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Welcome back to the Business with Beers podcast. Last week I hosted a bunch of owners here in Philadelphia for an in person hot seat event. It was awesome. And this week I want to kind of go through some of the most common pain points that the owners had in the room, and then we talk through some of the solutions. And by the way, if you want to join me at the next one of these events, there's a link below in the podcast. Send me a text. Shoot me a text with your name, you, your phone number, and just a little bit about yourself, and I'll send you back a form so you can sign up. Get on the wait list. I do cap the number of people at these events because I want them to be intentionally small and very impactful for the people who are in, you know, the hot seats. And so anyway, next one's gonna be in Charlotte. We already have a ton of demand, so get in there, get on the list. And if you can't make that one, we're gonna be hosting more throughout the year. So. All right. One of the biggest pain points that a lot of the owners had is low accountability. And it shows up in a number of different ways. It could be that, you know, people just don't follow through the things that they said they're going to do. It could be that they hand off issues for somebody else to handle. It could be that, like, there's a customer complaint or some sort of problem that they just, like, let fester instead of taking ownership of it and working to find a solution. Right? And this is like kind of human nature for a lot of people, right? Like, most people want to take the path of least resistance. And so if your team is given an opportunity to just go and just avoid the conflict and avoid having to do the hard work and avoid, like, all the stressful conversations, well, guess what? Like, that's what they're going to do. And there's this phrase that I try to live by, which is, you get what you tolerate, okay? You get what you tolerate. So if you tolerate people showing up late and just, like, not really caring, guess what? Like, you're gonna get people who show up late and not really give a shit. If you tolerate people who, you know, let customers, you leave their house and they're unhappy and they're not satisfied with the work, and maybe they said something, but they didn't really, you know, do anything, well, guess what? That's what you're gonna continue to get. And on the other hand, if you don't tolerate anything but excellence, then that's what you're gonna get. Because tolerating means, like, you're okay with it, right? Like, people are gonna know at your organization if you're okay with something or not. Now, I think the challenge that a lot of owners have is they run small teams, right? I think back to like, you know, when I first started in my team, we had four mechanics, three mechanics a store. And like, if I went and was a real jerk to one of those guys and told him he sucks and he's got to move faster and he messed up this car and this and that. Well, like, and if he quits, well, guess what? Now I go from three to two. And it's like, it'd be really hard, right? And I'm not the mechanic. I can't fix the car. And so you kind of get in this cycle of being afraid to have the conversations that are necessary with your team because you're afraid that they're going to quit. And it's really hard to find good people. And maybe it took you forever to find this guy and maybe he's your top performer. I think that is sometimes a real big challenge, especially in the trade businesses where sometimes the top performing guys are sometimes a little bit difficult and kind of comes with the territory. But we can't just let them get away with anything they want and we can't just be a total jerk. And so how do you find a balance? And there's a couple ways. And listen, I'm no expert at this. I'm still learning too. A lot of it comes over time. But here's what I've learned. Seen work in my organization and a lot of this, honestly I've learned from bringing in the guys from the military who are in extreme high level leadership roles. And so they wouldn't get to the point that they're at without it. And so they're really good at implementing this stuff across the organization. And I give credit to them a lot of this. So one of them is you just gotta start with the basics, right? So we ought to start with a written explanation of what is expected. So write it down, SOP checklist, document. Like whatever it is, it has to be written. If it's just like, hey, I told you about it last week, or I sent you a text, or we talked about it at minute 72 on that group meeting we had, it's not gonna be really effective. So you wanna clear the path. So it's like, here's the written expectation, then you wanna review it, then to make sure they Understand it then, then if it has to be trained, it can be trained, right? And then there's some sort of like sign off where they're like, yeah, I got it, I've been trained on how to do it, this, this and this. Because the other thing I hear is like owners make excuses all the time to be like, oh well, maybe it's my fault, I just haven't trained them or I haven't spent enough time with them or like, you know, they're taking ownership of someone else's like lack of results and lack of accountability. And that may be true. Maybe you just like threw them to the wolves and said, hey, have at it. And you know, it was what it does. But a lot of times that's not the case. And you really have given this person a lot of opportunities and they just like aren't the right person. So to make yourself feel better about it and to make sure they are completely clear on what's expected of them. Written, reviewed, trained, signed off. So now there's no more excuses, right? There's no more I didn't knows and all that stuff. From there, a couple things. One, a scorecard is a great tool, right? A simple spreadsheet. It doesn't have to be complicated. It could literally just be the items going down and the dates growing across and they just, they put in a number, right? If the expectation is, for example, let's say we're in my artificial turf business and we have a sales rep and let's say our expectation for him is three estimates a day. So no matter what, he needs three estimates every single day. So 15 a week. Now a lot of those estimates are going to be ones that we pay for with ads, right? But there's also the expectation that he goes out and builds relationships with local contractors that he gets self gen like he goes out and generates his own leads. He whoever project goes and knocks on the neighbors doors to let them know, you know, hey, we're doing this thing, you might see your trucks. And by the way, if you're looking for a quote, boom, we're here. We can make your backyard look awesome too. And all those things that we documented, we trained, reviewed. So if he has a light schedule, so say he only has one estimate in a day, then he knows he needs to go out there and do the work to generate two more estimates. And so if we're looking at a scorecard and you know, it's a daily scorecard and it has a 1, a 1, a 0, a 2, a 3, a 4, or whatever. Like, there's gonna be a conversation around, you know, hey, listen, the minimum expectation is three estimates a day. You had a number of days we didn't do. Ding. Like, what happened? Right? Why didn't you get those? And he might have his excuses and this and that, but we're clear on what it is. We have it. He's got the playbook. And at the end of the day, if it's like, if he's not generating anything more than what we give him through marketing, then like, at a certain point there could be a discussion of like, hey, listen, this is like what the job requires. Like for us to hit our metrics. Like, we know that we close, I don't know, one out of three jobs. Like, we got to close a job a day. And if we only do two, like, we're not going to close enough jobs to be able to hit the numbers. And so, like, your job is dependent on this. And if not, like, it's probably not going to work out. So that's one way. So scorecard to track specific metrics every single, like day or week, depending on whatever your cadence would be and go from there. Second part, if you run a remote team video on meetings at least twice a week, okay? So for example, if you, you have a dispersed team, you're mobile, guys are out in trucks, guys are on the roads. Maybe you don't all meet at the same place. Like in the turf business, you know, we have a project manager, a sales rep, and then my partner. And you know, they'll cross paths, right? But a lot of times they're starting from home, they're independent, they go around, they come back at home, we don't have like a central place. And so it's critical that we have the face to face. I think people get away with way too much stuff. If there's no cameras, you know that they're on, it's 10 o' clock and they're at home in their pajamas at their kitchen table. It's like, bro, what are you doing? You gotta be out there generating leads. I mean, I've seen these stories. I've had other businesses in the past that were mobile businesses. And the same thing happened to us. We're like, guys would take shortcuts, right? They'd say, well, I don't, my first estimate's not till 11 and I already got three today. And it's like, but you don't only have one tomorrow. Like you could go generate business right now to generate two more for tomorrow, right? And so Video on scorecards. And on that call, keep it simple, review the scorecard. This is where I'm at for the week. This is where I'm doing really well. This is where I'm struggling. If you have multiple people in the same role, it's a great opportunity to share best practices, challenges, what's working for somebody else? And then the last part is just like, what's your plan versus what did you get done? So this is a great accountability tool just to say, today I'm going to go follow up with this one. I'm gonna do this thing. I'm gonna knock on five, 50 doors. I'm gonna do this and this, right? They're gonna have a plan for the day because we a, we make them think through the plan rather than just like sitting there and like, oh, what am I going to do today? Like, you make somebody spend the time prior to the call to come up with a plan and then they talk about it on the call. And then tomorrow or the next day or the end of the day, depending on how you do it, they post to a slack group or a WhatsApp chat or whatever you have to say, did I do the things I said I was going to do today? So if they said, give me the three things you're going to do and they say, I'm going to, you know, I'm gonna follow up with 10 estimates. I'm gonna knock on 10 doors, I'm gonna try to get one referral lead or whatever. Then it's like, all right, doors I knocked on, you know, 45. I followed up with 12. So I'm good there. And then boom, like, yeah, I got my one thing. But like, otherwise, if you, if they say they're gonna do a bunch of things, they just wing it, right? They're like, ah, today I'm just gonna like go and like, I don't know, call 100 realtors. And then there's no, like, follow up. And there's no, you know, hey, how many realtors did you call? What was your success? Tell me about it. Like, tell me about the wins. What did you learn? Blah, blah, blah. If you don't ask them those questions, then you just taught them that they can just say whatever the heck they want in a meeting. You're gonna be like, oh, yeah, sounds good, whatever. And then there's no, like, you know, there's no follow up. There's. There's nothing that, like, you're never gonna check on them to find out if they actually did it. And so that Leads them to say, oh well, I almost got too tired or it was hot out today or you know, I was bored or you know, whatever. They're gonna come up with all these reasons of why they're not gonna do things. And so just think through that process. All right, so expectations reviewed, written, trained, signed scorecards and then a cadence of accountability. Usually meetings. Now if you run retail based, so in the auto business, I mean we still do video on meetings. You know, guys have, we install webcams in all their offices. Everyone's got it there. Like we want to see everyone's face Monday morning. We're gonna go through wins, we're gonna go through losses. And you know, our districts are going to run their own individual meetings to train on some things and we are going to have accountability around that. A couple other things. One is you can use pay as a pretty powerful lever. So for example, if you know, you could say if you don't get five Google reviews in a week, you lose a percentage of your weekly's bonus. If Google reviews are important to you, you could be. If you don't. Like there was a guy last week who it's a membership based thing and he needed people to sign membership agreements, right? Like it's a subscription service, like they have to sign thing. And he had a whole bunch of times where subscriptions, these service agreements weren't getting signed. And that was a huge, huge problem because that is literally like the business. And so they were some very serious consequences if they did not get these things signed. Like up to the point of termination, but definitely losing pay. And so effect people have a loss aversion more than they have a gain. So it is more motivating to someone to not lose money than it is to earn additional money. Like if you said hey, I'll give you $100 more if you got five Google reviews versus you are going to lose $100 on your bonus if you don't get five Google reviews. The loss of $100 is more motivating to somebody than the, the 100 hour gain. It's just like psychology. So it's a very powerful weapon but you have to make sure you use it like very well. If your entire playhead is like you're gonna lose money for this, you're gonna lose money for that, you're gonna lose. Then you have like a landmine every single way they walk. Well guess what? Like people aren't gonna wanna work for you. Cause they're like man, like they just feel just too stressed and all this. So I would ensure if you pick one of those negative consequences that it's one that's very important and very impactful to you and, and then that can do it. Okay. For us it was Google reviews. Like our Google reviews were not good. We didn't have enough. We were low ranking on SEO. We had a minimum of five Google reviews they have to get every week, which most of these stores are seeing like 75, 100 cars a week. So like to get five people out of 100 to leave a review isn't a huge ask. And I mean I have stores doing 20 or 30. Right. Five star reviews every single week. And now I mean I got stores, you know, doing, having 2,000 reviews. We've moved some stores from a 3, 39 to like a 4 7, a 48 because we only had bads because we never asked. We started asking, we were being proactive. Boom, we get a more accurate representation which is we, you know, we do a good job. So that would be the other one you can use. Just be careful with it. It's powerful, so don't overuse it. And yeah, so if you can implement a few of these things, like I said, it's all about just getting 1% better. It's not necessarily moving mountains. But if you can start to implement to create some accountability, you'll start to see it. And then, I mean, finally the easiest way to create more accountability in your organization is to hire people who have it naturally. Okay, now that's easier said than done. But like, you know, I've had, I was specifically looking for it. This is one of my biggest pain points for many years is I had a bunch of people around me in leadership roles who were unaccountable. They didn't do the things they said they were going to do. And I got really frustrated. So I went out and said, who are the most accountable people I could find? And guess what? People who are in special operations in the military, extremely accountable, literally life and death situations that relied on them doing the things that they said they were going to do and everybody's on board. And so I went out and found a foundation that helps place these guys into leadership roles. And you know, it has been a great, great source for me. So now I have the extremely high level at the top and then that falls down. If you have people in your organization at the top who do not have that level of accountability, well, guess what, it's all going to roll downhill as well. So that's another source to look is military and just other people who naturally are just going to do things. So hope this is helpful. Good luck this week. And by the way, if you want to join me at my next session, fill out the text and I'll get you on the wait list and we'll go from there. Cheers.