Episode 140 Podcast Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

You say you’re doing it for the family, but the reality is that the family gets what’s left over. They get a tired, worn out husband and they get a dad who’s disconnected, tired and stressed and snappy at the kids. And because if you’re working that many hours a week, if you are working 60, 70 hours or more a week, it’s very hard to show up as the best version of yourself for your wife and kids. G’day 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 (00:38):

Good to be back. Good to see you, Rob. Hi everyone. What a topic today. This is another one of my favourites, this idea of hustle culture and hopefully changing people’s thought process around it. And let’s be upfront. We’re not having a go at hard work here. This isn’t how do you do things much easier? How do you put your feet up? How do you get to relax? We know that hard work gets people to where they are. And I think today we really want to talk about what that actually means to get people to pause for a minute and listen to what’s being said and what they’re buying into.

Speaker 1 (01:08):

Yeah. It’s one of those things where I think what I’m really grateful for of something that my dad imparted on me in particular, coming from a blue collar family, my family growing up in the land was we grew up working hard and that culture God instilled with us. And I think it’s definitely the great Aussie way where we work hard. And I also do believe that if you want to achieve anything great in life, you’ve got to work your ring out, you’ve got to work hard to be able to achieve something. But there’s a fine line between working hard and working hard and it being a flex, but not getting you to where you want to go, isn’t it?

Speaker 2 (01:48):

It is. And I think the missing piece is what people equate as the result. When it becomes hard work is working hard and I’m working hard and there’s no sort of jump to what the output is, what the result is. I think that’s where you get lost in that idea, well, I’ll just work harder. And you never get that sort of link up that, hey, you are here for a reason. There’s an outcome you’re chasing. So your identity then just becomes all about hard work as opposed to what are you actually here to do? And it happens, I think interesting. We see it all the time. When guys reach a certain point, it starts to go the other way. The hard work, even if it is paying off, stops paying off.

Speaker 1 (02:26):

Yeah, it does. There’s no doubt, and you’ve been there, I’ve been there in business in the early stages of business. You have to work hard to get a business up and out of the ground. There’s no denying that. And you’ve got to put in the long hours because you literally are wearing all the hats in the early stages of business. You are trying to market, you’re trying to sell, you’re trying to get jobs across the line, you’re trying to deliver the work, you’re trying to then invoice and do all the admin. When you’re in the early stages, you are absolutely everything. But as you start to grow your business and start taking some of those hats off, it’s a dangerous thing to keep that mindset of working the longer and harder I work, the more money I make. That mindset is important, but it starts to get to a point in time where it starts creating diminishing returns.

Speaker 2 (03:20):

Yeah, absolutely. I think about it. You just talked about growing up. I remember being in tech and startups in software and big startups with venture capital and things like that, the pressure’s on. The long hours are unavoidable at those stages. But I think when you get to the point where you’re working through and your decisions start to get worse, you have a team that’s now looking at you going, “What the hell are we doing here?” You’ve got a family that’s screaming at you like, “Where are you? Are you not coming?” Or they stop asking you things. We’ve seen all of this before in our clients, but I think those modes of operating have to come to an end at some point. And that’s what we’re going to explore today. So we’re going to talk through why do these hours become a badge in the first place?

(04:02):

How do we end up here? Second, we’re going to look at what are you actually saying and what are you actually advertising through this idea of I’m up at five, I’m up at this, I work 70 hours this week, I’m doing 80, I’m the hardest worker. What are you actually advertising through that? And the third thing we’re going to do then is let’s look at what we can change the scoreboard to be because that really is the thing that clicks into gear and you start to make that shift. So that’s where we’re going today. So let’s start with this first idea about why the hours become the badge in the first place. So no one, I think by accident ends up going, I’m proud of my 70 hour weeks. There’s an industry that’s trained. There’s a culture that’s trained people to somehow value that.

Speaker 1 (04:45):

Yeah. There’s this mindset of, I think it bred into us at early ages, like our parents said, work long and hard and you’ll get ahead in life. It’s a generational thing. I look at my dad and my granddad, it’s a generational thing that we are all brought up that type of way. And then specifically in the trade space, it’s like let’s be the hardest worker on the job site. And when you’re in that sector, it’s like, well, you equate making more money to hours work. So if you want to make more money, you do more overtime. And if you want to get ahead and get promotions, you work long, you work hard, you show you’re capable, you demonstrate ability. And so it’s almost this mental wiring from generational to mental conditioning to the industry, the sector that the guys are in. It’s this whole mindset that gets developed in early ages into their trade, isn’t it?

Speaker 2 (05:44):

Yeah. I think you’ve got to have it to get anywhere, like you said, and generationally and how you grow up is part of that. But then it becomes a value thing too. Your hard work equals the output. The output equals the bill at the end of the day, the invoice we get to put in. You become valuable to someone because of that hard work. And then it locks in my value becomes tied to the amount of effort I’m putting in. And I think that’s the next thing. Effort then becomes, I can control effort however I want to. It’s easy to do. And if showing up or a number of hours becomes my scoreboard, then I can always control that and I can pull that lever whenever I want. And I know I can increase or decrease my value based on that. So I think that’s another thing that unfortunately wires it up that that’s the way the game gets played.

(06:32):

And you think about apprentices, exactly that.

Speaker 1 (06:34):

Yeah. It runs deep in society and it definitely does, but it comes with a cost and society celebrates hustle. Whenever you talk to someone, how are you going? Oh mate, I’m busy. It’s everywhere around us. And part of today is I don’t want to knock hard work. When you’re running a business that’s doing one, two, three million dollars or more, you’re in the top percentages of businesses in Australia. And when you want to be in the top percentage at 1% or a top 5%, you’ve got to work your ass off. I don’t want you to be listening here today saying, Rob and Dan think that I shouldn’t be working hard. I do want you to work hard because if you want to achieve anything great in life, you’ve got to work hard. But today is about breaking the conditioning, breaking the mental thought pattern, breaking your go-to badge of honour, which is, oh man, I’m busy.

(07:31):

Oh man, I’m working hard. Oh, look at the effort I’m putting in. Look at the hours I’m working to be able to get ahead. There’s a point in time that you’ve got to realise that working longer and harder is not actually getting you any further ahead.

Speaker 2 (07:43):

Yeah. You look at what we’ve talked about so far, Rob, we’ve talked about apprentices, we’ve talked about growing up, we’ve talked about when you’re younger, we’ve talked about having a work ethic that you need as part of your makeup as you enter a workforce. It’s early stage stuff. But when we start looking at, I work 70 hours a week and we hear it from business owners approaching a million dollars in trades, that’s telling us a very different story.

Speaker 1 (08:05):

Yeah, it is. There’s a point in business where it actually starts creating diminishing returns. And what I mean by that is the long hours that you work to get your business up and out of the ground and roughly to the million dollar mark. And the reason why I say a million is that’s where you’re starting to start to phase yourself off the tools and turn a corner to continue to grow. The mindset and the hours that you worked, which got you to a million dollars is not what’s going to get you to two to three to five and beyond. And the reason why so many tradies get stuck at that 80K months or a million-ish dollars a year is because they’re carrying that mindset forward, but there’s got to be a point in time where you got to turn a corner and it starts in your identity, the way that you think and your relationship with time.

Speaker 2 (09:01):

Yeah. I think it’s a sign when we hear it that someone’s still wrestling with or hasn’t or won’t make the shift from going from doing everything to managing. And I think it’s as much as, I don’t know how you feel, but it’s a sign of poor management. There’s so many skills that will help you do this, but if you’re holding onto it, that flex is the first sort of symptom or sign that, hey, you’re not doing a good job here. This is not good.

Speaker 1 (09:26):

Yeah, you’re right. And I’d agree with you there because it is a sign of a poor manager because when you’re growing a business beyond a million dollars, the success of the business comes down to not necessarily how many hours the owner works, it comes down to their ability of how well they build a team and manage that team’s performance. And that comes with good management, good delegation, holding people accountable, driving performance. You build through people rather than build by working a lot of hours by yourself as a doer.

Speaker 2 (10:02):

Yeah. And this is what you talk about when you say the power of leverage. I mean, talk through when you say the power of leverage, that’s all of those things. It’s the skills, it’s the people. Anything else you’d sort of add to that to help put that little contrast in between the idea of the working hard versus managing the leadership and that sort of stuff?

Speaker 1 (10:20):

Yeah. Well, the reason why a lot of business owners get stuck at their million dollar market is because they are working 50, 60, 70 hour weeks. And once you get to that point, you’ve literally hit capacity within yourself. So therefore the business has hit capacity. And it’s not because there’s a lack of opportunity out there in the marketplace. The opportunity for the business to grow is constrained by the capacity of the business owner. And it’s the owner’s capacity which becomes the constraint of the business to prevent it from growing.

Speaker 2 (10:53):

Yeah. And I think we’ve got ample examples from all the client features and things we’ve done on the podcast where you’ll hear that story over and over again. The thing that unlocks, the thing that happens first, the thing we talk about all the time to business owners is being able to unlock that, to realise that power of leverage, to make that shift. There’s so many, I don’t know if there’s a favourite one you’d say to people, but nearly every single one we do has that theme in it.

Speaker 1 (11:20):

Yeah. One in the earlier days of The Trade Den would’ve been Frank Virtue from episode 43. And I remember him doing 80 hour weeks, crazy hours, sitting at the kitchen table, still on the tools, no people around him. But you look at the business that he’s got now, he’s got bookkeeping support, he’s got admin support, he’s built his ground crew, he’s got a project manager in place, he’s got estimation and quoting support in there. And it’s that building of that team and delegating and managing and driving performance and leveraging his time through people and through systems is what unlocked the next phase of growth. And now you look at Frank, he does it in a 35, 40 hour week max and he’s running a multimillion dollar business with a full operational structure around him. He’s got a bigger business, he’s making more money, he’s more connected and present than ever with his family and he’s working less hours.

(12:16):

So it’s the opposite to what most people have a badge of honour or flex about because they equate more performance with more hours.

Speaker 2 (12:24):

Yeah. Another one that sprung to mind just then as you were talking was Phil Dawes. He used to do the whole old night thing and that was he’s just the way the world worked and that’s what got me to here and all that sort of things as well. So that’s another one. There’s just two. I mean, we could go on. Let’s move across then and go a bit deeper. I want to get into what it’s actually telling you in real terms, this idea of when you wear that badge. You say it at a barbecue or pub, whatever it was you said at the start. It’s almost like you think it’s a successful thing. It’s almost like that’s the secret to success. It’s the common thing that drives everyone, but it talks about a list of problems and they really need to be called out. And if you are wrestling with the position we’re taking here, just think if you think about this the other way, do you get a similar sort of hit?

(13:12):

If I said to you, instead of saying I work 70 hours and I said the business can’t run without me, would that be a flex or would you automatically pick up on it? That 70 hours means why can’t the business run without you if you’ve got no systems, no delegation? Who owns the rest of this sort of stuff? So it’s those sort of things. That’s one of them for me. It’s like all you’re telling me is it’s just you no matter who you got. I don’t know if you’ve got any others, but there’s probably a couple more we can think of just to really pull this out of people and sort of snap them out of this idea that this is a good thing.

Speaker 1 (13:44):

Yeah. I like to think of it as the business owner as the bottleneck. If you are saying that you are working that many hours, then what you’re actually saying is you are the bottleneck. All the decisions keep coming back to you. All the ideas keep coming from you. The team are constantly looking at you for the next move, the next thing. If you are working that many hours and you are running a business that’s doing a million dollars plus, it’s not a healthy business and you are then saying, look at this, I’m working so many hours. It’s actually a sign of an unhealthy, unoptimized business that is not performing well because you are not performing well. You’re inefficient, you are promoting it that it’s doing great, but it’s actually not healthy. And the sooner you accept that, the better.

Speaker 2 (14:30):

Yeah. I think of that little slide with that little bottleneck man that we show to people when we do this. The other one I think as well, and I want you to break this down because you’re good at doing this one. If you sat there and said, “My hourly rate, if I really told you what it was, is embarrassing.” And I think this is a big one as well that wakes people up when we do this. Talk through that idea of trying to work out what your hourly rate or what your true worth is on an hourly basis.

Speaker 1 (14:55):

Yeah. When you think about a 70-hour week and say 50 hours a week, let’s do it on a calculator. 70 times 50 is 3,500 hours. That’s what you’re working over a 50 week year. Let’s say you’re paying yourself 120,000 divided by 3,500, you’re paying yourself $34 and you’re earning less than your tradesman. Yeah. And it’s crazy. And this is for a lot of business owners, when you really do the numbers for the hours that you work, you’re probably earning less than your team and you’re carrying all the stress, all the pressure, all the risk, and you’ve convinced yourself that, “Well, I own a business and I’ve got all this freedom.” Bullshit. You’re earning less and you’re working more, carrying more risk and earning less than your team, yet you’re promoting how great you’re doing. Wake up call, you’re not earning as much as you think when you really look at your hourly rate.

Speaker 2 (15:56):

Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at it now, that’s all for you to hear this and reflect on yourself. Let’s look at it then in a business sense, right? This now impacts the business. There’s a real hit that you take as you go through this and as you get, remember we’re talking business owners to business owners. We’re talking guys that have progressed beyond getting out of the ground here, but these costs start to cost you even more. It compounds the more you do this. The first one, I think, poor decision making. You can’t avoid that. If you’re doing this consistently and running yourself into the ground, you’re going to have all kinds of issues with decision making and just the way you’re showing up and what your output actually becomes.

Speaker 1 (16:37):

Yeah. I’ve never met a business owner doing 70 hour weeks who’s still going to the gym, eating well and looking after themselves because they literally. There’s so many hours in a day and only so many hours in a week. And when you are working that many from start to finish from early morning to late at night, you’re not spending time at the gym, you’re not going for a run, you’re not looking after yourself. You’re probably overweight, drinking too many beers, potentially smoking darts, and you’re eating shit food at wherever you can find at the servo because you’re tired and you’re stressed and you’re worn out because of the hours you’re working. So good luck trying to make great decisions when you’re unhealthy and tired and worn out and working the hours that you are. It’s a recipe for disaster, isn’t it?

Speaker 2 (17:23):

Oh it really is. And when we see it show up on numbers, it’s like what happened this month? Oh, I had a quoting error. We’d never get to the variations. The conversation I had with that builder was terrible. It all of a sudden becomes all about the turnover that I hired the wrong person. We hear all this all the time and you can almost draw a straight line to the way they’ve gone about it.

Speaker 1 (17:44):

And Dan, that’s why I like when we meet a business owner, when we meet a bloke in the trade space for the first time and they are working crazy hours like this, this is what I love about what we do in coaching around getting them to. We get straight onto working on the immediate resolution of the issue within the business, whether it’s a time, team, money issue. We always go to one of those three. But then we look at the personal side and that’s why I love our Bevan framework. And for those who may not have heard our Bevan framework before, it’s built off the back of Michael Bevan where he built his cricket game off the game of hitting singles, ones and twos. And we talk about this a lot in coaching where we talk around health habits and for someone working 70 hours a week, they’re like, “Fuck you guys serious? You’re going to ask me to go to the gym and eat healthier.” I’ve got no time in the day to do that, but this is why in coaching we go. Our Bevan framework is all around not just coaching the business, but the man behind the business. Because until someone makes some personal changes there and the business change at the same time, that’s the recipe to move forward, isn’t it?

Speaker 2 (18:52):

Yeah. There’s no one thing to do. There’s always a pairing up, the business, the person, the person, the business, whichever way you look at it, you’ve got to approach both, you’ve got to tackle both. And even then that relationship with time, like you said, there’s so many fundamental things we need to do. It’s a whole nother episode really when you think about it. But let’s talk about then the next thing that does show up. And this is the idea that the family, they get. And we talk about, it’s not so much your family suffers, they just get what’s left of you. So as you hear this, think about what is left at the end of this 70 hour week and all the stuff that you put yourself through, what is left and what the family gets left, it’s usually not much.

Speaker 1 (19:34):

Yeah, but you say you’re doing it for the family, but the reality is that you’re right, the family gets what’s left over. They get a tired, worn out husband and they get a dad who’s disconnected, tired and stressed and snappy at the kids. And because if you’re working that many hours a week, if you’re working 60, 70 hours or more a week, it’s very hard to show up as the best version of yourself for your wife and kids. It’s just impossible. And yeah, it’s okay to be a good provider, but your kids want their father back and your wife wants her husband back. And it’s not just good enough to be a provider. It’s about being present and it’s your ability to show up and have that presence with your family. And you literally cannot be present for your family and be there for them when you’re working 70 hours a week.

(20:24):

It’s just physically impossible.

Speaker 2 (20:26):

Yeah. The last one I’m going to throw up here is also, this is almost like the self-fulfilling prophecy. If you want to guarantee you’re going to keep doing this, you keep doing it because what happens is your good people, your team is often left with the dregs or the stragglers. Good people leave when they see a business that’s run like shit. And it sounds like, it’s not like, “Oh, this place is crap.” They have this idea and they go, “Well, I know if you are doing this, I could do this better by myself.” And they go off and do it. So that idea of. We hear it all the time, “I started the business because I knew I could do it better than the business I was working in.” And a lot of that does come from exactly what we’re talking today. So I think that’s the third and probably the last little piece on this, but the idea that good people leave businesses with this sort of thing that’s going on because they recognise that it’s not a metric you should be buying into.

Speaker 1 (21:16):

Yeah, I’d agree with that because the business is often a reflection of the owner. And when the owner is working crazy hours, it means how that shows up in the business is the long hours is a reflection of a business owner who does not embrace leverage and is often poorly unorganised. And when the owner is poorly unorganised, it often shows up, the business is a shit show operationally, isn’t it?

Speaker 2 (21:41):

Yeah, absolutely. Every time you see it all the time, there’s just so much extra stuff that has to happen because no one’s really running the show. Everyone’s just head down ass up and it’s just all hands to the deck all the time. It’s relentless. There’s no sign of it letting up. There’s no improvement. It’s like, well, I might as well do this by myself and get going on things. Processes get missed, for instance. We could have a really good process. I’m going to go and do that my way myself. But when you’re running at this level, the way we’re talking about today, you haven’t got time to do processes, you haven’t got time to do training, you can’t build the capability of your team. All of that stuff gets missed and as a result, the good people move on really quickly. All right. I think we’ve convinced people hopefully to have another look at this idea the next time they say it.

(22:27):

Let’s have a look though. We’ve got to turn the corner. We can’t just say don’t do something. We always in coaching say you’ve got to replace something with something else. You want to take something out, you got to put something in. Let’s talk about this idea then about changing the scoreboard or what the new badge of honour can be. And I want you to talk about, let’s start with the ones we’ve just sort of exploded, the idea of presence and what that means. How does that show up for a family or for a business owner who’s got a family or relationships that they’re in? I think that’s the first thing as this new badge of honour that we create.

Speaker 1 (22:58):

Yeah. The new badge of honour for me is being the dad who can go to a school concert and being able to do help with pickups and drop offs if they choose to. That’s a flex in my eyes. How good is that, that you get to run a business and have a great team and have time leverage and you get to do what you enjoy in the business and you can be there for your kids to watch them grow up? How cool is that as a flex?

Speaker 2 (23:23):

Yeah, it’s awesome. And I look at that and not just the concerts or the one-off things or the drop-offs. It’s also then when a school holidays comes up, your kids, your family look forward to that time. And if you are not there for that, it’s like, well, at what point do we ever get to do this? Everyone else is available, but you’re not.That to me is like, that sucks. Get real and be able to take a few days off. Have a longer weekend, a couple of days where you can spend time over school holidays to do shit that kids are excited about.

Speaker 1 (23:53):

Yeah. The next one for me is the relationship with your wife. I think it’s one of those things that when you’re running a business and have a young family, one thing that does disappear is that connection with your wife because life is busy and you can sometimes become passing ships in the night because of the craziness of the going of all the dynamics. And so the next flex for me is how good is it to be able to know that you’re running a great business, you’re not only present and connected with your kids, but you actually get to connect and spend quality time with your wife, whether that’s go and have a little coffee somewhere or go and duck out and have a lunch one day or just get to spend some quality time together at nighttime rather than you sitting on the laptop working.

(24:38):

So it’s just one of those things where that’s the flex for me where it’s not just, “Hey, how do I be there for my kids?” But how do you be connected to the wife? The love of your life, your wife. It’s that.

Speaker 2 (24:49):

Yeah, it is. And this is why when we do coach people, we talk to. When we teach using your calendar as a tool of the trait, that’s one of the first things that goes in. You’ve got to fill up on those things that are important. If you are just going to say, “Well, my 70 hours is cut. I’ve got nothing left.” What’s important in there really? What are you really saying to everyone around you in terms of where they sit in the pecking order? And some big things happen when you really look at it that way and people start to go, “Well, I can now see how they’d view that from the other side.” So I think that’s an important one. The other one then, and you spoke to this a bit before, but being able to flex, I think, the health side of things, the fitness, the presence, the energy you’ve got for the rest of your life, have you got the energy required to live a fulfilling life?

(25:34):

Because if you don’t, then everything’s robbing you through the business that you’re doing. The business and the results you’re getting own you 100%.

Speaker 1 (25:43):

Yeah. I love it when we see our clients. We put our clients in round tables every quarter and it’s like a mini mastermind every quarter where they’re working on an improvement. I love following along and watching them where guys are taking photos of, “Hey, I’m at the gym or hey, I’m at the park with my kids.” Or, “Hey, here’s my meal that I’ve had today because I’m on my healthy meal plan.” I love watching clients in their quarterly improvements and they’re stacking good habits on top of each other because they become wholesome men. They’re looking after their health and wellbeing, their physical wellbeing, their mental wellbeing, their connection with their wife, their kids. They’re actually going back to the gym and doing all those things, having hobbies and all those things that life’s all about. It’s important to be able to have a life, not where your business just consumes your whole life.

(26:30):

And you’re right, that’s the real flex where you get to be a healthy man. How good is that?

Speaker 2 (26:36):

Yeah, vibrant, ready to go. It’s awesome. I think this then comes from that idea that does the business own you, do you own your business? Being a business owner, that you can be proud of the business you’ve got. Not that you’re just sort of hanging out with everyone else and trying to get that sort of connection through the fact that business sucks, it’s so hard, I’ve got no time, or I thought it was going to be freedom and now I’m handcuffed to the bloody thing and everyone’s nodding going, “Yeah, yeah, sounds great.” That idea of having pride in what you’ve built as an asset is something that’s going to create wealth, those sort of things I think as well, that’s the scoreboard you should be looking to.

Speaker 1 (27:10):

Yeah absolutely. Today’s really been a mindset session where we are really trying to crack this identity you’ve got, this mindset that you’ve got, this belief of the longer and harder I work, the more money I make, this badge of honour of working crazy hours. Hopefully today’s been a wake up call for you and you’ve just got to accept that what got you here in business is not what’s going to get you to where you want to go. And there’s got to be a point in time in where you accept that. And if you’re running a business where you’re working crazy hours and you’ve plateaued and you’ve stalled and you’re feeling stuck, it’s not because there’s a lack of opportunity out there in the marketplace. You as a business owner have just hit capacity and something’s got to give in order for you to get. And the only way that you can embrace that is be that business owner who loves to leverage, leverage other people’s time, leverage other people’s resources and start to build structure in your world because you can’t get more time in your week.

(28:10):

The only way that you get time back is to build team, build systems, build structure. So if you’re that business owner who is working long, hard hours at the moment and you’re not getting to where you want to go and you know that you’ve got to re-stump, restructure, rebuild your operations to get to where you want to go, then jump across to strategysession.com.au, fill out the application form, book in a time that suits, and let’s pull apart your structure and the hours you’re working and what you’re doing and where you’re trying to go and let’s build a personalised plan for you to be able to help you build the business and life that’s something that you’re really proud of. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed today’s episode and we’re really looking forward to coming back to you with another episode here on The Trade Den shortly. Until then, take care.

Speaker 2 (28:55):

See you soon.