Managing 40 Employees with Only 12 Hours Per Week

Nick Slavik, founder and owner of the Nick Slavik Painting and Restoration Company, shares insights on managing relationships, the significance of purpose, and the strategies he employs for business growth, including effective marketing and sales techniques. 

He discusses his journey from leaving a family business to starting his own, the impact of military experience on his perspective, and the importance of empathy in both business and family life. The conversation emphasizes the balance between personal growth, family, and professional responsibilities.

About Nick Slavik
Nick Slavik is the Proprietor of the Nick Slavik Painting & Restoration Co. and is the Host of Ask a Painter Live.  Ask a Painter Live has aired weekly for over 9 years, instructing, answering questions, and championing the trades and entrepreneurship as an avenue for freedom.  Nick has been a social media influencer and content creator for over a decade.  His company will celebrate its 17th anniversary this year, employs +40 people, has a leadership team, and operates a full-scale finishing shop and training facility.

Nick has been a craftsman for more than 33 years.  His company has been awarded more than 17 National awards for craftsmanship, including massive restorations of Victorian mansions.  He has created a rigorous Apprenticeship program where he finds, trains, inspires, and mentors young people in his craft. Nick is currently the Chairperson of the Board of Directors for the PCA - the Painting Contractors Association.  The PCA is a 140-year-old nonprofit whose mission is to build better contractors. 

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instagram.com/slaviknick

youtube.com/@AskaPainterLive

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linkedin.com/in/nick-slavik-aa7b53157

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 4:58 The Impact of Military Experience on Perspective
• 10:53 Leaning into Relationships
• 16:34 Intentional Parenting and Relationships
• 22:41 Empathy in Business Management
• 27:37 Understanding Biological Urges and Personal Growth
• 33:29 Effective Team Management Strategies
• 40:55 Marketing and Sales Growth Strategies
• 46:10 Navigating Economic Changes in Business

Transcript

Nick Slavik (00:00)
You get a visionary, a super good technician who starts something, no management. And that's where they stall out or fall apart altogether.

I've had to force myself to be a manager because we're not at the business size where I hire a general manager or a CEO yet. So I've had to synthesize a way where I don't completely drive myself nuts, but also supply my company with management. That has completely coincided with being a better father and a husband.

Kaila Sachse (00:25)
Welcome to the Bringing Up Business podcast, where we talk about business and parenting. Whether you have an idea for a business, you already have a business and you're planning a family, or you want to upgrade your existing business and family situation, our goal is to empower you with strategies and confidence. I'm your host, Kaila Sachse, owner of a marketing and creative agency called Yumari Digital.

I am also proud to call myself mom. I have a two-year-old who I get to hang out with every day and who is sometimes also my sidekick on work adventures. Today, we have the honor of learning from Nick Slavik. Nick Slavik is the proprietor of the Nick Slavik Painting and Restoration Company.

His company will celebrate its 18th anniversary this year with over 40 people employed. He is also the host of Ask a Painter Live. Ask a Painter Live has aired weekly, legitimately weekly, every week. He shows up every week for over nine years, championing entrepreneurship as an avenue for freedom. Nick, I'm so excited to get to hang out with you again. Welcome to the show.

Nick Slavik (01:39)
Thank you for that and I was just admiring your beautiful voice over voice like you have like the great tone and pitch for doing reads just like that. That was perfect.

Kaila Sachse (01:44)
Ooh. Ooh.

Ooh, okay. I'll have a nice little extra skill I can add to my repertoire here. I love it. Thanks for sharing. I appreciate that. So let's dive into your journey because everybody's business and parenting journey is different. For you, which came first? What did that look like?

Nick Slavik (01:55)
you

Yeah, it all came at once. So I got married. My wife was shortly pregnant after. And I started a business all in the same year. And I should also say I left a longstanding family business all in the same year. So it's a force majeure.

Kaila Sachse (02:29)
my goodness. What? Okay, wait a second. Tell me about this family business that you walked away from. Like, what was that like? mean, having to say no to something is a very difficult thing to do. So why did you walk away from that business?

Nick Slavik (02:46)
Yeah, to be, man, I love accuracy. My father basically had no place for me. So it was more of a...

him saying, you can stay if you want, but there's not much here for you. So a very long story short, my father got me started in the painting business when I was 10, 10 to 18 worked for him, four years in the army, did college after that, I tailored my entire college education to running entrepreneurship, small family business, trades based business. And then joined my father after college. And basically, we had a big powwow. And it's like, hey, what are we going to do here? We got a bunch of families to support. And very kindly, he said, you know, this is my

business. I don't have any plans for that. And I had worked my entire life building up to me doing the, you know, Atlas holding up the globe behind the scenes of this business so that my father could have a retirement, my brother could grow a family. And it just wasn't there. And it was a huge shock to the system. Father didn't show up to my wedding. And six months later, I started my own business and we started a family shortly after and ⁓ a lot happened in that year.

Kaila Sachse (03:52)
Yeah, that sounds intense. thought, so, you know, my story, I started my agency and then a month after I found out I was pregnant. So I can like understand what it's like to have a million things happen at once. But that like, that all sounds so intense for you. I can only imagine what that was like.

Nick Slavik (04:12)
Well, I had this really interesting experience where growing up, I didn't have the best guidance and perspective from parents. So I was just kind of like flailing out in the world anyway. And I served in the military between 2000 and 2004. So I went to two wars. I went and got a college education.

And honestly, I had this experience decompressing from that military experience in college and then through family of I found myself saying a lot of time, all you want, like in college, all you want me to do is read a chapter tonight. Like, what's everybody complaining about here? You're sitting in a chair and you're reading a book and you guys are angry at that. And so at some point it's like I just came down from, you know, sleeping in the dirt.

Kaila Sachse (04:49)
Right. Yeah.

Nick Slavik (05:02)
all sorts of other things, not having food for long periods of time. And then when something like that happens, it's ballasted against that. And you're like, well, it's still not that. So it's the theme for my life for probably the last.

Kaila Sachse (05:13)
Right.

Nick Slavik (05:18)
18 years of running this business is it would have to be pretty bad for me to have a bad day. A lot bad would have to happen all at once for me to have a bad day. So I've been operating under that for two decades now.

Kaila Sachse (05:25)
Mm.

What a blessing to be able to experience, no seriously, to be able to experience such a low, low, right, and experience actual difficulty so that it can color the way that you view daily life. And you have, I imagine you're walking through the world with a lot more gratitude for the basic things.

Nick Slavik (05:56)
Well, and I have to be really careful. It comes with a lot of cynicism as well too, because you can, it's very easy. ⁓ I grew a very high pain tolerance and it's very easy to walk around the world and be very critical of other people who complain about small things or I can't seem to show up to work. And you're like, do you understand? Like.

Compared to what? Like that's hard for you compared to what? And so you ⁓ finding a place to lead my family and my businesses through empathy has actually been the biggest challenge of this entire two decade period.

Kaila Sachse (06:33)
⁓ That's a very important point, right? it's so easy for us to look at other people's situations and maybe we're not, obviously we're not getting the full 360 of somebody else's life. We never can actually be in somebody else's shoes. We can only imagine it. And so it's so easy for us to look at other people and be like, hey, they got it easy. Why are they complaining right now? Why are they not showing up in the way that I know that they can?

when in reality they're going through their own difficulties. And so I love how you touched on empathy. Empathy is such an important cornerstone of how we can be in community with other people. So let's talk about that. How does that enter into your business and your family? What does that look like in those two realms?

Nick Slavik (07:21)
This has been my life's work for two decades of trying to find, trying to close the gap between where I know I need to be with this and where I actually am. And every year through intentional work, you bring it closer and closer. And if I'm being honest, I think I've had some pretty major breakthroughs in the last three to six months of this sort of thing.

This is like a million conversations all in one, but the thing that helped me find peace with this so I can be present and empathetic with people is figuring out what I think my actual purpose is, like my direction, not a goal in life, you know, because you could say like, hey, I want a business to be this big. I want this many kids. I want a cabin and a boat. And the problem is like when you get those things, if you consider that your life's purpose, your life's purpose is now over.

And now you can understand why a human would slide into a midlife crisis and existential angst and things like that. And so I've done a million pounds of work on trying to find my purpose. Like what is the direction I head in that will never be solved? And as long as I stay on that direction, a lot of these other little minor things that pull me into unempathetic Nick don't seem that important because they don't move me closer to my purpose

I've made more peace with that sort of idea and finding empathy in the last three to six months than I have in the last 20 years.

Kaila Sachse (08:43)
That's incredible. mean, the inner work that it takes to understand, understand the difference between goals and purpose, because they are very different. You mentioned a couple of breakthroughs in the past six months. What did those look like?

Nick Slavik (09:02)
Well, there's sort of this concept of like, and I'm sorry, these are super basic things, but they're things that I didn't grow up with. So I'm all being exposed to them in the last three years of intense sort of work on myself. you have a choice. You have like.

Three choices with every personal and professional relationship you have. You can lean into it and be productive. You can lean away from it and be not productive, or you could do absolutely nothing. so thinking about who my relationships are and what level of leaning in and leaning out or doing nothing I should do has been all the difference. And including, like, I've leaned into my relationship with my wife more than I have in probably our 18 year, 20 year relationship.

recently and she has done the same and that has brought me so much professional peace. didn't understand when you're I didn't understand how much it affected me because sometimes you can go 10 years 20 years with this thing that you just assume is a baseline and it's not a baseline and when you really start leaning in and doing uncomfortable stuff and working through uncomfortable things you realize like my god I've been dragging around an 80 pound backpack with me for all these years and all of sudden you get this

light and airy feeling. You move closer to your purpose and then all of a sudden these little squabbles while an employee was late to work doesn't seem as important anymore, you know?

Kaila Sachse (10:28)
Absolutely, absolutely. I completely understand what you mean. I spent my 20s doing so much internal work. I came from a very difficult childhood. And so I had to confront that. Otherwise, there was no option. If I didn't confront that, I could see the road that I would head down and it wasn't a good one. So I chose to do that work and

It's not easy. It's not easy confronting all of the things that scare you and make you uncomfortable and practicing the opposite every day and leaning into those fears. But I'm so glad that I did because like you say, you realize you're dragging around this 80 pound weight and you don't know that you're dragging around that weight until you do that.

Nick Slavik (11:18)
Absolutely.

Kaila Sachse (11:20)
So, what does leaning in with your wife look like?

Nick Slavik (11:24)
For me

The biggest problem is I have a unique personality. And I invite one unique, not like I have a great personality. No, it's just unique. I tend to be the guy who cuts everyone off and races to a solution. I get very impatient. I'm very optimistic. So in discovering the difference between a human who wants to have a conversation with you for comfort or for solutions is a big

Kaila Sachse (11:33)
you

Nick Slavik (11:53)
And I just assumed because I love brutality. I love solutions. I don't overlay any emotions on anything I prefer when people criticize what I do in a helpful way so I can make improvements Turns out not a lot of other people enjoy that sort of walking through life with brutal feedback all the time And that's how I kind of like well if I like this I'm sure everybody else likes it too. That is not the case and especially with your your significant other and your children

Kaila Sachse (11:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nick Slavik (12:22)
and most of the people you interact with, a lot of people want to be heard. And so I've changed how I interact with my wife, how I interact with my kids, how I interface with my leadership team on one-on-one meetings, and how I interface with all my employees on a place of ask a lot of questions, listen, and see how far you can go without offering a solution. Let them come up with the solution. And that's that.

Kaila Sachse (12:48)
Mmmmm

Nick Slavik (12:51)
That makes me, that gives me anxiety just thinking about that. I don't wanna do that.

Kaila Sachse (12:58)
It sounds like maybe you're more of a visionary. You have an idea for what can be done, what needs to be done, and you just want to implement that as quickly as possible. Did I read that right? Yeah.

Nick Slavik (13:07)
Yeah, have.

Yeah, for sure. I follow the traction model and I am not an integrator. I am an absolute visionary and I have this crazy modifier attached to it with this insanely impatient, insanely optimistic. So it's rapid action and we, kind of internally follow the scientific process where you come up with a hypothesis, you change a variable, you do a test, you learn from it and you cycle through that so fast that it makes humans around you dizzy. But the best part is you iterate and learn.

And so I can do 10 cycles through experiments and actually come up with something good before most people would be like, they're still kind of like feeling it out. And that's not always good, but in the things that I can control, it's actually been very helpful.

Kaila Sachse (13:50)
Yeah, I can actually see that being very helpful for business specifically. So how do you, how do you nourish that while also taking care of your team and giving them the space to be human and share their ideas too?

Nick Slavik (14:05)
Oddly enough, ⁓ so I have some interaction with a non-profit, like a trade association that helps our industry, and we track a lot of stats from painting businesses all over the world. And we find a very unique thing that in painting businesses that I've recently found out is not unique to just painting, which is a lot of people are like me. I was a master crafts person. can restore ⁓ a cathedral, I can gold leaf, I can paint the ceiling in your house. I can do anything coating wise.

people like me will start a business because we can't find anywhere to work that will support us because there's just a bunch of unprofessionalized businesses. So you have a master technician who's also a visionary. The thing that's missing in the middle is any form of management. And management is listening, asking questions, constant support, office hours. That is not a visionary and that is not a master technician. So the majority of paint businesses in the United States are completely management lists.

What I've recently found out is most businesses are the same way. You get a visionary, a super good technician who starts something, no management. And that's where they stall out or fall apart altogether. Long way around of saying.

I've had to force myself to be a manager because we're not at the business size where I hire a general manager or a CEO yet. So I've had to synthesize a way where I don't completely drive myself nuts, but also supply my company with management. That has completely coincided with being a better father and a husband. when I, when I went down the path of performance coaching. So I'm from Minnesota. We can't say therapist here. We're very,

You know, we we use performance coaching because we're so private and we're so introverted here. So when I went down the line of performance coaching years ago, I basically said, I need to become a better manager and for my kids, for my wife and for my businesses. And I had to confront a bunch of brutal things about myself to do that. those things, the improvement with the relationship with my kids, my wife, and all of my businesses has all improved with me learning empathy, listening, and asking questions.

Kaila Sachse (15:49)
you

So beautiful. Tell me, remind me again, how old are your kids?

Nick Slavik (16:17)
Yeah, they are 10 to 16, two years apart, two boys, two girls, all evenly spaced.

Kaila Sachse (16:23)
Wow, that is just like the perfect staccato. Okay, and how have you noticed your relationship with your kids shift as your internal being has shifted through performance coaching?

Nick Slavik (16:38)
Yeah, there's yes, there are my many performance coaching sessions. Yes. So ⁓ there is like the soft skills. There's like the listening, the asking questions and the empathy. But then there's also me with my spreadsheet where I take eight areas of life that I want to be intentional with.

Kaila Sachse (16:42)
you

Nick Slavik (16:56)
and you attach some sort of purpose to it, and then you have very long-term goals. And I have goals all the way down to the week, which is, what do I need to do this week in order to move towards my purpose? And then I have accountability partners who help me with that. so yes, there's this whole thing about, you have to have a system of listening, answering questions, or asking questions, things like that. But then you also have to overlay.

Like, are you just going to stand around and hope that happens? Or are you going to say, four times this quarter, I want to go golfing with my oldest daughter because she loves that. She asked me to do it. And that will force a lone time. And that will give us time to listen and ask questions and things like that. So that's we overlay KPIs with the soft skills. And that keeps me on track. I don't want this to sound like robotic sort of stuff. But that's what I need in order to move towards my purpose.

Kaila Sachse (17:49)
Yeah, well, that's a very important point to make, right? It's important that we understand ourselves and how we tick, what works well for us. And so for you, having the KPIs with the soft skill overlay, and it sounds like the accountability and the overall purpose drive, that is the system that you have intentionally built.

in order to drive this vehicle forward and live a life that feels more on target for you. And so it sounds like first you have to understand your major life purpose and what your values are. Otherwise you have no idea where you're going and what you're doing, what matters to you. And

Once you understand what your purpose is and what matters to you, that can boil all the way down to your daily life and understanding like, ⁓ don't feel good right now and that's probably because I'm in misalignment. Something just isn't working.

Nick Slavik (18:48)
Listen,

one of the things that I work with a lot of my employees on too.

Other paint business owners too is the concept of dissonance. And dissonance is how I understand it, is the difference of where you think you should be or know you should be and where you are now. And that is that 80 pound backpack on your back that sometimes we don't realize if we're not intentional about knowing where we should be. It can be the stress that just grinds you to dust. And sometimes you don't even know what the cause is. And that is it's that dissonance that like, I worry when people don't have dissonance all the time if I'm being honest.

Kaila Sachse (19:19)
.

Nick Slavik (19:24)
honest.

Kaila Sachse (19:25)
Right, right. Yeah, because if somebody doesn't have dissonance, that means that they're in lala land. Maybe, maybe, right? There's no awareness. So what are the red flags from your perception that somebody is not in alignment? And what would you suggest for somebody to get that help? Like, what does that look like?

Nick Slavik (19:50)
Yeah, 100%. So malaise, like general malaise. It's like you're just feel like you're being crushed by everything and everyone around you.

I can't be consistent. I'm not waking up on time. My job performance is not great. I'm disappointed in the last couple of ways I've interacted with people. That is somebody, this may be a little more about me than somebody else, but that may be more about you and not having a system in which to decide what to do. I also love a good oversimplification. And I got introduced to this a bunch of years ago

where once you do a little work on what your purpose is or what direction on the compass, not an exact degree, but like you can even just take a vector. Like I don't know for sure, but this general area that I'm going to head that way. Once you know that, ⁓

Kaila Sachse (20:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nick Slavik (20:43)
I boiled it down to a simple question, is, is what I'm going to do right now move me closer to that purpose or farther away from it? So you get a bunch of friends like, hey, let's take a golf weekend where all it's going to be is drinking and debauchery and we're going to spend a bunch of money. And it's like, wow, that sounds like a lot of immediate fun, but does it move it closer to my purpose? And typically the answer is like, And so you

Kaila Sachse (21:01)
Yeah. Right.

Nick Slavik (21:07)
feel much better about saying no to something like that when you know like, no, this is my purpose and that's actually

Kaila Sachse (21:10)
.

Nick Slavik (21:13)
to move me farther away from it now. And that's not what

I want to do. And if you truly believe that is your purpose, it's not a hard decision.

Kaila Sachse (21:21)
Right, right, having that compass set, again, maybe not to the exact degree, but the general vector, that can help immediately lead your decisions. Yeah, that makes sense.

Nick Slavik (21:34)
Yep, and and it can work.

So that's like, yeah, that's a bad example. Like hey, do you want to go to bachelor party? It's like, huh? It doesn't interest me anyway, and it doesn't move me closer to my purpose. That's a hard no one of them actually with people like my personality is I should start another business and you're like, well, yeah Like does that move you closer to your goal? Because we we all suffer from some form of shiny object syndrome and you can literally be like, but it's not a big business It's just a little online business and you're like, okay

Kaila Sachse (21:56)
Mm-hmm.

you

Nick Slavik (22:01)
Does that move you

closer to your goal or not? it can rein you in that way as well too.

Kaila Sachse (22:05)
That completely resonates. have that problem. Ideas come to me and I feel like I have to be the one to nurture them. And ultimately I've come to realize that by spreading myself so thin with so many different ideas, now I'm not serving anything at all. Nothing moves. everything goes backwards. So let's talk about how...

Nick Slavik (22:26)
Everything goes backwards.

Kaila Sachse (22:32)
How does that empathy show up in a day-to-day way within your business? say if an employee shows up late, for example, like how do you handle that? What do you do?

Nick Slavik (22:45)
Yeah, I have a decision making rubric around that, my response is dictated by the answer to one of these two questions. Is it a core value violation that they're late or is it a technical violation? So a technical violation is listen, people make simple mistakes.

Is this a good person? Does this person take care of our clients? Do they follow our standard operating procedures? Are they decent human beings? And if the answer to all that is yes, and they made a simple mistake, do not crack open their neck and scream down their face. I know this because I did it for the majority of my life of, zero empathy, zero, I used to fire people. If you're late three times, I would give you a choice. I'm docking you a dollar an hour or you're fired. What do you want to do?

Kaila Sachse (23:29)
Wow.

Nick Slavik (23:30)
And I come to realize there's a whole bunch of awesome human beings that are going to be 13 minutes late every day. And that's the only thing that's wrong with them. And so at that point, you're just like, boy, that makes me tremble. It makes me so angry. I shake inside that you're doing

Kaila Sachse (23:30)
Yeah. right.

Nick Slavik (23:46)
this because you could solve so many things by just being 13 minutes earlier every day. But at the same time, they're like, you know what? At what cost? At some line, these are awesome human beings. They're trying very hard.

They've probably not been raised like I have, been to two wars, have a college education, got married and had four kids. I bet you when they get a little more life experience under their belt, they'll probably make more decisions too. And in the meantime, they're awesome humans.

Kaila Sachse (24:11)
Wow. That sounds foundational to building a business that's actually going to work together and thrive together. Instead of this opposition leadership, not even leadership, management or boss versus employee, now it's all of us as a team. all see each other. We identify each other as being one in this mission. We're all moving forward together.

Nick Slavik (24:38)
the biggest problem is, growing up with no perspective, you assume everybody performs like you, thinks like you.

likes feedback like you. And honestly, for us business owners, visionaries, and the innovators of the world, it is not that case. And recalibrating yourself to interact with the rest of the world is sometimes a very difficult thing, especially when I got raised in a thing where it's, I just got screamed at, do it better, do it faster. And there was no empathy, there was nothing. So I led with that sort of same thing. And recalibrating that has literally been the toughest thing ever.

Kaila Sachse (25:11)
Yeah, yeah. aside from performance coaching or therapy, how else can you gain a wider perspective so that you can better see other people?

Nick Slavik (25:22)
man, ⁓ the topic of this week that I've been ideating on is friendship. I host two retreats a year. I just got done with one last week and the overarching theme of that thing has been friendship and the benefits of friendship. And sometimes when you don't know your purpose or which direction to go, sometimes just forming and deepening meaningful relationships.

is all you need until you find until you take that vector and narrow it in like that. I have this this is going to sound really gross, but it is true. I have five different humans that helped me in some form of accountability and brutal feedback in my life. Some are performance coaches, some are friends. One is a mentor.

And that that sounds like well all you do is just go around from counseling to counseling and mentored. No no no listen this is I probably have three to four hours a week of this sort of thing and five entities that do this but it is literally a combination of friends that are in a different season of life than me, a mentor, a formal coach, some therapists and honestly I found a great rhythm.

Kaila Sachse (26:18)
Wow.

Nick Slavik (26:31)
with a couple hours a week for that. And that's literally the thing that helps me. I didn't have any outside perspective growing up and I have to get it really quickly now because of the stage of business and family we're at.

Kaila Sachse (26:43)
What do you think was the catalyst for you in realizing, okay, I have a narrow perspective. I've been growing up, maybe I live in my bubble.

and now it's time to do some work and learn from other people. What shifted for you?

Nick Slavik (26:58)
So also been thinking about this and there's a pattern I have where I have biological urges to do certain things. Start a painting business, ask a painter, grow these businesses, find friends. I was not raised by somebody who has those things and by

whatever reason it's here, whether it's chemical or spiritual or something else, through all of this adversity, through all of the, you shouldn't have friends, they're all your enemies, you you need to treat other people harsh, through all that, a lot of that didn't make sense to me. And I had these biological urges to do something different. And I don't know where it came from. I'm trying to figure out that, but they're there. And I'm so grateful that they are. And I wish I had something better to tell you, but...

Kaila Sachse (27:19)
Yeah.

Nick Slavik (27:45)
I can't sleep at night if I don't do these things

and I don't know why.

Kaila Sachse (27:50)
I get that. get that. Oprah used to call them the whispers. It's something that speaks to you and is like, something is off. Something is off. Something is off. And she would say, the whispers will get louder and louder until they are screaming at you and shaking you and breaking you until you listen. And so ⁓ what a blessing to be able to listen to them while they're still tiny.

Nick Slavik (28:15)
I love putting it under that because the whispers have never been quieter than they are right now in my life and I'm grateful for that.

Kaila Sachse (28:22)
Mm-hmm. It sounds like you're tuned in, right? You can't hear the whispers unless you are actively trying to listen for them.

Nick Slavik (28:30)
Yeah, more tuned in than I was before.

Kaila Sachse (28:33)
Yeah. You know, it's funny, this is a show about business first and then parenting and how those two worlds can live together. What's always so fascinating to me is that we will dive into conversations that are not so tactical, right? Like what are the exact steps you are taking to technically grow and start or start and grow this business, right?

Instead, what I find is that we get into conversations that are spiritual, are the talk about personality and how we go about the world. Because realistically, zooming out, having a business means that you are in community with other people and you are all trying to move toward the same goal. And when we understand how to work with other people, that seems to be the key that unlocks

everything.

So let's talk about how the heck you, how do you do all this? You have your business, you're doing your inner work, you're doing your podcasts, you're also spending very intentional time with your kids and with your wife. What does your day to day look like?

Nick Slavik (30:46)
Yeah, and upfront and honest, I haven't always been this way. I've forsaken, forsook. My family has been forsaken for lots of years. That's a weird one. ⁓ Yeah, in figuring out my place in the world and then deciding to rapidly grow a few businesses, it's...

Kaila Sachse (30:54)
I don't know. I don't know what it is.

Nick Slavik (31:07)
I, my family did not see me for a lot of times. And when they did see me, fellow paint business owners who have done rapid scaling, like I have, we like to joke that our favorite game to play with our kids was laying down, which is daddy comes home from work and I lay on the floor and you can, you can crawl on me. You can throw stuff at me, but I'm laying down. That's, that's the game we play tonight. So,

No, they haven't always seen me and I haven't always been present for sure. in recent years, another biological urge that I have is oversimplification. And that has been such a boon to what I do. Everything can be broken down, the fat cut off of it. Don't do one extra thing for one extra minute if it doesn't either help a human or return on your investment.

And that has been a great biological urge. That's that whisper where I can't, if my 17 step standard operating procedure to paint a bedroom could be 16, I can't sleep at night because there's some fat to be cut off there. So I have broken the systems down in these businesses, even the management and the interpersonal systems down to so beautiful and so simple that I own a residential painting and restoration company.

I have the Ask a Painter as a brand. I do nonprofit work and I have a real estate holdings company. And all in, if I really want to express and grow all these things, it's gonna take about 50 to 55 hours a week. At its minimum though, my business only needs about 12 to 15 hours for me for the painting business. ⁓ Ask a Painter as a brand needs maybe five hours a week. The real estate holding company takes about an hour.

Kaila Sachse (32:41)
Wow.

Nick Slavik (32:47)
and the nonprofit works takes about two to 10 hours depending on the season of the year. So all in all, four huge entities, I can probably do the minimal amount of work in about 20 to 25 hours a week, 50 if I really wanna lean in and do stuff. So I don't think you can carve any more fat out of there, honestly.

Kaila Sachse (33:05)
That's pretty trim. That's like 99 % lean right there. Man, okay, hold on a second. You said 12 to 15 hours for a business, for your painting business that has 40 employees, right? Am I connecting these dots correctly? How do you?

Nick Slavik (33:09)
Very much so.

Kaila Sachse (33:23)
manage a team of 40 in only 12 hours a week.

Nick Slavik (33:28)
some unsatisfying answers and possibly some satisfying answers. Number one, if you recruit good people, it takes up about 20 to 30 % of management. If you recruit good people, you'll will save about 30 % of your week just from managing all the stuff that should be managed by you know, we operate under the decent human being principle, which is we typically find people who are great humans who have never done this before. We start with the base where people are going to show up on time and treat others nicely.

Kaila Sachse (33:32)
We'll take both.

Nick Slavik (33:55)
and then we overlay our technical skills. And that's been a great strategy. Insane amount of investments in human and patience and empathy, but in the long run, it does pay off and we're in the long run. So number one, you can save 20 to 30 % of all the headaches of business that we always think about. The constant, my God, this went wrong, or this didn't work well, or this happened on a job site. ⁓ Just by recruiting better and firing quicker. ⁓ If somebody's not an immediate heck yeah.

in your company in a week or two, you just fire them. That's just it. That's just how it goes. ⁓ Then there is standard operating procedures. So business owners like us, love systems and processes, systems and processes. And then typically what we do is we sign up for 51 different apps, use Zapier to connect them all. And we think that is what it is. And it's like, no, you've created spaghetti code and a very complicated system. so what we do is we have like four interior painting processes and each of them

Kaila Sachse (34:24)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nick Slavik (34:53)
have a menu card, a standard operating procedure that fits on one page. And we train in our apprenticeship program those four standard operating procedures. We have time trials, all the gear is there. In my company, we go to paint somebody's house, there's only one brush, one tape, one patch, one caulk, one type of wall paint, things like that. we've taken selection, cripple-ization out of that whole thing. There's only one brush, so you don't have to select that.

Then you have the business processes, where we have broken down the major silos in the business to starting with who owns what. The estimators own this. The project managers own this. The coordinator owns this. Marketing owns this. Ops manager owns this. And everybody knows their job. So if somebody says, hey, there's a change order on a project, everybody knows that's an estimator. Kick it back to them. They do it. This is my job. That is your job. I'm here to support you. So clear lanes like that.

And then there's the management and human processes, which is basically if I can keep morale high, problems go down. People stay longer and then it takes less management. So again, it's what I found with the management process is hardcore weekly one-on-ones with my leadership team. Every single human on my leadership team gets a one-on-one meeting with me. And this is the thing that I've had to work on, which is I used to have a list of 81 KPIs, graphs and metrics.

And I used to tell them what to do before they asked for help. And now what I do is I sit down, we go to a coffee shop and I say, how's your week? And then I just shut up for 45 minutes. And it's the most beautiful conversations ever. And we are so grateful that we talked.

Kaila Sachse (36:31)
How does the hanging out at a coffee shop, "how's your week?" conversation translate into hitting the KPIs though? how does that bridge the gap?

Nick Slavik (36:39)
imagine a scenario where, I need you to produce $1.5 million of residential repaint work with an average job size of 51.30 and ⁓ a gross profit of 45. You didn't do that last week. You need to do that. Go out there and do that. What do you need for me to do that? Like this didn't work out. You need to get on these job sites. You need to bang trash can lids together. And so when you start a one-on-one meeting,

The only time where that human individually interfaces with you with pointing out their faults, telling them what to fix and telling them you better do this or next time, it's not gonna be great. That is a, if you're one personal interaction with the boss, is that every week? That's a wet blanket and you tend to not perform better or leave. But if you sit there and you connect with somebody personally, they feel ingratiated to you. I feel better about it. They love your company better.

they will decide to do that extra thing. They will decide, you know, we work a four day work week. So my project manager decided tomorrow that he wants to get this special door delivered. And he goes, Nick, it's Labor Day weekend, but I'm coming in tomorrow because I want to get this thing done. If all I did was lead with, you need to get out there, you need to be here Friday, you need to... It doesn't work. It's this long play of interpersonal interaction,

Kaila Sachse (37:53)
Mm

Nick Slavik (37:54)
so that...

People are in with your culture so that they will just naturally do the things. And that has been the hardest thing for me to just trust as a process.

Kaila Sachse (38:04)
Ooh, that trust. Because I can imagine, you're sitting there 45 minutes later, you've been listening to this other human being hold the floor and your foot's tapping underneath the table. And you're just waiting like, okay, can we talk about the actual things that really need to be.

talked about. So I can imagine that trust in just saying, you know what, this time spent is worth it because it will pay dividends later on. makes sense.

Nick Slavik (38:28)
It's

a pretty wild thing. I found a ton of peace with this to the point where my goal for the last two years has been to find my voice as a manager, not as a visionary leader and not as a master technician, as that manager. And that is so against that. I would never hire me to be that. If I did a disc profile, you'd be like, you are the worst manager that's ever been invented on this planet.

The problem is my company needs it and I like to accomplish goals. So I am going

Kaila Sachse (38:53)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Nick Slavik (38:55)
to force myself to be a square peg in a round hole. through finding my own voice, just like musicians and comedians do, I now look forward to these one-on-one meetings where for years I dreaded them. I found any way to get out of them and that was a huge disservice to my people. So sticking in there.

Kaila Sachse (39:11)
Yeah.

Nick Slavik (39:13)
lots of performance coaching and everything else. You can synthesize your own way to be what your company needs until you can hire somebody that's who's better than

Kaila Sachse (39:21)
Yeah, I love that. I love that. So it's like step up or hire out basically. Step up or hire somebody who can do that step up for you.

Nick Slavik (39:27)
You have it.

I talk with other business owners all the time, like, but I hate one-on-one meetings. It's like, that's what your company needs though. Doesn't matter what you like. Like, what do you want to do here? Like, then move backwards. Go back to doing this on your own. Don't have employees. Like, that's the choice. Being a business owner, put your big boy and big girl pants on. It's not what you want to do. It's what your business needs.

Kaila Sachse (39:50)
Yep, yep, yep, yep. And that can be translated to parenthood too, right? Sometimes, a lot of times as a parent.

Nick Slavik (39:56)
That's all it is. I hate to make those parallel and I'm very careful to say, like talk with my wife. When I deal with employees, I do this and we can translate that to our kids. I'm very careful not to do that, but it is literally the same.

Kaila Sachse (40:09)
Yeah, yeah, you're managing a team, you're managing a family, right? And ultimately you want everybody to succeed and do well in life. So what are some things that you have done to help propel your marketing efforts, your sales efforts? What has that looked like over the years?

Nick Slavik (40:27)
⁓ boy, it starts with sort of this spiritual goal in my companies of just kind of like we just talked about. If you are the owner of this thing and you don't want to grow, fine, do whatever you want. But if you do want to grow, you're going to have to solve labor and leads. And this is every business. You're going to have to find people to do the work. You're going to have to find work for the people to do.

And what I find is that a lot of business owners go down the path of, I'm not good at that or I don't like it. I'm going to hire somebody else to do that for me. There are times when that is appropriate. But if you as a business owner,

hire an agency to find all your employees and then hire an agency to do all your marketing, you're going to pay a premium These are things that you need to solve. You don't actually have to distribute the flyers or make the meta ads, but you have to manage the people who do that. so that, like taking a step back and saying, my purpose in this company is to solve labor labor and leads. And I'm going to devote an enormous amount of time and effort to that. It's typically going to be solved by me.

with my effort, a little bit of my money. If you start with that, then there's just a whole bunch of technical stuff. Like ⁓ many, many trades companies right now are suffering from lack of leads. And most trades companies then just search up marketing company and they will soon go bankrupt if they just hire a marketing company for a very small service based business. And so part of this thing of saying, taking ownership of it.

Kaila Sachse (41:36)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Slavik (42:01)
and figuring it out yourself and not saying, they're marketing experts. They can just solve it for me. I've used about eight different marketing vendors as tests through the Ask a Painter thing. They've come to me and said, hey, can I do some marketing for you? If I do well, will you mention my name? None of them worked out. And ⁓ it's not because I'm better than them. It's just because I have the ability.

to lean in really, really hard and see how these leads affect our business and make changes based on that. When a marketing company will just put an ad out, send you a lead and say, job is done, I'll say, no, no, no, a lead is useless to me unless it turns into an estimate, unless it turns into a project. So understanding you have to solve this, taking ownership of doing it, and then it's all the beautiful technical things underneath that you can just do. The constant scientific cycle of do an experiment, data.

Kaila Sachse (42:36)
Right.

Nick Slavik (42:47)
track the data out. Just before we did this, I was updating my operations dashboard and I think there's 12 different graphs on there that I have data feeding into my company where I can open that up and it gives me the immediate pulse of leads, sales, production, labor, materials, everything else. And that's what I love doing. That's what I like taking ownership of. And if it's going bad, I love to fix it. If it's going great, I'm happy to tell my people they're doing a good job.

Kaila Sachse (43:11)
This is why you're doing well. That's exactly it. You are tracking what is working and you are cutting off what is not working. I can't tell you how many times someone has come to me, because I run a marketing agency, right? And they say, Kaila, can you increase my sales by 15 times? And I'm usually like, no, I'm not a salesperson. I'm not working within your company. There's a very big difference.

I am an external person who is helping to try different ideas for you, right? And we'll see what sticks and we're gonna double down, right? But I'm not growing your company for you. I cannot do that work for you. You are the one running your company, not me. And having to differentiate that for them and also for myself too, because in the early years I used to take offense and I'd be like, man.

Why did this person's company not succeed? Why did they take? That's all, that's totally my fault. I should have done XYZ better as a marketer. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you're going to start a business, it is up to you to take full ownership. Labor and leads. understand what is it going to take to actually do the work within your business, right? I'll

send leads to somebody, but they have no idea what to do with it. And they flop, right? It doesn't go anywhere, because they don't have that task force in place.

Nick Slavik (44:38)
I love that you mentioned that because it's telling. And this is not me bagging on marketers, but the most effective marketing agencies that I know of almost have to have a coaching arm for small businesses because the small business is way less sophisticated than the marketing company as far as data and analytics. So I find a lot of marketing companies that interact with home service businesses, they also have to coach you on

tracking estimates and completed jobs, sales training, and then like a lot of the coaching in my industry, because we're so fragmented and unprofessionalized, you need to call these people back, like really quickly. You can't just like, well, I do that on Saturday. It's like, no, that's not how the world works anymore. along the line of the other things we talked about, I do have empathy for a lot of people who interact with our trade. It is a two-way street.

Kaila Sachse (45:23)
Great.

Nick Slavik (45:31)
we've just came out of the crazy irrational exuberant COVID times where there was a monstrous tailwind of leads.

And what's more interesting that since 2007, eight, nine, the housing crisis, the great recession, and the economic downturn, most home service businesses have been on a 10 to 15 year run where there's never been enough labor and there's been too many leads for us to handle. again, when that is now your baseline, you just assume, oh, I'm killing it. Everybody loves me out here. I just, oh, these people, I tell them I'm booked out two years and they still want me to do their house.

But dad, where's all the good people? All these kids are stupid and lazy. Well, it's because there's not enough of us and the market is great and the labor force, everybody's employed. So there's not just a bunch of unemployed people walking around. We seem to think that that's something we caused as business owners when it's really just the macro economy. Now.

Kaila Sachse (46:24)
Alright.

Nick Slavik (46:30)
You go through a 10 year period after the Great Recession where just tailwind of leads and I experienced the same thing. You go through COVID times where the United States government was air dropping hundred dollar bills on the economy. Nobody could go to Italy because it was illegal. So they improved their house. So now all of a sudden you're just getting like, oh my God, I'm getting this is this is not a lie. I'm getting 80 plus calls a week at the height of COVID for people wanting estimates.

And at the height of COVID, I have an estimating team of two. And I jump in where I'm needed. We were doing 60 to 65 completed estimates as a team per week. And this is my guys running ragged. We still couldn't keep up with demand. And then we think, oh, we're marketing geniuses. All these people want us? What I found in 2024 is that

Kaila Sachse (46:58)
Wow.

Nick Slavik (47:20)
our leads in spring were cut in half. So we were getting 80 leads a week, now we're only getting 40. And so I had to make the decision as a business owner, because I take ownership of this, is are we headed towards a recession or are we going back to normal? Every bit of data that I could find internally and externally, my friends who run paint businesses across the United States, many of them 10 times larger than I am, that all had data that corresponded with mine, which is we are not crashing and burning.

We're going back to what it was before COVID and honestly, before 2009, the great recession where there's not an overabundance of leads, there's not an overabundance of labor. You just have to get out there and do normal business again. And so that's what we're operating under with great success this year. Leads are up, labor recruitment is higher. We've never done better with each of those because we saw that coming. So that's basically what we're dealing with in my industry right now.

Kaila Sachse (47:50)
.

So, and that's the power of tracking your own internal data. That's the power of understanding the overall macro economy and what's actually happening. And there's a great value in speaking with other business owners around you and getting a gauge. Like what are you also experiencing? Am I just like the only crazy one or is this actually shifting? So it's so good to have all three of those points in your back pocket so that you can better prepare for the next season of your business. Nick.

I have learned so much from you. Thank you so much for sharing all of your tactical wisdom, but also I really appreciate your touching on the soft skills because that is so essential to business. Where can people find you, your restoration company? Where can people find your show?

Nick Slavik (49:02)
Yeah, a single source of truth is website nickslavik.com. But honestly, if you get on Instagram, if you get on Facebook and type in Nick Slavik, I've given you over a decade of stuff to trip over. It would be hard not to find me on any of those things.

Kaila Sachse (49:15)
Amazing, amazing. Thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it.

Nick Slavik (49:19)
Thank you.