have it broken down?” We have this big black glass board in our office. It’s probably a 10×10. We have these multicolored, bright markers, like you’d see almost out in front of a bar where they have the drink of the day, and they draw the pictures of the drink. We have them put those things on that board with a start date and end date and a mechanism that shows certainty, “I’m saving $2,500 and it’s going to take me a year. It’s $48 a week. It’s coming out of my paycheck. It’s into an account that I can’t touch. There we go, I’m on the path.”

It has to be crystal clear. It has to have a lot of clarity there. That’s something that anybody reading can start tomorrow. Once you have somebody that’s done that once or twice, and they go from a somedayer to a todayer, you’re going to have a person that’s going, “I like the way that feels. All I had to do is breathe and that goal is going to happen. I’m going to do that again and again.” That’s what we’ve experienced with people here. They’ve maybe paid off a Visa card, then they got their first car. They saved for a down payment on the house and they’re living in that house and they’re taking vacations. They try to give me credit for that. I’m like, “No, all we did was designed a path. You walked it. We had the vehicle.” It’s something that any business owner out there could use starting today.

We’ve challenged you. We’ve asked a lot of questions here as we’ve dug into this. I’m going to ask you to challenge our readers. What is something that they should do today? Not someday, but today. What is that one thing that they should do to take action from what they’ve read?

If they’re an individual, they need to find a quiet place. They need to sit down, and they need to draw out what they want their life to look like. That has to happen. Here’s a statistic that you might be interested in. If you take 100 people, 80 people in the United States claim they have no real goals, so that leaves 20. Of the 20, 16 people have goals, but they’re hopes, dreams, wishes and somedays. That leaves four. Of the four out of those 100 people, they write their goals down, draw them out, have them crystal clear, cut out pictures from magazines, make a puzzle, and yet 3 of those 4, take those goals and shove them in a drawer somewhere, maybe never to be seen again.

The Law of Attraction is powerful. What you see, you tend to attract yourself to. Click To Tweet

Only one of those people is willing to take those goals, write them out, post them on the wall, in their bathroom, in the dashboard of their car, maybe in their kitchen, where they look at them every single day. Those people on average earn eight times more money than the other 99 in their lifetime. That was a study done by the University of Virginia. I would implore anybody that’s reading to sit down, draw your life as specifically as you can. Keep that in front of you. Look at it every day, because what happens is the Law of Attraction is powerful. What you see, you tend to attract yourself to. Keep that in front of you and you will see your life change quickly.

I would only imagine that someone that has never drawn their life before, has never written down their goals. They’re going to go away. They’re going to sit down and do what they can with this. If they get stuck, do you have any resources or anything to help them to get unstuck? Where can they go to get clear on what they need to be doing during this time?

Two brief stories. The easy one is to read the book. I talk about that particular issue because it happens a lot.

The book is?

Blue-Collar Cash.

Blue-Collar Cash by Ken Rusk. We get it on Amazon or anywhere?

BCC 2 | Blue Collar
Blue Collar Cash

They can get it on Amazon, IndieBound, Apple Books, anywhere books are sold. The other answer is this. This is a brief story. Do you remember when you were younger and the first time ever that you wanted to jump off the high dive and you were scared to death? You talk yourself out of it a half a dozen times, and then finally your buddies were all sitting there next to you and they said, “You’ve got this, you can do this.” You climb the ladder and looked over at them. You climbed up, got to the top and looked over at them. You walked down that handrail towards the water and then the board started giving underneath your weight. You’re scared to death then you look over at them and finally, they look at you and they say, “You’ve got this.” What do you do? You launch yourself off the high dive.

It’s the same exact thing when you’re trying to do these goals in your lifetime. You need to find one person that you can trust. That maybe a family member or it may not be a family member. It maybe a mentor. Find someone that you can trust and share these goals with in crystal clear detail and say, “I want to get this done. Of all the people in my life, I’ve picked you to help me.” Once you’re walking a path that you can’t turn around on, you may hesitate and stumble, but that person will be there with their hand on your shoulder. They are invaluable to taking you down your first goal path. Once you’ve done it successfully on your own, you may not need them anymore other than to say, “I have gratitude. I give thanks for you for being in my life.” To have someone there with their hand on your shoulder, it’s an invaluable force to keep you on that path.

For all of you out there, Ken is pointing to a couple of different things here. One, get the book, Blue-Collar Cash by Ken Rusk, anywhere that you can find that. It’s a great read. The other thing is when he’s talking about being specific. You all know and we talk about it a lot, the clearer that we are with this stuff, the more concrete that we are with it. That’s what I love that you’re pushing for us, Ken. Be specific about it because that allows us to see it and allows that partner that we selected to hold us accountable to it. We don’t want to be like, “Did I get that?” We want to know for sure. Ken, this has been an amazing segment. I’m glad that we’ve been able to spend this time with you. You do have a special offer with the book, and I want to make sure that we highlight that for our readers. I’ll let you share that, share where to go, and share your website with them so they can have any way to get ahold of you if they have any more questions with it.

First off, thank you for having me. It’s been fun. I always love these discussions. If you go to KenRusk.com, you’ll see what we’re up to there. You can get the book there as well. It has all the buy buttons on it. We also have @KenRuskOfficial on our Facebook page and Instagram. We have a blog on Facebook and we have a constant content to support the blue-collar industry because I’m fond of that. At the end of this thing, I always believe that giving back, it was the last chapter I wrote in the book about the power of giving back and how you don’t do it for any specific reason, but it seems to enrich your life. Believe me, it does.

I’ve sponsored Make-A-Wish for several years. I’ve done Kids Wish every single year. This 2020 is no exception. We’ve made a long-term commitment. One of the things I want to do is, anyone who buys a book, I want you to know that my author revenue from the book is going to go towards sponsoring Make-A-Wish. I’m trying to do multiple wishes this 2020 and into the spring. I would encourage anyone to buy it as a gift for someone else, maybe a young person that’s in their life that they need some direction, or maybe you’re in your midlife and you want to get out of the cubicle and go back to working with your hands because you feel passionate about woodworking or a craft or a skill. Pick this book up and know that you’re not only getting yourself some good information, but you’re also going to help some child in need to realize a wish to Make-A-Wish this 2020.

Thank you, Ken, for joining and thank you all for all out there that are reading. Go to KenRusk.com. He’s got all kinds of great content. Get the book, Blue-Collar Cash, and we look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks, Ken.

Thank you.

Important Links:

Who Is Ken Rusk?

MEET THE AUTHOR

BCC 2 | Blue CollarKen spent his younger years digging ditches and working in construction. He never went to college. Instead, he made goals, planned, and worked hard for thirty years. Now, Ken is a very successful entrepreneur with multiple businesses and revenue streams.

Ken Rusk specializes in mentoring and has coached hundreds of young people in areas such as short-, mid-, and long-term goal setting, life visualization, career paths, and sound financial planning. He is passionate about helping people achieve their dreams regardless of their educational background or past.

Luke Miller | Get Your Mind Right & Let Your Profits Grow

· ·

Luke Miller, founder of Tile Money and host of the Tile Money Podcast, may work primarily with tile installation contractors (as the name of his business suggests), but the customer service, pricing, management, and other lessons he passes on apply to any contracting business.

One thing that tile installers – not to mention people in other trades – struggle with, says Luke, is that some consumers, because of what they’ve seen on home improvement shows, think DIY is easy. That leads to unrealistic expectations about the time a job takes and more.

By the same token, many contractors feel that because they’re experts in the technical work and they have the tools… starting a business should be easy enough.

But being an entrepreneur actually requires a whole other mindset and skillset. We get into that in detail with Luke in this episode, as well as…

  • The biggest unknown every new business owner faces – and how to find the answer
  • How to actually start running a business instead of just “doing the job”
  • What you must have in place to work less but make more money
  • The dangerous consumer misconception that impacts contracting businesses
  • And more

Mentioned in this episode:

Matt Jones | You Don’t Have a Lead Problem, You Have a Conversion Problem

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On this week’s episode of the Blue Collar Culture Podcast, we speak with special guest, Matt Jones. If you’ve been listening to our show for a while, you’ll know that we are focused on results for trades-based businesses; we are firm believers that the trades need to be supported in the same ways as other industries. Matt is a former plumber who was so frustrated by the lack of support from digital marketing companies when it came to trades-based businesses, that he actually set out to solve the problem on his own by starting his own digital agency: The Tradie Web Guys.

“I can fundamentally say for 80% of the people out there, they don’t have a lead problem, they’ve got a conversion problem. What I mean by that is, if they’ve got a website that isn’t capturing information, that’s not educating, or nurturing, or leading people to the next step, their website’s not converting. So, they could be getting enough traffic, they could be getting enough eyes on their website, but those eyes are not taking the next step. They’re not filling in a webform, they’re not making a phone call, they’re not downloading a resource, they’re not doing something,” says Matt.

We chat about Matt’s frustration over the lack of support for the trades and his journey to creating his own agency, as well as:

  • His podcast, The Site Shed
  • Myths about marketing for the trades
  • Advice for tradespeople on how to improve their messaging and reach more prospective clients
  • Tips for improving your conversion rates
  • And more

Mentioned in this episode:

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