SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you did not show up tomorrow, not for a day, not for a week, not for a month, what would actually happen to your vehicle wrap shop? I really want you to think about that because a lot of us live in this frame that what we have right now is always going to be the way it is. So in this video, I want to basically break down how to build an unbreakable business. And uh because problems are going to come up every single day in our business, we are constantly dealing with problems. But are we making sure to take care of the real problems before they actually arise so that we can be proactive and ensure that we have plans or contingencies in place so that our business can continue to operate? Because at the end of the day, you do not know what will happen tomorrow. You do not know when an employee is going to quit. You do not know when they're not going to show up the next day. And the only person that suffers is not only you, but most importantly, your customer. The person that you work so hard to attract. And in many cases, what we just do is say, hey, sorry, yeah, you know, it's because, you know, you know, people can't come in anymore. It's hard to find good help, whatever excuse it is. That's not the problem. The problem is you didn't have a contingency in place. And today we are going to solve that. So a few months ago, I was on a phone call with a business owner, great friend. Um, I used to do all of their printing for many years, and they run a really great shop. Um, and they do a lot of really cool things. Long story short, he ended up having a medical crisis to where he ended up in a hospital bed for multiple months. And in that lesson I was talking to him about, I was like, you know, what's curious is um have you ever thought that that situation, as bad as it was, showed you that your business was good enough, or that you were even good enough to continue to operate your business without you actually having to be there slaving away. Now, did it operate to the most high effectiveness that it did? And was it probably most likely much more profitable while he was there? Yes. But the feedback loop that I wanted to cover with him during that phone call was that it didn't die. And sometimes in business, it's just about surviving till tomorrow. And because it didn't die, he now has evidence. As bad as that situation was, he now has evidence that if there was a vacation that he was not going on with family, I believe he's got kids. You know, is there something that he's missing with the kids uh in sacrifice or in lieu to the business? What is it that he is missing? And then sometimes what is the little small voice in his head that I know I used to tell myself that I must get this done. It was top priority. When in reality, the business would survive without it. And I could start to work on the business a little bit more than I was. I could start working on hiring contractors or working on hiring people to replace myself. And yes, on the short term, on the front side of things, it would have a small suffer because it's new and I'm implementing this into my business, but it didn't die. And this was the really big pivotal point for me is I observed a couple of my customers, not necessarily anybody in the rap industry, but I observed multiple customers that I was serving. And um we would always have just conversations about business. And one guy, he broke his back. He was an arborist, so he cut trees down in like Alaska, and then he had like three or four other locations. I was like, Man, you're really you've really been growing these last couple of years. He goes, Yeah, you know what? It took me breaking my back to see that I could run the business without being in the trees. And I was like, Yeah, I don't want to break my back to learn how to run my business. So I actively started working on like not hitting rock bottom or trying to, um, you know, whether it be health, financially, whatever it may be, I didn't want to hit rock bottom to start working on these things. And the thing that I started, you know, as you start to work on this, you know, let's just say the other guy, he was in a hospital bed. He physically could not be at his shop, and it had to do something with his breathing. It was his lungs. So he was just bound to a machine. And which meant that he couldn't be bound to that squeegee. He found contractors to work in his place, he made the pricing good enough that at least it was profitable enough that he could continue to pay his bills. He didn't go into debt during this situation outside of the medical. Um, I don't know the situation there. But the business operated. And you start to realize while you're answering these questions for people that you are having to employ while being bound or you know, in your office or whatever the situation is while you're growing your shop, that most of your information in your business is stuck in your head, and we really need to learn how to extract it out of our head and get it on paper. Now, if you are not having conversation with AI, and if you are not recording and documenting yourself, that is the number one leveraged activity that you can do right now, whether you're a one-person shop, 10-person shop, 20-person shop, doesn't matter. Speaking out loud, documenting, recording is the number one levered activity you can do right now. We live in a time and age of where information's kind of a commodity. So everything I tell you guys is already known. But most people, one, don't take action on it, and two, they don't leverage in the right way. And it's my opinion that in the blue-collar world, the reason why we're gonna get left behind to some of these uh corporate companies that are going to extract some of the leverage that you can with AI is that we don't have enough data or information or context in a pool to where we can actually lever the AI. Now, I don't use AI like anybody. I use AI quite a bit, but I don't use it like what most people are trying to do. Most people are trying to like create these agents and things, and they spend more time working on the agent than they actually do being effective in many cases, because most people aren't capable of doing these things. But just recording myself with a device while I'm on a sales call, just recording myself in this video, I am taking all of the information from every single video I do, and then I put it into a repository so that I can help drum up new ideas. They're still my ideas, and it's all my voice, but I have so much context to draw off of. Or remember this story, for example. I literally pulled this story from months back that I completely forgot about. I don't want to go too deep into AI, but I'll end it with this. If you could imagine basically that AI was like you're in a library and you're like, you know what? I'm having some issues with my team. Like, literally, um, you know, low budget film here. Bang, I I have the perfect book on dysfunctions of a team. And then all of a sudden, it's like, here's my situation. The AI is like, this page. So AI is effectively like AI in your business with a ton of context of you talking with sales calls, uh, meetings with customers, uh, meetings with staff, uh, you working on a vehicle and pulling it apart and talking out loud, you legitimately can um create a perfect recall of that situation years later. And to where whenever that situation finally happens again, you can pull that story and say, Oh yeah, I remember that. And more importantly, you don't pull it, your team does. And this is the number one way, in my opinion, to reduce your key man risk is to talk out loud and document yourself. So now that we're done with AI, there are three pillars of building an unbreakable shop. And pillar number one is your people. So this is the most common fragile point in any shop because it's the most difficult one to master. You can't, we're not dictators, we don't control people, and we definitely don't want to run our our businesses in such a culture that, like, you know, we're forcing people like chained to our shop to work there. We want to attract people to work there, but you also really can't control whenever you know somebody just decides to leave, and you can't control, like, you know, that somebody just, you know, what I don't want to install anymore. You know, I don't really think this is for me. Or maybe they heard the grass is greener being a realtor and there's a big real estate boom, or maybe they just want to go do vibe coding or something like that because they hear that there's lots of money over there. Like, there's a lot of information out there and a lot of distractions. And so people are constantly going to come in and out of your business, but you know, you need to be cross-training your team on purpose. Uh, I used to have a rule in my shop where if they were an admin, then they got moderately trained, not specialized, but they got moderately trained on tablework. So they got trained on a little bit of outbound sales and a little bit of uh tablework to where in a pinch they could move to one degree in either direction of the shop. Uh, same with the installer. The installer could do the administrative duties on checkout, but they could also do the production process if needed in the event that somebody called out sick. Um, and if you don't have an extra person, like if you don't have a one degree of safety uh on these positions, because maybe you're a three-man team, then you need to have some contingencies where uh maybe you need to find some contracted help. You need to make sure to have two or three backup designers, you need to make sure to have two or three contracted installers in your area. I just had a conversation this morning where um a guy, his key production guy is going on vacation uh next week, which is their key installer, and all of a sudden, out of just nowhere, their other installer just disappeared. He didn't come into work or he said that he something happened basically, and he just didn't show up. What do you do? Do you just cancel the vacation with family because somebody decided not to show up? And um, I was talking to him, I was like, Well, let me help you where I can. But like, what we need to do is we need to find a contract installer immediately. But now we also need to go ahead and find like three or four more. We need to find a guy that's not local, is willing to travel in a pinch if we need to. Um, and he had enough work for somebody for a whole week, and that helped as well. So you just want to make sure to have a backup roster. If you look at any pro team in any sport, there is a second string and a third string position typically on every single team. So your business needs to follow, you know, success leads clues. Like, let's just not reinvent the model and just copy what other people do. It's exactly what we need to do in our businesses, and um, you don't want to be stuck holding the bag working until 2, 3 a.m. in the morning uh just because your guy decided not to show up. And also, you know, you are going to go through seasons where you're just gonna be replacing people. Um, you need to have a really strong onboarding process for people that are coming in and out of your business. You need to be able to know that when you hire somebody, you reduce all the friction that it takes to hire somebody. Like, yes, they're gonna be new and they're they're not gonna be exposed to things in your business. But you could have like a curriculum quite literally that week one, this is your activity. By Friday, you must learn X. Week two, this is your activities, and it's already pre-dialed, and then you can even go uh a step above that and kind of gamify it, saying, like, hey, this is the lowest bar, which is already set pretty high, but you could also expedite how you onboard, and there will be certain checkpoints that if you can meet, you can go ahead and be in control of your pay raise because we have minimum and maximum times in every position, especially the install position. The second pillar to building an unbreakable business is your equipment. If you only have one printer, you might as well have none. If you only have one plotter, you might as well have none. Because the moment that you really need it and you pick up the biggest job that you ever picked up, plan on that thing going down. Happens every single time. And you know, your printer it doesn't care when your fleet wraps are due, and your cutter doesn't care that it's your biggest week. So um having good equipment on hand, and not only that, but warranties are expensive. I want to talk about that. And so you want to make sure to have somebody in your local market that you've already talked to. Like me, I never treated all my competitors like competitors. I wasn't buddy with them either. We were friendly competitive, but I have gone to um multiple of my competitors and had prints made, I've had cuts made, and I've had laminations completed. And that way I didn't fall greatly behind on the work. Maybe I didn't make as much money on the project, but uh not getting the job done in time is a very poor reflection of myself uh with somebody that entrusted me with their whatever it was to project to work on, but also it didn't back up at all the other projects, too. And um, you need to make sure to have supplier redundancies. I mean, if anybody if any of you guys went through uh COVID, you know that like for the first time ever, vinyl was like literally not available. Um, I remember I had some odd 60, 70 kits under my table at one time, which was uh hard to stomach. Fortunately, I had the cash and reserves to purchase that much material, but for the longest time, you couldn't get rolls of vinyl at Grimco or Fellers. Like it was like one or two rolls at a time, and and it was really bad. Um, and then it was kind of like uh if you live in the southeast in in um you know hurricane country, whenever a hurricane comes, you can't find food or toilet paper. Uh, it was the same way for vinyl. So you you want to make sure that you have multiple supplier accounts to where if for some reason you don't have ink, you can call the next one. And then not only that, you need to have it documented somewhere in like a Google Drive or in your server, and it's a checklist to where if you were gone, let's say your admin's trying to place an order of materials, and like fellers is just like, nope, we don't have it. Admin's just like, okay, who do I call? Right? So you need to have this is our primary vendor, this is our secondary vendor, this is our third vendor in a Google Doc or something that is clearly defined and easy to access for these individuals so that they can still make the decision. They know what to do in that scenario. To where when you are maybe on vacation and maybe you don't have service, your installer didn't show up that day. All of a sudden, guess what? I have a list of four or five installers I can call right now and try to solve that problem for my boss before he finds out about the problem. It's a really good saying that I heard from a CEO of uh BlackRock Financial and um Black Knight Financial in Dunham Brad Street. Uh I was working on his Tesla, just clearbroad, and um I'm at his house, freaking like 9,000 square foot house, and he just walks up to me while I'm inspecting all the edges on his PPF project, and he he's just so calm. And I was like, dude, you're the CEO of two mega companies. Like, how are you so calm right now? I'm stressed the F out over like my five guys. And uh the biggest tip and lesson that he gave me in life was that when he delegates something, he makes sure that the person understands the role in its entirety and that he has provided all the resources that they need to succeed, and because of that, could he ask of them to see the responsibility all the way through not to report on it? Not to say, oh, fellas have material, what should I do? No, just handle it to where when you come talk to me, I don't have to worry about all the baggage. It's hey Brett, uh, so there was no materials, uh, but I got it handled. Great. If I want to know more, I'll ask. But I don't want to know all the details. I don't want the report, I just want the result of what happened. And and so if you don't have your equipment, your vendors, and your data with multiple redundancies, you literally could lose quite a bit of your business very quickly, and that's a problem. Um, the last pillar in your business is your processes, and you know, a lot of people see what I'm doing today, which is you know, living full time in Mexico and operating my business, and it's grown. Now, is it perfect? Your business is never perfect. No, it's not perfect. There are issues and problems in my business today, just like there are in your business. There are always problems. And if you don't have problems, then your business is probably dead. Um, but you what I did was I, in order to check my processes and the health of how much process I had in my business, is I intentionally took a vacation. You know, I for the longest time would never leave my shop. I was there from 6 a.m. till 9 p.m. every single day, and I could never tell where things were failing at in the business. And because I was just so intimate and close to everything, I had no field of view, I had no uh perspective, I didn't, I only had a single lens view of my business at that time, and leaving to Mexico for two weeks, um basically, you know, didn't have good service and I wasn't available in most times. I I basically got the feedback of all the things that I needed to fix in my business at that time. And so if I were to leave, these things would break. Great. I want to leave, so let me fix those things. And I worked on those things for let's just call it 30, 45 days, and then I tested it again for another two weeks. Guess what? Saw improvement, great feedback loop. Then I went in and I did it again, but for a longer stay, I did like three or four weeks, I don't recall, and then I fixed those problems. And then whenever I did my final one, I did like two, two and a half months, and I was like, great, the business is good enough without me. Now I can only work on the business and continue to refine. So that's a very high-level view of what was occurring, but you know, I didn't leave for two weeks and come back and blame everybody for you know all the fires. Instead, I just actively, you know, wrote down the feedback loop and I was like, okay, do I honestly have everything that I need to have for that person to succeed in that position for this circumstance? No. Okay, let me build that. Okay, so then I go and record that SOP specifically, I document it and I put it in a place that everybody has access to and is easily findable. Now, the next time that mistake happens, I can say, hey person, did we not have the documentation and resources to succeed at that job? Yes, I remember the SOP that we made together. Okay. Does it need to be improved? No, I didn't look at it. Okay, so you chose to not follow the operating procedure that we set in place together to make sure that you got a desirable result. Yes. Okay, so then what would you do in my place if you just actively if I actively ignored all of your requests? You'd be frustrated, right? Okay. Well, I'm only moderately frustrated this time, but let's make sure that that doesn't happen again. This is a tool of omission versus commission, which just means that is this an active mistake or is this the business's responsibility or a passive mistake? So I basically just use this feedback loop over and over and over in my business to dial in the processes that I needed today to solve my problem of I didn't want to be in my shop anymore. Um and so that's our first job in the business. We should actually love mistakes. It's so funny the perspective that we look at things through. The only reason why we get really, really, really, really upset when errors happen in the business is because you're usually the one having to fix everything. And really, it's not even that you're having to fix it, it's probably because you have fixed this same mistake five or six times. That's that is probably the reason that you're actually upset, but you are masking it with something else. You basically are handling the same errors over and over and over, and your standards are too low to either have the hard conversation with the person or understand that you just are too lazy to build out the documentation for that person to succeed. And once all of the passive mistakes are eliminated, at that point, you're not attacking the person. And once you achieve this different perspective, then you're like, aha, this is the cheapest this mistake will ever be for me to fix in my business today. And then you get to focus on all the fun stuff. You get to focus on creating abundance of opportunity, you get to focus on making more money, you get to focus on creating real opportunities in your business, and that is way more fun. Like as we build our businesses and we have more people, yes, there's operational drag, but let me tell you, it's really fun seeing people develop and grow and seeing people win and seeing people succeed. And to anybody who has a limiting belief that I should stay small and keep it all, I challenge you to at least try. If you have never tried to see the other side of the coin, you're just operating in fear. You're too scared to even try. So we made a whole video on mapping out your business. It's literally step by step exactly what to do in your business. I'll put the link below. But the very first thing that you need to do, period, feedback of mistakes or not, is set your process in place of in your business. Something as simple as lead came in, what happens? Okay, we contact the client. How long until we contact the client again? Did they answer? What do we do if they didn't answer? Do we leave a voicemail? Okay, what do we say on the voicemail? So don't build out the SPs just yet, but just map the steps and then just use that as your checklist of things that you need to document and then put them all into a place that's easily findable and searchable. This stuff, this this type of work feels really weird. Um, because I actually feel the reason why most people avoid uh working on their business, even though they say I want to work on my business, not in my business. But you you think that you need the whole day to work on your business, but you're not willing to do 15 minutes on your business, so you don't even know what to work on when you finally get to work on your business, right? And I think it's because we don't get the dopamine loop as fast. You're not gonna see the results of working on your business. It's like climbing a very steep mountain. You're not going very far, but you are going up. And you're climbing this thing, and then all of a sudden you turn around and you look and you're like, Holy heck, I've made it really far. And it's a result of tiny little adjustments every single day. It's not one lever that you just pull really, really hard, and all of a sudden your business changes. So I want you to start working on your business at least for an incremental period of time. You are the only person who can answer how long that should be. But even 15-20 minutes, you could do one SOP. Just one. And it doesn't have to be perfect. Make a rule, like if you're a perfectionist, make a rule. I only get one chance to shoot this today. And I'm gonna put it into a documentation format, and that's gonna be good enough for right now. I will revise it when we have the feedback loop arrive, because it's a good culture play for your team to see you owning accountability when you have a mistake. Because one, they saw you had it documented, and two, they saw you improve it. Get serious about this. If your business at the very beginning of this video, if you are already a person who is terrified of leaving your work, your business for a day or two, or you feel so obligated to it that you just you can't even uh take your significant other out for for lunch for the day or something of that matter, there's a problem. What if you had a car accident? What if somebody needed you and it was an emergency? Who knows what could happen tomorrow? And then now this thing that you've been working on and in for years is so fragile that it just dies and you get a bad reputation just because you didn't plan in advance. Please don't do that. Please be prepared. So when you get back to your shop Monday morning, I want you to do an audit for your people. Who on your team has zero backup? That's your first cross-training target. Who's approaching the one-year mark in your business? Have a meeting with them. Ask them what their goals are. What are they looking like? Do they still enjoy working here? What are they wanting to go after? Having more meetings with your team members and making sure that they're aligned with their goals will also help you be more prepared uh and almost know when they're going to want to leave in many cases. Um, for your equipment, start calling around to your local market. Agree to a print rate with a buddy uh in case your printer goes down so that you don't have to pay full wholesale price with like uh WePrint wraps, you know, um, which they're a great backup resource, but it could be negotiated much better to where you can just drive across the road and pick up your materials and stay on track. And for your processes, I advise you to go out of vacation. Like it sounds weird, but literally go on a vacation and test your business. Walk through every critical task and ask if I were not there, who does this? And do they have everything that they need to succeed? And then tackle the biggest errors and mistakes that occur in the business first. And if you start doing this, then you'll start to see like this is actually kind of fun and you can gamify it. Like it is frustrating sometimes at the moment, but like it's it's just little tiny things, that's all it is, and you're always gonna have them. So we might as well have fun with it. So I hope this was effective. I hope this was beneficial to some of you guys. And if you ever need me, shoot me a DM. I'm here to serve. I have a goal of helping a hundred vehicle wrap shops to seven figures by the time I'm finished with this industry. So reach out if you need me, and we'll see you on the next one. Peace.