Episode 29 Podcast Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The biggest mistake that you can make as a business owner is expecting everyone to operate at the same level as you and think the same way as you do. Hi everyone. Rob Kropp here and welcome back to another episode of The Trade Den. Welcome back Dan, how’s things?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Things are good thanks Rob. Hello, great to be here today. We’re rifling through episodes it feels like and absolutely loving the feedback we’re getting and all things podcast at the moment. It’s absolutely humming, which is great.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, I’m speaking to plenty of guys who have booked in a call after listening to the episode and they’re just like, Rob, it just feels like you’re talking to me. It just feels like my problems, my challenges, and it’s just great to hear some practical solutions and I’ve had plenty of mindset shifts along the way, so yeah, we’re getting really good feedback. It’s really good to hear, isn’t it?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
It is, and thank you for everyone that shared and sent it to a mate. Like we say, if someone you think needs to hear it, share it, we’re definitely getting more and more people joining into The Trade Den community in Facebook. So yeah, really, really starting to see some results of The Trade Den community itself growing, which is awesome.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah, it is, and today’s a big topic, super relevant for those who are in their journey where they’re looking at taking a step back off the tools and getting off the tools is a really important step to be able to grow your business and have that flexibility and freedom to be able to have the business that works for you rather than you being handcuffed to the business all the time. So really looking forward to getting into today around driving productivity onsite without having to physically be there in person. But we’re also going to do another one, not that these are a pigeon pair, but we’re also going to do another topic around how to be transition from being a good mate to a good manager. So even though these two episodes coming up are a little bit separate, they’re kind of intertwined to some degree arn’t they?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
They are. I think it all comes hand in hand with that sort of challenge as you transition from being the guy on site, being that site guy, the tradie, however you’ve identified with yourself, it’s one of the biggest questions we get from clients when they first start coaching. Nearly every single client I think at some point asks us this question of how do I drive productivity if I’m not on site?
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, it’s a big one. And like I mentioned before, getting off the tools is one of the most important steps that any trades business can make. It’s a real milestone to hit and it’s one of those things that as you do transition yourself off tools and to get into the office, that’s when the business absolutely starts moving and grooving. It’s not that you get more time in your day, but you just get more time in the day to focus on the things that matter. But when you do do that, there’s two challenges that often come up, and the first one is, is that they’re thinking, well, why don’t my ground crew work as hard and fast as efficient as me? So that’s the first challenge that they come up against. And the second one is, is that, well, when I’m not there, why is it that productivity and quality always slips to a level that it starts costing us money? And so they’re the two biggest challenges. It’s almost like when you take a step back, it’s like, well, as I do step back, this is my opportunity to grow, but what it does is if you don’t have the right things in place, which we’re going to talk about today, it presents itself with problems because these challenges often arise.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah, we see it time and time again and guys bump up against this. It’s a real barrier that if you don’t learn to navigate where you’re going with this and work your way through it, you are always constantly going to be a slave to your team and your business. It’ll never break, you’ll never get that freedom break that word freedom that people use with business. This is easily one of the biggest obstacles that people have to overcome. In this episode, we’re going to explore probably the top three answers we provide to clients and the answers that have helped them get off the tools and keep that quality and output where they want it to be.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
We’re going to talk through today a couple of key strategies that you can implement one of them and it’s going to really help you drive productivity and the profitability of your ground crew, but implement all of them and a lot of your frustrations will disappear and what it’s going to enable you to do will help you really leverage your ground crew better than you’ve ever done before, but it’s going to help you really drive the productivity and overall profitability of the business to make the money that you deserve and are worthy of within your business. So today’s going to be a big game changer.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, you ready to jump in?
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Let’s do it.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Alright. So the first thing I think when we get this sort of challenge thrown back at us and are forced to answer these questions, the first thing we always do is shoot back a topic that we call setting your team up for success. So really why can’t my team do it as good as me? Why am I losing so much quality and productivity while I’m not there? The first step are you setting your team up for success?
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Yeah, this one’s a big one because I think what happens is the owner of the business point the finger back at the ground crew going, well, it’s their fault. They’re the problem. Why aren’t they working as hard and as fast as I could get it done? And they’re often looking at the ground crew as the problem when more often than they aren’t the problem, not in every case anyway. And this is where as the owner, you’ve got to step up and take some ownership or some responsibility to be able to ask yourself that question, well, have I set them up for success and have I enabled them to succeed and actually given them the tools to succeed? Because if you haven’t, then you can’t actually blame them for that. You’ve got to take some responsibility for it.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think then the first point in setting your team up for success for me is allowing enough time. You mentioned your team’s, not you. The way that they do it will be different for a number of reasons, which you might want to elaborate on, but allowing enough time for the team to complete a job and then getting buy-in that that’s what we’re all signed up for, that commitment that this is when the job will be done.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Yeah. We have to remember and remind ourselves often as business owners that our team will not have the same level of urgency or sensitivity to be able to get the job done as fast or necessarily to the same level of quality that we do as the owners. We have to remember that we’ve got our names on the doors, we’ve taken the step as a business owner to be able to run this business. Sure, they want to do the very best that they can, but their sensitivity and urgency will know will be nowhere near as heightened than ours as an owner because we’re the one running it. It’s our name on the door. We ultimately are responsible for the profitability of a business. It’s the business’s money that we control in the end of the day, not theirs. And I think we have to remind ourselves that we’ve almost got unrealistic expectations that if we expect our team to operate at the same heights as we are of the owners.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yeah. There’s also I think an element of as time goes on, you lose that capability factor. You forget what it was like to be an apprentice, be it first year, third year, whatever it is, trying to get a job done. I think there’s a capability element to this as well is being really honest about the capability of your team and being able to ensure that you’ve given them enough time to do the job to the best of their ability, given their ability at the time they’re doing the job.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Yeah, it is so true. And you sometimes lose a bit of touch, you lose a little bit of touch around what it’s like on site, especially if you’ve transitioned yourself off the tools and it has been a while since you’ve been off the tools. We see it a little bit with clients where they go back in the tools and they’re like, oh, that hurts the body’s sore and yep, I kept up with the boys for a few days, but gee, hasn’t it been, haven’t I paid for it for a week? But I think over really allowing enough time for your team to do it comes back to this video that I watched many years ago and it was a really great perspective from Gary V and he was interviewing this guy going, why are you not growing? Why can’t you get to the next level?
(08:51):
And the guy’s like, well, no one can do it as good as me. I’m faster. They just don’t do it at the same speed, the same quality and the same urgency as I was. And Gary V hit back with the perspective going, well mate, when you’re growing a business, 80% is good enough. It’s it’s better off having three, five or 10 employees that are doing it as 80% as good as you. Then you trying to do it at a hundred percent. And that’s a really great different perspective and it’s not that you put up with sub par performance and it’s not that you put up with sub par quality, you’ve still got to be able to hold the line around that, but it’s just that level of acceptance that the team aren’t going to naturally have that same amount of urgency and desire as you as the business owner. So when you are pricing jobs and when you are going for building out your hours allocation, when you’re going in to win a job, you’ve got to allow for that because you’ve got to set your team up to success to put enough hours in the jobs for them to do it, not to fatten it out to make them lazy, but you’ve got to really set them up to succeed in the longterm for the job.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
You do. And we covered that a lot in our pricing series that we recently we recently put out, so if you haven’t heard that already, we’ll put the link in the show notes but jump back into that pricing and really get an understanding of how to price according to where your team’s at as well as a number of other things that we covered. It was a great little series. Further to that point, I think it’s how many times do we hear it where guys end up, they’re half off the tools, they’re in the office and then it becomes a sales versus operation sort of discussion. It’s the ground crew who are telling you one thing, it’s the office crew that have told you something else.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, absolutely. Sales, sales versus ops is always a big challenge because sales are trying to go in there to win the jobs and then sometimes they don’t have a much appreciation or consideration of what it’s like to deliver the job. And there’s nothing worse than the operational team getting that job going, man, are you serious? They’ve gone way too skinny on these hours. There’s no way that we’re going to be able to deliver that job in those hours in that deadline within those timeframes. It’s this impossible. And so when we talk about setting your team up for success, it’s not only being realistic with the hours, being realistic with the hours that your team can do it, but it’s also ensuring that you’re pricing it in a way where you get buy-in from your team to be able to make sure that they buy in to being able to get that job done in that time within that deadline to that level of quality. Because if they don’t get their buy-in, then you set the job up to fail from the beginning. So I think all this setting up from success is really important as you’re going into the job.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah, don’t be afraid to get your supervisor or leading hand involved, ask them questions about the job, what they think it’s going to take. So it’s a really good and easy way to set your team up for success. I think, Rob, the next thing in terms of you can set your team up for success through your pricing and making sure that you’re allowing time for those things, but the second part of this that when we talk to people about this specific question is, well, are you communicating that to anyone? Do people actually know the time allowed, the deadlines and what the expectations are? It amazes me in coaching how many times we ask that question and guys like, well, I don’t want to give that information away or should I be telling them that sort of stuff? Is it too much? They just know what to do.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah. The worst is when you allow five days in a job and it’s like, oh, let’s just tell ’em three so they get it done earlier and let’s put the pressure on ’em and put the squeeze on ’em because that’s just how we do things around here. That mindset in my opinion is rubbish and then not communicating enough information is also setting them up for failure. You’re worried about not giving too much away, but it costs you money in the long term because your team don’t even know what they’re meant to be working towards in the first place. It’s just a recipe for disaster.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
It is. There’s so many things that go wrong just from that one little piece. If you get that right and you start communicating clearly about expectations, it’s amazing how your ground crew will step up to meet the expectations, but they’ve got to know what they are.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah. I tell this story all the time in coaching, and this really strikes a chord with clients. When we tell us of a guy named Patto and he works in a fit out company and we worked with Patto many, many years ago and he does fit outs of nursing homes and he’d go in, strip it out, pull it all apart, and then bring all the subtrades in, get the carpentry team in the plumbers of Sparkies and all that kind of stuff, fit it out, do a brand new fit out and boom, someone else would move in. And he never went through the exercise of breaking that job down to strip out, pulling all the pieces and then complete fit out. He never went through time, allowed deadlines, expectations, materials allowed for the job or anything. So he was wondering, well, why is it that we’re blowing out on time?
(14:07):
Why is it that we’re not meeting expectations? Why aren’t we meeting deadlines and why do we blow out on costs on our job? It wasn’t until we started doing job costing that he realised that things weren’t getting met. And it wasn’t until in coaching that we hit him and went, well, mate, the reality is you can’t hold your team accountable to something that they don’t know what they’re being held accountable to. And that was a real light bulb moment for Patto where he is like, ah, you’re right. And for him, he was so reluctant to share with his team because he was worried that they’d know how much money he would make and what margin did he make and all those types of things on the job. But what he was actually doing was costing the business a lot because of his lack of willingness to share that information, whether he was too busy or for what other reasons as well.
(15:00):
So that was a game changer for Patto when he then started to open up with his ground crew to be able to go, guys, here’s our build programme. We’ve got this many days to strip out. We’ve got this many hours to be able to get it done by. This is how we then break down the job. This is when our carpenters are going in. This is when all our subtrades are going to be able to go in. We’ve got this many deadlines. Here’s the timeframe that we need to get it done by here’s how many hours that we’ve allocated it for. So once he started sharing that information and being a little bit more open with his team, his team actually really started rallying around him and stepping up because they had something to work towards. So as an absolute game changer for him.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
It is. I think the biggest hurdle to people doing that though is they think they’re going to give away some sort of information about how much money they expect the job to make or that now my staff are going to know how much we make. They’re going to run off and start their own thing tomorrow. It’s a valid fear, but it sort of disappears the minute you really break down, well, how did I set this job up? And that’s all you’re really doing them is giving them building blocks to be able to hit the targets that you’ve set for them.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Correct. You’ve got to give them enough information that they are armed with it to be able to run the job correctly. You don’t need to be able to tell ’em what the sales price is and what dollar value of margin you’re going to make. Or maybe you need to with your supervisors or a project manager, you need to talk about percentage of margin. But with your ground crew, you’ve literally got to talk hours, break the job down into components. If it’s a bigger project, break down the hours, you break down timeframes, deadlines, expectations, quality inclusions, exclusions, and empower them with enough information to get the job done. And you leave out all the other stuff around the amount of margin you’re making, the sales price and all that kind of stuff. They don’t need to know that. But if you’ve got to set them up for success to be able to give them that information so they know how to run the job and what they’re going to be held accountable to in the end of the day.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And those targets are meaningful to the ground crew, if it’s not meaningful to the ground crew, it’s just going to go in one ear out the other as noise, it doesn’t really matter. So your team’s going to work harder to achieve the real targets, not these unrealistic expectations of maybe a job should. We’ll tell ’em it’s two, like you said, we’ll tell ’em it’s three days when it’s really five.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Yeah, and I think it’s hitting that point home that we spoke around with Patto before, it’s you can’t hold someone accountable to something that they don’t know that they’re being held accountable to it.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Absolutely
Speaker 1 (17:42):
You can’t drive productivity on site if you don’t arm your team with the information and with what they need to actually be productive. That’s a you problem, not an them problem.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yeah, for sure. Absolutely agree with you a hundred percent in that. And that goes not just for setting up ground crew, it’s across the board in your business. If you’re not doing that, you’re missing a trick for sure. The next one we talk about is in relation to that question is filling the leadership void. And the answer is that when people, let me just set that up in terms of people getting off the tools, guys coming off the tools starting to get in the office, they’re maybe putting more time into BD work, sales work, whatever it is, estimation. There’s this real need to fill what we call a leadership void, isn’t there?
Speaker 1 (18:27):
There is, because when you are running a business say sub a million dollars, you are the one with the most experience maturity, the level of responsibility you price the work, the job inside and out, and there’s a level of urgency that you’ll hold to be able to do that. Now where clients get caught or business owners in the trade space get caught is it’s easy when you are running one job, but all of a sudden when you start running jobs concurrently, you can’t replicate yourself. You can’t be on the same job at the same amount of at the same time. And so as you’re starting to phase yourself off the tools, what happens is the owner will be on one job and that job will run really, really well. And then they’ll go, oh shit, I’ve got another job over here. And then they go over to that job and then the first job slips because they’re propping up the second job and they’re see soaring between 1, 2, 3 jobs all running at the same time. And because there’s no senior tech or a really good leading hand actually managing that job and the ground can run underneath them, the business owner never gets to run all jobs profitable. At the same time, the only job that runs profitably is the one that the business owner finds himself on at the time.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Yeah, absolutely. So you need that leading hand to come on and really be your eyes and ears. And it’s not sort of like some covert operation, is it? It’s not all just between the leading hand and you as the business owner when you’re off the tools like ring me in the office, whatever it might be, there’s a real role description and a real responsibility of that leading hand to the people in the ground crew that are on site doing those jobs.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, correct. That person there has, they earn a couple of bucks, an extra an hour, they’re responsible for managing the output for the day. Obviously you as the owner are communicating with them. They’re communicating with a couple of guys underneath them, one or two or three or whatever’s in your crew. They’re there responsible for liaising with the customer. They’re there responsible for making decisions on site. They’re there to be able to coordinate the apprentices who can’t think for themselves. Sometimes they’re there for ensuring safety and quality and technical support. And so that person has a level of responsibility about them that they push the job along in your absence and you need someone who has that level of responsibility and authority to make those decisions because in the absence of that, your team around you will be looking for leadership and they won’t get it so that they’ll lower their performance or this is where you cop a thousand calls a day because they’re looking for your direction, not knowing what decision to make next.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
And when we talk leading hand or senior tech, we meet someone that’s in that role formally, not just someone who you’re saying, well, you are in charge, it’s on your shoulders. You are the guy. This person’s got to be able to go more than that and be skilled in a way that they’re able to understand the expectations as they’re being rolled out to the crew. They’ve got to understand the scope of the job the way maybe a quote’s been set out, like you said before, understanding what the inclusions are, the exclusions and being able with the authority given to them to make decisions along the way. So it’s not saying, well, I filled the leadership void because John owes in charge. That doesn’t cut it. He’s got to have that sense of authority and decision-making ability and also a real capability and understanding of what goes into running a job.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah, correct. And the best example of that, who someone has done it really well is Luke Temple, one of our roofing clients based at Sydney and he does commercial roofing and he started with one crew, which he was in charge of. He obviously started winning more work, he won more work, hide more grand crew, split his crews. He couldn’t be a across two crews, so he put a leaning hand on the second crew. Then as he started winning more work, he needed more time to price more work. He built in a leading hand across the two crews. Then as he’s grown and grown and grown, he’s done three crews now up to four crews. So his business become is a real powerhouse now of a business who puts out really good quality work, but Luke’s does a very good job of driving quality, productivity and performance on the ground crew.
(23:09):
And that’s not because Luke is literally spending 40 or 50 hours on site every single week. It’s because he’s having key meetings with his key leading hands. And those leading hands have factored in non-billable time in their week because they’re the ones that are driving performance across those multiple crews, which prevents Luke being dragged back on a site day in, day out. And that’s what gives him the time to price more work and estimate and grow his business and work on it and actually have a quality of life because he’s leveraging those really good leading hands within his crews.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
So that gives us our foundation for the first two things. If you are struggling with this and it’s a question you’re asking yourself about productivity, making sure that you’ve set your team up for success and you’ve filled the leadership void goes a long, long way. I think this is where we talk about if you can incorporate one of them, it’s great. You incorporate two better and then the best approach to it is to incorporate all three. And the third one we talk to people about all the time is developing your team’s ability to problem solve. It’s a real big one. It’s not enough just to tell your ground crew, Hey, work harder, work faster. It should be something different to what you’ve done today.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Yeah, this is a big one where business owners are almost cut from a different cloth to some degree. And the reason why you got into business is because there’s probably something a little bit unique and special around you. You could work faster, you had that little bit of nowse about you, you could do multiple things and problem solve and solve problems like no one else. Or you’ve got the ability to be able to think three or four steps ahead and have some level of urgency that other people that just doesn’t come naturally to them. And so I think the biggest mistake that you can make as a business owner is expecting everyone to operate at the same level as you and think the same way as you do. And like you said before, Dan, you can’t just go to site where they’re blowing out on time. You can’t just go to your team and go, come on team, hurry up. We’ve got to work faster. That’s telling them what to do, not giving them the tools to get better at what they do in the longterm over more and more jobs.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
I always tell the story, it’s like going, it would be teaching someone to swim who can’t swim, and you throw them in the water and you see them struggling and just standing there yelling at them, swim better or swim harder or swim faster. It doesn’t help them or stop them from drowning. You’ve got to actually, you’ve got to get in there and actually train them and teach them and develop them to have the skills required to do a number of things like making good decisions, like being able to manage time, like being efficient. There’s a story that you tell about Shane the plaster about how he was able to build those efficiencies in and train his team really well to start to make good decisions on site so that they could problem solve.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Yeah, I remember dealing with Shane a couple of years ago and he would go to sites and go, come on guys, we’re not meeting our square meterage rate for plaster. Come on, we’ve got to work harder and faster. Come on boys, come on boys, come on boys. And he came to coach and he’s like, I just feel like I’m a broken record. I feel like I’m telling the guys we’re not meeting where we need to be in the timeframe. Why isn’t it they’re not listening? And so what we had to do is reframe that to be able to go, well, Shane, you can’t just tell ’em to work faster. You’ve got to give ’em the tools to work faster. And there’s stuff that comes naturally to you. So when you are walking around on site, you pick up this and you collect that and you do this on the way to doing the next thing, yet people in your team will just be moseying around and they’re not thinking three steps ahead and they’re not problem solving what I’ve got to get done next.
(27:05):
And for you, Shane, it comes naturally that you’ve got the ability to see things before it even happens. And that’s what makes you a good plaster and a good businessman of a plastering business. So you’ve got to teach your team that stuff. And that’s where so many business owners go wrong is that they hire a tradesman especially and they go, well, he’s a qualified tradesman. He should know what to do. But they fail to do ongoing training and development of their team to get the very best out of them and they wonder why they’re not becoming as productive as they could be.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Yeah, time and time again, we see that. I mean people get sick of answering questions about how should I do something? Or getting asked. Well, people asking for help on their ground crew with, even if they’re asking and reaching out, you get frustrated. It’s not time to be frustrated. It’s time to coach and teach and give them that experience or give them that skill that they’re looking for. Once you do that, hopefully they’ll come back with a little bit more in that skill over time and they get better and better at it. People do get better over time when they’re taught. If you are sitting there telling people that it feels like you’re in a kindergarten, just remember everyone graduates from kindergarten at some point, they do learn enough to get to the next step. You’ve got to take that same approach with your team and keep developing them as you go.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
And it doesn’t matter if they’re an apprentice or a tradesman, it’s your job as the project manager or a maintenance supervisor if you are wearing that hat to be able to invest time and energy and effort into your team to make them more efficient and more effective in what they do. Just because they’ve been to trade school and they’re qualified doesn’t mean they can’t get better. And when you do go to site, go there with purpose, go there to tick a few boxes. So you go in there, you check up on the job, make sure everything’s going okay, you might talk to the customer, but then this is your opportunity to be able to have informal conversations or informal training on the fly to be able to develop you guys to be able to go, have you thought about doing this way or have you thought about it doing that way? And you got to remember, if you are 10 or 15 years into your trade and someone who’s only two or three years, you’re like 13 years ahead of the curve for them, and the difference between you and them is time.
(29:33):
And so you’ve got to be able to spend your time training and developing your team with the experience that you’ve gathered over all these years so you can develop them to be the very best tradesmen that they can be in your business. Now, a lot of guys don’t do that because they’re like, well, what happens if I train them up that well that they might leave? Well, it comes back to that saying, train them so well that they could leave, treat them so well that they don’t. And I think that whilst you’ve got someone within your team, train the hell out of them because the better you train and develop them, the more productive they’re going to be and less dependent on you in the long term.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
And if I can add the better trainer you’ll be so you’ll have a better training programme, a better way of navigating when someone inevitably does leave your team, it’s not such a big deal. It’s like, all right, we get our training hat back on and we get the next one trained up just as good as the last if not better.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
I think about it in our business, and I know before you stepped into head of ops here at Pravar, we probably spent about a day and a half across our coaching team doing reviews and training and all those types of things. You’d know better than I would probably half your week is training, developing, meeting with the coaches. It’s half your week is meetings, accountability and development. It’s half your week as head of ops, isn’t it?
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Easily, and that’s not the time that’s spent thinking about it, how do they get better? Where do I need, where are the blind spots that we need to tackle? How can we get better at this? And then how do we train them better to allow them to pick it up quicker, faster, better so that we can do it again? And once we’ve got that in place, then where all systems go on that development, it’s great to have that team that loves it. It’s funny, the more you train and develop someone, if they’re into that sort of thing and they want to be developed and grow in their role and in their trade or their profession, it’s amazing how more engaged they are in the work that they’re doing for the business they’re working with at the time. They’re actually less likely to leave than what they are to leave even though they’re getting trained up and skilled.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
It’s something that I’ve got to really remind myself. I’m coming up 15 years in as a coach and I know you’ve done it for a very long time as well, but we’ve got a coach that may have been only with us two years, I’ve done thousands and thousands and thousands of coaching calls and our newer coach might’ve only done hundreds and hundreds. And so there’s a big gap there and it’s unfair. Yes, we’ve got very high expectations in terms of the level that we want to operate at, but I know myself, and I know you’re probably the same. We’ve got to remind ourselves that it’s not, we’re better. We’re just so much further down the line in terms of the number of calls that we’ve run, coaching calls and the craft that we’ve, we’ve developed that is coaching that we can’t just expect a newer coach be at the same level as us from the word go. It’s just unrealistic expectations, isn’t it?
Speaker 2 (32:41):
It is. And the minute you feel frustrated, you’ve got to look to yourself. You’ve got to look to yourself as the owner, the person responsible for training, whoever it is. Why am I feeling frustrated? What am I missing here? So I think going back, like we said the answer to why can’t people do it like me, it does come back to those three things we said, you’re either not training your team up to have success, you haven’t filled that leadership void, you haven’t taken the time to put someone in there with real responsibility and then holding them accountable and really putting ’em in that role to drive productivity in your absence, or you still haven’t developed your team to effectively problem solve enough. There’s still too many things, too many gaps in their knowledge that they just haven’t picked up yet. And I think Rob, for me, it reminds me, we did talk about this a lot in, I think it was back in episode 10, we talked about some of these principles. It might be worth just going back through those quickly to let someone know what’s available in that episode.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, episode 10, we spoke around how to stop people hijacking your time and how to almost cut your calls in half. It’s closely tied to this. They’re not being productive on site because, and they’re, they’re either making a thousand phone calls to you because they don’t have certain things in place or they’re not being productive because they don’t have certain things in place. So these two episodes are actually quite interlinked to some degree. And in episode 10 we spoke around where they’ve got a culture of being dependent on you. And so the reason why you might be feeling like that you have to be on site all the time and have to be there to drive productivity is because you’ve created this culture. So the way we break that is we need to teach them how to think. We’ve got to break that culture of dependency to teach them how to think.
(34:29):
So that’s the first one. The second one is they’re either not productive or they keep hijacking your time is because they don’t have the right information. And that’s why back in episode 10 and in this episode we spoke a lot about scope of works and job packs and appropriate documentation. The reason why your team aren’t productive or are hijacking your time, they don’t have the right information. They don’t have the information at their fingertips to be able to actually be productive. And that’s not their fault. That’s your fault. And it’s something you’ve got to fix up within your business. And the last one is that you haven’t trained them to solve and deal with roadblocks. And so the way around that is you got to help them develop the skillset to solve problems. How do you actually develop someone’s skill to be able to do that so they can be productive? Because when they face a challenge, they’ve got the ability to be able to work through it in a productive manner. So if you haven’t done so, make sure you go back to episode 10 because episode 10 is very closely linked to what we’re talking about today around driving productivity on site without actually having to be there in person.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
For sure, for sure. Should we do some key takeaways and wrap this one up?
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah, absolutely. Number one for me is you’ve got to communicate time allowed deadlines and have clear expectations communicated to your team. When you do that, you set them up for success and it also gives you something to hold ’em accountable to be able to drive productivity.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Yeah, it, I’ve got failure to fill that leadership void. For me, that’s just a recipe that if that’s not there, it’s like a vacuum and it sees you back on site and up to your neck in paperwork, spot fires and countless phone calls for your ground crew. Nothing will assure that more than the not filling that leadership void.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Yeah, I love it. And the last one for me is improving your ground crew’s capability and capacity for making good decisions is the key for being productive on site.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Great stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Good stuff, Dan. I love it. What a great episode. Should we leave it there? What do you think?
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Yeah, for sure. We don’t need to overcomplicate this three steps. It’s all there is that we need to answer that question and go a long way to removing those frustrations that we talked about at the top. What about action steps? Have we got an action step from this week? I can think of a couple. What about you?
Speaker 1 (36:48):
I think the only action steps out of today is choose one of three that we spoke around today, whether it be setting your team up for success, filling the leadership void, or developing your team’s ability to problem solve. Start with one, one at a time over time and once you identify that one thing that’s going to drive the most amount of productivity on site, start there and then move to the next one. So one at a time over time, choose the one that’s going to have the most amount of impact and then just keep working through them over a period of time.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Brilliant. I love it. Absolutely. Great. Alright, and obviously as we come to the end of the episode, as we do usually every week, we’d love to remind you if you haven’t already to give us a rating in your podcast app, wherever it is that you’re listening to us, give us a rating, maybe leave a review. We’d love that as well. It just helps get the word out there and spread some of this information that we think is definitely helping the industry and helping people get better.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Good stuff. Dan, love today’s episode. Really topical conversation that I know if you are listening today, get in there and make some really great changes. It’s a difference between growing profitably or growing broke, and it’s one of the biggest challenges a lot of business owners face is that as they wind themselves off the tools, they become less profitable, less make less money than when they’re on the tools and they actually get fearful and go back to being on the tools. So the way we do that is break the pattern and we drive productivity without having to physically be there in person. Hope you enjoyed today’s episode and looking forward to coming back to you next week.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Catch you on the next one.