Hello, everyone, welcome to the handyman success podcast. We are on episode three and I’m super thrilled about today’s episode. We’ve got Chris Olson Pacific home maintenance, of course. Let’s see, I should introduce myself. I’m Jason Call founder of handyman marketing pros, one of your co hosts with Alan Lee and the handyman journey. A man who needs no introduction as I normally say. The purpose of the handyman success podcast is to use these guest stories use Chris’s stories and his experience in business as a Cisco successful home for a contractor to teach you real practical business tips, marketing tips, life advice from his experience, so not only to teach you but to inspire you that you can achieve whatever goals that you have in your home improvement business. So, without any further ado, Chris, thank you so much for coming on. Man. We’re really excited about this episode. Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me on. Yeah, if you don’t mind, give us an every everyone listening here a little lay of the land a little history about yourself your business like kind of where you’re at right now. Awesome. Yeah. So like Jason said, my name is Chris Olson. I am a owner of Pacific home maintenance, which is a general contracting company based in Monroe, Washington, which is just northeast of Seattle about 45 minutes. So right up in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve been in business since October of 2019. Officially, I worked in construction for several other GCS and various trade companies for three or four years before that. And for the last six years, I’ve also been a professional firefighter and paramedic and was full time in the fire department for a while now just do it part time. Still a passion of mine, but my business has kind of become my primary focus.
I am 26 years old. I’ve started a business about two years ago, like I said, and started as a one man show handyman company actually found Alan Liam handyman journey when I was shooting probably only like two or three months into business and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I learned a lot of good tips to get started and kind of like figure out the lay of the land and had a lot of good advice from people that have been in the industry a lot longer, and from people and in that group and other places on Facebook and found a lot a lot of really cool resources and a lot of really cool contracts in the industry.
I grew over the two years after that, where today we as we sit. We are a licensed general contractor for the state of Washington. We specialize in decks fences and Exterior Remodeling. So we do large custom decks a lot of composite and deck covers deck awnings, full with like the kind of crazy outdoor living spaces you see on the front of magazines, we do a little bit of interior remodeling. And we still have a handyman division to do a lot of the small like general home maintenance tasks and jobs to currently sitting with myself and a full time office manager in the office. And then I have a full time project manager to full time crew leads, three full time crew members and a handful of part time guys, total last time I looked was 11 people on payroll with three active job postings that I can’t fill.
We’re on an average day we’re running two or three crews, usually two crews with a truck and trailer and a third crew of the van. Usually one sometimes two big jobs running at a time and then we fill in the gaps. A lot of the smaller jobs. Most of our small jobs these days are kind of handyman sized jobs but specifically related to the industry we do. So we do a lot of fall like deck construction projects where we just come in and we spend four weeks in your yard and we tear everything down and start over. And it’s a 30 to $50,000 project a lot of times, but we do just as many small jobs where we come out and we just replace a couple of deck boards repaired deck railing fix the staircase, add something to the to an existing deck or fence or yard project and in and out in a few hours. So we kind of have the full spectrum of small jobs two or three a day all the way up to our largest project to date was $74,000 and took us six weeks. Wow. Wow. That’s excellent. Um, so how did how did it go? As far as hiring people? You got 11 people on payroll now. You started October 2019. So when did you hire your first employee? And how did that go? Like what what was the process of that? So honestly, the first whole series of employees I hired was an absolute nightmare. I actually I will give one big piece of advice to new business owners when it comes to payroll which is don’t try to do it yourself pay somebody else to do it. It is one of the most It is one of the biggest and most important checks you can write as a new business owner. Because the first time you mess something up or you mess something up you forget to carry a decimal point or a zero. It will cost you more than you will pay your accountant for a year of managing your payroll. It’s very easy to make money.
My mistake and owe the IRS or the state or lni, like at least in my state, the lni division, you can owe them 1000s of dollars if you make a small mistake on paper, piece of paper or somewhere.
So until the last three months, I did not take that advice. And I was doing all of it myself. And I actually ended up owing lni, like $7,000 one one month because I had because I had miscalculated my hours for almost a year with five employees. So I pay $300 a month now to have a professional accountant do all my bookkeeping and my payroll.
But laugh at that now. Yeah, it’s funny. Now, one of the things that like I’ll kind of talk about later is like, the number one piece of advice I’ve ever gotten as a business owner, is when you are trying to decide whether you should do something yourself or pay somebody else to do it. If it’s not something you’re good at, and you like doing, right, somebody else a check to do it, because it’s gonna save you time, effort and money in the long run. It might feel like you’re spending money, but in reality, it’s gonna save you money in the long run. What you do best and write a check for the rest much. Yeah, I would love that as a T shirt.
So Chris, if you don’t mind, kind of like fleshing out like, from cuz, like me and Chris work together. It’s like kind of how you know, I know Chris, and I knew he’d be an awesome like person to come on the show and like, share what he’s doing because he’s just been killing it.
Your team, like from when I’ve talked on the phone? What I see on Facebook, your team is awesome. You guys have great like connection you guys get along? Well, obviously, output and the work you guys do is amazing. You’re profitable, you’re growing. So what if you don’t mind kind of fleshing out a bit? What is your hiring process look like? Like? How do you find your crew leads? How do you find your part time workers? Like, what does that look like for you? Because a lot of people they struggle with bringing on reliable help that you know is gonna be there for them and going to their company. So I’ll be totally honest, the answer this question will probably frustrate a lot of people because it’s not repeatable by the average person.
For my first year in business, every employee I had was another firefighter who worked for me part time. And they were all people that I had known for years before I hired them. So my first long term employee who was with me, for my entire duration of firm, he was my first employee ever hired at six months in business. And he worked for me all the way up until last month, when he left, he actually got offered an electricians apprenticeship that’s going to lead to him owning the company in three years. So he got offered a business opportunity you couldn’t turn down, and no hard feelings towards him for that. But my other three or four employees after him are all either friends of mine that I’ve known for a long time. Or one of my career leads is my best friend’s brother in law, who married my best friend’s sister and then moved into moved into town and was a mechanic for five years had a lot of the same knowledge and just needed some basic training. And he’s been with me full time since. And then I the only employee I’ve hired that I didn’t already know before I hired them is actually my current project manager. And technically, even though I didn’t know him personally, before I met him through my business, he was actually the sales manager at my lumberyard for my first year and a half in business. He left the sales industry to do construction for the last six months to a year. And he was working for another contractor. And I started talking to him and I sent him text like four months, saying, hey, when do you want a job? When do you want a job? Hey, when do you want a job? And finally, he called me back and I swear, I swear on my life that is text back was just like, well, you give me health insurance.
And it works. I hired him just based off based off that. So he’s a great dude.
And how do you hold? How do you hold on to these guys? I mean, what do you if you don’t mind? What are you paying them per hour? Are you paying them an incentive? Bonus? Yep, yeah, so sounds like yeah, so my full time guys all get benefits. My full time guys, the brand new guy on the crew that doesn’t know what kind of hammer to put a battery in, make 16 make $16 an hour for the first 90 days. And then if they show up to work on time, do good work and our honest, trustworthy, and even if they don’t know anything yet, but they are proven they want to be there, they get an automatic $2 raise to 18 an hour. Anybody that’s been here for more than six months to a year is making between 20 and 25. And my higher level employees make 35 Plus, okay, and I actually have one guy on my payroll, who’s one of my former mentor, so he used to own his own company. And he retired and I keep him on payroll to do really specialized technical projects, and he actually makes 15 an hour. Wow, wow, that’s awesome.
I would love to hear a little bit like like in about your business like do you do you mind sharing like what you try and get per hour? Yeah, so listen. Yep, so actually, it’s actually really simple math. So I have one of my business coaches, Tom rebreather.
I mentioned, he has a whole formula for figuring this out that makes makes it really easy. A huge portion of his coaching is understanding the numbers of your business. And understanding how those numbers affect what you should charge. So I don’t really charge hourly, unless it’s a very small like, really minor job. But I do base my estimates off an hourly estimated per man hour cost. And that per man hour cost is a breakdown of my annual revenue, divided by the number of employees, I have times 1700 hours, which is my number of billable hours per year, in theory, 1700s of random number that’s basically like 40 hours a week minus holidays, sick time, whatever, I have four employees time, 17 160 800 hours, I take that number, and I divide my annual overhead, that gives me a number that I have to charge per hour per man hour to cover my overhead, then I say, Okay, I want this many dollars of net profit per year. So let’s say I want above and beyond everything else is paid, including my salary, the business, I want to make $75,000 of net profit this year. So I take that $75,000. And I divide that by that 6800 hours. And that’s my amount of dollars I have to make in order to get my net profit, then I take all my employees wages, I add them together, divide it by the number of employees, that’s your average hourly employee cost, multiply that by 1.3 1.4, wherever you have to get to get your actual employee cost, because obviously, you pay a guy $18 an hour, it actually costs you more like 23 or 24, because of insurance and taxes and workers comp and everything else.
You take that number, and that’s your average cost per employee of actual field labor cost, you add all three of those numbers together, your overhead per hour, your profit per hour, and your labor cost per hour. And that’s the minimum amount of money that you have to charge per hour. So for me, personally, I do all that math, and it comes out to $91 an hour. So my absolute minimum per man hour is $91 an hour. So I have two guys on a site, it’s $182 an hour. Right?
That’s awesome. That’s and that and that obviously changes based on your overhead, your your expenses, your number of employees, like anything you change in the business, you have to go back and refigure that out, because my number actually was 65 an hour not that long ago. But that was when I was basing it off of having six employees and not four. And I dropped it from six to four, because I only reliably have for my project managers and reliably work in the field. He’s in the office a lot of days. And my other two guys are part time. And sometimes they’re there two or three days a week, sometimes they’re only there a couple times a month. So I’d rather have them kind of be a bonus and labor productivity and an extra expenses compared to an actual factored expense. Because obviously that difference of $30 an hour is a huge difference if you’re talking about weeks and weeks and weeks of not making that money for overhead and labor. Right? For sure. For sure. And I love that the aspect of knowing your numbers. I mean, some people might have been listening to you and been like, oh, like, What is he talking about? Man? Like I flunked a math in school. But yeah, no, this is the most important thing that I really think a lot of people just gloss over because they don’t want to deal with it. Yeah, that’s the number one way to grow your business is really sit down, figure out your numbers, you know, and exactly what you’ve done, Chris, because that’s, that’s where the money is that because if you have four employees, six employees, nine employees, but you’re not charging enough per hour? Yeah, that’s the point. Right? It’s the goal. Yeah, growing a big business, the goal is to actually have a life and have a sustainable life. Yep. Yes. What are your employees? Exactly, as one of my coaches says, You, the first step to scaling is, is having everything together. So you’re scaling something good, and not just scaling. If you scale a business that you already aren’t profitable in whether you know it or not, you’re not going to get more profitable by growing. If you’re running in the red with one employee, you’re gonna run in the red with four employees, you’re just gonna run further in the red. Right? This is one one huge thing that, you know, like in regards to sales, right? There’s a lot of talk about conversion rate and things like that, you know, some people that they might be getting, they’re like, Well, I’d rather have, you know, a 70% conversion rate. But yeah, what are you charging per hour, right, like, I could get 70 or 80% conversion rate if I charged 100, but a lot less. Yeah, but what I need to charge is X amount, and I’m gonna, my conversion rate is going to be a whole heck of a lot lower. But I need to charge that. So it doesn’t matter from getting clients if they’re not paying what I need to make. They’re not Yeah.
It goes back to the classic saying it’s it’s cheaper to not work than work at a loss.
That’s very true. That is very true, because there’s a lot of expenses that come along. Yeah, business. So why would you do it if you’re not making some money? Yeah, well, I mean, you hear about contractors all the time that they they, they work hard all year, they get tons of revenue, that tons of expenses, and at the end of the year, their bank account reads zero and they don’t understand why they’re like, I don’t understand
I’m taking these checks for 1012 1416 $20,000 all the time. But for some reason, at the end of the month, I have $14.73. Left. Yeah. And it’s and it comes down to that, like, really knowing inside and out, like, what’s your actual overhead cost? What’s your actual labor cost? What’s your actual running around cost? Or like one of the things I see a lot with, like handyman companies specifically, is they don’t understand that, like, they need to factor in their own costs. So if you’re, if you’re working in the field, and you have one employee, you have to bill as if you have two employees, things like that. Like, yeah, you have to, you have to factor in your own labor as a business owner and your own labor in the field. And you have to build as if, if I was going to replace somebody, if I was going to replace myself with an employee, what would I have to pay them? Right? For sure. Yeah, I love how you flesh all that out, Chris, really appreciate you sharing all that. And something to like, I want to encourage anyone that that’s likely small, most people listening, they’re not the size of Chris’s business. But that just means your math is a little bit simpler, a little bit easy. But whether you have one person or 11 people, you need to be doing this math, and understanding your numbers and knowing what you need to charge to, you know, not only like just pay your expenses and pay yourself, but like, what kind of net do you want? By the end of the year? Yeah. What kind of net profit do you want? And so building all that in so like hearing Chris, breakdown all this, I guess, I just encourage people to really take a look at those numbers and figure out like, what do you need to charge to make what you want to make? Yeah, well, I’m thinking about things like if you’re going to make a business decision about hey, I, I’m running around doing like, say you’re a company that all you do is build fences. So you have you and a second employee running around building fences, you’re handling the office side, and you’re like, man, I can’t keep up with sales, I’m three months ahead, I want to hire a second crew. So you start thinking you’re like, Okay, if I had a second crew, I could make $10,000 a week instead of $5,000 a week. But what you don’t realize is you’re going to do that. But then you’re also going to add the cost of a second truck, the cost of additional payroll, the cost of additional tools, the cost of additional equipment, and you’re gonna have twice the risk per week, something’s gonna go wrong, twice the amount of callbacks twice the amount of insurance claims twice the amount of whatever, and you have, and you have twice as many employees to manage. And all of a sudden, you start realizing that, oh, maybe I’m, I’m gonna, I’m gonna double my revenue. And I’m only going to add a 10% like net profit at the end of the at the end of the month. If you’re lucky. what’s what’s the point? Right? Yeah, people, you know, if you go down that road, like, you’re literally spinning your wheels for nothing, you know, but there, there is a smart way to grow a business. And I think that’s one thing that you’ve really shown in Excel that in here, Chris, I love the quote, like from Dave Ramsey, and maybe this can launch into our debt talk. But sure, you know, you know, if you don’t tell your money, where to go, your money is going to go where you don’t want to go, and you’re not gonna know where the heck it went, right. So if you don’t know your numbers, like, we can’t stress it enough, like, I can bet you there, there’s probably, you know, 1000 people listening to this podcast right now that do not know their numbers, you know, and that’s just, that’s the sheer fact of just how a lot of people do business. They just go out there, like, I have a hammer and a screwdriver, and I’m gonna go make some money, but they don’t know their numbers. They don’t know how much is going out every day, right? They may not even know how much is coming in every month. They just think that what what’s coming in is gonna be more than what’s going out. Yeah, really, that results in your bank account being zero, you know, so, yeah, well, and one of the hardest things about being contractor to is like I, I was really fortunate to start learning a lot about business right away. But one of the things I hear all the time is I hear, like, I don’t understand, like, I have a great product, I have great customer service, and I just can’t seem to make enough money. And it’s, and it’s people don’t really grasp right away sometimes that being a really skilled, amazing craftsman. Like you can do the you could be the best bathroom remodeler in the entire state that you live in. But if you don’t know your numbers, and you don’t know what things are costing you, and you’re not keeping track of what’s going in and what’s going out and do appropriate business planning, you’re still gonna you’re still gonna fail to plan like failing, like, failing to plan is planning to fail.
Definitely, definitely. And, you know, I love the topic that we’re on, like, because I was actually just listening. You mentioned Tom rebar. Earlier, I was listening to one of his videos the other day and absolutely phenomenal guy. But he was talking about, you know, rates, right and what your rate should be, you know, and I think, really, when you make these big decisions, it comes down to mentality. You know, we talked a lot about at the handyman journey that there’s two different mentalities. You can have a champion mentality or a victim mentality. And by default us as humans always default to the victim mentality. Yeah, but I believe that we are created and called to live in the champion mentality and that’s really where excellence happens when you choose the champion mentality. So every
choice that you have in life, you have the choice to either take the victim route or the utopian route, you know, and when you’re talking about pricing, if you figure out what your pricing is being, like, in your instance, you come up with 91 bucks per hour. Yeah, you know, the victim mentality would be like, Oh, crap, that’s a lot of money. No one’s gonna want to pay that. Yeah, no one’s gonna want to pay it, right. That’s the mentality. But the champion mentality is like, no, I need to charge this so that I can get to where I want to go so that I can pay my employees while so. So I can give that benefits, that he won’t come work for me unless I have benefits. Right? Yep.
mentality. That’s what it comes down to. Yeah. And spoiler alert for all those people listening $91. Now, it’s not a lot of money. Not at all, not at all. Now, when it comes to all the construction, there’s, I can’t remember the exact number. But I think the average hourly rate for most construction companies in the Seattle area is actually closer to 150. And when we charge for small jobs, we’re on the back end charging upwards of 250 an hour, a lot of days, and people pay it every peel paid every day, they’re happy to if you have a quality product, a quality experience, a call a quality, customer service mentality, and you’re delivering an excellent product. There are a lot of people in the world that are happy to pay a premium price for a premium product. If you are if you’re providing a premium service and a premium product, and somebody says I don’t want to pay that it’s absolutely crazy. I that’s that’s insane. They’re not your customer. There’s somebody else’s customer. Yeah, there’s a there’s, there’s 100 guys on Craigslist that will happily happily work for $35 an hour cash under the table on Saturdays. If you’re trying to effectively run a business, you you can’t have that mentality. Yeah. And if you need to charge a higher rate, like I absolutely love the discussion that we’re having about pricing here. Because that’s like what I’m all about. But like if you if you need to charge a higher rate, and you think people aren’t gonna pay you, then the champion mentality would say, Okay, well, how can I up my game, so people will want to pay that, right? Like, there’s so many things you can look into right? Like wearing, making it a company wide thing where you wear booties, in some examples, make it a company wide thing, where when you do a dryer vent cleaning, you put those little, you know, skids underneath the dryer so you don’t scratch up the floor. You know, you make it a company wide thing when you know when you’re going to chain, do a ceiling fan over a bed, you lay a sheet out over the bed like these things are things that set us apart from other people and provide that superior product so that you could charge a superior price. Well, and the craziest thing is that I think a lot of contractors like handyman people just don’t quite wrap their head around is that the bar is low. The bar is really low.
so low. I have I have a joke that I had a friend the other day he asked me he was like, hey, like he’s an electrician working for a big electrical company has been been I’ve been electrician for like eight, nine years. He’s a union guy. He’s a super savvy, smart business guy has a side hustle. He was like, man, I kind of want to go off on my own and run a company. And I was like, I came up with his exact question. He was like, What if I did this? Like what, what’s, what’s some advice you have? And I said, answer your phone.
Because I can’t tell you how many times the GC I had to call like seven electricians just to get one to pick up the phone. The one electric company that I have, that I use regularly is absolutely amazing. But because they’re so good, they’re booked out for four to six to eight weeks at a time. So if I need something last minute, I have to start calling phone numbers. And I kid you not there are times where I run through 10 companies in my area for any given service and let them pick up their phone.
The other day I finished up a big deck awning. And we were putting a gutter up on the on the front of this deck on a 20 foot long gutter like literally it’s like a $300 job for a gutter company takes them 10 minutes and they could have swung by knocked it out. And I called the first like eight companies on Google and the first seven didn’t pick up their phone. The seventh guy picked up said hey I’d be there in like an hour I just I’m finishing up the day and I was like great What do you want? He was like I’ll take about $200 I was like how would I pay you 300 and you get here in 20 minutes
and he swung by and took care of it on his way home but it just so happened ironically that he actually lived like a mile from my job site that I was finishing up on wow wow that’s perfect and and that’s the thing is that the bar is so low so low like you were your logo your trucks you are company uniforms you show up on time you send a reminder text the day before your appointment. You have logos on your trucks vehicles branding that all match you answer your phone in a nice way you call people instead of texting them about important information you’re not a complete jerk and you are automatically employee and company of the month above everybody else in the industry. Yep, it’s not hard. Yeah, what you could do is just simply ask yourself right if I was hiring a handyman it’s hard sometimes for handyman to really to think like that because for me I would never hire myself. I would never hire handyman just cuz. Yeah, right. Like I’m just gonna fix it myself. Yeah, if you were gonna hire a handyman. How would you want them to act right if they had mud on their boots would you want them to put booties on before they came into your house?
There’s all these things and I think you hit it, you hit the nail on the head, answer your phone, like, the biggest change in my business ever was when I hired my customer relations personnel to answer the phone notes or the emails, because I had gotten a reputation. And that’s something I talked about in my book, the handyman marketing strategy book. It’s just I got this reputation of don’t call on a sleeve because he doesn’t answer his phone. You know, I was so busy. That’s crazy. I didn’t know that. Yeah, I was doing the work. And I was good at what I did. But people wouldn’t like there was literally this persona of like, Alan doesn’t answer his phone. So there’s no point in even calling that like, I heard that from quite a few different avenues. And, like, well, crap, like, that’s a horrible. Like, I definitely don’t want to be known for the guy who doesn’t answer his phone. And I like but that was, that was me. I was so busy. had all these voicemails, it got to a point where it’s like, well, man, I got 100 voicemails, I don’t got time to go back and call all these people. And so yeah, I’m super, like, super sad to say, I let those people go. And I never called him out. I gave him horrible customer service. I deserved that reputation of someone who didn’t call him back. But when I call when I hired my customer relations, personnel, everything that that’s when my business started growing, like, because I had someone to take that load off and start answering the phone so that I could focus on other things in the business. You know, I answer your phone. It’s you. And if you can’t answer your phone, hire someone to answer your phone. Yeah. And one of the biggest things that I learned early on that I’m glad I did that I tell people all the time is higher before you need somebody. If you need to hire somebody, it’s too late. So like I some how I got my office manager is kind of a crazy story. So my office manager, her name is Kenya. She’s literally just like the most amazing person on earth. She is my best friend’s wife, actually. And the way that I ended up hiring her was I was talking on the phone with my best friend one day and I was like, man, I just I’m working I kept track. I did this thing for a couple of weeks where I actually tracked my own hours and a time timekeeping app. And I was averaging 80 to 90 hours a week, because I would work because I would work 40 hours a week in the field. And then I would come home and I do paid work until I couldn’t stay awake anymore. And then I go to bed, and I go to the next to that same thing six days a week. And I was talking to him, and I called him and I was just like, man, like, I’m just I’m swamped. I have so many phone calls, I have so many emails, I’m just absolutely exploding with growth. I just hired my first employee about that time. And I was actually that was actually a little bit after I hired my first employee, Jeremiah and I was on to my second or third employee at that point. And I was like, man, I just gotta hire somebody.
And I was I was like, hey, you’re your wife works in admin, right? Does she have any friends that would be interested in like, interested in a job? Like, does she know anybody that might might want a job? He was like, I don’t know. I’ll ask her. And that was like, that was like on a Tuesday, calls me back on that Saturday. He was like, Hey, Chris, how are you doing today? I’m like, oh, not bad. He was like, Hey,
can I ask you a question? I was like, Yeah, he was like, How soon do you want to hire like an Office Admin manager? And I was like, I mean, yesterday. He was like, why don’t you come over to dinner at our house today? And I was like, Why? He was like, I’ll tell you when you get here. But long story short, can you got laid off today? Wow. And I was like, Okay, I’ll be there in like 20 minutes. So prior to working for me, she was the nonprofit coordinator for her church.
So she coordinated the like, admin, financial business side of the food bank, the youth ministry program, the adult ministry program, like all and she goes to a church that has something like like, three to 500 members, and an average service like for services on a Sunday, and all of them have 1000 people in them. So it’s a lot, it’s a lot of volume, if she was dealing with millions of dollars coming in and out on a regular basis and dealing with accounting admin emails. And she, at one point, managed a team of up to 20 people. Wow. So I get there. And
he’s basically like, he basically was like, yeah, so can you got laid off today? How would you like to hire her? I was like, I was like, Can I do that? Can we Is that even possible? And I didn’t realize that, like, he told me that something about her getting laid off. But I didn’t realize that she she’d spent that whole week he or she, she’d already been laid off. When I talked to him on Tuesday. I didn’t know that. And she had spent that whole week looking at applying for jobs. And this was right at the beginning of when the COVID-19 shutdown was starting to happen. And she was just like having an impossible time finding a job is really light. So I managed to hire her and I just gave her a huge raise because I hired her at a rate that I could afford when I hired her. And it was $20,000 a year less than she was getting paid.
Before she met, she came on knowing we were going to grow and it’d be a good long term job. Wow. That’s awesome, man. Yeah. And and she she does all my day to day like emails, phone calls follow ups. Up until I hired my accountant. She was manually entering all of our expenses, expenses, expenses, receipts, invoices into QuickBooks and keeping track of our books, keeping track of like crews and scheduling and getting things to people and managing the office. And then we actually moved into our office, we moved into an actual like storefront office building in January of this year. So we have an 800 square foot office, that border that faces a busy street with a 2000 square foot warehouse shop behind it. Wow. And she coordinates and runs the day to day in the office. And has been just an absolute like, blessing. Man, that’s so cool. Yeah, they’re, they’re worth their weight in gold. For sure. Yeah, something on this topic too. If you don’t mind backtracking a bit. Like a big thing that I love about Chris’s story is you started with handyman services, small jobs, just you write
a dude with a pickup truck and a garage full of tools? Yeah, yeah. So if you don’t mind kind of like walking through that story a bit, because I talked to a lot of people that they either come from as a general contractor remodel, and like, I’m tired of that I want to do small stuff, or people that don’t want to do small stuff, but kind of like level up and add on, you know, bigger projects, like decks, fences, remodels that you’re doing now. So if you don’t mind, kind of like walking through your story on, you know, starting as a handyman service, what that was like, and kind of like how you’ve like grown your business to now only in three years, just having this amazing growth, if you could just kind of walk through that for guys that I know are looking to, like, do that same thing that you’re doing? Totally. Yeah. So I mean, the biggest thing is, is the honest truth is I started off as a handyman, not because, like I wanted to do small jobs, or I thought I couldn’t do large jobs. I had a background in construction, like I could have started a debt company right off the bat. But I was still working full time in the fire service. And I was only wanting I want something to do a couple days a week to make extra money. I had done like a lot of general handyman type small projects for friends and family for probably years before I actually started my business. Like I had an ongoing agreement with my, like my ex’s mom that I would come over and I would do maintenance tasks at her house all the time, I did all of her yard work, landscaping hardscaping stuff I did like redid her entire yard over the period of like six months, did stuff for my parents and stuff for friends and stuff for other paying members.
and realized one day I was like, Man, I’m I’m a full time firefighter, I have four or five, six days off a week, I can start this business and do it as kind of a side job. And that’s how it all started. You think I’ll do a couple days a week. And I had had a lot of the tools already I had a lot of equipment already. I had a pickup truck and a trailer. I basically just slapped some magnets on the side of my truck and bought business cards and T shirts and start start working. And I learned through trial and error.
And at first it just kind of grew and grew and grew where I started doing more and more jobs working more and more days a week. And it got to the point that basically every day I wasn’t at the fire department I was on a job. And I started realizing like a that I enjoyed running a business B that I enjoyed the customer service aspects of running like a service business. And B and C i learned like how potential how much potential there was for growth and long term like ability to do a lot of things I wanted to do by owning a business versus working for somebody. And I loved being a firefighter and I still do I still work part time as a firefighter and part time as a paramedic.
But I basically I hit a point where to be totally honest, I realized that making like 80 to 100 grand a year with pension for the next 30 years wasn’t what I wanted.
I I actually so I worked part time as a firefighter for a long time, I got a full time union gig. And then I got let off probation 11 months into my union gig for not meeting standards at that specific department and then got hired at another department and then left that department to work part time. So I kind of bounced around. I’ve worked at four or five different fire departments in two or three ambulance companies. And now just work part time at one of each. And focus on the business Monday through Friday and kind of I kind of joked that running grip working as a 911 ambulance paramedic is my days off.
Very cool, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. So what was that point? I know a popular topic is like how do you know? And like what did you do when it was time to leave that that comfort that job? The salary, the pension, the benefits? What What was that? What was your experience and making that
Jump full time and to Pacific homeliness. Honestly, it was the point where I realized I was losing money by going to work.
Right? Yeah, I realized that. Part of it was that back at that point, like, say, six months to a year ago, I didn’t have a skill, the crew leads my two crew leads I had were a lot less experienced. And I hadn’t hired my newest project manager. So there was a point where, even though I had amazingly good, awesome employees, because of their experience and skill level, if I wasn’t on the job site, stuff would still get done. But production would get cut in half, stuff wouldn’t get done as quickly things would get missed. Stuff wouldn’t get done as efficiently. And it was a lot of the devils in the details kind of stuff. And also things like just coordinating deliveries of materials, picking up stuff, dealing with vendors and suppliers dealing with customers.
It got to a point where I knew that I was losing more money in my business than I was making my go into work.
So, and I really, and it was around that same time that I realized, like I kind of I think I leveled up in my own brain from saying, this is a side job that got really big two saying, like, I could be a like multi million dollar your company with 30 employees in a few years. Right? Yeah, it’s it’s that big vision. Like I love what you did when you started. You know, it wasn’t so much just about starting a handyman business. But it was the potential of what it could be, you know, when I first started, you know, I was making, you know, X amount of dollars per day, at my previous job. And then I’m like, well, like, I can make that in just a few hours doing handyman stuff. Yeah, now I make more than that in an hour. You know? So it’s like, absolutely insane. Yeah. But so how much of that would you say, of that, that kind of that, that long term vision really plays into starting a business, you feel like do you think that’s important to have? Or can you start a business, I would actually say that.
Having that long term vision and having that long term drive that is so strong that it gets you out of bed at five o’clock in the morning to do stuff that when when you get to a point in life, where you own the company, and you can take days off whenever you want, but instead you get up at five in the morning to come to the office and work your butt off for 14 hours.
You can’t survive as a business owner without that, like he might last a while. But the if you don’t have a fire in your belly that gets you out of the bed, gets you out of bed in the morning and keeps you working and interest fires you up every day. Whether it be a passion for whatever you’re doing as a business owner or a passion for like being successful, like passion for making money, passion for being successful passion for having more free time. Like wealth is different to each person, like some people want to be a business owner because it gives them more free time. Some people want to make tons of money. Some people want a Ferrari, some people just want to have more time to spend with their family and their kids at home. And if you don’t have that, I don’t think you can really be successful as a business owner long term. You might last a few years, but eventually you’re going to realize that the amount of work that it takes isn’t worth it.
Like I had a conversation with my project manager, CJ. Today, actually. And we were talking about how
we’re talking about hiring more crew leads. And I was talking to him about how there are a lot of people in the world that are amazingly skilled craftsmen, amazingly driven individuals, amazingly good people, but they have no desire to own a business. They want to make good money, they want to clock in, they want to clock out and I want to go home, right? Like I have one of my crew leads right now who he looks at my project manager working like 60 hours a week and coming in on the weekends. And like, my project manager will text me at like 2am and be like, Hey, man, I was thinking about doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what do you think? I’m like, go to bed CJ.
Like, he’s almost as bad as me. But CJ is going to be like, he’s going to be in the company for the long haul. And he’s going to be he’s on the same level as me as far as like, crazy, giant, real, unrealistic, realistic vision of where we’re going to be in five to 10 years. And my other cruelly just laughs And he’s like, man, I just want to like come to work. Let’s check into home my wife. Right, right. And there’s there’s people that want that. Yeah, there. That’s one of the things that I talk about all the time, like you talk about people that argue about minimum wage, and the reality is at the end of the day, if somebody starts to work at McDonald’s, and somebody is going to enjoy it. At the end of the day, somebody at the end of the day is somebody has to be the guy that hands you your food at Taco Bell, somebody, somebody has to be the pizza delivery driver. Somebody has to be the checkout person at the grocery store. And there are plenty of people that are more than content to make, like a basic wage and clock in and clock out and go home the other day. Yeah, and it takes a special kind of absolutely crazy to be a business owner. Yes, definitely.
What shifting gears just a little bit. What would you say?
one of your biggest wins or multiple different wins in your business that you’ve experienced. Well, I guess both business and personal, you know, yeah, in this two year journey.
And honestly, like the the biggest wins have been the little things. Like, I don’t think there’s any one really big event that’s like been like, oh, man, this is like the turning point of our company, or this is like, this is gonna be the big thing. I do remember, like, the first time I sold and landed a large job. Like we did a lot of like 1015 $20,000 jobs, but I remember selling a $60,000 Deck project. And we had never done anything even close to that size.
And I remember, it was a referral from one of my
it was it was actually my landlords, friend’s husband, or something like that, like it was, it was a direct referral through Mike, my commercial office space that I ran, it was my landlords like friend, basically. And I remember going out there and they didn’t even get a second estimate. They didn’t talk to anybody else. They just said, Hey, you came highly recommended, what is this going to cost? And they laid it out is exactly what they wanted. And it came out to like $52,000, or something like that. And then Okay, when can we start?
I remember, there wasn’t a turning point. But I remember that was the day where I was like, Okay, I need to hire more people.
Right. Um, and it was and it was, and that was a less than a month, I had moved into our new space. And it felt really big and empty and like we were bought with move into too big of a space. And spoiler alert, six months later, it feels too small. And I want to buy another building.
Yeah, and it it was definitely a point where I was all of a sudden, like, man, we’re, we’re This is definitely this is possible. Like this isn’t just like a dream. This isn’t just like something that’s maybe going to happen like all this all of a sudden it felt real. So and that’s the thing is like, there are definitely days where I wake up and I walk into the office and I walk in and I’m like, man, I can’t believe that I’m walking into like, a legitimate office with four desks in it and 10 employees in a shop full of tools and like 16 foot high warehouse shelving with a forklift and giant piles of materials and supplies and like two or three trucks where the guy is coming in and out in the morning and driving way to leave. And like we had a demo this morning from one of our our decking suppliers and the representative from like the regional supplier came in and gave us a whole presentation and left us like this huge pile of samples and demo pieces that are on the wall behind me and a bunch of stuff. And I’m like, Man, this is this is kind of crazy. You’re really you’re you’re making a business. That’s awesome. Yeah. So adversely, what would you say would be your biggest struggles that you faced both business and personal II throughout this two year journey? Yeah, so the hardest struggles easy. So the hardest struggle was getting myself out of the field. It was really it for me, the biggest thing was relinquishing control. Because I have a, I have a hugely high unrealistic production and quality standard.
One of the things that my project manager told me when I first started was he was kind of laughing. He was like, Man, you work on the jobsite, like a monkey that just snorted cocaine.
Like what is wrong with you? Like you outwork the other three guys put together and I was like, Yeah, well, I’m the only one here not getting paid by the hour.
Right.
And, and expecting anybody else to work as hard as the guy that owns the company, it’s just not gonna happen. Doesn’t matter how motivated and how hard working they are. You’re never gonna get you’re nobody’s ever gonna do. Nobody’s ever going to be a second you and a company. And I feel like a lot of guys had that problem. I hear people talk about that all the time in the handyman journey. They talk about how like they want hired employees. They don’t want to they don’t want to lower their quality standard, right?
Yeah, you want to as good of a job, I’ll lose customers because of blah, blah, blah, like they won’t, they won’t be as tidy as me I will go find something as experienced as me I can’t afford to hire somebody that has the same level of quality control and experience as me. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just I just hear excuses. victim mentality when it comes out. Right. 100% Yeah. And quite often what you speak and what you think comes to action, you know, yeah, so if you’re speaking that into your future employees or whatnot, that’s, that’s probably how you’re going to treat them. And yeah, that that like general topic, though, of like, it’s so hard to get out of the field, right. And you’re relinquish control from what you do best. And so some advice that I got within this last year, which was, it’s so great for any business owner. The biggest thing holding a lot of businesses back is that the owners, they cannot give up what they’re best at, or what they’re good at. And that’s often the biggest hindrance of business growth is that the owner just cannot step away from what they are good at. And you know, likely you’re not going to find someone that’s going to do it just as well but as the
You can equip them, you can train them, you can give them processes, you can give them systems that they can do a pretty dang good job meet the expectations of the client. And then that frees you up to what I mean, now you’re in your office, right? I mean, it’s Yeah, you’re in your office more than in the field. And I haven’t put a tool belt on. I haven’t been to more than two or three times in the last three months. And how’s it feel now, though? Like, you’re separated mostly from the field? Like, how does that feel like reflecting on like giving that up? I really regret buying a $600 tool belt right before I moved out in the field. Oh, man, oh, man. Yeah, that’s a regret right there.
No, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s crazy. Like I, I hear all the time and a lot of business coaching groups and on Facebook, and so that the the hardest thing for business owners get their head around is, when you have the ability to work on your business instead of in your business, all of a sudden, things change rapidly. If you have the ability to take a step back, look at the big picture, focus on the niche things that you’re good at. Like, for example, for me, my my number ones, my number one thing that I can do in the business to make the business money has nothing to do with building anything like we’re a construction company. And the most beneficial thing I can do from the company is sit in the office and make sales calls. Right? Because honestly, because honestly, I’ve found in the last six months, I’m a better salesman than I’m a carpenter.
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. It’s, it’s one of those things that you don’t really realize until you get there, you start to realize that having the ability to step out of the field as a construction contractor and run your office is huge. All of a sudden, your ability to do things like I spent four hours this morning, just working on implementing our new CRM. So we just signed on with jobber. It’s a whole like job management software system is kind of like market or job Nimbus, or one of those other CRM is that a lot of the guys in the handyman group or familiar with? And then I also there are a lot of handyman guys that don’t even know what a CRM is or don’t want to use one. Or they see that it cost $300 a month, and they’re like, I’m not spending $300 a month on some stupid computer program. Yeah, I can’t afford to spend $300 a month it’s like, well, what it automatically does things that take you hours a day to do. I mean, $3 is like an hour to work for us. I’m not sure what what CRM did you use before that. So that’s the funny thing is I didn’t, we had a task management software called Asana, which is basically it’s a really, really, really, really, really, really fancy to do list. So you can create journals and books. And within those journals and books, you can have tasks. And within those tasks, you can have sub tasks. So we had a book for prospective customers, active projects, General company, jobs, marketing, blog posts, General admin tasks, finances, whatever. So a lead would come in through a website that Jason built for us, popped in an email, my office manager would add them as a task in Asana under prospective customers should send him an email, ask him to get us photos of their project. And then I would jump on and see if they needed to get a phone call, I’d call them and do a sales call. When we sell it, they get moved to prospective customers where my project manager can see it. And then they have tasks assigned for order materials, get the suppliers get the supplies, coordinated, finish finish estimating the final details, get that get that delivery scheduled schedule, which crew is going to be on site plan the dates officially schedule, invoice them for a deposit confirm the contract is signed, dun dun dun dun list. Wow. And then we also had we also had QuickBooks invoice Oh yet QuickBooks for that. Yeah. So we did all of our estimating, invoicing and Job Costing through QuickBooks. You’re gonna you’re gonna love having it all in one. Yeah, well, on the on the coolest thing is, is Java back integrates through everything else. So Java automatically syncs and back integrates with QuickBooks. Every one of my employees has a company email. And as a user in Java, now, they can, they can snap a picture of a receipt and attach individual expenses to specific customers and specific jobs. When they clock in and out, they can click which job site they’re on. So at the end of the job, when it’s completed, I can see exactly how many labor man hours were actually spent on that job. I can see an exact expense total. And it’ll automatically generate me a report that says you spent this much on this much on materials, your profit margin, and ROI is this number, just automatically, and then it all back syncs to QuickBooks automatically. That’s awesome. That’s gold. Yeah. I mean, I personally use Mark eight. Yeah, you know, I know. I know, quite a few people who use Java and yeah, they’re phenomenal, phenomenal progress. You know, I looked at both the other reason I chose Java with Mark over market or market or I don’t know which one it’s actually called, is it Mark eight. You know, I’ve talked to the marketing guy and he’s like, you know, you could call whatever you want. Some people call it Mark, Mark Conte, you know, Mark Cocteau, that’s, that’s awesome. Whatever.
But they don’t even Yeah, I, I looked at both and like market job Nimbus service Titan, they’re all more oriented more towards service call businesses. So if you really are doing exclusively handyman stuff, I feel like market is what I would have bought and used. Java just has a lot of features that are more designed to manage multi day multi week larger projects. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And that’s, that’s really why I use Mark eight. Yeah, recommended. While I believe mark, Kate’s the number one in the handyman industry, but sure, definitely, you know, you move on, if you get into contracting, you know, to jobber. And guess
what, you know, it’s kind of, ya know, if I was going towards, you know, multi multi day or multi week jobs like, yeah, and if I was doing just handyman service calls or even like market even for like an electrician, or a plumber, or an H back technician, or a contractor that is doing primarily, service calls that are individual days, or multiple appointments a day is awesome. And I love that it has so many integrated features, like I love that it has stuff like postcard mail services, and integrates directly with so many other services, and you can invoice an estimate and do all that stuff within the same program.
And then on the flip side, I looked at like buildertrend, for example, but buildertrend is more for like a GC that does four or five, six jobs a year. And that job is that job is a $350,000 Custom House or a $500,000 addition. And they’re running like 14 subcontractors and 20 employees and eight months of work on one job. And it’s overkill for us. So finding a CRM is a really hard thing to do as a handyman or a contractor is there’s so many options.
Yeah, that’s something that I think any new business too, they need to invest in a CRM. Yeah, just the keep the database. Also any kind of marketing functionality, like the email blasts or text message like hitting up your current client base is the is one of the best strategies to combat the slow season to fill the books or whether, you know, you start focusing on a handyman division. It’s like, Okay, how do I feel some some job? Some work coming in? Well, your your clients, you’ve already helped them already. You’ve already established that great reputation with them, right? Yeah, that’s the lowest hanging fruit to get more work. What the cheapest customers a current customer, for sure, yeah. CRM helps you. Yeah, you keep that returning customer, a returning customer, you know, keeps that. Yeah.
And it’s and it’s not even just like, it’s not even just returned customers, it’s referrals, it’s returned customers, it’s being the top of mind, it’s being like it’s the same concept as 20 years ago, you gave them a magnet to put on their fridge, like showing up in somebody’s email inboxes, the new fridge magnet like it when they when I think of like, Oh, I need this done. Your top of mind. Like, Oh, I see your emails, I see your blog posts, like I follow you on Facebook and Instagram, like I see your projects. And then the biggest thing is too is like if you are a handyman company or a small service call contractor and you have aspirations to grow to do bigger jobs. Or if you’re doing exclusively like handyman and home maintenance repairs, and you want to do bigger jobs. The way that one of the biggest things that led to us doing bigger Jobs was that we had existing customers we had done small jobs for that asked us to do larger jobs.
Our first full from scratch deck bid was actually a customer of that idea prior to that we hung a TV for
That’s awesome. We did $125 TV mounting, which for all you listening to see now that’s less than half what we charge now.
But just just to just to clarify with $110 now with a three hour minimum now, so hang on to these $303 plus tax.
But back then it was 150 bucks. I didn’t know any better. And the other day for 330. Yep, did. And then that.
That client hired us about three or four months later to
cover what it was Oh, it was replacing flooring in a bathroom. And it was like a 15 $100 job. And then three or four months after that he called me and he was like, hey, I want to replace my deck in my backyard. My parents were visiting me at my house. And my mom actually stepped to a rotten board and put her foot through the deck and was so and was the front that’s a really funny story. But the short version is is her. Her mom or his mom was so upset about it, that she was like you’ve got to replace your deck right this very minute. made a whole big thing about it. And he he ironically is actually a friend of mine now but he works for Washington state he actually collects sales tax from delinquent businesses.
So it was I better not hear from you anytime soon.
But uh, he he was like, I can’t afford this like it was right Miller COVID he had just gone through a divorce. He had just like dealt with splitting out assets didn’t have the money. And he told his parents was I can’t afford a deck like this is gonna cost me 2030 $40,000 and he called me he got an estimate and his parents wrote him a check for it.
Wow, wow, nice, insane. Um, but we move on to the next. The next deal here, I want to do a little shameless plug. If you guys like if you guys listening and you guys like this podcast, and you are interested in Mark eight, the CRM that we’re talking about, there will be an affiliate link down in the show notes. Click that. And if you guys sign up with that link, it will help out this podcast. So that’s just a little shameless plug for you. But, Chris, get back to you. What What would you say has worked well, in your marketing strategy?
hiring Jason.
Number one, number one.
Number one shameless plug for Jason. Is I shameless plug for Jason and handyman web design is I hired Jason when I was a brand new business, I came out what I paid, but it was something really crazy. Like, there’s like $300 or $500 for the initial like one page website.
from three, even I didn’t even want to talk about it. It’s so crazy. Well, I got a screaming deal. Yeah, like I, yeah, I got lucky. I got, I got up again, with Jason before he knew how valuable services were.
And I got a screaming deal on my initial website, and I got compliments on it for I still get compliments on it. But I’ve since redesigned it like 18 times with Jason. But, but 100%, because of me, it’s been great every time but I always tweak it and change things and update things and add more pages and add more services and add more features and use it as a sales tool. But that initial decision to like get a professional website, work or somebody that actually knew what they were doing goes back to if you don’t know what you’re doing write a check somebody else.
And having that was the number one first big thing.
And then long term or human Jason to create like a really good web strategy, really good ad strategy, getting everything optimized as far as like generating and creating content that was optimized generating and creating blog posts and things for the website. And generating an awesome like SEO and ad strategy is still the number one things that brings leads to our door and it brings qualified leads, not just leads. Probably you guys out there still using homeadvisor. And Angie’s List and Yelp just stop right now. It’s a waste of money.
Yeah, it’s it’s short term. So yeah. Yeah. Chris for I mean, since since the beginning, really. And it’s all about building like a long term asset that you own that works for your business. And yeah, you just don’t get that with the short term stuff. And so and that’s something to I commend Chris about is like, he sticks with stuff, like he tests it out. And he tries it for a while. And because I talked to a lot of guys that they just throw money here, they throw money there and marketing, but you need to stick with it. You need to you need to double down on things that are going to be long term growth for your business, it’s going to be an asset to your business and and it’s certainly not home advisor.
Absolutely. No, no, don’t apologize.
So I mean, obviously, like we work together, Chris, but like what else in marketing? Like, I mean, I know you have some nice raps on your truck that was first you got to start with the magnets, but the route. Yeah. Anything else that you tried, like outside of digital? Yeah. So shout out and maybe give people an idea to give a try? Yeah, so I’ll do two or three things. So one is definitely like Jason mentioned, getting your truck wrapped, getting company uniforms, getting getting a brand. So one of the things that people I think a lot of times don’t understand is, Jason’s probably gonna spend us better than me, but I’ll butcher it and try my best. But there’s a huge difference. Difference between advertising, marketing and branding. And what a lot of new businesses don’t understand is that
posting on Facebook might not be advertising, but it is branding. And putting yard signs up in your neighborhood might not be advertising but it is branding and it is marketing and wrapping your truck and having a cohesive company look from the beginning. Having a logo that matches your business cards or flyers, your door hangers, your signs, your shirts, your truck, your shop, your sign, everything matching, that in and of itself, automatically sets you up cut above 90% of the contractors probably around you. Like you hear all the time. Like Like I hired a guy to build my deck and he drove up and I beat up old 1990s for that unity diesel truck that my neighbors could hear coming from a mile away. And he stepped out wearing ripped Carhartt smoking a cigarette and my neighbors complain that he bought the driveway.
Ironically, that’s my handyman.
Yeah.
Ironically, like that, that was my that’s my dad. That’s like
that’s, that’s all you got. Yeah.
And the reality is, is that a lot of those guys do the same quality of finished work as me.
The bonuses I charge four times as much and it’s full circle. I know we just have a few minutes.
Here. So I definitely want to like,
like maximize three. Can we turn three minutes into an hour’s? Yeah, yeah. But it’s kind of a part two next month to do on. So Chris has like this awesome brand wrap trucks, professional website web presence, you know, people find him and see him everywhere. He’s got great customer service, someone answered the phone, whenever someone gets an invoice and estimate it’s branded, they have payment options, they can pay online, it’s all professional. And that all builds up to allow Chris to charge a premium rate and make good money doing what he does. And so yes, all this stuff costs money. But you you will make significantly more when you have this entire brand, this entire presence, this entire experience that all your customers are getting and even tying into Asana. It’s project management. So when Chris has a new like debt client, and Kenya’s you know, getting everything organized, she checks all the boxes, it’s the exact same experience that they’ve created, that they know is an awesome experience. And they do it over and over and over again. And he probably does more profitable every single month that he does these this kind of work. And so I hope Yeah, listening sees the bigger picture here that it’s all working together so that Chris can have this killer business that is just growing like crazy. Yeah. And, and one of the things I’ll mention is this is probably the hallway conversation, and we didn’t really get to get to talking about like working business debt or debt, maybe that can be a part two thing. But
to give you got to give you guys a really simple version.
Nine months ago, we took out a small business loan for $30,000. And that small business loan took us from doing $300,000 in revenue last year to doing 900,000 to a million in revenue this year. Working debt is good debt is only bad if it doesn’t make you money.
Based in my opinion, there’s a lot of opinions on that. I’ll piss off half the guys listening by saying that out loud. But but but the reality is, is the same concept is you can drive $1,000 car that you have paid off and spend $300 a month fixing it when it breaks or you can make a $500 a month car payment on a brand new truck. Right, right. Yep. And in business like all those things Jason was talking about, like all the things we do to have a cohesive brand and have a cohesive, like experience, do cost money. But it’s a one time expense that will pay dividends in the long run, like getting your truck wrap might cost you a couple $1,000 maybe you can get it wrapped for a lot less. But like we have a full vinyl like custom wrapped, we don’t our trucks that cost 3500 bucks. And I have done hundreds of phone calls and leads over the last year for having the truck wrapped around one truck wrapped to two trucks wrapped to three trucks wrapped to two trucks and or three trucks and two trailers wrapped. And everything we have all matches, it’s all cohesive, it’s all brand and the number of people that just drive out drive down the road and say, Oh, I know back when it was just me in one truck. And I get phone calls. We would say man, I see your trucks everywhere. I was like what you mean even trucks like with an S?
And it’s it’s crazy. Like it’s it makes it it can make you seem like a bigger company than you are and it builds reputation builds a brand that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Definitely Yeah, and that they’re built as part of building the brand too. So yeah, that’s an interesting thing. You know, Chris and I probably have just for maybe clickbait information we probably have completely polar opposite you know different thoughts on debt. So if you guys want to hear that conversation, you know if you guys want to see maybe a second episode with Chris, go ahead and leave us a comment in the comment section or leave us comment on the podcast you’re watching you’re listening to. That’d be kind of fun to hear if you guys even want to go down that rabbit trail. Yeah, we can get Alan Stephens on the podcast let’s
get Alan Stephenson Chris Olson and us Yeah, that’d be a big deal
awesome i love Alan he’s he’s an amazing asset to the to your your community and your Facebook group and he I’ve called him and I actually am I’m going to try and hire him as my personal financial advisor here pretty soon if once I have the money to afford that once I have enough assets and liabilities to actually justify paying somebody to manage them.
So I got I got one more question for Chris because we literally two minutes but before I forget anyone listening watching join the handyman success Facebook group master Facebook. Yep, yep. And we’re gonna pull Chris in there. We’re gonna have everyone that we interview in this Facebook group. So it’s all about business marketing, kind of the stuff that we’ve dug into today. So request to join that group. Chris is going to be there like I said, All our previous guests, we can you can ask them questions ask us questions. I mean, that’s what this group is all about this kind of content. So the handyman success mastermind group on Facebook.
Last question for Chris. One. Like last, what is your parting advice tips to anyone that’s like looking to sell
Start their business are kind of they’re kind of capped out and they’re trying to take it to the next level. Sure. Number one piece of advice is
make this really short because it could turn into something long. So the say hire Jason. Well, yeah, hire Jason. But besides hiring Jason,
the number one thing that you can do every day to be successful is realize that it’s not the big things that matter. It’s the little things. So people think that self discipline is this magic thing that you’d pick some people just have. And the reality is, is there’s two different kinds of discipline, there’s macro discipline, there’s micro discipline, macro dispute is the keyword effect of you doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of little things, to train yourself to be a disciplined person and having self discipline, if you make sure that you make a list of 510 15 things that you’re going to do every day, to move the needle forward on your business and make progress. Eventually, those little things turn into big things. If you’re at a point where you’re thinking about starting a business, make a list and get started. You don’t have to do all of it in one day, research insurance companies, one day research bonding companies, the next day, research what it takes to be wise, if you want to be licensed if you don’t research the requirements of what you can and can’t do. Get all your ducks in a row, and quit your day job when you’re ready.
And that, like leads to, you know, it’s these big opportunities that like Chris has experienced and Chris, like still strives after we all have these opportunities, we want to like leave her job to like, hire an employee, and it is a combination of little choices that we make every single day. And eventually with with persistence, and you know, drive, that opportunity is going to come up. So I love that. Yep. And if if you’re making choices from the victim mentality, your opportunities are going to come from the victim mentality. If you make your choices from the champion mentality, you will get champion opportunities. Yep, 100% champion opportunities. I want some champion. I want I want a bull that for
that, but
awesome. If you don’t mind, can I shamelessly plug myself really quick to go for start some stuff. Go ahead. Yeah, so that really quick. If you want to find me on social media, we’re Facebook Pacific home maintenance, LLC, Instagram is Pacific home, W a website is Pacific home, w h. com, feel free to go check it out. You can check out Jason’s awesome website, we’ve got a ton of cool social media stuff going on. But the shameless plug is that I am in the process of starting a podcast of my own and a YouTube channel my own. It’s gonna be Pacific home pros. And we’re going to be launching in the next couple of weeks, we’re just working on recording our first few episodes and getting things off the ground. We’re going to be talking about general construction, business success, marketing and advertising and stuff like that within construction specifically, and talking about topics specific to the industry too. So if you’re interested in decks, fences, remodels and that kind of stuff, and we’ll talk about handyman stuff, too. I’m going to be getting off the ground soon. So I’ll be posting in the Facebook groups too, once we get totally rolling enough ground
to do some collaboration, for sure. Oh, yeah, I definitely would love to have both of you guys on at some point. I’m gonna try to try to get it off the ground first, and then get some cool guests after it after I get started. Yeah, I have no doubt it’s gonna be awesome. I mean, as as Everyone listen, like, and like Chris being on the show is just a huge blessing to like us. And then hopefully he has been to you and like his story and what he’s been able to accomplish in a few years has been just, I’ve been honored to be like, just a part of that. So thank you so much for coming on, Chris. Super excited to see like what happens for you by the end of this year. I mean, it happens so fast. The podcast, all the stuff that you’re working on. Super excited for you. Yeah, and thanks so much for having me on you guys. It was it’s been fun.
Thanks so much, Chris. Hope you have a great one. And we will have you on again to it for part two if people want it. Yep, sounds good. Me. We’ll see it Chris. You have a good day. You too.
Links:
Chris on FB – https://www.facebook.com/Olson.chris.987