Harmony of Hustle
Jump into the World of Justin Shoemaker aka "The Waterboy" . From Business, to music, this is the inside look of the world of the hyper-driven and their Harmony of Hustle.
Harmony of Hustle
Episode #28: 12 Key Lessons I learned Growing My Biz from $0-$100k a month
In this episode I go over the 12 biggest lessons I learned from hit our $100k/Month in revenue milestone! I hope you find this helpful!
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In 15 months, I was able to take my company from $0 a month to $100,000 a month, and here are the 12 most valuable lessons that I learned that you can also replicate my process. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Justin Shoemaker. I'm the CEO and founder of ClearWave Water Solutions. I have grown multiple companies up to 10 to $25 million a year in revenue in short amount of time. I have also now done that with my own company, clearwave Water Solutions. We are going into our 16th month. We're going to break over a million dollars a year, and this is part of my way of documenting my journey and growing this company into the biggest thing possible, and my hope is that some of these lessons will also help you on your journey as well. You grow faster with better talent with less people than you do with more people with less talent. Don't be afraid to cut the fat. This is a lesson that really took me way too long to learn. I always thought having a big business and a big sales team meant you needed to have a ton of people all working, all trying to create the most amount of sales and leads possible to help grow the business forward. In reality, what ends up happening is you just get bloat, you get people that aren't that good and what ends up happening is the top performers see that you're allowing these lower performers to enter your organization and it just drags the morale down. Ironically, when I went from, I had a team of about eight or nine guys. When we cut that down to just two or three of the best sales guys that I had, my numbers actually quadrupled the next month. We were doing about $50,000 to $60,000 a month and when I cut the fat had the best closures going in, had good lead flow just going into my best closures. That is when we were actually to break our first $100,000 a month. Very, very important.
Speaker 1:Growth is a lagging indicator. You've got to stay patient. I think this is one of the hardest things for any small business owner or entrepreneur is how do you stay patient when you are growing or in a growth cycle? The reality is you do so much work you see almost no return for that work and you start to wonder is it even worth it? The reality is you won't actually get to see a lot of the success that you've been doing until later on in the company, all the things that you do today compile and then create the success you see later. So if you fix a broken system, you don't actually get to see later. So if you fix a broken system, you don't actually get to see the returns of that until month two, month three, month four after you implement that system. You don't get to see the effects of your sales training that fast until month one, month two, month three. Now, sometimes if people can learn quickly you may see some a small uptick in in your sales closes, but the reality is you don't get to actually see the cashflow benefits of that until months down the road. Same thing with, like the referrals that you get all of those things compound and the reality is you got to put in all that work at the beginning to then see it.
Speaker 1:One other big thing that you really have to make sure you do is control the implementation. I've had so many SOPs and KPI forms created to help my sales leaders and my door knockers and my in-home guys really be the best they can. But if you don't train on those, if you don't constantly have them go to those documents for guidance and you don't have your thumb on the pulse of the company, then they won't actually do anything with it and you're just wasting time. You're not creating any good processes. So you've got to make sure they actually use the documents you give them. Your first bad client experience won't destroy the business, but it will teach you how to make it grow even bigger.
Speaker 1:When it's your business, your name on the door, your money, you really do care about the customer experience, and anytime you have a bad one and the customers get upset or they give you that four-star review, that three-star review, it feels like death. It feels like it's all over. No one's going to buy from you ever again. And the reality is it's just not true. There's going to be some people that just don't have a good experience because that's who they are, but also there's going to be a lot of people who probably have a bad experience at the beginning because you're just not that good yet and that's okay.
Speaker 1:The reality is, as long as you focus on that and as long as you look at what the mistake was and you fix it and you fix the problem and you put the process in place so it doesn't happen again, then you continue to grow and you get a compound. The business growth sucks so much and growth hurts so much, because usually you're growing because you're fixing problems. You're fixing things that are going wrong in the business. And because you're fixing problems, it just feels like things are always on fire around you and that's stressful. You want things to feel smooth and good, but the reality is, if things are smooth and good, you've plateaued. It's a straight line. Okay. Finding problems and fixing problems is literally what makes your business better. So, instead of being upset when you get these bad experiences, just make it right by the customer and instead use that as a way to say okay, this was a hole in my foundation, I can fill it with something that's gonna be more substantial. And as long as you do that smartly, your business will be fine. It'll be better than ever. And a lot of times, if you over deliver for that upset customer, you can turn them from a four star review to a five star review and sometimes even get referrals from them. And, to really top it off, if you do a really good job, they may even come work for your business, which is exactly what happened for us.
Speaker 1:$100,000 a month is not as much as you think. Now, obviously, I got to do a little bit of context here when we talk about these monthly figures. A big part of that also depends on what type of business are you in, right? If you're in super high ticket, then you could get 100K a month right off the bat. If you're really low ticket, it might take even longer and if you're in mid ticket it could be kind of in between. It doesn't matter how much money you make, how much money do you actually keep and bring home? And if you are growing, I'm just gonna let you know right now a hundred thousand dollars in a home service business is not a lot of money. A lot of that just allows you to buy more inventory at bulk to save you uh, save you some costs. It allows you to put more money into marketing so you can reach more people. It allows you to hire more key people to make the business more effective. But if you think that getting a hundred K a month is like a level where you're going to feel comfortable and things are going to be like, ah, I'm rich now, I'm going to tell you right now that's not the case in the early stages. That business is going to gobble right through that If you are trying to grow, if you're trying to stay small and you're like a one person operator and you have a, you know you just want to make some good personal income then 100K a month is probably going to be a good spot. If, again, you're a single operator with a couple installers, if you're trying to make something big, that 100K is going right there to feed that monster.
Speaker 1:Breaking systems creates exponential growth. This kind of goes back to finding problems. In the early days. You're going to have a lot of systems that you want to try to put in place and when you initially make the exoskeleton of what is your business, a lot of those systems are good for the growth phase that you're at, and what I have found to be super helpful for me in these early startup stages is do everything you can to break the system. What you don't want to do I have made this mistake multiple times is you have a system that's working and then you try to change it before it actually breaks, and what can happen is you either hire people you don't need at that time and you create a cashflow issue because you increase your overhead when you didn't need to, or you try to fix a problem that's not even there and you waste your most valuable resource, which is your time.
Speaker 1:I wanna give you a real life example of this, and that would be installation. So if you do what I do in home service, I need a dedicated installer to go out and install my systems. And a perfect example of breaking a system is I have one installer with a truck with equipment that goes out and just does the job, and then I could build systems around him to track inventory, fleet management, gas card management, gps management, got it. And maybe we have a booking schedule or a booking system that books them there. Well, at the very beginning, I don't need an expensive booking system because I don't have all these people coming in. Instead, what I want to have happen is I want to get him so much volume that it almost becomes too hard for me to then book him on time and get him coordinated with all these appointments, cause then I say, okay, now I can buy this, this better booking system that will automate some of these processes.
Speaker 1:Then let's talk about inventory management. If we only have a couple of jobs coming in every month, I can probably do that myself, or I can have him kind of track it live If we get to a point where he's always on the road and we have orders coming in and out and I'm sitting here pulling my hair like, oh my God, what do I do next? I can't keep track of his inventory, okay. Well, now maybe I need to invest in a better inventory system or hire an inventory manager or an ops manager. If it turns out he's running all over the state, he can't handle the volume. I broke another system. Now I need to hire a helper or hire another installer to now cover the volume. But if I just hired two plumbers and only one guy's working while the other guy's sitting at home not doing anything, he's either going to quit or, if I put him on a salary, I'm going to be wasting money, and this can apply to any part of the business. But build the systems so that the business works and then do everything you can to try to break them, and as you break them, you'll build them back stronger, bigger and better. But that will also stop you from wanting to move too fast, because sometimes you want to hire, hire, hire, do all these crazy things and then you put yourself in a financial sinkhole that gets really hard to get out of.
Speaker 1:Give people room to grow, but do not hold their hand. One of the hardest things to do when you bring in people into the organization or give them responsibility is not micromanaging them and helping them every time they need it. A lot of times in their very, very early stages. You're going to get really close with the initial employees. Your contact to them is one-on-one. I know every single one of my guys right now. I know my sales manager, I know my sales guys, I know my door knockers, I know my plumbers. They all have my personal cell phone number and as the company gets bigger, that kind of one-on-one relationship tends to become a little bit more disassociated.
Speaker 1:Because doing bigger and better things as the owner, what you need to do is you need to train leaders early on. So you need to bring people in who want to lead, who want to have like big goal aspirations, and then you give them the opportunity to reach those goals. So you give them the opportunity, but you can't hold their hand all along the way. A lot of times they're going to come across problems and the easiest thing for them to do is to reach out to you and ask you hey, justin, how do I fix this? Or hey, justin, this happened, what do I do? And what you'll find is, a lot of times they already knew the answer. It's just you're the authority and they haven't built up the confidence to really make an autonomous decision, and that's okay. But you want to get them to feel autonomous. You want them to feel that they have some sort of agency over their decision-making, so the best way to do that is to allow them to make those decisions under your protection. So when they come to you, instead of just saying, hey man, this is how you do it, just stop them really quickly and ask them how they would do it, and then, if the answer they give you sucks, then you can walk them through a logical framework on how to maybe look at the situation better, and then you get a good teachable moment out of it and help them grow into a better asset which can then help serve your business.
Speaker 1:Go bigger, faster and stronger even faster. Build the foundation slowly, then increase volume. This is super hard to do as well, because we always want to go big and go fast. We want a Ricky Bobby business, myself included. But what I have found is, if you build a foundation shittily and you don't give it time to actually grow and settle and you try to just dump volume into it and dump sales into it, you're going to have issues. This kind of goes back to breaking systems. You want to make sure that you still have systems that will, to some degree, do really well. So if you only have one installer, the last thing you want to do is be trying to book appointments all over the freaking state. If you only have one sales guy, the last thing you want to do is try to bombard these people with 50 appointments in one day. You've got to build things slowly and you want to be able to train these people.
Speaker 1:If you just start trying to do mass hires, you try to throw them out on the road. You try to throw them out on the streets, door knocking. You try to get them in homes right away because you're trying to get sales in, because you're desperate, because you've spent all this money on lead generation and now you have too many leads to handle and none of these guys are trained. Well, now there's going to burn through your money. They're going to go into homes. You're not going to get sales. You're going to get upset because nothing's closing and you're like dang it, what is wrong with the business, and then they're going to get mad and they're going to leave. Instead, if you can afford to just go slow, build the overhead over time and focus on real detailed training. You get these sales guys who are really good at what they do, and then, guess what, when you then increase the volume, they close at a higher rate and you get more ROAS on the money that you're spending.
Speaker 1:Track all your lead sources and then redistribute all your funds into the best three. Now, this one is going to take a little bit of time. You're going to need to be in business for about a year 18 months to really get some good data on this. So what I recommend, especially if you're early, early days, is you definitely need to spend money on all types of different resources. That's Facebook ads, google ads, seo If you're in the home service area, homeadvisor, angie ads, you got Yelp, you do mailer campaigns, door hangers, canvassing self-genning home shows, partnering with department stores all kinds of different resources. Try them all. Put a bit of money into all of them and just track the data and what you'll notice is, eventually there's going to be some winners that start to emerge. As you start to see these winners emerge, start cutting off the limbs of the marketing campaigns that aren't working in your market and then funnel that money into the ones that are. And then slowly you'll notice probably four-ish, maybe five, will start doing really well and pump the rest of the money into the last three because you'll get more bang for your buck on all the money that you spend and you'll close at a higher rate and the money that you that you're trying to save, especially these early days, will go a long way. You should always be tracking these stats live so that way, if you start to see that one of these things are starting to lag, you can readjust funds. I use my CRM for this, but you can also track it in Excel sheets If you want to. There's a bunch of software out there that you can use. The reality is you don't need a bunch of different resources to make money, you just need those three. Especially in the earlier days, as you get more cashflow and you get bigger, you can have multiple revenue channels to help lead the business forward. But you want to make sure that you use your money smartly, especially early on.
Speaker 1:Social media content is the king for hiring, so one of my best door knockers that I hired on actually came to me because of my podcast, and what was great about that is he's already bought into my culture. He's already bought into the vision and he wanted to work. He knew what I was about, he saw what we were doing here and he wanted to be a part of that growth and part of the team and it's super important. That's why I do this, that's why I document things. And what's crazy, guys, is that podcast episode only had like nine or 10 listeners Not a lot. It really goes to show you that it doesn't really matter about the views and the likes and all that. It's the quality of the content you're making and the quality of the people that are actually watching the content. By having consistent content going out and using it in a way that you're trying to give value to people, it's going to attract like-minded individuals into your ecosystem and some of those people will either send you business or they'll want to come work for you.
Speaker 1:And if you can have someone that has the same mindset as you or wants to have the mindset that you have and has already bought into you and your company culture, that is a win every single day. It doesn't cost you anything to do it. It just costs a little bit of time and effort and really you're an entrepreneur. Time and effort is the best currency that you freaking have. So if you're not on social media, if you're scared to do social media trust me, I'm not the most natural guy on social media Just get in front of the camera, start documenting your, your process. Just start a podcast kind of going over what you're doing. That's what I'm doing here. I'm showing how we've gone from $0. We started with zero. Now we're doing a hundred K a month. We're going to go and probably do 1.3 million this year. That's not bad and we're documenting the entire journey and we're going to continue to do that until I grow this thing to a billion. Sell it, go public. Whatever happens, you guys will be there. If it gets burnt to the ground, you guys will see it as well and maybe it'll be more entertaining than it becoming the biggest success ever. I guess we'll see.
Speaker 1:Don't drop pricing just to get deals in. You'll lose the ability to serve the client. Now I have on quite a few occasions just dropped price to get some of my systems into a home, which is terrible because it came from a famine mentality. If you have a premium service, if you have a premium product and you know you want to serve your client at the highest level, you need to price that in accordingly, because what will end up happening if you do this long enough, if you do enough jobs, things will go wrong. If something goes wrong, you want to be able to help them and fund that help. You know, a lot of times if you need to serve a client, you tend to lose money on deals. Right, that's just how it goes. You got to do everything you can to make it up to the client.
Speaker 1:If you are going to go really in the hole, you will probably still do what you need to do to help the client, but it's going to be more difficult. It's going to hurt and sting a lot more. If you can at least break even well, then you're going to be able to serve that client so well that they're going to totally forget about the issues they had. And that's how, especially in the early stages, you are able to survive the hiccups that, unfortunately, you're going to inevitably have in the business. You will run into roadblocks, you're going to have issues, and the best way to make sure that you don't go broke is you charge what you're worth, and that's why it's never good for a homeowner to go with a cheaper company who has a worse product. Because if you have the best warranties, if you can serve them at the best level, you have the best service plans. They're in better hands with you and that protection should come at a little bit of a premium price. I love to tell my customers this I'm like guys. If something goes wrong, who do you think can serve you better? The one that you paid $7,000, $8,000, $9,000, $10,000, $11,000 with? Or the person you spent $2, it's not even close. Now, this one is for the home service.
Speaker 1:People Continually check in on field services, keep standards high In home service businesses and really any business that has like an installation component to it. There are two times where the customer gets to experience your business. Number one is with the salesperson. Generally, that's always going to be super positive, because salespeople tend to be people pleasers. They tend to be really good with individuals. They tend to be people pleasers. They tend to be really good with individuals. They tend to be good conversationalists. They tend to have a good experience on the sales side right. That's probably why they bought in the first place.
Speaker 1:Where I have seen things fall apart is on the installation side. You need to vet and you need to be on your installer's hiney. You need to be checking in on them and making sure that you set a very high standard via SOPs and KPIs and that they understand how you want the customer to be treated, and I highly suggest, if you can't afford to have someone do these, do them yourselves. After every install, you need to do customer quality assurance calls Within 24 hours of the installs. Call your client. Don't email them, not a text. Call them. Get a live person on the phone and ask them what went good, what went bad and what you can do better. That should happen every single time, because even if they give you and this is where I got caught up they might leave you a five-star review and they might have actually had an experience that wasn't that great.
Speaker 1:And then what ends up happening is you as the owner, you're looking at all these five-star reviews, come in and you're like, oh, we're killing it. My installers are doing awesome, but they might be doing stuff that isn't what you would want to have happen. They might be on jobs way longer than they need to be. They might be doing things that are a little sketchy. They might be saying things to the customer that aren't professional. What I have found is some of these customers, as long as the system goes in well enough and they're happy with the service of the product like it did what it said it was going to do, if the installer asked them for a five-star review, they'll probably give it to you. But you know what they're not going to do. They're not going to refer you to anybody, they're not going to give, they're not going to want your business to serve their friends and family, and that's what happens. And so you don't want to be caught into this fake security by seeing all these five-star reviews come in. You want to be on top of it and you need to have, once you find an installer or a service guy who he knows his stuff, he holds your standard. You never have any problems with him. Promote him, have him then handle all the QA for your install team. The people will fall to your standards and whoever you put in charge of that installation team is going to be the standard they will follow. So make sure whoever is in charge of that has the exact same mindset as you and the same standards that you do.
Speaker 1:When you finally get the momentum, don't let it stop. A lot of times it's easy, once you can finally take a breath and there's money coming into the business, to want to kind of lean back, take a deep breath, like, ah, I made it. Guys, don't do that. That is the kiss of death, because early on, like you worked and you stressed and you got the gray hairs to get the momentum in the first place, don't give it up. It might feel tedious. Once you have the momentum, you might be kind of bored, because you'll get to this point where things are getting a little bit easier. You're just kind of doing the same day to day. You're calling people over and over. It might be getting a little bit boring. That's when you have to go even harder, though. That's when you really are going to be able to capitalize on all of these deals and get more clients in. Don't let it slip. All right, don't let that momentum go away.
Speaker 1:And a lot of times you'll see, in your sales guys too, they're going to start making all this money that they haven't seen before. So what do they do? They put their foot off the gas because their bank account's full. And what ends up happening? You get this whiplash effect where reps make a lot of money and then they stop working. Then they get desperate because their bank accounts go low. So they work even harder and you get more momentum. Then they want money and it goes down and you're up and down, up and down, up and down, which is why, if you have a sales team and you have a culture you're trying to build, it just can't be all about money, because eventually, everyone has different levels of what they want to hit or what rich or wealthy means to them, and once they hit that, a lot of these guys are going to pull back on their momentum.
Speaker 1:What has worked for me is creating a culture of competition, competitive greatness within my team, where it's not about making the most money, it's about being better than the next guy, it's about beating our competition in the region, it's about getting on top of the leaderboard, getting the special swag that no one else has. Those things mean more and those things will keep people working even after they've hit these great milestones financially. And that's how you avoid the up and down, up and down, and instead you get a team of savages who only go up. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching this video. I hope this was helpful to you.
Speaker 1:Like I said, I am growing this and I'm documenting my journey of my water treatment company. We have been doing very, very well. We are going to continue to grow this thing. I'm going to continue to document it. If you like what I'm talking about, you want to come join my team. I am actually now trying to expand, so I am hiring salespeople. So if you're interested in that, feel free to give us a call at 757-828-8594. You can shoot me a DM on social or you can shoot me an email at support at clearwavewatercom. If you're down and you want to be a savage and be part of this community, please come join us. You do need to live in Virginia, north Carolina, south Carolina, dc or Maryland. Those are the main markets that we are in. Again, guys, thank you so much for watching. I hope this was helpful. I'll catch you on the next one. No-transcript.