Profit & Grit with Tyler

Trust-Based Sales Will Make Your Home Service Business Thrive - Gary Rawding

• Tyler Martin • Episode 6

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Gary Rodding transformed from aspiring musician to successful business owner by building companies that prioritize trust, quality, and people over aggressive sales tactics. His innovative approaches to sales training, cash flow management, and team building have created sustainable growth for Symphony Concrete Coatings and Symphony Home Improvement.

• Building businesses that prioritize customer education and trust over aggressive sales tactics
• Differentiating through consultative selling in an industry known for pushy tactics
• Hiring people without sales experience to avoid entrenched bad habits
• Using unconventional interview questions like "tell me a joke" to assess character and composure
• Creating a daily cash flow management system to reduce stress and improve planning
• Tracking key metrics like Cost Per Lead Issued (CPLI) and Net Sales Per Lead Issued (NSLI)
• Gaining competitive advantage through transparent pricing and exceptional quality
• Building an elite sales team focused on finding the right solutions for customers
• Using data to drive business decisions while maintaining strong company culture

Visit symphonyconcretecoatings.com or roddickconsultinggroup.com to learn more about Gary's approach to business growth.

Visit profitandgrit.com for the show notes with links.

Book a complimentary meeting with Fractiona CFO Tyler Martin at FixCFO.com


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Speaker 1:

Early on, when I was developing my organizations, cash flow was something that happened after I did a bunch of work, so it was just what it was. It wasn't something that I was watching and paying attention to, so it was either there or it wasn't. And every now and then you go look at your bank account and you go, whoa, what happened? Oh, I had a payroll and I had this other expense and I had these things that added up and all of a sudden they just coincided on the same day and you weren't really prepared for it. After that happens once or twice, you decide that I'm not going to let my life operate like that.

Speaker 2:

I'm not going to allow the world to happen to me. Welcome to Profit and Grit with Tyler, where blue-collar owners and insiders spill the real story behind their hustle, building businesses that thrive through sweat and smarts. We'll dig into their journeys from scaling chaos to growing the bottom line, with lessons and grit that pay off big. Here's your host, the blue-collar CFO, tyler Martin.

Speaker 3:

Today's guest isn't just selling garage coatings. He's building businesses the right way. Gary Rodding went from trying to make it as a musician to running multiple home service companies, and he's doing it by flipping the script on how sales is done in the trades. In this episode, we break down how to train a killer sales team from scratch, how Gary builds trust fast with customers, and how a simple spreadsheet helped him take control of his cash flow and sleep better at night. If you're trying to scale a field-based business without losing your soul in the process, this one's for you. Gary Rodding, welcome to Profit Grit. How are you doing today? I'm great. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, thanks for being here. Hey, I'd love to start out just learning a little bit about you, something professionally well, first learning what you do professionally, and then something about you personally.

Speaker 1:

Well, I am the proud owner and CEO of Symphony Concrete Coatings, as well as Symphony Home Improvement and a smaller organization called Rotten Consulting Group, where we specialize in sales, consulting and coaching. I've been doing this for several years now. I've been in the business since probably about 2007. And we've been growing every year and doing really well with it. It's been awesome owning a couple of small home improvement businesses and some challenges, but I think we do a pretty good job with it here.

Speaker 1:

And personally I'm a father of two. I've got two wonderful boys, 13 and 11, who are just starting to get into some really fun stuff right now. They're getting into some cool hobbies and things. We live in Massachusetts and we love to travel. Spent a lot of time up in New Hampshire at the Lakes region, you know, and formerly I was a musician before I got into the world of sales and started my career. I was, you know. I tried to make it as a rock star pretty difficult, but now that my son has started playing drums I've also kind of gotten back into that as well. So it's kind of exciting to break off the rust from it a little bit and start playing again. So some fun stuff happening in the family right now.

Speaker 3:

That's very cool. I used to have drums back in the day. I wasn't very good, but all I can remember is how many complaints I got from family members and neighbors about how much noise I made. So I'm thinking maybe you're going through that right now.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a different experience on this side of the drum set. When I was a kid, learning how to play, I was like everyone loves this, I'm entertaining everybody. It's a little different when you're the parent and you're trying to work and the drums are going off upstairs. But it's good though, and it's fun to just jam a little bit here and there with them and see their excitement the same excitement that I had when I was a kid, because my father was a drummer, I'm a drummer, my son's a drummer, so it's kind of a generational thing. So it's pretty cool. That sounds very cool.

Speaker 3:

Hey, you started out saying you're a proud owner of Symphony. And what do you mean by proud Like I just love to hear when you say it that way. What makes you proud?

Speaker 1:

So it's kind of one of our core philosophies of our business really is. We take a lot of pride in what we do and it's kind of the objective, it's kind of the whole point of it all. I mean, there's lots of things you can do in the world to make money, but if you're going to make something, make something good. Make something that you feel confident is doing good in the world and is doing the right thing, no-transcript. So I'm proud of it. I'm proud of the team that we put together here. I'm proud of the hard work that everybody puts together every single day and there's tons of challenges, there's tons of things that come up that are difficult, but we make sure that we are doing the right thing for our customer. We're doing the right thing for our customer. We're doing the right thing for our employees and at the end, everyone feels like they have a good job, that people care about them as much as they care about their job, which I mean it doesn't get any better than that. That's the whole point of it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's very cool. Now, the home repair, home service business that industry is a pretty challenging industry. I mean it obviously has a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of homeowners and a lot of homeowners that need repairs and improvements. What's been your claim to fame? If you will? How have you guys been able to build your business, scale your business in what typically is a pretty competitive space? I think we do a couple things really, really well.

Speaker 1:

And one we have a great partnership with an amazing manufacturer, so we're very fortunate to have that. So we try to make sure that we're putting the best possible materials down when we do our job. We do full trainings and make sure that our guys are very experienced with installing it. But the real number one thing is that we really approach our sales process differently. We're not just trying to bend people's arms to buy home improvements, which I think is a real common process nowadays. It's like very aggressive. It's like one step away from the old timeshare sales and the guy with the plaid jacket saying, well, what can I do to get you into a car today? We don't want to be like that, but that's kind of where our business has kind of moved towards. And I think when you're doing it right, the customer appreciates a really consultative, informed, educated sales process where there's a sale going on, there's convincing happening, but it's convincing them to do the thing that's most right for them, that they're going to achieve the most, that they're going to benefit the most from. So when we find somebody where this isn't the perfect solution, we're the first to tell you and we'll point you in the right direction, to where you should be, when this is the right solution. We want to make sure you understand why and how it impacts you, so that way you can feel confident and comfortable to do this when it's the right time for you.

Speaker 1:

So it's a difficult situation in this business, in our space, this home services space, to not be pushy but to also be, at the same time, really confident that what you're offering is the right thing. So there's a kind of a give and take, there's a balance with that that you have to really make sure that you're on the customer side when you're doing this stuff. And it's really a mindset, it's a philosophy and it starts in the culture of your organization. If your organization is all about let's push the monthly bonus or something like that, you want to give your guys incentives to be excited about their job. But if it's all about driving that bottom line dollar for your salespeople, then they're going to do things that will accomplish that goal.

Speaker 1:

Specifically, if your goal is to accomplish process, is to create and execute the procedure and complete your presentation if that's the goal, sales will happen. They will happen naturally. But if you are really executing everything that you get in performing your presentation. Then the results will happen as they need to, but you're really doing something that's right for your customers. So I mean, you know, I think that's something that's worthy of being proud of. You know, that's a big part of how we operate our business and it's really how we approach our sales process. It makes us a little bit different.

Speaker 3:

So I was going to get into this a little later, but it seems like it's a good spot to talk about it now. So in home services, lead generation and converting leads often is a huge topic. It's like how fast are you to the phone, responding to the prospect? How many leads are you converting? What are they turning into dollars, that type of stuff? How do you guys, without being pushy when you're getting lead generation, how do you make that work in your business model so that other competitors aren't maybe taking deals from under your feet?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely so. One of them is most of our customers not every one of them, but a very significant majority of our customers make their decision to buy when we come out on the initial visit. Now, it's not that we're pushing them to do it, they just decide that, yeah, I don't really have any other reason to wait, let's just do this one. This is the one I want. We typically aren't the lowest possible rock bottom price in the market either, so you have to ask yourself why is it that a customer would just make a decision and pay probably a little bit more than the cheapest guy with a paintbrush and a bucket to do something on the spot? So why would they do that? And part of it is about setting exceptionally strong expectations.

Speaker 1:

I think one of the things that causes people the most anguish when it's time to do home improvements is these are unfinished goods. These are products that have not been completed. You're not buying something in a package. This is the promise of something that's going to come, and so when you are buying somebody's promise, that promise has to come with trust, and so creating a situation where you have super duper strong trust with that company is one of, like, the most critical elements and you don't just, hey, trust me, that doesn't work right. You actually have to earn trust, you have to be honest, you have to use data, you have to show the proof right. You got to be the right people for the job. So trust is a huge component with all of this stuff. So there's a lot of parts of it. But setting those expectations, that's a super, super important part of this. Your expectation determines your outcome in a lot of places, you places.

Speaker 3:

Do you mean setting the expectation with the prospective client in terms of? Or could you give me an example Like? What do you mean so?

Speaker 1:

we went to a I'll give you an analogy a little bit Sure. We went to a haunted house. This weekend Halloween's coming up. My kids are about the age where it's time to start enjoying those things and it's one of those places where there's actors that run up to you and they try to scare you. And you see them walking up towards you so you know they're going to come up and say boo, and so that doesn't really give you that jump scare. But I watched as my son was walking ahead of me down the path and somebody was coming up to say boo and instead of stopping at the rope along the path, he flipped the rope over his head and ran right up to him. His expectation was that he was going to stop in the very clear boundary, but because he broke that expectation, it caused that fight or flight experience for my son and he jumped 10 feet, which we all thought was hysterical. But what it was is the expectation was broken and therefore he got a more natural reaction out of it. That's the expectation he was expecting to be scared, but because they would follow the normal rules, he wouldn't get scared. And then, when they broke the rules, that's where his fear happened.

Speaker 1:

So a lot of expectations is setting up where you think it's going to be on a scale of one to 10. Is it going to be a good experience or is it going to be a bad experience? If you are expecting something to be an amazing 10 out of 10 experience and then one thing goes wrong and it's a nine, you don't walk away thinking that was a great nine experience. You're disappointed when you think something is going to be a one out of 10 experience. Go, this shot is going to really hurt when you're getting a vaccine. When you're a kid, this is going to really hurt, right, I was always worried about it. And then it happens You're like, oh, that really wasn't that bad. And then you're like, oh, I'm not really scared of that anymore, and so I think that kind of experience with home improvement stuff is really important.

Speaker 1:

And, to be more specific, setting the expectation that everything's going to go perfectly, there's not going to be any hiccups, everything's exactly the way that you expect it to be, that's a bad expectation. You are only setting yourself up for failure. In fact, a good way to do it is say here's the things that we're concerned about and here's the things that we're doing to protect against that, and here's what we're going to do. If anything goes wrong, I'm going to be on site or I'll be on the phone right here for you, so that way we can communicate exactly what our steps are. So that way you can feel confident that you're going to get exactly what you've paid for. All right, we're going to make sure that we have provisions in place to make that work. Those expectations are super important.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so almost like an under-promise, over-deliver type of thing. Absolutely yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense. So let's dig into this whole sales world. What's your philosophy? How big is your sales team? Is it just you or do you have a whole team?

Speaker 1:

No, we have four people on our team. We're looking to grow that up next year. I've managed teams as big as 50 sales reps in my career, but we keep this department fairly small. Our business model is not to grow tall, it's to grow wide, so meaning we're not looking for an $80 million single home improvement space here.

Speaker 1:

We'd like to build a series of $5 to $10 million businesses that spread out over a larger territory that can be more local, proactive, with customers taking care of the local needs, as opposed to larger corporate structures that kind of interfere. This way you can be more nimble, you can be more attentive, you can give that small business experience, which I think customers really appreciate, but also still have stability of a larger organization that's going to be able to provide resources and drive down costs so that they can get things that are more reasonable. So we keep our teams small and we keep them elite as well. So we make sure that our teams are super highly trained, really professional. It's hard to find great people to do this stuff, so when you find them, you want to keep them happy, you want to keep them trained up and keep them working really well.

Speaker 3:

And, on that note, a lot of business owners, whether it be in home service or any other industry. They have a challenging time finding good caliber salespeople that follow through. Do you have any methodology? I heard you say training, which obviously probably plays a big part of it, but what's your methodology for finding really quality people in the sales area?

Speaker 1:

So we go to the same place that everybody else does. We do a lot of hiring on places like Indeed and I think one of the critical methodologies is that we don't hire people with a ton of sales experience, so it's a little bit backwards. I think the best salespeople are already employed and happy and working really well and they found their niche and they're dialed in, and so where are you going to get them? You're going to have to recruit them and take them away from something else and in our experience what's been better is we can give somebody a skill. We can give them the training we can teach them how to be successful salespeople. Give them the training we can teach them how to be successful salespeople.

Speaker 1:

Most of the time, if you have a lot of sales experience, you don't even know it. You have undiagnosed biases of what your sales process is supposed to be like. And if I said what are your bad habits? You know a couple, but there's a lot more than what we can see and it's really nice to be able to mold and shape and train those things out of somebody instead of having them bring in a lot of that baggage from their past experiences with sales. It's really hard to untrain a lot of bad habits. But if you have a culture, you have a process, you have a system that really is attentive to avoiding those bad habits and you don't really get into that habit to begin with. You get into the good habits of always following up on your calls, always doing a demonstration, always arriving on time, always being professional, always, you know, being polite, those kinds of things. Then you don't end up falling outside of that, it just is, it becomes second nature and you just do it every day.

Speaker 1:

So we try not to hire too too many. It's not that it's a deal breaker, but I just. Part of it is that I love the experience of that light bulb going off for somebody too. That is one of my favorite things in the whole world when you see somebody that just they just get it, it clicks, and so learning that sales experience, and they go oh, that's how it works, seeing them try it out for the first time and sometimes failing at it, and then learning how it works and then learning why it works, and then that's where we have our best success.

Speaker 1:

So the things that we don't hire is lots of sales experience, but we do hire attitudes. Attitudes and character can't be trained. There's nothing you can do about that. If someone doesn't have character, high moral fiber, trustworthiness, right, those kinds of things, there's nothing that you're going to say or do to teach them how to do that. Part of it is that, yes, you hire people that have that and then you have a culture within your organization where everybody believes and embodies it. It's kind of weird.

Speaker 1:

I talk a little bit about this in our organization, but within the organization it's second nature. Nobody talks about it. It's just how it is. To talk about it almost cheapens it a little bit, but it's just. It's just the nature of what we do. And, uh, it's something that I'm very sensitive to, something that I'm always watching, as the, you know, the leader of the organization is making sure that that's part of our culture. It's pervasive through the whole organization. But so characters are super important, one attitude super important. And you know, people have to desire what they're doing Right and if you could, yeah, that's the biggest part is the desire that they are to be successful.

Speaker 3:

So something that you said really stuck with me. You said you look for character. Do you phone? One of the things is we do a lot of interviews before we bring somebody in.

Speaker 1:

In addition to that, everybody goes through a two-week training period where we are intensive working together one-on-one all day for a couple of weeks, and you really do learn about people and how they approach things when maybe you give them a homework assignment. There's a couple of weeks and you really do learn about people and how they approach things when maybe you give them a homework assignment. There's a part of the process that we go through that's like a little one-page script and it's really important setting expectations in the script. So it's really important that we say it a certain way. So, just kind of as a test okay, would you memorize this? There's a lot of people who just won't do that, just because they don't want to, and how they approach that process and how they go through that. It tells you a little bit about how they're going to approach the rest of their work.

Speaker 1:

Within the larger scope of Things to Learn, we do some testing. We do a thing called a disk profile, which has been very, very helpful in determining, because there's a lot of people who want to be successful in it but they don't actually want to do that job, uncomfortable about maybe asking somebody if they would like to make a purchase, which I think is one of the number one reasons why fairly decent salespeople, who are well-meaning, don't make sales, is they never ask hey, do you want to make a purchase? And it's an important part of that process you do have to ask that question. So if they're going to be uncomfortable with that and they're going to be shy about asking that, or they're going to flinch when they ask it, if you ask somebody, hey, do you want to buy this? And you flinch when you're saying it, it sends a nonverbal signal that there's something that you should be worried about. It sends that nonverbal signal that says wait and don't buy this because there's something that this guy doesn't think is right.

Speaker 1:

But when you're 100%, beyond all reasonable doubt, completely convinced that this is the perfect solution for you and I say I really sincerely can't think of a reason why you shouldn't do this, can you? And the customer says no, then you just sit there and what? Do nothing? No, you just say, well, let's just do it. What do you say? Put her there, and I think that's a really important part of a process. It know people, it only works if they're ready, it only works if it's their decision. But you know, if you don't ever ask them to buy something, then you're not going to get the order Just how it is.

Speaker 3:

So one thing that I was thinking about when you said you usually hire people that don't have past sales experience. One thing I found oftentimes is and you said it so beautifully a lot of times people see themselves as potentially being a salesperson, but when it comes time to actually doing it, it's like just such a different. I mean, they just can't do it. It feels good to think that they're going to be that way, but when it comes down to doing the hard part of it, it's really difficult. How do you vet that out? Does a personality profile? That in itself probably tells you some, but have you ever? Do you? Have you ever been in the training, that two week training, and you're like, oh man, I'm seeing some red flags. Does that kind of serve as a little bit of a period of still interviewing, or where do you catch that?

Speaker 1:

100%. So the, the personality training testing that we do, the, it's not really personality, it's a, it's a behavioral profile. Yeah, sorry, it does measure, and I and I think there's an important distinction, because you're not going to tell somebody's like, you're really not going to know how they are. It's a self-reported test. So it's them telling you what they think of themselves, what they like. And if I say I like chocolate cake, you know that I like sweets, right? So there's an important part of that. So if they say I like being a very dominant type personality type, they think of themselves like that, that's good enough, all right, you don't have to go through all of their past history and experience to find out if they enjoy that, if they think of themselves that way, that will be good enough. That'll be what they desire to be. In a situation you know where they, they can show off the thing that they like to do. So somebody who's a highly dominant personality trait or a highly influential personality trait, somebody who thinks that they're good at making relationships, is going to tend to do better and enjoy the process of sales. We can teach them the words to say or how to say it, or the more, more or less. It's not really the words to say, it's the questions to ask, which is really the most important part. But we can teach them those words. It's really about whether they enjoy that experience. So that's a component of it, for sure. So we use that profile. That's really helpful.

Speaker 1:

I think another weird kind of peripheral thing was that. So I grew up in the music. You know world. I went to school, studied music, and I think that's a little bit of a similar case for what you're describing here. A lot of people wanted to be musicians. I was one of them. A lot of people wanted to be rock stars or loved the experience of playing their instrument, that sort of thing, and then, when it came time to go do the thing that musicians do, which is perform or record, they maybe didn't fall in love with that. So then, what are you a musician for? Are you just for yourself? That's great, that's awesome, but you're going to have a hard time making a living doing that and I fully support that.

Speaker 1:

I think people should be able to play guitar in their bedroom all they want. That's a really wonderful thing. But is that a career path? If you don't like, you're afraid of getting up on stage, you know. So I think that there's a big difference between somebody who enjoys playing music and then somebody who loves being in a spotlight. You know, you hear people talk about public speaking as being one of the highest fears in the country. People are terrified more than death. They're afraid of public speaking. It takes a certain personality, it takes a certain behavior, a desire to thrust yourself into that spotlight and put yourself there and choose that instead of being asked to do it. You know, and I think that's an important part of the sale process too, is people that have that minor mental dysfunction of wanting to be in that spotlight. That person does really well in that sales process.

Speaker 3:

You know, you got to be comfortable with it. I love the way you said in regards to the disc profile and thanks for correcting me. I got to be comfortable with it. I love the way you said in regards to the disc profile and thanks for correcting me. I've never heard anyone say it this way, but it's so true. A lot of times people don't like those profiles because they go well, I can just game them or I can just answer questions. But the way you said it is, it's really you answering what you like to do. People tend to think it was like a right or wrong answer that there is to it. It's not. It's like you expressing behaviors that you like and then us using that data, or others using that data, to see what's the best match for things that you enjoy doing or how you see yourself, and I think that's a great way you articulated that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it's an important distinction when you are measuring it. Yeah, I think it's an important distinction when you are measuring it, to understand what it is that you measured. You didn't take an IQ test. They weren't getting these answers right and achieving a score. This isn't their personality, like Myers-Briggs test or something like that. They didn't achieve something and there isn't any one that is better than another. It's just how you feel about something, and I think when you put something into a test, it becomes this quantitative data, but what you're measuring is qualitative data, so you also have to have a qualitative understanding of that data. You can't just look at it and just check or not check. Right, it doesn't work like that. So it pairs with an interview is really important too.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's great and I imagine you use the one. I think there's one specifically for hiring, I think this kind of. They have a few different versions, but I think there's one geared towards hiring. Is that the one? It's a shorter assessment. Is that the one that you guys typically use?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's like 15 minutes or 10 minutes or something like that. It's real quick, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it, yeah, yeah. And you know what? We're not looking to dig through everything, we just want a little extra, because what we're also doing is saying what do I think this person is? I'm asking the interview questions that are related to that too, and you're going to give me answers that are like you know, what do you do for fun? Or you know my favorite interview question that measures influence and dominance, and I've had a lot of debate over this over the years and there's a lot of people who are right that it's a bad question. So I'll start with that. But my favorite one is tell me a joke. Now, some people hate this. They think it's like the sell me a pen thing. It's not that. It's just.

Speaker 1:

When you get a short circuit question, when your brain stops, how do you get it to move? How do you force it to move forward? What do you do to get this thing to progress? Because as soon as I asked that question in an interview, a couple things happened. Number one you literally forget what the word joke means and you have no idea. I've never heard a joke Like what? What's a joke? And the second thing is immediately after that, some jokes pop into your head that you don't want to share in a job interview. By the way, this is a job interview. I'm not looking for you to say dirty jokes here. I don't want you. That tells me a little bit about your character. Right there too. Do you have a filter or not? Do you know how to control yourself?

Speaker 1:

The next thing is some people will look at me and go, I'm not a joke-telling kind of guy. And then I'll say just literally just tell me anything, any joke at all, just something that you've remembered a setup and a punchline, that's it. I'll give them a little lifeline with that. Some people will refuse to do even that. That's a bad sign, because when I give you some sales training later on, I'm going to say, okay, here's the setup, here's how this punchline works.

Speaker 1:

You're not going to be able to deliver that, you're going to feel uncomfortable with that, and so that has been consistently just for the outside sales job, consistently such a good telltale question in my interview process, and no one's ever had that question before. So it is so out of left field. It's much stronger than some of those crazy Google questions that you read about online why are manholes round and not square? That kind of question right? And I think it's been, and it's easy and sometimes it's it's, uh, pretty good. You find somebody every now and then who loves the experience of telling the joke. They love the experience of telling something and they set it up and they really, you know, elaborate and you just know that when they get into a situation where they have to tell the story, they're going to be terrific with it and it's been a really, really indicator for me. I've been using it for about 15 years.

Speaker 3:

That's interesting. I've never that I probably would be a deer in the headlights if you asked me on, unfortunately on, I'd have to come up with something quickly and and to your point, like it'd have to be clean for sure, I mean I could see how some people would rattle off some inappropriate joke.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so you know it's, and that's part of the reason why it's a tough. It's such a valuable thing. I don't know if it's good advice for other people, right, because you know HR isn't going to be too happy if you ask that, right, right, but for me personally it's been a very good, valuable tool.

Speaker 3:

Yeah that's a good one, hey. So switching gears here metrics, so sales, oftentimes first thing you think is okay. What metrics are we tracking? What do you use for gauges to evaluate how someone is progressing or achieving their results? Do you have any set metrics that you guys tend to look at?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we're super data-driven. It's one of the really critical ways that we manage our team. So the numbers tell the story. You can look at the numbers and know exactly what's happening in your organization. There's a. I guess the way that we look at it is. It starts with what did we spend money on in terms of like lead generation and what was our cost per lead?

Speaker 1:

Every organization has their conversion points. So in our business we have conversion points from you know, how many dollars did you spend on your Google platform? How many impressions did you get? Then how many you know people were driven to your website, and then, of those people, how many engaged? And then how many people converted to inquiries. And then you know, and so forth. So there's all these moments where there's an event that happens that is filtering down a larger group into a smaller group. So this many people saw it, but this many people clicked on it. And what we do is we look at the cost from every one of those conversion points and we look as it boils down. Every time you filter down to a smaller group of people. We look at those net costs until we get to cost per lead issued.

Speaker 1:

In our business, lead issued is you give an appointment for somebody who wants to see your product, who wants to get a price. We give them a set time and date that we have a team that sets and then we give that to our salesperson. The salesperson is expected to be on location on time and deliver an estimate and give a presentation for what we do, to talk about what it is. And it's short, it's really, you know, maxes like maybe 45 minutes. We really go through everything, lots of questions, but that's called an issued lead. So you have a cost per issued lead which is all the net cost boiled into that, and then at the end we take all the sales of our issued leads. We count the issued leads, we take all the net sales per issued lead and that is called NSLI or dollars per lead, net sales per lead issued.

Speaker 1:

And that number, nsli, is the secret number for the sales department. It is the full efficiency rating. It measures how much you close, how often you close. It measures your cancellation, your retention, it measures your average ticket. It's all in one number and you can use that as your common denominator to compare all of your team. You can even break that out to say what is our NSLI on this lead source. Is this lead source actually better than another one? Even though you may get more leads or you may get better quality leads from one other place, what nets out to be the actual best results? And that's where you can measure. At a glance, every day, you can see who's doing well, who needs some help, who needs more training, who needs more resource, those kinds of things. So you have your NSLI and then your CPLI, which is your cost per lead issue.

Speaker 3:

Those two metrics. So I want to make sure I understand this. I don't want to get too deep in the math, but just make sure I understand it. So the cost per lead issue if it's costing you 500 bucks to issue a lead, so that would be all your ad spend, every, you know, every click, every, um, until they actually got down to a lead. So a lot of times you know you'll get like cost per click and all that other stuff, we don't care about that, we just our whole total spend to get one lead. So it's 500 bucks, let's say. And then then you're taking off that If it takes my salesperson 10 leads and I know this probably wouldn't be good 10 leads to convert one $10,000 sale, I would take that $10,000 divided by the 500 times 10, which is 5,000. And would that be two? Is that right, 10,000 by 5,000?

Speaker 1:

Actually let me break it down. It's two different numbers. So, cpli, is you spent? You spent whatever? Yeah, $500 per lead $500,. Yeah, you spent your money to get those leads $500 per lead. You give 10 leads to your salesperson. So you have two numbers you have $500 per lead and then you have 10 leads per salesperson delivering $10,000 in sales. It doesn't matter how they got there, it gives you $1,000.

Speaker 3:

NSLI. Ah, okay, but it's the number of leads. Got it, got it, got it yeah.

Speaker 1:

So you divide the net sales by the number of issued leads and what that does is, ideally in a home improvement business you're talking about 10 leads delivers, maybe $20,000 in net revenue. So you have $2,000 of net revenue If your lead costs $2,000 NSLI. If your lead cost $500, now those are both I, those are both issued leads. Nsli, cpli those are the same common denominators. Now you can divide those two together, got it? So now you know what your budget is. So if you are pricing out your job and you've allocated 25% for your marketing budget that's a high number, but you could just for easy numbers here you have $500 on your cost per lead issued. You have a $2,000 NSLI. If you divide those out, you could say your salesperson is delivering at 25% NSLI. A stronger salesperson will drive your marketing costs down and that's really the biggest part of all this stuff. Your marketing costs make or break your business in the home improvement space. Yep, yep. The stronger you are there, the better you are with your profit.

Speaker 3:

And once you know your ratios, you can almost model out what you want your business to be Like. You can go okay, well, I'm converting at this, I'm getting this. This is what it's costing me. This is how much, absolutely. Oh, that's really cool. I like that. Okay, I know we're coming up on time. I wanted to ask one question. I love that you said you're so driven by data, but I also wanted to go over in the area of cashflow. Could you share with me anything you know? Every business owner tends, at times, struggle with cashflow. I'd love to know what your story is in terms of how you've monitored cashflow. Have you done anything to overcome any cashflow hurdles? Anything that you could share with us that could help the audience?

Speaker 1:

Early on, when I was developing my organizations, cashflow was something that happened after I did a bunch of work. So it was just what it was. It wasn't something that I was watching and paying attention to, so it was either there or it wasn't. And every now and then you go look at your bank account and you whoa what happened. Oh, I had a payroll and I had this other expense and I had a. You know these things that added up and you know, all of a sudden they just coincided on the same day and you weren't really prepared for it. After that happens once or twice, you decide that I'm not going to let my life operate like that. I'm not going to allow the world to happen to me. I'm going to make proactive efforts to make sure that I'm observing things so that I can predict the future as much as can be predicted. So one of the things that I've done in the last couple of years is I have a model that I build which is just simply figuring out what we're talking about with NSLI. You can move backwards and forwards on that line on your conversion numbers. You can have assumptions that you can use to figure out what is going to happen. So if I spend this much money, I should expect to get this many results, and from those results I should expect to get this many contracts, and from those contracts I should expect to install this many jobs within this certain margin of error and you can build out kind of the future. When we forecast, we can kind of see what the next year is going to look like. The variability mostly is in marketing, and so you do want to see this stuff every single day, right, because it doesn't. You know, once we quote a job, we're not usually we're never really changing the price of the job, jobs of the job, right? We're trying to be super straightforward, upfront with what it's going to be so that there's no surprises at the install and our guys do a great job. So we don't really have a lot of variability there. It's just the marketing costs in. You know what Facebook or Google decides to do that day.

Speaker 1:

So you know, as far as, like, cashflow purposes, what I do is I have a spreadsheet that I keep a daily track, where I just go in and enter my top line numbers, my bank accounts, all receivables, all the things that I'm expecting to pay. I also make an estimate of what my next payroll is going to be and I have a subtotal at the bottom that basically just says at the because the big expense, of course, is our two-week payroll. Every two weeks it's like clockwork. There's a huge expense that comes out. So what I'll do is I'll have an estimate for that. I'll take all the daily cashflow, all the receivables, and then on the day of payroll, what's the bank account going to look like? So, plus all the upcoming installations and the revenues from deposits and things like that. So I try to assume as much as I can and I adjust it every single day. It takes me now maybe one minute to jump into three bank accounts and drop the information in and into, like a credit card and the credit card processor and that sort of thing. I keep track of all that stuff and then at the end I'm watching a graph, a line graph basically for the year, where it shows our cashflow every single day. And Google Sheets is great. You just put a trend line in there and it tells you are you going up, are you going down? And you subconsciously make choices when you have data in front of you, even if you aren't making a decision about the data, the choices you make for your business, if you have the data in your head, are going to influence all those things that you do. So just seeing it every day makes an impact, makes the line go up at the end.

Speaker 1:

In addition to that, one of the things as a leader that's really difficult is the burden of knowing that this isn't for me. I thought being the leader was getting to be first in line. No, you're last in line and you are responsible for every single person that's put their trust in you. So it is an awesome responsibility Not awesome like it's cool, it's humongous. And I'm happy to take on that role. I'm happy to do that. I will come through for my team. I'll make sure I'm here for them, but I also recognize how important it is. So when you are taking on that responsibility, you owe it to your team to really be aware of where everything is. You owe it to them to be responsible to make sure you're guiding the ship in the right direction.

Speaker 1:

And as a CEO, that stuff ends up being kind of stressful a lot right.

Speaker 1:

A lot of the times that's like something that like weighs heavy on your shoulders. So one of the ways that I've reduced my stress load is getting it out of my head and onto a piece of paper so that I can say this is the map and we're going to and this is the route and this is where we're heading, and I don't have to make a decision over do we go left or do we go right? Do we go, do we wait? I can just say the map says go this way and I trust this map. Right, I've made a course that I know we can move forward on and then, as a leader, all you're dealing with is the roadblocks and the obstacles and managing those challenging situations, instead of the bigger challenge, which is like getting us to our destination and I'll tell you that has been a very valuable tool for reducing stress load is to not have to have it here. It's outside of my head, it's someplace else, and it makes life a lot easier to manage.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, wow, that's great. I love that. That also that unknown. Like you, don't have to have the fear of the unknown. It's like so many people. Business owners often don't have those numbers in front of them. They've got it up in their head and they think the math's correctly, uh, correct, and and they're just. But they're, they have sphere of unknown. Are they correct? Are they not correct? Or do they have everything and it just? That takes it away too. So, wow, that's a good explanation. So, hey, your website once again is symphonyconcretecodingscom. Symphonyconcretecodingscom. I'll put that in the show notes at thinktylercom. I'm also going to put your LinkedIn in case anybody wants to reach out to you. If people wanted to reach out to you, is there anywhere else they should go? Are those the two best spots?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you can drop your email in on roddickconsultinggroupcom if you're interested in talking about sales with me. I love talking about sales and if you're in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, you need an amazing concrete coating for your garage, your basement, your pool deck, your patio. We'd garage your basement, your pool, deck, your patio. We'd love to do a fantastic job and show you our consultative sales process and meet some of our amazing salespeople.

Speaker 3:

By the way, I was looking at the pictures on your website, man, you guys do some great work, isn't it awesome?

Speaker 1:

It's like oh yeah, man, it's amazing. Everybody loves it. It's such a fun transformation and I've done every home improvement there is. Nobody loves their home improvement more than we do like a new garage. It doesn't sound like that when I talk about it. When it's in real life it's like holy smokes. It's incredible. Yeah, it looks good. It's a fun job to do. It's fun to do it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, awesome. Okay, man, I appreciate your time. Thanks for being here. A lot of wisdom you shared, so I can't thank you enough. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much. Take care, gosh. I love this conversation with Gary Rodding and here's my big takeaway you don't need to be the cheapest, but you do need to be the most trusted. Whether you're in HVAC, plumbing, coatings or remodeling, the real win is building a process that delivers results and builds confidence. Gary's approach to sales and leadership proves that systems plus culture equals some serious momentum. Now, if you're listening to this and feeling the pressure, maybe payroll's getting tight, margins are getting squeezed or your leads aren't converting the way they used to. That's where I come in. Visit FixCfocom that's F-I-X-C-F-Ocom to book a short intro meeting. We'll figure out where your cash flow is leaking and build a plan to grow profitably. Thanks for listening to Profiting Grit, the show where blue grit meets real business strategy. Please be sure to follow and share this with someone building from the field up. Thanks a lot.

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Tyler Martin

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