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Contractors Journey to selfmastery requires discipline,
integrity and respect. Welcome to hammer and
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grind. Welcome to hammering grind,
the podcast built for contractors, real contractors,
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true stories, real solutions. My
name is Brad Hebner and I will
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guide you on your journey to mastery
of your construction business. You can find
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hammering grind on all the social media
platforms. Just search for hammer and grind
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podcast. Now, if you're looking
for more help, you could check out
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our free facebook group called the contractor
profit group. I do free trainings in
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there and it's a great community to
be a part of. Now, if
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you're serious about making more money,
saving more time and creating a business that
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supports your lifestyle, check out my
paid coaching group called the profit club.
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I've put together a proven system for
creating a winning business. Now listen.
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I'm so confident that you will succeed
in my program I'm now offering a n
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X ro I guarantee. That means
if you don't make at least a x
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return on your investment within a twelvemonth
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amount. You can find out more
information about the profit club at hammering grindcom
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forward, slash the profit club.
All right, so on this podcast we're
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going to be talking about why self
evaluation is so underrated. This is such
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a critical thing of business and personal
journey that most people don't do. Myself
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included. I struggle with this,
to stay consistent with doing this. But
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self evaluation, or just evaluation in
general, is such a critical task of
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your life and your business. There's
so much information that can be learned whenever
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you take a step back and you
reflect and you evaluate where you're going in
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your life and your business. So
I'm going to be talking mostly about your
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business, but I may throw in
some life stuff there too. They kind
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of go hand in hand and I
think it's important that we really look at
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both areas. So I want to
start off with a just a little analogy.
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Whenever you fly on an airplane and
you're going to go, say,
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from New York to La, once
the pilots get the plane up in the
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air, they turn on the autopilot
right because they're not flying that whole thing
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from New York to La would be
hard to do, like to keep hold
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of a plane and keep that much
level of concentration and be tiring and stressful.
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So autopilot is a great thing.
They get up there that punching the
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coordinates and they hit start, turn
it on and then they can sit back
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and kind of, you know,
have a conversation or do whatever, monitor
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things and what's happening. And that's
what a lot of us think is how
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it is to run a business.
You know, we start a business,
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we get some marketing in place,
we you know, get our branding in
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place, we get our website,
we get all that stuff, we hire
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some people, the phone's ringing and
we're just, you know, scheduling jobs
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and that's like, that's it,
like it just kind of runs on its
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own and there's there's nothing that needs
to happen or there's no maintenance or you
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know, upkeep or anything that has
to happen to that process. And that
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can't be further from the truth.
So what happens with your autopilot on an
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airplane? Well, the autopilot knows
that it's going to go to ex coordinate.
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Now, if I was smart enough, I could have figured the stuff
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out before the podcast and gave you
an exact coordinate from New York to Lah
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however, I didn't do that,
but let's say it's, I'm going to
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make stuff up, let's say it's, you know, a hundred and eighty
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degrees. Is the direction they need
to go or the coordinates they have to
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go towards. The computers on the
airplane are constantly evaluating where the airplane is
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at and where it needs to go. So, another word, it doesn't
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just hit autopilot and it sets the
flaps and the rudder and the alerions and
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all the different things. It doesn't
just set it once and then that plane
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stays on that trajectory forever. It
doesn't happen like that because you have turbulence,
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you have, you know, wins, you have jet streams, have
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always altitudes, all these different things
that affect the air stream on the airplane,
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the path the plane is flying through
the air. And so if it's
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flying through the air in a little
bit of turbulence knocks it one degree off
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course, the computer says, wait
a minute, based on this current trajectory
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that we're going, this current path, we're not going to end up in
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La we're going to end up in
Mexico. So we need to make some
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adjustments. We need to turn the
rudder or alerons or however, it is
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that's, you know, controlling the
plane. We need to make some adjustments
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to get back on course. Same
thing with altitude. If it hits a
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pocket of turbulence and drops, you
know, ten feet in altitude, it
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says, wait a minute, we
need to get back up to this current
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altitude so we don't run into any
other airplanes or any other traffic that may
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be out here. Right. So, the the computers on the airplane,
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from the time at the auto pilots
turned on until it's turned off, are
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constantly evaluating where the plane is currently
at and where the plane is going,
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nonstop making adjustments, making micro adjustments, you know, milliseconds, thousands of
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adjustments, I don't even know.
Be Interesting to find out how many adjustments
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are made on a flight from like
New York to La it's probably in the
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hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of micro adjustments are made during that
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flight. If somebody knows what that
is, shit me up and let me
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know. It'd be interesting statistic to
know. But your airplane is doing this
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right. It's constantly evaluating where it's
at versus where it's going. So what
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do we need to do in our
business and our personal life to be able
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to do this, like to evaluate. Well, in on a personal note,
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one of the best things you can
do is journaling, and I know
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a lot of guys are like journaling. I don't have a diary. I'm
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not a I'm not an eight year
old girl, you know, who keeps
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a diary about all the things that
happens to school, like that's not what
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I'm talking about. journaling is more
about getting your thoughts on paper and about
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reflecting the day. I knew a
guy once, his name was Scott,
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and he had one of those college
bound you know, typical what they call
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those things, the note books,
like the typical ones you would see in
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school. He carried one of those
everywhere, like in his back pocket,
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and that do was constantly journaling.
Like each day he would have two full
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pages of notes, and I would
ask I was like, man, why
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do you journal so much? He's
like, I want to document everything I
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do. I want to know where
I'm at, what I'm doing. It
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allows me to stay focused on what's
important. It allows me to see what's
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what I focus on during the day. You know, just it's a great
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tool and he was a very creative
individual, very smart. He was electrician
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by trade. That was from like, I don't know, eight years ago,
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and I still remember that to this
day, that he would carry that
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around in journal all the time,
at lunchtime, journaling on a break,
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journaling, I mean just journal,
Journal, Journal, all day long.
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I'm not suggesting you have to do
it that much, although it wouldn't be
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a bad thing, but I am
suggesting that you should take up the habit
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of journaling once a day, if
not twice a day. So when you
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wake up in the morning, you
write your thoughts on paper, when you
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go to bed at night, you
can write your thoughts on paper. And
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really the morning one could be more
like these are my thoughts for the day
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going into the day, this is
what I expect to happen, and not
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so much like goal setting, but
like this is kind of how I expect
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the day to go, what I
need to get done, things that I'm
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worried about today, things that I'm
excited about today. And then at the
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end of the day you're reflecting on
the day and so you're putting in there
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like things that happen. Did the
day go as expected? Did you have
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a good day like you were hoping
did the thing that you were stressed out
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about actually come to fruition or was
it just way you stress out for no
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reason? That's a super important tool
there, because if if you realize that
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the thing you were stressing out about
for two days actually wasn't nowhere near as
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bad as you thought it was,
that's a lesson of okay, maybe I
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shouldn't get stressed out as much because
in reality it didn't happen the way I
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thought it was. It didn't.
It wasn't as bad as I thought it
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was. And so you reflect back
on that, you evaluate that emotion and
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you realize that, okay, did
serve me any purpose. It didn't help
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me at all. Being stressed out
for two days literally didn't help me at
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all. But if you're not writing
that down, if you're not reflecting on
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that, if you're not evaluating that, you'll never know that. You'll be
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stressed out for two days. It
doesn't happen, you never realize it didn't
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happen the way you thought it was, and so the next time something comes
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up, you'll be stressed out for
two days and you'll repeat this process because
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you never evaluated whether or not that
was worth it. Right. So journaling
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is a great personal way to get
your thoughts on paper. It's also been
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proven that journaling actually helps to increase
your IQ and it helps to clear your
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mind, because your brains are super
computers and there the subconscious is constantly running
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like an autopilot. Your brain is
constantly running right, and so a lot
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of the junk that we put into
our mind, a lot of the junk
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coordinates that we put into our mind, our brain, the supercomputer autopilot,
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is saying, okay, here's the
things we got to do to stay on
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course. You think that your customers
aren't going to pay you for a consultation.
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Great, I'm going to create a
course to prove that. I'm going
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to keep you on course, because
you set the course as my customers won't
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pay for a consultation. So now
my subconscious is going to say, okay,
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let's create the course. We'll figure
out ways to make that happen.
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We'll figure out how to how to
you to sabotage the conversation so that it
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doesn't up and so you can say
see, I told you, I told
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you. People don't charge for consultations, or they don't don't pay for consultations.
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That never work in my town,
and your brain is say, Yep,
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let's figure it out, let's make
it happen, let's stay on course.
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So that's that's a small impact of
what happens or brains going to be
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an autopilot, whether you want to
or not. Are Subconscious is constantly on
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autopilot, it's constantly autocorrecting, and
so if we're not controlling the the data
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that is controlling the autopilot, in
other words to where we want to go,
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then it's going to be putting us
on the wrong path all the time.
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Okay, this is why a lot
of people struggle, myself included,
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when you have the wrong mindset,
the autopilot will keep you in that mindset.
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So I don't want to go down
the path of mindset. I just
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wanted to touch on that briefly,
about the importance of journaling and how that
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helps you with your self evaluation.
So let's talk about business. Well,
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we don't really journal per se in
business, although I'm not saying it would
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be a bad thing if you did
that. But really what we do in
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terms of journaling and business is our
KPIS, like how we track things in
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our business. The KPIS that we
track our sales, that we get our
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leads, that we get our closing
rate, all these things, job costing,
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which I harp on a lot,
all of these things are Evalua and
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tools in your business. It's to
help you stay on the course that you
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plotted. But before we can actually
evaluate we're rat we kind of need to
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set some goals. This isn't about
goal setting either, it's about evaluation.
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But one thing about goal setting is
that whenever you set goals, you want
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to make sure you're reviewing it constantly. Right, this is your brain and
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your computer, this is your business. You're reviewing it constantly. So if
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I set the goal of New York
to La, I'm constantly reviewing that to
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make sure I'm on the right path. And so when you set some goals,
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a couple quick tips on goal setting. One, they need to be
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realistic, like you need to be
able to realistically achieve that. Example,
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if you want to lose a hundred
pounds and you want to do it in
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one month, that's not a realistic
goal right. Unless you have surgery,
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you're not going to be able,
as a healthy lose hundred pounds in one
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month. Now, if you said
a hundred pounds and twelve months, that's
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potentially realistic. But you need to
have a realistic go but it needs to
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be a little bit beyond what you're
comfortable with. If it doesn't make you
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squirm in your seats, it's not
a it's not a big enough goal.
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Right. We don't want to make
it super easy, like Oh, I
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want to lose one pound in a
month. Well, you could do that
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in one day. It's too easy. So it needs to be realistic,
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but it needs to be just beyond
your reach. And then you also need
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to set be hags. It's a
Behag, big, hairy, audacious go
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those are like shoot for the moon
goes. You know, if, realistically
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you can do three Hundredzero dollars a
year and revenue, your be hag might
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be five hundred thous right. It's
just something to like shootout past. That
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way, if you do hit three
hundred thousand, you still have a target
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past of that to reach towards.
So set some Bee hags and set some
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realistic go so let's say you set
those goals and now you have to evaluate
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them. Well, how often do
you evaluate them? Well, it depends
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how much do you want to stay
on track? If the computers on the
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plane only evaluated every fifteen minutes,
you could still end up in Mexico because
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one degree off, you know what
I mean? O, we're fifteen minutes.
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However many miles that is. If
it's traveling five hundred miles an hour,
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that could be a lot and you
could be off and it. What's
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going to happen is that it will
course correct, sure, but you're traveling
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further because you're traveling one direction.
Then course correct me coming back another direction.
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You kind of have the zigzag thing
going on. If you're fixing it
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and making those adjustments. If you
evaluate, you know, on a plane,
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if that evaluated every hour, it
would be even worse. Right,
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you might fly into Canada and then
have to turn around and come back to
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La and then, if it does
an hour later, you might be down
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by Texas and you got to come
back the other way. Like it just
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and I do realize that those aren't
realistic, like locations or where you would
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be in an hour, but just
bear with me on this podcast, all
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right, go with me. So
you're going to be way off and you're
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going to end up traveling a further
distance, it's going to take you longer
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and it's going to be more frustrating. So when you're evaluating your goals,
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then you need to evaluate depending on
what the goal is and how often you
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need to look at it. Like
your leads. That should be a daily
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thing, a weekly you should be
writing down your leads every week, every
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day, how many leads you got
each day and where they came from,
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and then by the end of the
week you're looking at it and see seeing.
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Okay, so I had three leads
from vehicles. Had five coming through
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the Internet for, you know,
organic search. I had two referrals.
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Cool. So this week the Internet
beat out everything. Next week I had
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ten referrals and one Internet. Well, cool, next week the referrals one
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out. So you can look at
it in over time. You can actually
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start to plot timeframes and you could
see over like the course of a year,
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in January my leads drop off by
twenty percent and most of the leads
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I get in January are from the
direct mails that we send out. Like
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you can see this information and then
the next year you can course correct.
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You know that in January last year
all of your leads came from direct mailer's
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and that was it. You didn't
get any leads from any of the source.
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It was all direct mail. And
if it comes up to January and
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you don't send out any direct mail
pieces, you're probably not going to get
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any leads because you have this information
now to go off of. So the
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frequency of how often you want to
check these things totally depends on what it
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is and how, on course,
you want to stay right. You don't
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have to check them every day or
every week or every month or whatever it
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is, but you do need to
set some kind of schedule of how often
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you're going to check these and guys, all of the successful business owners and
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in the industry, doesn't matter what
it is, they all do this.
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It's not the fun part, it's
not the sexy part, unless you're a
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numbers nerd and you just love looking
at spreadsheets and data, it's not going
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to be sexy. This is my
least favorite thing about having a business is
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checking the data, running the numbers. I hate that part of it,
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but you have to do it and
you have to do it consistently to know
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where you're at. I've talked about
this many may times on job costing,
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which we'll get into next. But
if you don't know, like where you're
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at, if I dropped you in
the middle of a desert and told you
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to find your way out, if
you don't know which way you came from,
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how are you going to know where
to go? Right? Doesn't matter
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if you have a compass, it's
going to tell you where to go because
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you don't know where you're at.
So setting goes important in that aspect,
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but then really checking along the way
you know where you're going. I apologize
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if my thoughts are kind of all
over the place. I've had to stop
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a couple times and hack up along
in the middle of recording this, so
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I've kind of lost my train of
thoughts partially through, so bear with me
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a second with that. So as
far as like a job costing, this
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is one of the most important things
that you can do as an evaluation tool.
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In the military they have what they
call after action reports, and it's
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simply after an action has happened,
they do a report. One of the
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most famous instances of this is the
navy seals do this and if you read
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the book extreme ownership and dichotomy of
leadership by jocko willing, and Leaf Babin.
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Then they talk about this in the
book, about doing after action reports,
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and one of the most important things
about doing an after action report is
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you have to leave your ego at
the door. You can't bring your emotions
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into the room, the war room, or whatever they want to call it,
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when they're doing this, because it's
not about how you feel it when
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it's not about what made you mad
or any of this stuff. And so
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the way that you be the most
productive when you're doing after action reports is
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you strictly look at the data.
Now this piggybacks on other podcasts I've done
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about your feelings don't matter and it's
all your fault, like and leave,
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you know, ego suppression. All
those tie in here that you need to
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look at data. As a business
owner, you look at data, you
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take the emotion out of it and
you look strictly at the data. A
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good way of looking at this is
if you were a consultant to another business,
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meaning a friend of your said Hey, look at this data and tell
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me what you think. You would
give them an unbiased opinion because you're simply
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looking at the data and you have
no emotions tied into that. That's how
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you have to look at this and
how you have to approach these conversations.
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We also allow times in the military. When I was in our platoon sergeant,
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he would have what they call bitch
sessions, and that was simply once
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a month, once a quarter or
whatever, whenever he felt like the morale
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was going off. Course. It
was the opportunity where you, as a
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subordinate, as a lower ranking,
you know, private, Lance, corporal,
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whatever, you could voice your opinions
to the higher ranking and not get
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in trouble for it, and you
could even tell them if your platoon sergeant
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was the one leading the bitch session, you could be telling him what you
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don't like about him. Now,
obviously you got to have some tact here,
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right. You don't just tell someone, Heystaff, sergeant, your piece
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of crap and I don't like you
like that. Obviously wouldn't go over very
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well because I'm insulting him. That's
emotion involved, right, but I could
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say hey, stapps, certain one
of the things that, you know,
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I think we could do better is
you could give us a twenty minute heads
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up before we have to do this
and that would allow us time to get
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ready. So that's a way of
giving feedback about that person, and the
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rule is that as a leader,
in that specific scenario, the bitch session,
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the leader really is not there to
give excuses or even solve the problem.
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It's just to get feedback, and
so you, as a owner,
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you can implement this as well.
Now back to the AAR, the after
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action report. They go in there
and they say, okay, here was
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our mission. We supposed to go
in here and save this hostage, eliminate
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all of the enemy threats and get
back out alive. And we do that
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with without trying to fire a single
round. Or well, I guess you
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couldn't do that if you're trying to
eliminate enemy threats. Let's say you're trying
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to retrieve a hostage without shooting around. That's your goal. And in the
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middle of this mission, round start
flying, people start getting shot and dying.
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So they go back and they go
okay, what happened? And then
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one guy can say, well,
our plan was to enter through the second
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floor bedroom window and as soon as
we walk through their window there was a
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dudes down. They're looking at us. I guess he had got up in
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the middle of the night to use
the bathroom or something, and so we
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got caught off guard and we had
to neutralize the threat. Okay, so
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maybe now we need to know.
Maybe now we need a little bit of
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pre retail Ur recon before we go
into that window. Maybe we need to
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throw a camera up there and see
if somebody's awake or not. Next time,
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like you're just taking data and you're
collecting it and everybody has an opportunity
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to pitch in as to what they
think's happening, what they think would be
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better, what went wrong right.
So whenever you're doing your job, costing,
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this is part of your job.
Costing your AAR. After the job
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is over, you'd run the numbers
and you see, okay, we came
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in at forty two percent gross profit. Our target was fifty percent. So
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what happened? And this is up
to you, but you get your either
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your forming together production manager, your
lead guy, or maybe you get your
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whole team. It just depends.
Like if you have if you're use all
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subs and you have a production manager, you're just really going to be talking
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to the production manage you're not going
to be talking to the subs per se.
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If you have employees, you may
want to bring your whole team in
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because the more of the marrier.
If you have an apprentice who really doesn't
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have anything to do with any of
it, he may not need to be
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involved in that process. Right.
So you just determine who needs to be
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involved. But you go and you
have a meeting, whether it's once a
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week, once a day, after
every job whatever. Again, you determine
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how often you need to do this. You can't do it once a month.
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If you do fifteen jobs a month, you can't wait till the end
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of the month and then do all
fifteen jobs, because people aren't going to
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remember what happened on the first twelve. You're only going to remember the last
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two or three. So it's better
to do this fresh and it is this
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it this isn't an hour long conversation. This is like a ten minute conversation
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that could be had in the morning
before your guys leave, or at the
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end of the day, before they
leave. I would say in the morning,
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because if you do at the end
of the day, if guys are
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coming back and and they're tie and
they want to go home, they're just
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going to tell you crap or they're
not going to tell you anything because they
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want to leave. They don't want
to stay there. If you do it
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in the morning they'll love to tell
you because I think is staying around the
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shop and talk to you for twenty
minutes for they have to actually go to
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work. So you some common sense
with this. But you say what happened?
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We are at we're at forty two
percent gross profit. I looked at
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the hours. We were fifteen hours
over on man hours. You know,
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I look at the form and I
say what happened on the job and he
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says, well, this, this
and this. It's okay. What about
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you, journeyman? Well, this
happened to here and this and this.
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Okay, what about you, a
princess? Well, I just started last
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week, so I don't really know
much, but it it seems like it's
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a little crazy. You know,
we waste a lot of time in the
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mornings here doing these after action reports, these job costs and reports. So
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it seems like we're just wasting time
doing these. Okay, good to know.
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Maybe he's true, maybe he's telling
the truth, maybe it's a good
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information, maybe it's not. You
take that information and you dissect it and
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you you put it down on paper. So the next time you do that
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same job. You know to take
these things into account and you can,
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course, correct if you're over fifteen
hours, that could be because you underbid
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it. It could be because the
materials didn't come in on time, because
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someone in the process didn't order the
materials early enough. Well, if you
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have someone who orders materials, you
know procures of materials for you, and
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they don't they waited, I'm going
to go talk to that person. Hey,
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00:25:30.680 --> 00:25:33.319
what happened? Why did this material
get ordered on time? Well,
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because of this, and you just
figure it out. You go through and
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you evaluate the whole process from start
to finish and you figure out where the
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problems are in the whole process.
This is why evaluation is so important.
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If you don't do the evaluation and
you're over fifteen hours on labor, the
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next time you sell that job you're
over fifteen hours on labor. The next
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00:25:55.559 --> 00:25:57.880
time you sell a job, you're
over fifteen hours on labor and you don't
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00:25:59.000 --> 00:26:04.240
realize this. How much money in
time are you losing over the course of
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a month, six months, a
year, years? This was one of
368
00:26:10.079 --> 00:26:15.160
the things that I've lost tons of
money, hundreds of thousands of dollars,
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because I didn't job cost and I
didn't realize. I've said US before in
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a podcast. I looked at one
job one time and I had twenty five
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receipts from those and the job was
like thirty minutes away. That's an hour,
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00:26:26.000 --> 00:26:29.359
you know, two ways, just
in travel time, plus there it.
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So its more like an hour and
a half times twenty five. That
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was like whatever. That is thirty
forty hours extra on one job was wasted
375
00:26:38.119 --> 00:26:41.839
going to the store twenty five times. So that's a lot of money.
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That's a lot of waste of time. So could I have looked at that
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and evaluated and said, okay,
there's got to be a better process?
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And that's what I did. I
said we have to be better at figuring
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out materials ahead of time or instead
of US doing some of this little stuff,
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we get a subcontract doctor to do
it. That's how you can look
381
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at it and evaluate. So AARS
after action reports job costing. These are
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critical to your business. I would
say job costing is one of the most
383
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critical things you can do in your
business, if not the critical, most
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critical thing in your business. If
you don't look at your leads, if
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you don't know where your marketing is
coming from, that's important, but it's
386
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not as critical as figuring out why
you're doing something right or why you're doing
387
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something wrong. And one of the
things you can do to help you with
388
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your job costing meetings is to don't
ask why questions. Why is a when
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someone ask why, it gives a
negative reaction because when we were a kids,
390
00:27:48.640 --> 00:27:52.799
we were asked why a lot.
Why did you do that? Why
391
00:27:52.799 --> 00:27:55.400
did you punch the boy in the
face? Why did you steal that?
392
00:27:55.559 --> 00:27:57.880
Why? Why? Y, Y
Y, a lot of us have a
393
00:27:59.000 --> 00:28:04.000
negative connotation attached to why. We
get on the defensive. So don't ask
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your employees why were we over ten
hours on labor? Don't ask the foreman.
395
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Why were we over ten hours?
Asked him what happened to put us
396
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over ten hours. How can we
save the ten hours? How can we
397
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do a better job? Use How
and what questions? What's a better way
398
00:28:23.440 --> 00:28:29.599
to do this? How can we
make this process more efficient? Don't say
399
00:28:29.640 --> 00:28:33.000
why do it takes so long?
What was the reason it took so long?
400
00:28:33.480 --> 00:28:37.039
Even just saying it differently, what
was the reason why it tooks along?
401
00:28:37.319 --> 00:28:41.319
Why did it take so long?
Right, just me saying that it
402
00:28:41.359 --> 00:28:45.279
sounds negative one way how can we
do this better and ask for their feedback
403
00:28:45.480 --> 00:28:49.519
again, remove emotion, remove ego, make sure your team does the same
404
00:28:49.519 --> 00:28:53.880
thing you say. Look, I
don't care who if somebody screwed up.
405
00:28:53.880 --> 00:29:00.640
I don't care if Johnny dropped a
brand new cabinet and broke it. I'm
406
00:29:00.680 --> 00:29:03.279
not mad at that. I just
want to know how we can prevent it
407
00:29:03.319 --> 00:29:06.960
from happening again in the future.
What can we do to prevent that from
408
00:29:07.000 --> 00:29:11.400
happening? I'm just collecting data.
Your team needs to know this. You
409
00:29:11.440 --> 00:29:15.880
need to make it very clear and
if you react emotionally to what they tell
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you, guess what, they're not
going to tell you next time. So
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you have to suppress your ego,
you have to remove your feelings and just
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00:29:23.759 --> 00:29:29.920
collect the data. Use the data
to course correct, and you will be
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00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:33.839
on your way to hitting the goals
that you set, both personally and in
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00:29:33.920 --> 00:29:38.200
your business. So I hope that
podcast was helpful. You know where to
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00:29:38.240 --> 00:29:42.799
find me on all the social platforms, hammering grind podcast. Look US up.
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00:29:44.000 --> 00:29:47.599
You can find me everywhere, all
over the place. I'm pretty active
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00:29:47.680 --> 00:29:49.359
on all the platforms. Leave me
a comment, let me know what you
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00:29:49.400 --> 00:29:52.759
think about this podcast and until next
time. Guys, you know what to
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00:29:52.799 --> 00:30:00.759
do. Be The best you