Episode 108 Podcast Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

When we know we’ve only got so many hours in a given week to be able to dedicate to our business, we’ve got to be strategic around the yeses and the nos. There’s always a cost to saying yes, and in the hours you’ve got, you got to make sure you’re strategic in what you’re saying yes to and what you’re saying no to. Hey everyone. Rob Kropp and Dan Stones here from Pravar Group and welcome back to another episode of The Trade Den. Good to have you back, Dan. How are you?

Speaker 2 (00:31):

Good to be back. Always good. Thank you, Rob. Hello everyone. Looking forward to today’s topic. I like this topic. It’s a simple one. It’s a subtle one, but there’s some really big changes I can think of in client land that have been huge on the back of this one little shift we’re going to share with everyone today. So what we’re talking about is yes and the cost of saying yes. And most tradies don’t get into business and don’t become yes people because they’re pushovers. They do it … Sorry, I’ll say that again. You got into it because you genuinely want to help. You’re a service business. The clue’s in the title. You want to solve problems. You want to be reliable. You want to be responsive. You’re the person who delivers. That’s what gets you out of the ground. These are all good intentions, but unfortunately the good intentions don’t protect you from bad outcomes because every time you do say yes, as you said at the top, you’re saying no to something else, whether you realise it or not.

(01:24):

And unfortunately, after so much practise, most tradies forget that they’re doing it automatically and that there is a consideration or a decision to be made. So hopefully today we’re going to break down some of this and talk around what that cost is. So really important topic. And I think the starting point for us today, Rob, is really why we become yes people in the first place.

Speaker 1 (01:46):

Yes, people is coming from a place of good intentions. I think that’s the place where to start because it’s … Sure, there’s sometimes you might say yes out of fear or guilt or whatever it is. There’s an element of that or fear of loss or you feel guilty so you say yes because it’s an obligation. I think there’s definitely a component of it there. Most people say yes because it’s definitely coming from a good place. It’s a good intention around wanting to be that person who does certain things and be of service for sure.

Speaker 2 (02:21):

Yeah. It’s the want to contribute something positive, something valuable to the world, to the business, to the organisation, to the lives of your customers, whatever it is. That’s what we mean by positive intention. And it’s literally what tradies are trained to do from the time they start their apprenticeship.

Speaker 1 (02:38):

They are. And let’s go back to the nature of being a business. Being in business is there to be off service, to add value and solve problems and fix things. So most people say yes because they really want to help. That’s the first one. That’s the first good intention that most tradies, the reason why they say yes. And so it’s coming from a good place. It’s coming from a good place inside of somewhere. It’s like, yeah, I can help that. And whether it’s you’ve got something to prove, whether it’s you really got a mate in business, you might be a sparky wanting to help one of your builders and he’s a mate and you know that if you do something, you’ve got a few credits in the bank for next time he needs to ask a favour or you need to ask a favour. So most people do it because they genuinely want to help and they feel like it’s the right thing to do at the right time.

Speaker 2 (03:27):

Yeah. So for the first, let’s call it 10 years, your apprenticeship plus a couple of years just doing what you do. Before you start the business, you’ve grooved that so many times out of a desire to help. The next thing then is it carries on because you start your own business, you become a business owner, and you want to make progress in your business. And how do you do that? You’ve got to start growing. You’ve got to start saying yes to a few things that if you want to grow and progress your business, yes is a big component of that, especially in early days.

Speaker 1 (03:54):

It is. You say yes to that job, yes to that customer, yes to that bit of work. And deep down, you’re like, “Oh, I know this has got red flags or scars all attached to it. I don’t want to be able to take it on. “But you know deep down you probably shouldn’t. But you say yes anyway because you’re unsure about your pipeline, you’re unsure about where your next customer’s coming from, you’re unsure around where the next job’s going to land. And sometimes some people build their reputation off just saying yes and working out later. And that might be a good value proposition to get a business out of the ground, but it’s not always a great value proposition to be a yes to all people over a period of time.

Speaker 2 (04:35):

Yeah, absolutely. The other one that we’re going to talk to now, this is more on that sort of the fear side, but letting people down, and it’s huge. I was going to say our fear of letting people down, which is what it is, but saying no, it’s almost like it feels like we’re failing someone or we’re betraying someone by saying no. And that’s another reason why we say yes, because there’s a pain that people carry with saying that.

Speaker 1 (05:00):

There is. It’s easier to say yes. Let’s just face it, it’s easier if you’re like, “Hey, Rob, can you do this? And can you get this job done?” Or, “Hey, Rob, can you get your boys to stick around on that job and just do this little bit of extra work?” And you know deep down that you’ve got a jam packed schedule and you need to be able to move your team onto another job or another area. And you know deep down you can’t do it, but sometimes you don’t want to have to have the difficult conversation or you don’t want to be the bad guy who says, “No, we can’t do that right now,” because that is sometimes a harder conversation which people feel uncomfortable doing. And so people just say, “Yeah, we can do that. ” But that comes with a cost. It comes with an expense.

(05:41):

It comes with minimising yourself and your own team and where you’re trying to go just to please and people, please, other people.

Speaker 2 (05:48):

Yeah, absolutely. And as we look at this, I can hear people listening to this now and they’re like, “Well, hang on, what’s the problem there? I’m helping. I’m making progress in my business. I’m not letting people down.” And you’re right, it’s not that those motivations are wrong in any capacity, but what we’re saying is it can become really dangerous when it’s out of balance. When you’re saying yes to everything without any consideration and you’re unable to say no, that’s really the distinction we can make at this point.

Speaker 1 (06:17):

Because there is a cost. There is literally a hidden cost saying yes. And that’s what the essence of this episode is about is that when you say yes to something, it comes at the expense of a number of things, which we’ll talk about now. But most people don’t weigh up the other side of the equation when they say yes. They just say yes and work it out later without really understanding deep down what those implications are. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:43):

Well, let’s keep going. Let’s talk about those implications. The first one, probably the biggest one, and I know we’re both aligned on this, but the first cost is time.

Speaker 1 (06:51):

Yeah, the time, your time, especially as a business owner, when you’re in that position where you’ve got a certain amount of time that you’re willing to dedicate to your business. And we always say, you’ve heard it say it numerous times on episodes where it’s like time’s not your problem. The thing that you can’t manage time. The important thing is you’ve got to have the right priorities in the time that you’ve got. And you’ve got to remember that when you say yes to something, you’re then adding that to your plate. You’re adding that to your task list. And unless that is a higher priority of other things you got on your list, what most people do is just keep stacking more and more and more onto their list and they wonder why they feel like they’re not progressing or they wonder why they feel like their task list is never getting any smaller.

(07:37):

So time becomes an issue because you’re literally just saying yes to everything to people please or whatever the reason is why you’re saying yes. And it comes with a cost at your time, time that you don’t have to spend with family, time you don’t have to work on sales, time you don’t have to work on your business because you’re too busy filling your plate with other people’s priorities in that time you

Speaker 2 (08:00):

Got. Yeah. And not just priority, I think urgencies. It’s usually the things that get filled in, those gap fillers are all tied up with urgency. So urgent jobs that we take on and say yes to, I’ll quickly fit that in. And you think that, but then if you’ve really thought it through the other side, the cost of it, it’s huge. So let’s keep building on this idea. The other one then becomes energy. Like you said, you stack so much on your plate, you’re running through a to-do list that never ends. Everything’s urgent. Just talking about it, I can feel getting tense. There’s that anxiety around, how am I going to get through it? I feel absolutely busted. This is stressful. I’m overwhelmed. These emotions, your energy is really impacted. And when you say yes to something, you’re investing not just time, but energy. It’s real.

Speaker 1 (08:43):

It is. And energy and time are somewhat connected because when you keep saying yes to something, you just keep stacking and adding and adding and adding to your plate and you wonder why, no wonder why business owners go from work 50, 60, 70, 80 hour weeks, and that leads to burnout. And the reason why burnout exists is because you’re trying to wear all the hats in the business, you’re doing multiple roles, you’re saying yes to everything, and you’re doing things at the expense of your own health and wellbeing. And no wonder so many tradies are worn out, burnt out, don’t see their family, got mental health issues, overweight, lack the energy and drive to get things done. And those things are just symptoms of you being a people pleaser or a yes man. And if you can change your relationship with this yes, no equation, you might find that you start saying no to certain things or push back on elements and you’ve got more time, you’ve got more energy because you’ve got a spine and you’re willing to be able to stand on your own two feet rather than be pushed around.

Speaker 2 (09:50):

Yeah, I love it. Absolutely. The next one we want to talk about is resources or more specifically money. There’s always that cost. If I say yes to this, we can think my mind’s racing already in terms of examples, but money’s another one, right?

Speaker 1 (10:04):

It is. If you say, you’ve got to remember that based on the size of the team that you’ve got, you’ve only got a certain amount of capacity of work you can get done in any given month. And so when you say yes to a job, you’re inadvertently saying no to others. If you’ve only got the capacity to do a hundred grand months and you fill that ground crew with $100,000 of work, assuming you can’t keep growing and adding more ground crew in, then that’s your limit. And if you say yes to a whole heap, if you drop your pants on a whole heap of work to get work across the line and it’s lower margin work, then you are inadvertently saying yes to low margin work at the expense of other work, which could be higher margin work. And that comes at a cost. It comes with eroding margin and eroding your bottom line.

(10:55):

So there is absolutely a monetary or financial impact of saying yes to certain decisions in your business.

Speaker 2 (11:02):

Absolutely. I love … One of my favourite examples when we do this is talking about money is the idea of discounting. When you say yes to a discount and everyone sort of goes, “Well, I won the job. Did you have to give up a bit?” “Yeah, I did. “What did it cost you? What do you mean? I just discounted a bit. We had a bit on it. It’s okay. But when you really add that up, discounting is a key symptom of saying yes and not being able to say no. And when you do it, it carries a cost straight away in terms of money.

Speaker 1 (11:28):

It is. Or if you say yes to you taking on someone else’s priority and that means that you don’t have time to do business development, there’s a cost of your future pipeline of not filling it with extra work. So it may not be an implication of the financial implication right now, whether it’s a low value job or a discount in your current pipeline, it could be a cost in the future because you’re saying yes to low value tasks at the expense of saying, and you’re really saying no to business development and making improvements in the long run, which is going to bet for the betterment of the business. So it’s not always an immediate impact. It can be a future impact based on the decision that you make today, whether it’s a yes, no, a decision.

Speaker 2 (12:14):

Yeah, absolutely. All right, let’s talk one more, and it’s a massive one. It’s family. The cost to family of you saying yes, and this comes up for business owners all the time.

Speaker 1 (12:23):

It is. Let’s face it, running a business comes with … It takes sacrifice. You have to go over and above. There’s deadlines to meet, there’s jobs to get done, there’s customers to serve, and this is why you’re taking on a business because you want that responsibility. You want the reward from the business, but it also comes with the responsibility. And your team probably aren’t going to step up and go over and above, or not all of them anyway, but in the end of the day, the job has to get done. And that means that when you keep saying yes and yes and yes and yes to things, it’s definitely going to have an expense to presence and time and your own health and wellbeing and the presence that you can have with your family because keep saying yes to business, obviously something over here has to give.

(13:10):

And for most business owners, they say they’re doing it for the family, but the family are the ones that suffer.

Speaker 2 (13:15):

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s that idea. You think about it on a weekend, just saying yes to that extra bit of shift, that extra bit of work. What are you saying no to? Well, you’re not at the footy game, you’re not at the dancer side, or you’re not at those things. And guaranteed, your child’s not going to turn around and go, “Hey, dad, was that a really cool job? That was amazing that you did that. ” They’re just going to remember the fact that you weren’t there. So it comes at a real cost and those knock-ons are real and you’ve got to really weigh that up when you’re saying yes to things out of that compulsion to say yes or that inability to say no. So that’s a real cost.

Speaker 1 (13:52):

It is. And most businessmen have this either or mentality, whether it’s either a great business and make money or be a great family man. That’s their mentality. It’s either or. And they see that as a trade-off. And it doesn’t have to be. That’s what the essence of this episode is all about is you don’t have to choose business or family or family or business. It’s not an either or mentality. You can have both. It’s an end equation, business and family, but to be able to have both, you’ve got to be wary around what you do say yes to and what you do say no to. And you can still say yes, but it doesn’t have to be you doing it. You could delegate that through to someone else into your team. So it’s not that you say no that you can’t do it. It could be a yes, we can do that, but this is the best person to do it.

(14:42):

And so this whole episode is getting you to understand your relationship with yes and no and understanding the cost of saying yes, but it’s also about seeing the equation that it’s not an either/or mentality. You can have both, but the ability to have both comes down to your ability to know what to say yes to and what to strategically say no to because you’re trying to protect where you’re trying to go.

Speaker 2 (15:07):

Yeah, well said. And I think the next part of this becomes that most of this happens without business owners even being aware that they’re making this trade off. It’s not a conscious thing that happens. It’s sort of in the moment, it’s the momentum of it all. It’s such a snap, reactive way of living to be a yes man all the time. And it becomes a habit. It becomes a groove and it becomes what we call in coaching a pattern, and it’s a pattern we need to learn how to break. So let’s talk through the way to do this. And we’ve said it a couple of times, but let’s be really clear. The way to break that pattern is to have the presence of mind to be able to stop and ask yourself a simple question. And that is, if I say yes to this, what am I saying no to?

(15:48):

So ask yourself a question before answering the question, if you like, because that forces you to at least consider or see the trade off that’s being made.

Speaker 1 (15:58):

The great examples of that is if I say yes to this low margin job, what I’m really saying is no to a profitable job. If I’m saying yes to beyond the tools this work, you’re saying no to the backend organisation in the office and the time to work on the business improving it. So every yes has a trade off to a no. And when we know we’ve only got so many hours in a given week to be able to dedicate to our business, we’ve got to be strategic around the yeses and the nos. And that’s the key point here. And this is the reframe that we’re trying to get across here is that there’s always a cost to saying yes. And in the hours you’ve got, you’ve got to make sure you’re strategic in what you’re saying yes to and what you’re saying no to.

Speaker 2 (16:47):

Yeah, I love that. And I think that’s the clarity. I mean, the question, when you ask that question, what am I saying no to? It doesn’t mean that we’re trying to get you to say no. It doesn’t mean that you should always say no, just as in you shouldn’t always say yes, you’ve got to consider the trade off and make it. And sometimes that trade off’s worth it. Sometimes, like you said before, shit goes sideways. You’ve got to step in. There’s things you have to do that you might not want to do, but sometimes what’s urgent needs to be done in that moment. So I think now it’s about learning to make it a choice rather than a reflex action that you’re taking.

Speaker 1 (17:20):

Correct. And when you’re looking at your pipeline, for example, it’s like, “You know what? I know that that job’s lower than our margin target, but I know that we’ve got a hole in our pipeline and we’ve got to say yes to that. We’ve got to fill that hole in that pipeline.” And I’m strategically going to say yes to that, but I’ve got to accept that this month’s profitability is going to be less because I know that that’s the implications of saying yes to that. Or it could be that a builder’s really pushing you to be able to hit a stage claim and a completion of this job and they’re really pushing that and you know that they’re a builder you really got to look after. So you might go, “All right, mate, we’ll get in there and get this done.” And you’re saying yes to that, but you understand the implications where you’re going to have to juggle things around and move this around and have conversations with other builders’ work to be able to appease them and keep them happy.

(18:17):

But you’re doing it because you’re being strategic, not coming from a place of guilt or fear or trying to be a people pleaser. That’s the difference here. It’s strategic yes versus fear, guilt, or people pleasing. And if you can get the distinction between the two, it elevates your level of leadership because it’s strategic thinking, not lower level leadership that serves no one.

Speaker 2 (18:43):

Yeah. And if you extend that out exactly what you just said, you’re taking back control of your time, you’re taking back control of your energy, you’re taking back control of the resources, the money that you’re making, you’re taking back control of how your family runs. All of that is as a result of getting this equation rebalanced. So challenge this week on the back of all of this, at least once, if not more, what we want you to do is before you say yes to anything, ask yourself that one question. And it might be worth having it written down on a sticky note on your phone, whatever it is to remind you to ask it, because in the heat of the moment, it’s a lot different. But the question is, if I say yes to this, what am I saying no to? Write it down, be specific, and then decide if that trade off is worth it.

(19:30):

Make it a conscious decision. If it’s not, give yourself permission to say no. Give yourself permission to say no. The business will survive. The family’s going to notice, and you’ll start to see that building a business is possible in a sense, like you said before, that it’s an and not an or equation, but it all comes from this one little exercise. So give yourself the gift of having that ability to see a clear choice, determine the trade off, and then make your decision, as opposed to just reacting blindly and walking yourself into exhaustion from trying to do everything or please everyone.

Speaker 1 (20:05):

If you’re tired of saying yes to everything and feeling like you’ve got nothing left for yourself or your family and you know that it’s time for a different approach, then book a free discovery call at strategysession.com.au, and let’s work out how to build a business that doesn’t demand every hour that you’ve got because success isn’t about how much you can handle, it’s about building something sustainable that gives you the life that you actually want to be able to live and the business that you want to be able to build as well. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, get stuck into the challenge and remember, if you say yes to something, there’s always a hidden cost on the other side of the equation. Until next week, take care.

Speaker 2 (20:47):

See you soon.