Incentives Over Overtime: Fixing Productivity in Trades | Michael Fortenberry

Most trades businesses don’t have a revenue problem.They have a labour performance problem.

In this episode of Built. Trusted. Chosen., I sit down with Michael Fortenberry to unpack what actually happens when a founder-led trade business starts scaling and the owner is no longer on site. We talk culture, systems, job costing, and the uncomfortable truth about hourly pay. Michael shares how his construction companies grew, the mistakes along the way, and how performance-based incentives changed everything.

You’ll take away:

• Why the first real growth hurdle is when work happens without you on site
• Why hourly pay quietly incentivises inefficiency
• How showing crews the labour budget changes behaviour instantly
• Why quality improves when rework hits their bonus
• The link between authentic company culture and financial performance
• How incentives turn employees into ownership thinkers

Michael Fortenberry is a construction company owner and the founder of Protiv, a performance-based compensation software built specifically for contractors. After scaling construction businesses in New York City, he developed systems to align labour performance with profit. Protiv helps contractors manage incentive programmes tied directly to labour budgets and job costing.
 Website: https://www.protiv.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelfortinberry/

I’m Wes Towers, founder of Uplift 360. I help trades and construction companies be built, trusted, and chosen online through high-performing websites and Search Everywhere Optimisation.
 Learn more at https://uplift360.com.au/

Want to be a guest on Built. Trusted. Chosen.? Book here:
https://uplift360.com.au/built-trusted-chosen-podcast-guest-booking/

Transcript

0:00

Built Trusted Chosen. The podcast for leaders and marketers in trades and construction. Hosted by Wiz Towers from Uplift 360. Okay, good day, Michael. It's uh fantastic to have you on the show today. Uh Built Trusted Chosen. So just uh set the foundation so people know who you are and we'll understand as we progress, of course. Tell us who who you are, what you're up to. Yeah, uh famous astronaut and spy. Oh, wait, no, that's not what I do. Yeah, no, teleconstruction company. Um we also have a software company where we build performance-based tools for contractors to help uh help them build great company culture inside of uh their trade business. Yeah, well, I I find it a really interesting blend of um skill sets. Obviously, you got the construction uh background and and understanding, but the the technology side of things, and sometimes it feels as though um that those things are uh poles apart, those skill sets are poles apart. So I'm really curious to dig into your journey, how how you got to where you where you got to and um and some of the uh some of the things that you're helping people with. Um Yeah, there's a lot of scars. We're gonna we're gonna talk about a lot of blood, sweat, and tears when I go down after that. Yeah, well tell me, tell me how did you how did you get into what you're doing? And tell me some of those war stories. That'd be uh that'd be set up. I bet a lot of the folks listening, I bet they started they have the same origin story I do, and it was my dad's fault. Right? And that you know, dad was an electrician, you know, in the latter half of his career, and he'd been a welder for a while, worked for the government, but he was an electrician and really good at it. He's just a natural kind, he could build anything, you know. He just wants to sit down, build a house, build a house. So some of that just gets you know, you get pulled into that as a kid. And even though my career went in some different directions early on with military and then some some tech stuff, you know, I learned some technology pieces, you know, after the military. You know, I end up back in the construction world because you know, you have these roots in it. Yeah. And we had two different construction companies in New York City, have one and we have another. Um and had some success. You know, the second one's grown a lot now and focused on you know multifamily renovation work in New York City, which is you know, not the hardest construction in the world, but it's logistically challenging. Yeah. And scale systems became really important to us and and the processes to which we used to execute the work and the tool sets we used, it wasn't about having the right hammers and screwdrivers and levels and you know, two by fours. It's about the logistics tools for getting materials there on time and make sure we had the right staff scheduled and make sure our estimates, you know, were dialed in so that we, you know, when we had good job costing numbers that we could tell if we were making any money or not. You know, the actual systematic part behind the scenes of building things that is actually the part that's a lot of us aren't that good at. You know, you can be a pretty good plumber and not really understand what it takes to run a plumbing company. And that that was our our growth lesson. Yeah. Well, I suppose um starting out if it's a founder-led business, you you've come your come up through the through the ranks. You started as an apprentice if it's a plumber. Um, started as an apprentice, you work your way through, maybe you get into some form of leadership and eventually you uh start your own company and you and you don't really know what how to how to run a business, you haven't got the infrastructure around you, or the the the scaffolding, I guess, systems are like scaffolding to build. The foundation has two big parts. One is can you physically make plumbing work, you know, and install it and repair it. The other is can you make a business work? And they are completely different skill sets, they have nothing to do with each other. And nobody, if nobody taught you how to do the one, you spent 15 years mastering the other, then you're surprised at the fact that you know they don't know the difference between a bank balance and cash flow. You know, and those kind of those kind of pieces are are big are big missing parts for a lot of folks starting their own trade. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so there's a phrase, what got you here won't get you there. I I'm not sure who said that. I like that one. Yeah, it's that thing. So what do you think that the um I suppose there's roadblocks and barriers that you get to as you grow from from starting from scratch, from starting as one person and building out team. What are the big hurdles that you see um a common um common threads that's growing? Maybe they're your own experiences, but what you've observed as well with the um the companies that use the software. There there's a journey that I think folks go on as you go from, okay, this is just gonna be now it's me, and I'm by myself, or maybe I've just got one or two people, but I'm still at the job. I think the first big hurdle people run into is when the first job takes place and you're not there. So you're not physically at the job anymore. You're not you you've gone outside of your own shadow of your own job site to uh to try and go sell something else or to manage somewhere else, and someone else executes the work on your behalf for your client. And I think that's when this moment occurs where you you have to realize that the customer is no longer the center of this. The your employees are. And if you don't grasp that, you you run some real risk because your job at that point is to take care of your people, because your people are delivering the service, and the service is what takes care of your customer, right? So there's this if you if you try and bypass that dumb customer first, uh yeah, it's fine if you're a sole proprietor, but the minute you've got you know a handful of people out there doing it, you better be people first. You've got to take care of your people because they're the ones taking care of your customer. Yeah. So I think we don't always grasp how important they are to the equation and out of the gate. And then the other part is that I need systems that allow me to coordinate operationally when I'm not physically looking at something, whether that's ordering materials, estimating, managing my job costing, my financials, etc. All those things need to be systematized as you grow. The bigger you grow, the more systematic it needs to become. Yeah, 100%. That's a really great way of looking at people, people, your your people first, and they'll take care of the the uh the customers, which makes practical sense. I mean, um, yeah, it's it's people speak of mission statements and culture and and all that kind of stick thing, but uh it's what really you you do behind the scenes with your with your people, I suppose, that that counts the most. Contra is an interesting word, right? I mean, yeah, a lot of times people, I think contractors in particular, we get hung up on this word, well, company culture, and like, oh, what it I think they don't even know what that means. I bet a lot of them if they pulled the universe of contractors, like, I don't really know. We we have pizza parties like once a week. Your company culture is just it's just your company's personality. Yeah. And and one thing I would encourage you is no matter what, because there's like five different major types of company cultures, and and no matter what type you want to be or you think you are, it should be who you are as the leader. Because it's got to come from you. So it's got to be authentic to who you are. So you've if you're really financially driven, you're very uh structured, you like processes and reports and all this, don't go and say, yeah, we're family culture, because you're not. You're you're a hierarchical culture with rigid reporting requirements, and that's okay. It's not that that's bad. You just build your company culture in an authentic way so people know what to expect. You can hire people that do well in that environment. Don't try to hire somebody who wants a wide range of creative liberty to explore new ways of doing things if that drives you absolutely crazy. Yeah, and so build a company culture that's authentic to who you are, and I think you're more like yeah, I love that. It's and it's so aligned to see, I I do websites, uh, we're digital agency, and so culture, it sounds it sounds so similar to branding. So it's the same sorts of ideas, but that authentic brand. Um the self-awareness piece. So you mentioned people might say they're a family-oriented business, but really they're they're not um because they're hierarchical and and all that kind of stuff. So and you also mentioned five categories of how people might see if I can remember all these off the top of my head. You've got um family-oriented, which is a culture of team, but not team, it's family, right? Which is a different thing. Um, and they're actually I've got some data, I got some notes on this somewhere, but so that's one type of company culture. Um, think maybe like uh Southwest Airlines or something. You know, they're kind of fun, family, happy team, kind of family-oriented, supportive nature. You have companies that are uh very creative in nature. So they are you have your apples of the world, that creativity and uh and you know, trying new things and being willing to fail and move fast, kind of dynamic cultures. That's another you have um hierarchical cultures which you might see in the government or a bank or something like that, you know, the IBM type of you know, structures to reporting. You have growth and uh I call these kind of customer-centric cultures where where it's all about the financial, so a lot of reports and high expectations on growth and numbers and you know, that kind of data-oriented really appeals to that type of culture. Um, I you know, Tesla is actually a company like that. And then you have companies that are called elite cultures, which I think a lot of people aspire to this, but Netflix is actually an example of that, SpaceX is an example of that, um, Goldman Sachs. They are very the higher the bar to get work to hire there is really high. Like you've got to be incredible. And it's not a there's no family here. This is a team, though, but it's not a fail. You know, we hold each other accountable, there's a lot of accountability to you're supposed to be the best. We pay the most, you're the best. That's why you work here because this is the elite culture. None of those are better than the other. You can build enormously successful organizations in any of those environments, but I think you need to know where you land. And if one of those feels more like you, go that way. Yeah. Because on your hiring page it should say stuff like that. So you attract candidates that make sense. Yeah, 100%. That's to the the chosen, the chosen piece. People will choose to work. Well, people will often choose to work in a place because of the salary, the the pay is good. They'll they'll choose to stay because of the culture. Yeah, people will if you have a bad culture, you can never get someone to come back for money. But if they live for money, they might come back for your culture. It's your culture is more powerful. Culture is more powerful, it's the most singular, powerful financial driver of company performance. And that's as an academically studied thing. If you look at the impact of great culture versus companies that don't have great culture, it is more impactful than anything else you do. Number one, the top. Yet we don't you don't see many you know business school courses on how do I build company culture. Yeah. But I think a good contractor can build an amazing company by mastering your numbers and building a great culture. Yeah. Like just get those two things right. Yeah, and I suppose it'll be for to a large degree a reflection. The culture will be a reflection of the founder, a founder-led business be just naturally um coming from that position. So take a look at the founder and their own personal values and convictions, and that will tell us um to a large degree what the company culture is and and how it should align to what they're doing. Well, they're trying to fake it because that's not really who they are, but they think they're supposed to be this way. Yeah, not sustainable. It comes out and that's why I think a lot of cultures are are off, is because they're trying to be something they're not as a human being. So just be who you are and build a really cool culture from that. It's not that one's mean and one's hostile, or you can be, you know, a really powerful, strong leader and have pretty you know have a hierarchical culture of the reporting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I love that be who you are. I think there's a a book, uh it might be Alan Watts. Alan Watts uh wrote a book along those lines, Be Who You Truly Are, or something like that. Yeah, you can do that every day. Yeah. Let's speak to the the um productivity side of things because there'll be a bunch of listeners who are keen to accept that they might be saying, Oh yeah, uh I love all that fluffy stuff, but how does it align? How does that culture align to business? Oh, we want to see uh business growth and productivity and all that kind of stuff. Let's align those things. How does that work together? Once I kind of know who I want to be, I've got this company culture idea. I want my culture to translate to performance. Yeah. My culture is not something that I have incidental to the company. My culture needs to reflect in performance. And there are certain things that matter to me, whether there's certain KPIs. Maybe it's my sales velocity, maybe it's my uh you know, number of churned customers, maybe it's my adherence to you know achieving these uh performance on my cost codes, uh revenue targets, whatever, expense goals. You can have a lot of different objectives, GP, you know, net profit for the year, whatever those KPIs and goals objectives that you might have. We believe that the the word of the day is incentives. And incentives are there's this guy, Dr. Landsberg, I think he's like University of Rochester or somewhere. He had this, he said, all of all of human economics is some summed up in four words. The people respond to incentives. That's it. Yes. That's economics. And and so if you just look at how how do I get my people, my team, my customers, my vendors, whatever, how do I get them to respond to what I want? I need to create incentives that drive that behavior. Most of us have incentivized our team singularly through the way we pay them, which is mostly hourly. We pay people by the hour, by the day, whatever. And then we wonder why that incentive encourages them to work more hours. Yeah. Like it's perplexing. I don't understand. Why does my team act like they take so long? Like, why do they work so why aren't they efficient? Because you've incentivized a behavior that is specifically built on time. Yeah. It's the entirety of the model. It's a terrible model. We're a little stuck with it at this point, but pay is a horrible way to pay people. It doesn't incentivize quality or teamwork or communication or production or anything outside of time. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting point of view. Uh and definitely I agree with it. So if if you're m measuring everything just by time, well, if you can do it in 15 minutes, why do it in 15 minutes if I'm getting paid by the hour? You know, it's not my money. Yeah, yeah, that's right. They act the way they do because it's not their money. Your money, I hate to break it there by listening, but your people do not care about your money. They care about their own money, and they're actually somewhat accountable to their peers. They they will they're if if their peers can make more money, they're actually somewhat accountable there to the co-workers, but to the owner. No, sorry. Uh they may love you, they may think you're the greatest, but it ain't their money, man. And yeah, so get them, get, get that crew to feel like it's their money when they go to work. Like it and people describe this as ownership thinking and all these other different terms around it. Um, I just want them to look at that labor budget. Well, if I've got a dollar budgeted for labor, I want them to think that's their dollar. Yeah. I'm willing to spend it on them. I'm willing to give it to my budgeted that if they think it's theirs, they will treat it different. Yeah. Yeah, that's yeah, perfect. And so the the other thing too, how what's your take on um the the billing model of just time plus materials? Is that how does that work with that? I like that when I can get it. You know, that's a honestly, TNM work tends to be a relationship with your client. If your client trusts you enough that they let you build type TNM, then you've got a defined margin usually that goes along with that. Cool, good for you. Go get all that you can get. Um, you know, you're never gonna overperform on that, but you don't underperform, which is most of the problem set that we occur is underperformance, not overperformance. So, sure, if you can go get TNM, get your client to give you that money, absolutely, I love it. You know, but that's a that's a relationship with your client that's pretty stout. Um envious of it. Uh I've done some of that kind of work, I would love to have more of it. Um we tend to see more people, they've got a bid for a job. They've told you know, this general contractor, they told this customer they're gonna do the work and they're gonna charge a dollar for it. And if you can spend less than a dollar doing it, you just increased your GP, your net. If you spend more than a dollar, now you're making less, you know, and we have a lot of folks listening that see way too much of the latter and not enough of the former. Yeah. And to get back to the system side of things, because to understand if you're if you're if you're making a dollar or or losing a dollar, you need to measure these things. And you know, sometimes um as a small business, you can kind of track things as the founder because you know what's going on and you know what every individual's doing. Pretty simple. Yeah, but to to as you scale up, scale out, you've got to measure those numbers. What what are some of the key numbers? How do you your software does some of this stuff, does it? Or well, yeah, the software we built was designed as to manage the incentive programs for the teams. Yeah, so that was all about that market for it. This is something it goes back about eight, nine years ago. We were doing, we still what we still do is this kind of multi-family renovation, right? So we're putting in new kitchens and bathrooms into apartment buildings in New York. And usually at scale, right? We'll be doing 50 of the same apartment over and over again, just renovating all these apartments. And on a particular project, we had some cabinetry going in that was taking like we had like 10 hours of labor budgeted for installing it. You know, some kind of basic kitchen cabinets. And and the problem with that wasn't the 10 hours, it wasn't the $400 in labor, it was the fact that it was bleeding into the second day. Right. So Bob goes there to work and he takes the whole 10 hours, so he's eight hours one day and two hours the next. And that's throwing off my schedule, right? So I really, really, really want Bob done in one day. Bob, can you just get there in the morning, be done at the end of the day? And we made this deal. Technically, the guy's name is Frank, this first one. And we was like, can you just finish in one day and I'll give you the whole $400? Turns out he can do it in about six and a half hours, you know. And it's like you just had to want to, you know, and it's like, wow, maybe we're bad managers, I don't know. But what we learned is that that level of production only comes from inside them. You can't manage it from the outside to that level. You can't stand over and watch them enough. Like they've got to want to do it, and then they can't. We know they have gear. All of your crews are capable of doing more if they want to. And so what we started doing is we we grew a lot, and you know, 130 or so people in a field now and carrying a lot of different trades. And we we just built incentives for all of the tasks that we were doing: the carpentry and the painting and the flooring and the tile and the cleaning and all these different you know, pieces of the demo, etc. All these parts that we were doing in our trade, we just built incentives around the labor budgets. If they could beat the labor budgets and the jobs are done right, we always link back to quality, then I was happy to share that savings with the guys. I was planning on spending that in the first place, which is yeah, I would I I just like that as a foundation because it's very sustainable. You know, if it's savings mean money, so my my gross is better on the project, then great. I'm I'm happy to that's the easiest money I'll ever spend. So started doing that. And but as we grew, we needed systems to manage it. Excel kind of failed at a certain point, it was just too much. So we built software around it that we call Prodive. And that's what we we spun off about three years ago into its own software company that just manages performance-based compensation models for contractors. Yeah, I love that. I love the idea. And the other thing too, when you have a performance based model like this, there's a there's Parkinson's law, I believe, in it's something along the lines of um task will either it expand or contract according to the time in which you're uh assigned to it. So you if you say something's gonna take eight hours, it'll take eight hours, curiously enough. But if you you if you give yourself you know a couple of hours, chances are you'll probably get it done in a couple of hours. Now there's I've find that I can move that needle by giving them the dollar amount and telling them this is how much money you have. You want to get it done in 10 minutes, you want to get it done in an hour. Because it's knock yourself out, man, but it's your money now. Now, the what we do in the States, we've got a lot of rules around minimum wage and things like that. You guys have similar. So it's we still manage a floor for the guys, right? So they're they have a minimum, they they make their base wage, doesn't go any lower than X. And that's fine. And but if they overperform, they have a chance to earn more. And that's really important. Gets them to you get a it gets them to bring their brain. Turns out you get a free brain with every employee. Um they they it's like a gift with purchase. And they show up and they've got they bring their back to work every day to dig this ditch or to you know run this conduit or put the shingles on this roof. But the truth is they have a brain too. Some are better than others, but they all have one, and if you can get them to use it, they will perform better. Yeah, well, it's going to attract a grain players as well into your team because those people that are efficient and effective and get work done and motivated to get work done will be drawn to these types of incentive models. Um whereas those that just want to plot along and uh, you know, work a yeah, work a basic job. So you're going to attract and keep, you know, if if you're paid under an incentive model and you're doing really great, you've got the baseline of the you know, the compliance is taken care of, but uh in terms of the minimum and so on, but then above and beyond you're getting uh so much more, you you you you can't you can't leave the company. There's no one else doing it that quite uh it is really impactful to hiring, to recruiting, or attention of your folks. Yes. We actually lead with it a lot of times in recruiting because I mean, you know, Bob will come in, he's like, you're hiring a carpenter. He's like, I'm the greatest carpenter in the world. I'm getting $40 an hour, or you know, you're gonna pay me more. I'm like, well, our carpenters make $35 as a base, but our carpenters actually usually average about 52 because they're great at what they do. And if you're great as you're good as you say you are, you're gonna make a lot of money here. The people who lean in on that are the ones you want. If they're afraid of that model, then there's a reason they're afraid of it. They want to come in and hide, they want to come in and do the minimum. But the people who are like, wait a second, you're gonna tell me you just pay me more automatically, the more efficient I am, the better work I do. Okay, what's the catch? You know, like there's no catch. It's automatic, shows up on your paycheck. Yeah. And what about rate? I suppose rework would become a whole lot less of an issue because someone stuffs up and doesn't read the plan correctly. I have that same, the same this guy on on camera, a carpenter on camera, he actually said the quiet part out loud. He actually, we were interviewing people talking about this, this is years ago. And he said, Well, my my approach to quality changed when I went on this prophe thing because it cost me too much money to go back. I'm like, Yeah, welcome to our world. You know, like this welcome to this side of the table, my friend, because that is our that's our universe. That's that's how we operate as as contractors. If I have to go back and fix something, I'm probably breaking even on the job. If I go back twice, I probably lost money. Like it's this is a fragile margin under which we operate. And I I really want them to own that. So yeah, if you go back, that's eating into your bonuses. So get it right the first time. This isn't about working faster. There's no you don't work fast, you don't you don't wire something faster. You don't, you know, put in your shingles faster, you just work more efficiently. You you prepare your truck ahead of time with the right materials on it, you communicate well with your team, you set the job up well, you keep your job site organized, you can find things, but you just become more efficient and you communicate better. It's a teamwork thing. That's where the savings come from. It's organizational operational efficiency. And the trick is they've they'll pull it in. The cool thing is an owner, you can go to the job site now and talk about that stuff, and they understand why it matters to them. Like, hey, you know, if you guys maybe try doing this first and then do that part and see if that's a little more efficient, they'll be like, oh, we make more money. Yeah, that's all I do. Before you would say that and it didn't matter because it's not their money. Now you talk about things that this is what it takes to be great at your trade. When I when I when I train you on a process or I invest in helping you to get better at something, or encourage you, hey, watch this video. This guy's got a good technique for this. Awesome. Now that's how you make more money. Let's go. Yeah. It's an interesting thing. And it's a uh I've got a um there's a guy I know, I won't say who he is because it might incriminate him, but he works in a um he works in a shipping company, he unloads ships and so on. He's a team leader, and they're they're wired to work slower slower, so they tip into the um um overtime pay pay cycle. So they're they'll cap they're calculating how how slow do I need to work in order to get to the overtime. So the whole team, my whole team is a team leader, um, gets that higher paid bracket, which is a which is a crazy way to think about, you know, that's what employees might be thinking about if they're not right to do things differently. There's a great acquaintance, some math here. So what you need to calculate is that shipping company is how much does it cost me, how much do I plan for it to cost me to unload this container, for example. Yeah. Let's say I think it's gonna cost me a dollar. Well, so I've got a dollar in that. If I just tell the team, look, I'm gonna give you the dollar, if you get it done in half the time, you still get the whole dollar. Yeah. But you can get now, you can do twice as many because you're gonna get it done faster. Now, forget OT. The way they make more money now is to get more done. So they'll make way more that way than they ever would just getting a few hours of overtime. Yeah. So you just put the script on the way they think about how they make money, because right now it's an equation of time. And O2 is a friend. Yeah. And so, yeah, flipping that way of thinking, it they're almost thinking like a um the boss. They're thinking like the a self-employed person. Yeah. People describe this as ownership thinking was an old school kind of term for this, and I still very applicable. But ownership thinking, you what I'm trying to do is translate it to what the the crew controls, which is labor for the most part. Sometimes material abuses, but the big part, and that's where we most of us struggle, is adherence to our labor goals, our labor budgets. If I can get that sorted, then I'm in a good position to succeed. Yeah, 100%. And so just in practical terms, what does I uh I'm sure the model um changes somewhat to according to the business. Um, but what does a typical incentive program kind of look like? Just real quick. We see we see what it's wrong, believe it or not, trades are not as different as they sometimes think they are. In the end, we have the same basic problem set. I have a labor goal, I need to make sure I'm efficient against that, I need to do good quality work. Right. So those two things tend to dominate. And I have a hard time doing that today. And so what we'll generally see is a company setting the labor budget for the crew so they see what the labor budget is when they from the bid, right? So you've estimated that job and you've estimated it, say it's $10,000 in labor, $100 in labor, whatever the number is. What we've learned is that it's important to show that to the crew. We have an app where the crew sees the labor budget and they track how much time they've used and how much money they've used against it. So if they've got an hour to do it, they use 20 minutes, if they got 100 hours to do it, have they used 20 hours, they use 100 hours, they use 120 hours. It shows them how they're progressing along the way because transparency is important. If the crew, if you want them to change behavior, which is the goal of a bonus program, not just paying bonuses, I want to change behavior, then they need to buy into it. For them to buy into it, they've got to see it. It's got to be very transparent, or they they don't believe us when we just tell them, right? So show it to them. We we put it in an app. So then they'll say, okay, if you beat this and you save me a dollar, you know, most of our clients say, okay, I'll give you guys 75% of that, or something like that, or some 50-50, or they'll give you 100% of it. Just depends on the business. Everybody's a little different. And basically the guys know what that's worth to them because they can see it on their phone. They're looking at it and saying, okay, if we finish an hour ahead of time, we make an extra dollar. And they can start doing that math automatically. It's in there, it's on their phone, they're tracking it. It becomes their money. You have to talk to them like it's their money. So, what you do is you go to the job site and you look at your crew and you say, Hey, are you guys making any money on this job? Which is a funny question, right? Because you because they're they're thinking at first, like, well, I'm getting paid, right? Yeah, but if you're making any money, yeah. When they can answer that question, yes or no, you're winning. You're you're already winning as a contractor. Because if they go to the job side and think, Am I making money? That means do I have my materials? Are we being efficient? Are we doing good quality work? Are we gonna have a callback? Are we gonna be on schedule? Are we gonna be under schedule? Do I have the right team here? Is Bob doing it the right way? When they're thinking like that and they can answer the question, are you making money on this job? When your crew says it gives you an answer back to that question, you're you just hit a whole nother gear as a contractor. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. And so um, I mean, we'll we'll speak to the software and how people can get their hands on it because I mean, trying to run these incentive programs by a spreadsheet or Excel spreadsheet, that'd be a hell of a task. So you get it. If you're really small and you do the kind of the same work over and over again, and you just got one person doing one task, it's you can. The problem is we have multiple people on the job and they work different amounts of time, they make different wage rates, and they have a callback. Like who gets paid how much? It gets that's where it gets complicated, and that's where we needed software to manage it. You need some software. Yeah, before we get to that and how people can find, you know, get it get their hands on the software. Was there anything we haven't covered today that we should have covered? Um, you know, well, it was there a question I'm guessing that we I should have asked, and what would be a take? I don't I don't know. I think we've kind of covered a breadth of it. Uh I know you went through the culture piece. I I guess I would all of this, if you can't figure it out, is anchored around your people. Like from the beginning of this piece, like what kind of culture do you have so your people know to you know, communicating with your people, to incentivizing your people. The your people are at the center of it. And you know, really encourage uh leaders out there to to develop better um bi-directional listening skills and kind of people first skills. The more you can invest in your team, care about what they want. I think it's a zigzigler quote. Get help enough people get what they want, you can have anything you want. Um team get what they want. So ask them. If you don't know what they want, ask them. It's not always a raise, it's not always what you think it's gonna be. Ask them what they want in their life, you know. Yeah, and and and dig into it and really learn it because if you can help them get that, they will move mountains for you. Like that is just this path through to something better. You'll have a lot more fun running your business if you're running a human-centric team, you know, where people are are working together to achieve something, you know, as a team, than if you're just you know, everybody's in their silos and people don't care as much. It's just a lot more, a lot more enjoyable place to go to work every day. Yeah. Lean about it. Yeah. So, yeah, to tell people what what are the next steps? How did I find out more about um the software? If you want to learn about ProDib, I'm happy to share it with anybody out there who ever wants to see it. It's uh ProDiv.com. Uh get me and Michael at ProDiv.com. It's easy. I'm on LinkedIn, Michael Fortenberry. Um, those are easy ways to reach out to us and find us. Uh happy to show people software, happy to answer questions. You want to try and do this on your own, I'm happy to tell you what you know how I would do it. Um, you know, it's not always your a lot of times. I don't even sell people what we do. We just kind of help get them down the right road and they'll come back here when they're ready for it. But um like you know, I like working with contractors. I built two, you know, decent-sized construction companies, so I generally kind of understand the path. I'm a big fan of peer groups and consult and uh and coaching. So if you don't have a coach, if you don't have if you're not part of a peer group um that you can work with, find somebody who does trade consulting, trade contracting consulting and and peers. Um I think I wish I'd had that 25 years ago. Yeah. And and so the software works uh globally, is it uh presumably it's yeah, we're well because we started this in the US with a US company, but um that's folks in different parts of the world now. So it kind of depends on what operating platform they work with. You know, like we're integrated to systems like the ProCores of the world, and but there's other smaller applications that are for they're more local to different uh uh countries that sometimes we've got to build those integrations out to make it work for them. We tend to we integrate our system into their current operations. Um do that, you know, if you're using software X to manage your job costing and time tracking and estimates, etc., we'll try and integrate into X, you know, so that it's just works seamlessly for you. Yeah, it makes sense. A lot of those software as a service, they they work globally, so that's probably what people have in the US. Listen if we're not built through now, we will be at some point. So yeah, got it, got it. Brilliant. That's uh fantastic, Michael. I'm loving what you're doing there. And uh I'll put all the sh um the links in the in the show notes as well so people can find it easy to your LinkedIn and business and so on. So people can connect if they wish to do so. Thanks so much, Michael. Thank you, my friend. Take care. Thanks for listening to Built, Trusted, Chosen. Brought to you by Uplift360. Visit Uplift360.com.au