Today, Bill Kinnard is the President & CEO of Grandy & Associates, a company dedicated to helping contractors run profitable businesses. But he didn’t start there. He first went to school for heating and cooling, then spent 22 years working in HVAC wholesale distribution. At the time, his boss told him, “Do your job in any way you need to as long as my phone doesn’t ring.” This prompted Bill to become proactive instead of reactive, which led him to teaching classes about HVAC. After crossing paths with Tom Grandy, Bill knew there was more out there for him to do. Now, he clearly communicates strategies, processes, and tactics that help contractors better understand their businesses and become more profitable — and he couldn’t be happier while doing it!
Listen to other episodes and see videos of the podcast at http://buildingabusinessthatlasts.com
Today, Bill Kinnard is the President & CEO of Grandy & Associates, a company dedicated to helping contractors run profitable businesses. But he didn’t start there. He first went to school for heating and cooling, then spent 22 years working in HVAC wholesale distribution. At the time, his boss told him, “Do your job in any way you need to as long as my phone doesn’t ring.” This prompted Bill to become proactive instead of reactive, which led him to teaching classes about HVAC. After crossing paths with Tom Grandy, Bill knew there was more out there for him to do. Now, he clearly communicates strategies, processes, and tactics that help contractors better understand their businesses and become more profitable — and he couldn’t be happier while doing it!
Listen to other episodes and see videos of the podcast at http://buildingabusinessthatlasts.com
Hi, welcome to building a business that lasts. My name is j o n and I'm your host on a quest towards stories, tips, and ideas, and will help you grow a business without being stressed out, worn out, and ready to quit. Each week, I'll interview other business owners who have successfully grown businesses of all types for many years. It's my hope that these conversations will help you build a business that lasts
Speaker 2:if you've ever struggled with cashflow or profitability and just growing your business. This interview is for you. Today. I interview bill Kinnard. He runs grandy and associates and they help companies run more profitable businesses. We have a real candid conversations about the difficulties of managing cash flow, improving profitability, and getting down to the numbers in business. I know these are things that I still struggle with even after 20 years in business and bill lag rainy as artists. They've been doing this for 30 years, helping other people[inaudible] improve the profitability of their business. So without any further ado, here's my interview with[inaudible]
Speaker 3:[inaudible].
Speaker 2:Hey Bill, thanks for being on the show. Hey, glad to be here, Jay. So I'm really excited to have you on the show because I think that the knowledge and wisdom and the things that you teach every single day are really the kind of things that people really need help with. And to be honest, I, this is super transparent, but I'll tell you because you'll appreciate this and let people, people listening might as well. We've had an exceptional year profitability wise, but I have not managed a company that's big before. And a couple of weeks ago I had a real cash crunch of the kind that I was like, man, I cannot believe I let this happen. And we made it through that little window. But it was because I really wasn't managing my cashflow properly. Forecasting my cashflow, I should say, with all these kind of things, profitability and cash flow and all that kind of stuff. And I think a lot of business owners get stuck on, is that right? Oh, there's no question about it. Why? I say in every one of our programs at companies run a p and l out of their accounting program and the profit loss says we're making money. We must be okay. Your P and l will lie to you every day of the week. Yes, it will. You tell you're making money even though you're broke, right? You have to run the businesses as you experience. Right. Based on the cash flowing into and fallen out of the checkbook on a daily basis. Yeah, and it's, it's crazy because I feel super transparent even admitting that, that I've made that mistake recently because I preached this stuff like I understand it from a technical standpoint and I can teach somebody else, but all of a sudden I realized that there were a few things that we had left off from a forecasting standpoint that I hadn't planned for and even though we're exceptionally profitable, I ended up in a real tight cash crunch just because of the way the dollars flowed. And that can be a big problem for a lot of people. And it's exciting to have you on the show cause I'd love to dig into some of those things. But before we do, I want to rewind because always the purpose of this show is to give other entrepreneurs, business owners kind of a peek behind the curtain of the reality of running a business, building something ultimately that lasts the test of time. And you guys at Grandy and associates are certainly not, you've been in business for decades. Um, so I'd love to hear just kind of behind the scenes a little bit of behind your story. You didn't start the business, but you've been there for a long time and, and what's your transition been like into the role that you have?
Speaker 4:No. Well, it's interesting. You know, I never in my life did I dream that I would be here, right? That I'd be doing this. Uh, my background was in heating and cooling. That's what I went to school for eons ago. And you know, and, and got out of there and I spent 22 years in wholesale distribution, uh, with a, a, a leading h distributor and, and I spent the first 15 years of that in the field, right? So I spent my time in basements and crawl spaces and attics spaces and rooftop units and scraped my skin off the knuckles, right along with the, the our contractors who are in the field. And it was interesting because the first day I started, the president of our company said, Bill, you got to know two things about this role. He said, number one, um, we're not hiring you to be in the, uh, in the office. We're hiring you to be in the field. Right? So I knew I was going to be out and about and, and second one, he told me it was kind of interesting. He said, you can do your job any way that you feel you need to, as long as my phone doesn't ring because of our customers feel that they have to call me to resolve an issue, then you and I have a problem. Right? So what about doing that? And I found out pretty quickly, I could either be reactive and every time one of our customers had a problem, jump in the car, go out there, help and figure out what was wrong. Or I could be proactive and come up with ways to teach them how to recognize the problems so that when it came up they already knew how to resolve it and I didn't have to get involved. And so I spent a lot less time in the car doing that. And so I basically put together programs where I was teaching in four and five different cities a week I had. And I put these programs together and I'd work all day, you know, visiting customers. And that night I teach classes and I did this every year in, in, in, in, in paid fruit in a big way. Well, yeah, I did that for 15 years and then moved over into the sales and marketing side of our company. Now we were a, at that point, a$60 million company. And what I found is that I missed being in front of the classroom when I was teaching. I could see the light bulb go on. Yeah, yeah. I've got all the, these business owners and technicians looking at me and, and when the light bulb clicked, I knew it. It was there. They got it. And to me that was a drug, right? That, that really, that's why I did what I did. And when I moved over into the sales and marketing side, all that was gone. Yeah. And some people are fueled by the big sale, right? Some people are fueled by really, you know, making things, you know, happen within the company. Me It helping this guy get it right. And I miss that. And so after eight years of doing that, and quite frankly being groomed for, uh, the, the presidency of the company, one day, it hit me. This, I had no passion for that. I didn't want to do that. And so I, I opted the to, to leave the company, but just wasn't sure where I was going to go. And at the same time, I was also trying to, uh, to help our contractors be more profitable. Because if you think about it and distribution your role in life, you're a middleman, right? So your distribution is to try and get people profitable enough to make some money and buy stuff from you and pay you for it. Uh, and so also I was doing that. I stumbled across Tom Grandy and, and, uh, this business training that he did. And I actually hired Tom to come in and do some training. And as he taught that first workshop, I knew, right. In fact, on day number two, Tom and I went out to dinner and I asked them, you know, tell me a little bit about his story. And, uh, I went home that night and told, called my wife from the hotel room and I said, I don't know where, don't know when, but at some point that man and I will be working together. And three years later I left the dis left the company I was with join grainy associates at that point. And, and I worked alongside Tom at that point for about seven years now. The, the, the took on more and more of the responsibility that company has after about seven years. Now. This is a company who's been here for a couple of decades already at this point. You know, and Tom had a very entrenched way of doing things, but as many company owners have experienced, if you're not calling the shots, sometimes it can be a little bit unfulfilling. There's always, you had the new guy coming up always has this idea of how you could do things better. And I don't necessarily know that my way would be better. It was just totally different and[inaudible]. And so ultimately when, when Tom and I came to the agreement and I bought the company from him, now at this point, you know, 28 years in a very loyal following of contractors across the, across the u s and Canada. And you know, you talk about something, you know that you having a profitable year and but being broke, I had to learn that same thing, right? We're teaching this everyday. But like you said, sometimes putting into practice what we teach isn't always easy to do, right? It's easy to tell somebody else what they need to do, right? And so there was a, a pretty major learning curve at that point. And, and the other thing is that, you know, when, when my predecessor owned the company and Tom is still with us today, still active in the company, he's just not in that leadership role. When he owned it, it was a one man company. For all practical purposes, he had one revenue generator and some office staff. But what he was the revenue generator in effect at that point you own a job. Yeah. All right, Yo want a job. And I didn't want to own a job because that in itself I've identified pretty quickly. That was one of my shortcomings is that if I was the only one, then I couldn't stop producing[inaudible] because the moment you stopped producing, the moment the revenue staff's coming in and that creates a whole other host of problems. And so I didn't want to do that. I wanted something more for what I was doing. Right. I want to own a company, not a job. So that those were some pretty major struggles and things that I had to change it. But you know, as we went through the, uh, those, those first several years of the company here and my company today, it looks totally different. I mean, it's nothing like the company that we bought years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's amazing to just think about that journey. So many things I want to unpack from, from just the things that you're just talking about. The first is the idea of knowledge versus execution. One thing to know something, it's another to actually do something about it. And I think one of the things that happens too, when you're starting[inaudible] you were starting a new business, but you, you kind of are when you over time. I feel like even for him, I've been doing the same business for 20 years, but it's nothing like the business that it was even five years ago. Certainly not like it was 10 years ago. So I feel like I'm constantly starting a new business within my business, kind of, you know.
Speaker 4:Well, there's no question about it because you know, again, if you look at it, even if five years ago you were the best at what you did in your market. There was nobody who could touch you five years. If you're doing things the exact same way today, you're eating somebody else's dust. Yeah. Alright. Because they are always changing, always improving. The market is changing and if you're not changing with it, you're getting left behind. And so you're, you have to completely reinvent that and change and improve what you're doing on a daily basis. Because if you're not, again, you're not going to survive.
Speaker 2:Well, talk about something specifically that stood out is you talked about how much you love teaching. And it's interesting because I'm actually dealing with this struggle a little bit right now myself in that. I love that. I love to teach. Like I love being on stage to teach in front of a big group. I love teaching a small group. I love teaching one on one with a client and helping them figure out stuff. Most of that for me is around the marketing sphere, but a lot of times it branches off because business is just one big interconnected web. But I'm also struggling with like there's only so many hours in a week and I have a wife and children and you know all these other kinds of things and I have a business that has to be run outside of me being in the classroom as you do as well. So when you first started at granting, you're doing a lot of teaching and you're still doing a lot of teaching, but you're also running a company, figure out that balance of going, hey, how much time am I in the classroom? How much time am I running the business? You
Speaker 4:know, for me, you know, that varies all the time. But one of the, one of the biggest struggles that I had, right so early on that I had to learn is, you know, I was still a one man company. I was still, yeah, Tom was there. But the model that we've pretty much had at that point is, you know, is the typical sales model, right? You eat what you kill. Right? And so what I found myself doing is I didn't have a lot of work. And so I'd be, I'd be calling and marketing and, and, and calling and talking to people and doing all this other stuff. And then now finally starting to get some bookings. Well then I'd go teach. And when I'm teaching, there's no time to be calling[inaudible]. Right? And so I teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, and then that all of a sudden that whole stretch is done. Then I look up one day and I've got nothing on the calendar. And again, if you stop teaching, you stopped producing. There's no money coming in. It's so that, you know, I found at that point the hills and valleys were so severe, it was phased for famine and it was hard to function that way. I had, that's where again, it got away that same point coming back to me. Right? I didn't want to own a job. If I needed to smooth, if I was going to have any chance of smoothing things out, it had to be bigger than me. And so one of the things that I had to do was to, to really look at other ways of bringing in revenue without me standing in front of a group. And one of the things that I did it, it struck me in two ways. The first of those was I went to my wife and I had gone through a, a, an entre leadership master series class, and Dave Ramsey and I had a conversation and I expressed that concern to him at that point. And he said, I remember those days. And he said, the first thing I did that, that really helped me in that piece is to figure out another way to do it. How could I deliver this? Right? And they said, and at that point I set up a camera and I recorded myself and I started selling the recordings. Hmm. All right. So that gave a a method, right? So it started, you know, planting a seed a little bit, but it also meant, so we started to do a little bit of work with, with recording it and selling those. But, but really the big thing was I needed to hire another one on me. And so what I ended up having to do was to get an other producers out there. Now, today, you know, we've grown and, and there's a, you know, there's, there's three other producers, uh, teachers, coaches in the field who are our revenue generators. That enables me to step back a little bit, um, and spend a little bit more time, it two areas that you mentioned. The first one of those is running the company. They all, you know, uh, Gerber, right? Work on your business, not in your business. And I really had to get to that point. And the second thing was to be able to have a little bit of family time, right? Because, cause I had a couple of years in there where family was really that stretched pretty thin and, and so, you know, had a focus on that piece of it. And, and that's a, you know, I find that's always the struggle is that piece is how do you, I tell business owners, let me put it this way, I tell business owners all the time, you don't have to grow. It's okay to be small.[inaudible] all right, you can stay where you're at. But if you do want to grow, then you have to figure out a way to no longer be the producer. Okay. And so in my case, the way that that looks is I still do a lot of keynote addresses. I do a lot of conferences where it gets me in front of contractors. I can do some teaching at that point in time. And then I, I intentionally reserve a couple of, uh, targeted workshops that it's a real benefit to the company if I'm the one they're teaching my other trainers can do as good a job in some, they can do a better job than I can, right? It teach in those programs. But every once in a while there's an element there where it benefits to have me, I'll be intentional about picking belts. Right? But one of the things that I had to do, and this helped not only the business but it helped my family is I literally had my administrative assistant go into my calendar and block out every Monday and Friday from, you know, throughout our entire cycle. Right? So for us in our company, Summers are slow time. Our clients are all too busy in the middle of the summer to to go attend track class. So we kind of get a break and I can stay home. But we went through Labor Day all the way through memorial day and she blocked out every Monday and Friday. And that meant that I was not going to be teaching on a Monday or Friday. That gave me time, more time in the office. It meant that I didn't have to travel on weekends. It meant that, again, I had a little bit of sanity, right. Because if you don't create some space, you know in the head in the mind that it's tough for you to keep track of all that stuff. And so again, if you want to grow, you can't be the lid. Right. If I want to work in the business then then, then again, that's okay. But then on the lid, right, I'm the one who's preventing that growth and, and that's a conscious decision that you have to make, right? Do I want to be small? If so there's a trade off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Gosh, I feel like you dropped about five or six different knowledge bombs and I want people to miss them. The first one that when you're talking about working on the business, not in the business and the whole idea of job verse business, you talked about Gerber, some people may not have heard of that. It's a book that's very popular called e myth. If you've not read this, if you're thinking about starting a business or even if you've been in business, you must read that book and absolutely buy it right now, today over anything else and go read it. Um, the other was knowing when to scale. I think that anybody out there who has run a business for any period of time has experienced exactly what you said. Oh, I've experienced that both without a team and with a team where you're don't have enough business, so you get out there and you hustle and you go find more business and then what happens if you're good at that, you get too much business and then you got to go do the work to actually achieve whatever you sold. Now you're going to go and you're going to kind of hunker back down. You're doing the work, but you're not going to get more business and there's no, there's no systems in place to to smooth that out and there are some ways to do that even with a smaller, even as an individual, but it's almost, it feels almost impossible with until you start to have the right people around you to kind of delegate. Okay, I have somebody that's always working on developing new business. I have somebody who's all working on doing things, their revenue drivers. The other thing you talked about,
Speaker 4:and if I can't jam that you don't, that also introduces fear. Yeah. Because, okay, when I'm in all of a sudden that famine mode where all of a sudden I've done all the work and there's nothing there and there's nothing else coming in. I still got the house payment. I still got the grocery bills and the doctor bills and, and yes, just me, you know, but all of a sudden it changes the way you run the company because you're operating from a position. Fear. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is super dangerous and I've done it before and Gosh, every time that I do it usually doesn't end very well. Right. You have to get out of that. The other thing you talked about, which I want to make sure people don't miss these things cause they're really important is understanding why you're growing. It is so easy. I've done this too of to grow for growth's sake, whether that's to hit a revenue number or a profit number or a people number or a client number or whatever the number is that you're chasing, especially if you're one of those high achiever type personalities. But it is, it can be dangerous to do that because a lot of times you end up in places where you're not, you're not prepared to be there yet. Keep these growth goals, but you've got to sit back and you go, why am I doing this? I mean I had a season where I'd hired a bunch of extra people but I really wasn't and I was really good at growing revenue, but I was still trying to, I was just barely growing the profitability at that point. And it's like, well gosh, I just grew my overhead by you know, 100% and grew my profitability by you know, 3% is that worth it? Probably not. You know, and it's up to each person, but no. Why to grow is really important. The other one that you mentioned, two more things cause I just want to draw them back in time blocks is huge. You talked about that in your schedules. If you're not doing that, they're going to listening. You gotta do that. And multiple revenue streams. I mean, Bill, I think you and I both will attest to that, is one of the number one secrets, if you will, of lasting a long period of time, is having those multiple revenue streams because there's always going to be a time where one of those gets a little bit more contracted than the other. So I'd love to for you to talk about that a little bit more. Cause I think it's so important when you were starting to try to figure out what were those other revenues streams going to be, how did you kind of come to those solutions? How did, how did you start to figure out what those revenue streams might might be for you and what are those revenue streams for you? Well, you know, I have to admit that, you know, the first one was, was obviously just doing some recording because I figured if it worked for Dame Ramsey, it'll work for Belkin art. Uh, but, but quite frankly struggled with that a little bit, right? Because knowing how to do that, you know, I'm an HVC guy, so how do I know how to put together something like that? At the same time, looking for some of those other opportunities. And we mentioned earlier this idea about having to kind of reinvent yourself, you know, all the time, right? What do we look like? What are we doing? How are we doing things? You know, as we started to look forward a little bit, I started looking at, you know, really what was happening in the market. Again, finding people amongst our client base, the trades industry, there's such a shortage of people at that point. So that puts a pinch point on, on the business owners. Uh, and how do we make that happen? How do we get their people up to speed a little bit quicker? And so that's one of the things I started looking at down the road a little bit as is what could happen if they didn't have to travel, if they could attend the training from their place. Right. And at that point, you know, we could, uh, start to put together individual training programs. So we went out and found out what's getting into e-learning a little bit and you know, so this online learning, self paced
Speaker 4:online stuff, but I also knew full well that the times that I recorded a video and just played that video, Sidney sitting in the listening, you don't always learn near as much as if you have to participate in it. I tend to be an interactive learner and so I wanted my training to be the same way, so how can I get it there? And so yeah, that's why when we started to deal with the, uh, the different platforms that we could create self-paced interactive training. So we started to put together training programs that uh, the student has to interact with it at least every three minutes. You know, it, whether it's, it's answer a multiple choice question or drag and drops, but they have to interact with it, participate. They can't just let us sit and play in the background while the mind is wandering. And so that was one of the first things and we saw some successes there. Um,[inaudible] then again, I had mentioned earlier that family was taken a real hit the family time because I was finding myself traveling six and seven days a week. In some cases I get home on Saturday and have to, you know, change the luggage over and leave on Sunday. And, and my wife didn't want to be a single person and so how do I be able to do more of what I'm doing without traveling? And so we figured out a way to utilize the internet, utilize the tools that we had to be able to teach it, you know, and using platforms like the one that you and I are talking on today to be able to teach remotely. I figured if I could do a one on one meeting, there had to be a way I could figure out how to do a classroom type dry. Yeah, absolutely. And so we bent a little bit of money and, and uh, and a little right with technology today, you don't need a lot of money to, and we put in a studio here in our offices with a green screen. And so I can go and stand in front of the green screen and I and I can teach just about any one of our programs live from there. So started to do a little bit of that. So now I got revenue coming in where I can go home at the end of the day. But then from there that just started to mushroom a little bit more because again, if I could teach it from here at this location, um, I can teach it from anywhere. And so now some of our, even though our, our, uh, other coaches and trainers aren't located here in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where we are, there are other places in the country. Uh, now I've got other instructors teaching those same remote online classes. So I've just now hit two items. Number one, not only do I not have to travel, my trainers don't have to travel and we're still collecting revenue for wherever they are. And so those, you know, it just continues to grow in that fashion. And so we're putting a lot of emphasis today on not only, you know, converting much of the content that we have know have that, uh, in place. And so the more we can do that, I think the, the, the more use it gets. And today that's becoming a, a fairly substantial part of our revenue for the company as a whole. Yeah, I think it's interesting because whenever you start new things like that, what can be difficult? I think for somebody who's
Speaker 2:been in business for a long time as they've got this, you know, golden egg over here where the vast majority of their revenue comes in and it's a new thing over here and it's really not producing that much. And at first it's probably taken a lot of time and energy because I've been doing something like live, she's gonna figure out what camera you need and how are you going to get it online and how are the people going to sign up for it. And there's all these other questions that you haven't dealt with before where you just had to show up and be in front of a room. And so those barriers can often prevent people from moving forward. And I know for me, we've had plenty of situations like that and I think figuring out when to press through that pain of early start up and when to let it die can be really hard. How have you in those scenarios kind of thought through, hey, is this something we need to keep fighting through? And it's just in the early stages or something we need to go ahead and just kind of put on the shelf and maybe look at it again in a couple of years?
Speaker 4:Well, you know, again, I think that there's two elements to that. Um, one of them. Because you have to deliver what you're delivering, right? You still have to maintain the level of professionalism and quality and everything that you do. So I was striving for that quite a bit in some of the platforms that I was delivering. And I heard a line at one point, right? Yeah. At some point you have to ship it. Don't let perfection stop you. Right. Sometimes good enough is good enough. And so I had to look at what we were doing. And you know, even today there's things that we're doing that I look at and go, it could be better, but it would be another$5,000. Well it is acceptable. That's right. Right. And so that was one of the things that I had to look at quite a bit. And so are we still delivering the quality or is it not up to standards or is it not up to my standards? Cause sometimes mine can be a little bit too high. Right. And there's a little bit of a difference, right. When I go back and start pulling our customers and that was one of the things that we started doing is, okay, uh, what did you think? Tell me about, uh, the content that you, that we delivered, right. Did it meet your expectations? Did it, you know, what, uh, what's your one big takeaway from it? What are the things that you would omit from it? Right. Getting their feedback at that point starts to tell me that, okay, even though it may not be at the standard of the level of quality that I want it to, it's hitting the mark. Yeah. And so that to me is it tells me, okay, we press on, right. We keep doing this even though the revenue isn't quite there. And so that was one of those, uh, those elements that we had to certainly keep factoring in is can we deliver it? Can we start to bring in some revenue even though it's not exactly where we want it to be?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I think that, that, that stuff is really huge. And I deal with this a lot on our end because we have, and we build websites for clients. You know, that couple years writing associates.com for them, it wants to go check it out. It's a great looking site. Uh, but it's like, so myself is that we end up in a lot of situations, clients get months into a project and they, you can tell they're that perfectionist personality and they just don't want to launch the website because it's not quite where they want it to be. And I always tell them like, look, I dealt with the same problem with our own website. I got into it, my team had to go, hey, you're doing the same thing to us that our clients do to us, which is just nitpicking it to a point where like it, what is there right now in draft mode that nobody in the world can see except for us is so much better than our existing website that's already sitting out there just launched the thing and we'll keep making it better. And this podcast is a perfect example of, and if you go back and listen to some of the early episodes, the audio was bad and even record video. Now I record video, but my first couple of video recordings, I was basically like in a closet almost in our office essentially. Now I have a video studio and you know, so I just think it's that I always say, and I tell this to my team all the time, it's progress over perfection. Yup. Um, and some personality types have a really hard time with that and we still have to produce a good product. So that's the B, right? There's a certain level that's like a minimum, like it has to be at this level or we can't, it can't be seen. You know, you can't have a bunch of spelling errors out there. You can't have inaccurate information. You can't have a video feed. It's not loading, you know, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We worked with a, with, with another company, with a software product, uh, for several years within this company. And, and the, uh, the gentleman who designed and own the software, right. We did the marketing and training for it. Uh, but the gentleman who owned design, it was that perfectionist and he would not allow, it had to be 100% before he would release it. And the problem was that it took forever to get any changes to get improvements. Anything out there and it, because again, it was never, I mean, you know better than anybody with software, you're never at 100% and so quite frankly, this incredibly awesome tool, which, which could help contractors in a major way died by the vine because they know there's two problems. Number one, it had to be perfect and, and therefore he'd never release it and therefore he had no revenue coming in. Right. And he's got, well, I can't sell it until it's perfect. Well, I'm, you know, again, unfortunately this incredible software is not in the industry anymore today as a result of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I, I think that that's, that happens all the time, but I also, I also will say I had a old pastor who always used to say, people often fall off one side of the cliff or the other. I also have other clients, one of which who, you know, and I love deeply, but I want you to say my name, who likes to just go, hey, let's just launch it. And I'm like, oh, well, hold on. Yes, yes, I want to watch it. But man, we're not even close seconds. There's a certain level of let's just push it out there and see what happens. And I'm like, okay, I get it. But like let's, let's just, let's get some more details done. And I'm not the detail guy either, but so there is that, like there's that balance but also think that's where the value of having a really team in place comes into place with somebody else can double check it and see you from the outside. And that's what my team did with our own website and they're like, Jay, you're, you're doing that. I'm like, okay, that's fair. You're right. It's better than what we have out there. There's nothing that's grossly inaccurate. Let's launch the thing and make it, let's look at some real data and keep making it better. Totally agree with you. But that's hard. So you can fall off either side of the cliff for sure. Gosh, I feel like we've covered so much. What I really appreciate, Bill, about this conversation for you. Is it just the transparency of like running a business is hard. You know, like there's a lot of moving parts and, and even someone like you who really knows the intricacies of how to manage the numbers and you're literally teach other people how to be profitable in their business. And yet there's still seasons where I, that's what I do. I've got teach them how to do their own marketing. I teach them how to clarify their message and there's still times where I'm like, and we're, wow, gosh, how are we missing this? You know, it's so easy for that to happen. What I'd love to hear, what I always like to transition to at some point, you've talked about this a little bit earlier, that you went through a season where you had a real hard time finding the balance. It's 100% work and zero family or maybe it's 95% work and 5% family or there's all these different buckets of life. I feel like there's your own personal health, you've got friends, you've got faith, you've got family, which cause they kind of broken up into further buckets of spouse and children and everybody's demographic and set up is a little bit different. But the whole work life balance thing is something that's thrown out there a lot. I really don't like that word because I don't think it's about balance thing. It's about seasons of life. I agree. But I'd love to hear your perspective of, you talked about time blocking a little bit in that obviously helps, but what are the, some of the things that you've kind of done to go, hey, how can I protect my marriage or running a profitable business? What are some of the things that have worked or not worked for you?
Speaker 4:Well, you know what, one of the things that hit me, Jay was, you know, again, have this passion for running a business could be fun, right? It can be scary, but it can be fun. That's right. Challenging. They can be fun. Right? You know, there's all these things in there. And you know, again, with, with our mission is to be able to teach these business owners it really to, to have the life that they dreamed of when they went into business, right? You know, my wife and I call it the swan dive that we took off the cliff the day that I, I quit my role of 22 years, you know, being very well paid and, and venturing into this thing called entrepreneurship, right? And, and you've got this vision of what your life is gonna look like, right? And how things are going to go. And that was really what we desire to teach other business owners, right? How do we get to that point? And one day, you know, as I'm sitting in yet another hotel over a weekend, right? And having a short conversation with my wife, because at that point we know we're not talking a whole lot because of, you know, hey, I'm never around. What do I know what's going on at home? Right? And so, you know, it's all that. And finally it dawned on me going, wait a minute, what about that vision that we had for our company when we started it? Right? We're teaching other people how to do the stuff that we're not living ourselves. Yeah. And I don't want to do that. Right. You know, I always said I couldn't be on the road as much as I was when our kids were little. But it's even more important when I think about it too, to not be on the road as much when our kids are gone. Right. Because again, my wife didn't go into this to be a single, a single person. And so part of it is just that realization, where are you and what is your why? Right? What do you want? What, what, what's driving you right? What is that thing that you're looking for? And I want for me and my family, and quite frankly, every employee in this company, I want them to have that piece of the puzzle, right? So, you know, as you said, work-life, I don't like the term work life balance cause it's not balanced, right. It is seasons. Uh, so we're, we're gonna not only are we going to be intentional about, about blocking time off and doing that, we're also, right. So, you know, within the company here, we, uh, we're very cognizant, right? Eh, everybody here who's got anything to do with booking my schedule is aware of that struggle, right? And so sometimes, you know, uh, Laurie or Paul will come to me and go, Bill, you're entertaining this request to book this class. How does that fit in with what you are doing? Right? That's going to put you out of town four days that week. Is that what you want? Right? And so I've got team members here who are challenging me to remember that balance piece of the puzzle, but then at the same time, right? So, so it's part of it as being cognizant on my part. Uh, it's part of, you know, the communication between my wife and I to make sure that we're, that we're on the same page as part of it with my team, keeping me accountable for that, uh, the kind of that schedule, but then quite frankly is so here, you know, my team absolutely busts at during the heat of the trade training season. And so when we come to the, uh, the, you know, the, the, the slower time we work for four and a half days a week, right now, uh, we're going to give everybody a long weekends on a regular basis. We're going to do things that are fun outside of that because they're working too hard, right? And because so many business owners forget that piece of the puzzle is, what do I want out of this thing? Right? And I ask every business owner a classes I teach, do you want to do this until the day that puts you in the ground? You know? And in reality, the answer is no. Right? Which means at some point, we've gotta be getting, you know, taking something out of it. Now you have business owners don't want that. I will promise you their employees don't want it either. Yeah. Right. So what, what are you doing within your company to basically give that same uh, season? Right though a balance. Again, if we use that word to the rest of your team, cause I don't want to work them, you know, to the bone either, right? If they've got an issue, because if they're not, they don't have that sense of home life either
Speaker 2:in the happiness there. They're not productive at work. Yup. That's for sure. Right? If we have somebody here, it's family first here all the time, right? If, if, if we have a team member who's got a family issue, okay, then why are you here? Go take care of that issue. Right? Because if you're worried about that, you're not productive here. So get outta here. Take care of that. Right. Is Business owners, sometimes we have to remember that we just need to apply some of our same company policies to us as well as give ourselves permission to take that day off and, and just be aware of that piece. You know, as you were talking, there were a couple things that kind of made me think about in a, I can't boast a little analogy. So when I put it in a book, you can remember that it came from my, our interview, but it's the abcs of business scalability. So let's are abcs a of seasons of business, having an accountable team that's a, your schedule that's B and commit to your y. Let's see. Um, so I came from my interview. So when you see that show up in a book somewhere, you'll know where it came from. I think that what you're saying is so true. And you know, when you think about that conversation where you said you sat down with your wife and you kind of like, Hey, what, what's going on here? It's that like initial communication and commitment, but it's also accountability, right? It's your wife or your team member or somebody else being able to look at you and go bill. Like, this is not what we planned. This is not what you planned. This is, is this what you wanted? You know, and you've been able to go, oh, well, no, no. I guess it's not. And the beauty of the reality of the fact that most people listening to this podcast live in the United States, we have so much freedom[inaudible] so much opportunity to go, I'm not gonna do this. I'm gonna Change Gears. Right? And in certain seasons of business, that sometimes means letting go of services that you liked but didn't fit within your why. It means letting go of people sometimes that are don't fit into that spectrum. It means trying to figure out something new. I've been saying a lot lately because it's been resonating with me. When you run out of money, you can always go get more money and go make some more sales. You can start a side business. You can find a way to go get more money when you lose it. And people that go completely bankrupt. There's plenty of stories. Oh, Dave Ramsey, he's one of them. It was completely bankrupt and then becomes a multi mega millionaire. But once you spend your time, you can't go get more of it. We've all got eliminated finite amount of time and we don't even know how long that is. That's the other thing is we don't even know what's in the bank. This might be the last day that I get to do a podcast. Hopefully it's not exactly, I know, but I think that that is a really important thing to think about as a business owner for you and for your team. But I thought you made a good point too of saying, hey, some of these things we apply to our team we might not do for ourselves. I think that's why there is maybe a little bit of a hidden problem within the entrepreneurial community of just mental health, small business owners, because they bear that whole burden of everything on their own shoulders.
Speaker 4:They're not taking the time to get that mental headspace that you talked about earlier. There's, there's no question about that. You know, one of the things that, uh, early on, right, I remember talking to my CPA and the guy's name was Bob, and he said, yeah, I said, Bob, man, sometimes I feel like I'm just hanging out here all by myself. Right. It just wish I had somebody to bounce some ideas off of, am I running my business the way that I should? Yeah. Am I being as profitable as I can? And, and, and there were two things that he impressed on me is number one, there's always a way to make more money. That's right. Right. And sometimes so many business owners, you know, they, they get their foot stuck in the hamster wheel and they got to keep running and running and running and running because that's the only way we can make the money. There's more ways to make money. Yeah. Right? But sometimes we got, we got to do things different, right. The, you know, the old adage, right? If you want something to change, you gotta change something. And so you have to try something different. And there's always a different way. Don't get so caught up in the way that you do it or the industry does it or my tray does it or whatever else is. There's always a different way. Right. There aren't a lot of other trainers who have the full fledged green screen in the studio. Right. Because that was a little bit different way. Second thing is then he told me is um, he goes, well, I'll play that role for you. He goes, I'll, you know, call it a mentor, call it another set of eyes, call it whatever you want. Right. I'll play that role for you under two conditions. Number one. He said, uh, you will send me your financials every month. Hmm. And I've got way I'm, I've got share my financials with somebody else. And he goes, you will share me your fine. By the fifth of the month you will send me your financials every month and by the 10th of the month you and I will sit down, face to face, nose to nose, toe to toe, and we will go over your numbers. And it was interesting because in that particular time, um, he wouldn't just look at my, you know, the, the, the financials and say, oh, why you had a lousy month? That sucks. Right? You know, he'd go through and say, oh, wait a minute, two months ago you told me this number was going to change because you are doing x. It didn't change y like, so that, that accountability thing was so important. And having that mentor there to kind of challenge me in the way that I thought and the way that I did things did more to get me outside of my bubble outside of my box than any other thing that I did. Now, it's interesting. We haven't met, right? He's retired long time ago. We still walk through that same process as a company today amongst our leadership team here. Every month we call it our monthly financial review. We do that and we kind of hold each other accountable and there's things, you know, again, part of it is, and we might be deviating just a little bit, but getting those right people here, right? I'm a visionary type person, right? I can see big picture, I don't see details. I intentionally went and look for an operations manager who's a detail guy. And so there's Times that I've got this wild idea that I want to do and Paul's going, yeah, really. Right, and, and, and where are we going to, how are we gonna pay for that?
Speaker 2:You know? And it just doesn't make a lot of sense return on that. Right. In the meantime, Paul's gone it, we can't spend any money, right. Because we got these things coming up and going, if we're that tight, we're never going to grow. Right. And so we balance each other really, really well. And that's important to have somebody else that you can bounce stuff off of. Even though Paul and I walked through that, I still have another business leader that I talked to on a regular basis. That again, enables me, challenges me in, in the way that I'm thinking. Those couple of things are important to do because part of the way they're challenging me is again, coming right back. Full Circle. Okay. And how is that going to impact your personal life? Yeah. So interesting because it's, I've been talking about this a lot lately with this idea that everybody needs somebody to mentor them. So I'm just kind of holding them accountable. We all need people on our peer level, similar businesses, owners and similar levels to kind of talk through things. And we all need somebody to minty somebody that we're kind of shepherding up. And I think if we have those three layers of people in our lives that really change thing changes things. And actually recently I've been talking about that a lot as it relates specifically to business. And my wife and I are having some conversations about some of the things that are today and she's like, well you talk about this thing with business but you don't have it over here in these pieces of your life. And I was like, oh right. And so all of a sudden she's, she's using my own, you know, my own material that I'm teaching other business owners and I'm really talking about business something. Well life in general, but it's, I'm really focused on business a lot of the times. And she's like, what about with faith? And parenting and marriage, like where are, where is your mentor in those areas? And I was like, that's a harder question to answer. And so it's easy to get sidetracked. We're running out of time. You and I could talk all day long about this stuff because I think we both love it and like you said, I said earlier, business is really hard and you said it also can be really fun and both those things are true. It's banned, right? It's really hot and it can be really fun. I mean I love, love, love, love getting to run the business that I do and some days it's more challenging than I planned or expected. But those challenges also are the places where you grow. I mean those are the parts where it's like when the pain comes, that's where you kind of figure out a way to dig out. When you dig out, that's where you learn. As we wrap up, what I'd love for you to kind of think about is what's some parting advice? If you're sitting down and talking with a business owner, maybe it's somebody who's only been in business for a handful of years and they're just trying to figure out how to make this thing work. They're trying to go, is this thing gonna work? How do I get it to last? You know, here Jay and bill are running companies now that have been around for decades, decades. That is a lot easier to wrap your head around than my company who is, I've only been here two or three years, can kind of make it to five kind of make it to 10 what advice would you give those people as we wrap up today? First thing to remember, right when you stay at those two numbers, can I make this a five? Can I make it to 10 again, statistically, 85% of businesses that start won't hit five years. That's right. Right? So if you're, you know, if you're making it to that point, you're already in rare company, but if you're at year two, year three, and you're looking at that piece of the puzzle, the most important
Speaker 4:thing is number one, know your numbers. If you don't know your numbers, you see the rest doesn't matter, right? What does it cost you to operate your company from a cashflow perspective, right? Don't get caught up in your P and l, right? What does it cost you to run your company from a cashflow perspective? And then you have to charge what you need to charge. And then the second element to that comes into, well, if you say, well, I can't possibly charge that much for the first be wrong, right? The second question is all got gotta do is build more value, right? And again, I don't care what you do, right? You're providing a value and the value goes way beyond the actual product that you at, right? When I'm talking to, uh, to, uh, heating and cooling contractors, they don't sell furnaces and air conditioners, right? They sell comfort and peace of mind. They sell relief from asthma. When I'm talking to a landscaper, they're not selling lawn care, right? They're selling, you know, the piece and the gorgeous view as I'm sitting on the deck enjoying my ice tea, right? Those are the, they're, they're selling an experience, right? So you gotta look at that piece of it. So you build that extra value in there, right? As you're doing that in. Then along with that, you know, that idea that we talked about, kind of a recap as having a mentor, have, having somebody else to look at Your Business and tell you what, you know, what makes sense and to challenge you a little bit different. I think those things are so key. As you go through those things. You know, one of the things I've been challenging my team with over the last really four months is look at the experience from the customer's perspective, right? Don't look at it from the, you know, from your vantage point, look at the experience from the customer's perspective and how do they see what you do, right? And it changes the way that you do what you do right? When all of a sudden I go through this and, and yes it's functional, but how does it look if I were buying this product right? If from somebody else, right? And by doing that, it starts to change the way that you look at really your, your, um, your products, your services and what you do. Um, and if you do that, it enables you, I think to build in the additional value, right? That doesn't cost anything else, right? These little things that you can do that, that to change what you're offering and all of a sudden the value goes up, which means the price goes up, which means your, your margins go up, but which means your profitability goes up, which means again, you have margin not only in your company, but you have margin in your life. And that's, that's so important.
Speaker 2:That's really good advice, Bill. It's just been a absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. I think that the info and the wisdom from this conversation that you shared is going to be really helpful out there to people that have listened. If you're out there and you're thinking, Gosh, I'd love to hear more from bill, maybe look at some of these trainings and help run a more profitable business, go check out his free Webinar, can get it@grandyassociates.com. Just go in there and click free Webinar and a, you can get access to his training. Obviously bill's focused really heavily on some of the service and trades Biz HPAC plumbing, electrical as he's talked about, but a lot of those concepts can apply to a lot of different businesses. Uh, we're, it would apply to mine as well. So blocking and tackling as blocking and tackling. Right. That's right. Absolutely. Bill, thanks so much for being on the show. It's been a real pleasure. Absolutely. Jay appreciate to being here. Thanks.
Jay Owen:I hope this episode has given you some ideas or inspiration that will help you grow your business. If you found it helpful and you know somebody else who might benefit from it as well, I would greatly appreciate it if you would take the time to share this with them, maybe on Facebook or Twitter or Linkedin, or even shoot an email over to a friend with a link to this podcast in it. And if you haven't already, make sure you sign up for our email list@buildingabusinessthatlasts.com.