Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome back to the Business of Beers podcast. Your daily dose of strategies, tools and tips to help you build an eight figure business. Today's episode is a clip from one of my YouTube lives. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, there's a link below in the description. Cheers. Today I own 36 auto repair shops that do a million dollars a week in sales. And I have no day to day responsibilities in the business. My time is spent on the fun stuff. New store acquisitions, partnerships, investments, and now creating content online which helps accelerate all the things that I find to be fun. And so today I'm going to walk through the exact process that I've used to build teams and systems to build a business that then can thrive without me. And so that's the goal. I'm hoping that there's something that you can get out of this to apply to your business. Because a lot of these principles, you know, why I'm in automotive and why, you know, happens to be a franchise is universal because it comes down to really these three things. So first, you know, I've been In this business 16 years, first six, as you know, learning the business, working in the stores, and then I've been an owner for the last 10 years. So I've been doing this a long time. I think that's, you know, one of the things that I really value is if you want to get in something and you learn it and you stick with it long enough that you can have some really good results. You know, I talk to people all the time and they're looking for the quick fix. They're looking for something that can just like get in and make money. And the truth is there are no shortcuts. You know, you have intentional plans and you show up and man, some really good things can follow. And so I've been intentional in this process to say what are the things that I can do to replace myself? And it has been my game plan literally from the day I became an owner, which was I knew to be able to grow, it had to go beyond me. But, but when you're first starting out, everything is on your shoulders. And so what we're going to walk through is kind of like what this looks like. So to start, every business has the same three like pillars that it has to do. We have sales, operations and administration in every business, no matter the size, no matter the industry, at least all kind of the trades and the services. And even in tech and other things, you have these three divisions. And when you first start out, when I first Started out as an owner, and when you will, too, or are every one of these has its own pieces that have to thrive. And in the beginning, you, as the owner, do everything right. Like, you are most likely the person who does all the sales. You oversee the operations, and you make sure that everything is up to standard. You do the admin, you do the bookkeeping. You do, like, all the payroll, all the things that have to happen. And you do it because you have to, right? It is the only way that you can grow. And in the beginning, when you launch a business, I think it's actually. It's really good to do everything, at least from my experience. I mean, this is what I did is because then I could learn these different things. I could learn what it took to do sales and what a good salesperson would look like. I could learn what the operations would need to be in order to grow. I could learn the admin stuff, which is super boring, at least for me, but is really important, because if people don't get paid, if things fall through the cracks, like, that is where people can rob you blind. I've heard it. I've seen it many times from friends of mine who get robbed on the back end. And so you have to kind of conquer these three divisions. Where are you spending your time? And so I do this audit of my time, and I think through it and say, all right, I've got. How much time do I spend on each one of these things? What am I great at? Like, what fires me up that I would just absolutely love to do, and what drains me? So the process is pretty simple, where you go through all the things that you're spending your time on throughout the day, throughout the week, and try to answer these questions of what am I doing that I'm spending a lot of time on or a little bit of time on. What are the things that I'm great. They fire me up. Like, man, if I could just do this all day, that's what I would do. And then what drains me, what. What is like, completely takes the wind out of my sails that I'm like, stupid thing. I have no interest in doing this, right? And you just, like, you just hate it every time that person calls you or you have to. You have to deal with it, but you're the only person, right? So you have to do it. And the goal is we want to log everything, and we really want to figure out for you, because everyone's different. Like, what are these categories? And I've got this matrix that I think through and let's go. Okay. And so I get all these things on the list, right? And I did this when I had two stores and I was smaller. I do this even today. I've done this every step of the way is I've got a list. I'm looking at all the things that happen. And I think through these things. And first, the things that drain you, and they take a lot of time. Those are the first ones that we want to hand off. So think through, like, for some people, for a lot of people at least, especially, like business owners, we're visionaries, we see big things, right? The things that drain us are most likely like that back office, the admin, having to do payroll every week, dealing with insurance, anything related to insurance, maybe negotiating with vendors or dealing with, I don't know, just like paperwork. For me, anything that was like, paperwork and lots of details and all this stuff, like, I'm like, hey, I got the big vision. I want to go. And if you're telling me I gotta spend three hours going through something, like, I could do it, but I'm not gonna be very happy about it, and it's gonna drain me, right? And so that is going to be the first thing that I am going to look to hand off. That is going to be my. That is going to be my number one priority. And depends on the role, though for some of you, like, maybe for you it's operation things. Like, we go back to these categories. We got sales ops and admin. And for some, it could be the project management, right? Where, you know, I'm a partner in a artificial turf franchise in Texas. It's called Waterloo Turf, and it's a franchise. And, you know, I've got a partner, Rick, and he's kind of in this solopreneur mode. He does everything. He does sales, he does operations, he does this is that. And like, there's things that he's really, really good at, and then there's things I know he does that he, you know, drain him. And so for him, it's looking to hand those off, which could be, you know, the project management, like, all the details. Because he wants to go out and build relationships and be like the captain of the team, which is like what he's like, amazing at. And so look to do that first. Number two is the second thing I start to look at is what are the things that fire me up and take almost take minimal time. These are the things that you want to max out. So, for example, in my business, like, I've scaled it From a handful of locations to 36. Most of mine have been acquisitions. So in the franchise business, it is, at least in my business, it is very easy to do acquisitions because franchisees generally want to sell to other franchisees, somebody they know like and trust. And it's just like way. It's just way easier to do that deal than to deal with an outsider. And I know this. And so the highest value time for me would be building relationships with all the other franchisees that I can like that I would potentially want to partner with or acquire or whatever. And so getting lunch, you know, every two months with somebody that hour that I get lunch with that person has led to deals that are, you know, today are worth millions and millions of dollars, but take almost no time at all. Or for me to have an idea to share with another owner to add value, because I'm trying to build an authentic relationship with that person and then order to eventually get a deal. Right? No, no time at all in comparison. But. But extreme leverage. And what fires me up are doing deals. Like I love doing the deals, I love the acquisition. I love, like the challenge of putting it all together, and then I want to hand it off. But so find the things in your life, like, what are the highest points of leverage that you can have that take no time at all that you could potentially max out? That would be like my number two priority in as I go through this matrix number three are up here slow. I'm gonna call it the slow roll. So things that fire you up, but also take a lot of time. Okay, so in my business, for example, like training salespeople, training our managers for many years, I was really good at. I'm a really good at identifying talented people, selling them on the vision of what we're trying to create, and they can be part of it. Getting them on board, working shoulder to shoulder with them, to kind of try to transpose as much of my knowledge into them as I can so that they can see what I see. They can be excited about it. When they have challenges, they know what to overcome because they really understand. And that fires me up because I love to see the progress of people. I love to see that somebody can come and join our organization, and then within weeks or months, they're already at the top of the charts, and it's much better than where they came from. And we see the potential because for. In our business, we unlock value by building great teams at every level, at the store level, at the operational level, at the leadership level. And so that fires me up. But it also takes a tremendous amount of time. And the bigger you get, like, it's less and less. You just don't have time to be able to work with as many people. Right. And so that is something that, that I slowly rolled off of. So like in the beginning I would hire a lot of. I mean, I hired everybody directly, I trained everybody directly. And I kind of felt that, all right, if I could get a couple of these like locations settled, then I could move on to the next ones. And you kind of like build it and then go on the next. So it was like I wanted to slow roll that process because it was so important I was good at it. And it's very important. And so then it's like, can I hire somebody who can be 80% as good as me? And then I give them a shot. I let them hire a couple people. I see how they do and I see what they mistakes. And now I'm spending more of my time investing into that person, the person who is now replacing me to make those hires. Because if they can't hire people as good as I was gonna hire people, then the whole thing starts to crumble, right? Because if you're in the people business, every service is in the people business. We say we're in the car business, but we fix cars, but we're really in the people business. And if the people are the most important thing, as the owner, it's your job, it's my job to make sure we have the highest quality people. And so it's like so important. You can't just. That's why I say you have to slow roll it and invest your time into the people that make the hires. A lot of time, those are so important and you don't want to mess those up. And then finally, what I'm going to call the slow bleed. So things that drain you but don't take that much time, right? These are going to be the like all these random one off tasks that you get that's like, you know, there's so much context that someone would need to know that it's, it's really kind of hard to just be able to hand it off to a single person because it connects to a couple of different things. This could be some annoying vendor that you have this one off deal with. This could be some sort of like compliance call. This could be maybe dealing with a landlord about something. This could be, I don't know, something that like, it doesn't take that much time, but it like totally. It's like death by a thousand cuts. And it's not worth the payroll cost or the time to get somebody else to do it. And so it's something that you eliminate it later, you'll eliminate it when you can. But it would be for me, the, like the. The third or the fourth priority, after we're able to hand off the things that take a lot of time, that totally drain us, that would. Then we're spending time on low effort, things that fire us up, slow rolling, the stuff that fires us up, but takes a lot of time, but we get a lot of leverage if we can continue to scale it. And then finally, the slow bleed.