Scaling Systems Before Scaling Your Team

In this episode, we explore why many trade business owners hire staff. They often do this before fixing their systems. Josh says growth isn’t just about hiring more people. It’s about creating repeatable processes. Clear accountability is key. You also need an operational structure that can grow. 

This episode uses practical examples to show tradies how to:

• Create more capacity 
• Improve profitability 
• Avoid becoming the bottleneck

These steps help tradies expand their team effectively.

Scaling Systems Before Scaling Your Team to whole topic, we cover:

• Why More People Won’t Fix a Broken System Adding more people can make problems worse. It often doesn’t fix inefficiencies. It usually causes more complexity. It leads to lower margins and operational problems. This is instead of growth.

• Download Your Knowledge Before You Delegate Top business owners write down their ideas. They use checklists, processes, and systems for a reason. They do this before asking others to perform at the same level.

• Building Accountability Without Micromanagement: Josh says clear roles and KPIs boost performance. Reporting rhythms help teams work better. This way, they succeed without constant supervision.

• Scale With Intention, Not Ego Bigger teams don’t always mean better businesses. Focus on scaling the right systems first. This approach leads to more freedom, profit, and control.

Want to boost your trade business? This episode offers practical tips you can use right now. If you want to grow your team, boost efficiency, or gain freedom as a business owner, these lessons can help. They will help you build a strong foundation for lasting growth.

Learn to build scalable systems, boost accountability, and grow your business simply.

#TradeBusinessGrowth #ConstructionBusiness #BusinessSystems #Leadership #ScalableBusiness #TradeEntrepreneur

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to another episode of the Handle It Podcast. Join us to take the edge off business, cut through the noise, and give you practical mindset shifts, proven frameworks, and business strategies you can action today. You're not here to be lectured. You're here to learn, grow, and finally handle it. Let's get to work. It's easy to systemize or delegate out the things you hate. It's hard to systemize and delegate things you're good at. If you want a big headcount, there's nothing wrong with that. Like if that's your goal, but it'd ask you why you want that. You want a bigger headcount to reduce your own time in the business? Well then you don't need a bigger headcount. You just need people that can do your job and free you up. I don't want to be out of my business. I just want to do the part of the business I want to do. I used to want all of my team to care as much as I did about my business. Yeah, it's not gonna happen. It's like they fucking won't, Josh. It is going to break when you try to go from five to fifteen or plus. You cannot keep the same system. It's gonna need to evolve. It's a big thing to avoid just throwing more bodies at a broken system. You know, it's one of those things you've got to look at your business as this repeatable system that you fill full of great people. So you need both, you need a great system and you need phenomenal people. But I think a lot of people just go out and hire great talent and they avoid building the system along the way. So it's something that you do naturally, right? Would you agree? That's something that as you build your business, you should build your system. I agree with it. Like it's the entrepreneurial's dream to get away from the right race, away from the system of having to be an employee. But in order to build a good business, you actually need to embody being an incredible, reliable, systemable employee. Like you've got to be an employee of your own system to be able to get it to scale past you. And you said it a few times. Fucking give up a Saturday to build four weeks of a system for four Saturdays and then start taking Fridays off. Like you can take that time off after you put the systems in place. Yeah, you say it over and over again, people complaining about being busy. Like you can't get out of that. If your business demands that of you, if you're a smaller business or bigger business, I got trapped in my business of one employee and I got trapped in my business of 68 employees. So it's not the size of your business, it's you've just got to think about it like going to the gym. You don't get the return until you put, we're just talking about the gym before, right? The investment back. You've got to go until you sell we go to the gym. Yeah, 4%, right? Invest energy to go back and get it back later on. So we always encourage our guys straight away that are a bit busy and everything's a bit chaotic and shit. You've got to have to invest a few times outside of your normal operating hours to start to buy time back in the future. But preparing to scale, and and whether you're trying to scale from 10 million to 100, which we we're in processes of doing with a few people, from a million to 10, which we're doing with a lot of people, yeah, and even trying to just get to your first million, which is getting past yourself, right? Yeah. It is really the same thing and it's the same process of rhythm. And um, it's about going back and repeating what you built the system the first time, yeah, because it's gonna break when you try to get to that next level. Yeah, it's willing to let go of what got your success, like what got you to this level of success, ain't gonna get you to the next level of success. But it's not even a question, and and this is where some people think because they built an amazing system the first time around that got them from one to five. Yeah, it is going to break when you try to go from five to fifteen or plus. It is going to. You cannot, you cannot keep the same system, it's gonna need to evolve. Yeah, and it's like getting more, it's like my mentor told me, Josh, it's easy to systemize or get or delegate at the things you hate. It's hard to systemize and get delegate things you're good at. So if you're good at sales or operations, those are the things you're gonna hold on to for the longest. Yeah, and what we encourage our guys to do straight away is a lot of them come to us and go, Oh, how did you quote that job of gut feel? How'd you deal with that? I just knew. Well, if you want that, you're never gonna get free of the city. You never scale. You've got to try to like download your business out of your brain onto paper. I used to do that every Friday. It was as simple as that. My mentor said, Josh, once a week, don't let a week go by without reflecting on the week. Yeah, so I look back on my we gotta just go sit at a park bench in Coomer, actually. I know what the I can take it there if you want. No flag somewhere good. Yeah, and I just dumped my head onto paper and I was like, oh, what went well, what didn't go well, and then how can I start to build this in a repeatable? Do I need a checklist? Do I need a script? It doesn't have to be this big automated crazy thing. It's like a simple practical thing that you can give off to someone else and go, just follow this checklist on site. But I think a lot of people and and scaling uh before scaling staff, I mean, it comes back to this whole idea of not having to Josh go and hire more staff to be able to get to the next size because sometimes there's a lot of stuff that's being done throughout the days that is just complete waste. Inefficiency bloat. Yeah, that's where these big businesses go wrong, their profit margins go down to like one, two, three percent because there's so much bloat and inefficiency between departments, between people, and even like a lot, like the one thing we sell people straight away is like how clean is your data? Yeah, if you go into your job management system and you do jobs, and then every time you call that site or that person, it's the wrong phone number. Yeah, and everyone's spending three to five minutes. Hey, have you got you've got Josh's number, got Jackson's number? Oh, you let me send it to you. Like, it's like keeping your data clean is one of the things that's gonna be. But it's also keeping you, and and we'll be very careful saying this, keeping your staff dumb. Yeah, like so they're in, they're gonna have an inability to turn their amount of brain power they give you as a role to be able to be more effective. And so what we focus on, and and it's helped us scale over 20 staff and and very, very profitably as well, is that everyone in the team knows where their jurisdiction starts, ends, they know what they're responsible for, and they know the KPI they've got to get met by certain dates. Yeah. Now that's not a Josh, you need to get this done, and if you don't, you lose your job. It's we're collaborating to get there. They actually want to get that thing achieved, and that's the embodiment that a lot of them are incentivized as well by not having more staff in the business. The less staff we have that we can do the same job, they all get to increase their bonuses on. That's something we actively chose. Yeah. And what that meant was we were able to grow with zero sometimes increase in staff because the person's like, I'll take that extra thing on, knowing I'm gonna get reimbursed for it. Yeah, it's like enrolling your team to help build the system because they're doing it every day. Yeah. And we like go back to one of the other episodes, we said, like, we did company health checks, we would pair people up. Because I used to be doing this thing, like we used SimPro, right? And I'm like, they used to have to like click on every fucking image to figure out what it was. There's like no thumbnail. And then, but then SimPro did this update, and then I got someone else to come watch over me to go, how am I doing this? They go, bro, there's a button there, you can see all the thumbnails. So I'd spent three months doing something incredibly stupid. So it's like you said, collaborating on the process and looking at each other, going, how can we all do this better? Yeah, we don't need to bring on more bloat and overheads, and you can reward your team accordingly. According to me, yeah. And I do believe, like with the scaling side of things, it's it's important to understand why you want to scale too. Like we always talk about trying to get into the why of things. Um, there's a great book called Start With Why by Simon Sinek, and it's like even to reflect on yourself, you sort of spoke about going and reflecting. Why do you want to scale in the first place? Because when you get to the bottom of that, is it to have a bigger team? Yeah. Because a lot of people sort of go, I want to scale, let's go hire more people. Ego headcount, right? Yeah, headcount means something. And it's like, and and even you and I, we're so guilty of it as well. And it comes up all the time. But you know, on a scalability point of view, it's actively making a choice in your own reflection. If you want a big headcount, that there's nothing wrong with that. Like if that's your goal, but it'd ask you why you want that. Yeah. And then is it you want a bigger headcount to reduce your own time in the business? Well, then you don't need a bigger headcount. You just need people that can do your job and free you up. And so again, it comes back to better processes, will make that happen. Yeah. And once you start to build that out, it's really getting it out of so it's repeatable by them. And as we say, there's only two major things once you've got that system starting to generate. It's like you're never going to get it perfect. There's no end step, there's just constant refinement. Yeah. But then outside of that, all you can do is train your people. Like, firstly, do you know what to do? And mistake I would make was I'd be so busy, I'm like, you know what to do, Abro. Like, yep, and I'd walk away. Confirmation. If I hadn't even like checked because I was so busy, I didn't really give a shit because I was so busy with my own thing. Yeah, I'd go, oh, show me, oh, fucking hell. No, you don't. Let me train you. Then once they know what to do, then you've got to build a culture that they will do it with without you being there. It's like, will they do it when it's easy and hard? Because, like, I think you might have experienced this. It's like when you get to a level of success, it's like these habits and behaviors got you there. And it's easy for them to drop away because everything is so great. Like, oh, you stop checking on your numbers every week, you don't spot check things, you don't go talk to your clients because you're at this level of success. So it's like getting that culture to really hold people to go, well, we're doing great things. We need to discipline ourselves to follow the system that we've built and trust in the system. You're very right. Like, and and I think for for me personally, it's been one of those things that when we come back and audit clients and they they lose that habit, it's fine for a while and then it drops off, but no one notices, yeah, and then it continues to drop off, and it might be six months before you actually got a ship fight. Yeah, you're like, holy fuck, we we're yeah, we're we're on a deadline here. Yeah, and then you're trying to fire people and go, you've fucking been not doing no no the the simple thing six months ago that you dropped the habit of, that's where it started. Yeah, and I think as an owner, like I've had a lot of mentors that just say, like, oh, you've got to be free of your business, Josh, you've got to free of your business. But I think as an owner, you've got to have some level of involvement in the business. I call bullshit today. Me too, man. Like I read. I used to feel guilty and I was always trying to pull myself out of the business. I've got to be out if I if I'm not out, I'm not successful. Yeah. And what I learned the hard way was that was actually pretty, it's my opinion, now pretty poor advice. Yeah, I don't want to be out of my business. I just want to do the part of the business I want to do. Yeah. And that's what you get for building a great system. You can go to the part that you want to do. It could be you come in only once a week and oversee your business, check the numbers, and train your team. But it's like finding a way to build a system and then filling it full of great people so you can do what you want to do. But I think as well, you've got to also realize the effectiveness of that once a week you come in. So, like I take Mondays and Fridays away from my team and I use those days just to specifically steer the cruise ship. Like it's about me looking at the maps, going, where are we at? Don't take client meetings, don't take anything other than planning meetings with the internal team. Now, those days are specifically about me being really intentional at getting a lot of outcome in a very short amount of time. Yep. Essentially, my habit of continuing to drive the business forward. Yeah. You don't let someone drive the cruise ship if they don't have the ability to know where we're going, right? Yeah, and that's it. Josh, I think with it, accountability for me, like personally, it's been that accountability as an entrepreneur, as a leader in the business is sometimes hard to hold. Where do you drive and recommend for people to get that accountability? Yeah, I think Gary V really helped me with this with one little one of those little reels. I don't know what you think of Gary V. I I love and hate him, some of his messages. But one thing he did say is I used to want all of my team to care as much as I did about my business. And it's like they fucking won't, Josh. And I'm like, why won't they? Because, because, because I'm like, they can't expect that of them. Yeah. So I really started to push out my accountability to my team where, like, you know, it's accountability versus responsibility. But when I started to really go, well, what's the things I need to be currently doing to drive my business forward? And it can be quite hard to discern that because what got you said, like to 1 million to 5 million, has to change. Because a million dollars, you might have two or three guys on or whatever it is. That's not, you know, that's what 30 odd hours a day. When you get to 20 people a day, uh 20 a size of 20 people, there's 160 hours a day at least that you've got to steer. So if you get five percent more or five percent less out of them from those couple days a week, it's massive. So but that's also like even down to the accountability and tracking side. So for me, I stay accountable with the head leadership, right? Because they their their jobs to do it because they're getting incentivized. Do you find yourself dipping down sometimes? Are you really like disciplined to stay out of it? I mean, it would be only human to do that and to do and to to go, I've just not got energy this week. And and a lot of the time it's like it's the discipline of it's gotta, I've got the principles of things that must happen. Yes, because I've I've been through the process of seeing us lose 30% of profit because of a bad thing that happened three months ago. And if you look at your own business, anyone listening, you'll be going, Oh fuck, maybe that's that that thing we stopped six months ago. I remember now we were doing it, we were flying, and then the habit got broken. Um, and I spoke to this about you know someone the other day about addictive habits, like positive or negative, you've got to try and get an addiction to it so that you don't. And my addiction was when the team filled out the report, yeah. I actually get a bit addicted to seeing what the list of changes that's gonna come off that week. So when we do our reporting, we've got from the entire list of our business of all the numbers that gets put back in front, and each team leader brings back, they've got eight minutes and they've got to go eight minutes, they go through their thing, they go through their numbers, they explain what was up and what was down, why it was up, why it was down, and then from there they make a list of all the things they're gonna be actioning this next seven days because of that to improve their section. I got addicted to seeing that because I was like, it's like seeing my own business make more money and other people driving it. And that was the fuel for me to then go, oh, that accountability for getting ready to scale meant that I could very easily see the numbers to go. If I turn the volume up here, it'll it'll pay a dividend in three months. Yeah. That's the return of it, right? So it's like, and we did in our business just to briefly cover that off. What people can do is like it's like right frequency of checking and measuring with the daily huddle, the weekly meeting, the monthly, and I had to really go back to your accountability point of view. I had to make myself accountable to not check the things every day that didn't need to be checked. Like Josh, my mentor said, write it down, and if tomorrow you still need to talk about it, talk about it. Yeah, but if it doesn't, leave it for a weekly meeting or a monthly check in, or you just cook your team, get them to be accountable in one's heart. Like this is like you said, keep, stay here, do this extraordinarily well, and the rest of the business will take care of itself. Look, there's so many habits you can implement, and none of them are right or wrong. And they're gonna be tailored ways you do it for yourself. But one of the big things is making it very clear for your team of what is the expectation and truly going, can other people in the team explain their expectation of another employee? And if you can audit your team in that way and say, hey, do you know what this person's achievable of? If that crossover is able, you're gonna see some incredible collaboration across the board and your team of people helping each other achieve a common goal. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Handle It Podcast. Head over to resvita.com.au to join the handle it with resvita community, like hundreds of people, just like you have done, and gain access to grab free resources, tools, templates, and the blueprints you need to scale. Now you know it's your move. See you inside.