Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast, the show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over 103 million in annual revenue. I’m your host, Brandon Pierpont, founder of Painter Marketing Pros and creator of the popular PCA Educational Series to grow marketing for painters. In each episode, I’ll be sharing proven tips, strategies and processes from leading experts in the industry on how they found success in their painting business. We will be interviewing owners of the most successful painting companies in North America and learning from their experiences.
In this series titled “3rd Generation Painter, 1st Generation Mindset”, Joshua Joosten & Cody Roberts of Sequoia Painting will be sharing their story on building a near $2m residential and commercial painting company based in Tulare County, CA. They will be detailing the changes that Sequoia Painting has undergone from starting as a post-retirement hobby for Joshua to a profitable and growing enterprise with a very unique approach to the painting industry.
In episode 4, they will lay out the systems and processes that Sequoia Painting has in place to ensure quality and make the company truly scalable.
If you want to ask Joshua and Cody questions related to anything in this podcast series, you can do so in our exclusive Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast Forum on Facebook. Just search for “Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast Forum” on Facebook and request to join the group, or type in the URL Facebook.com/groups/PainterMarketingMastermind. There you can ask them questions directly by tagging her with your question, so you can see how anything discussed here applies to your particular painting company.
What’s up guys? How’s it going? What’s going on doing well, doing well, very excited for this one. The the systems and the processes you guys have been hinting, hinting at those, talking a little bit about those for a while now.
So I’m excited to dive in you bet systems. Don’t, they don’t really matter though when you think about it, you know, it’s better just to re invent the wheel, kind of make it up, you know, new employee, new, new uh new approach each time, obviously, obviously, joking systems form the backbone of any successful scalable enterprise. And when you don’t have good systems, you figure that out when you reach a certain certain size. Yeah, so let’s, let’s kind of start with, how did you guys start building your systems?
What was it? Um, I mean, Josh, when we, when you launched it, were you just focused on that from the beginning or, or, uh, you know, how did that work? You know, I, I wasn’t, uh obviously because it was just gonna be more of a hobby. Uh, you know, so didn’t really have any plans on making any systems and as we started to grow and, and get, you know, on a larger scale, um, I was, I was noticing, you know, issues coming up and, and all these things and I was like, man, what, what can I do to prevent that from happening?
You know, and, um, talking with my mentor, uh, he had told me one day and, and, uh, I, I was calling him for, for some question, uh, how to handle something and, and he, he tells me he’s like, you know, he goes, I, I do not mind you calling me, you could call me as many times you want. By this time I was calling him sometimes 20 to 2100 times a day. You know, it, I had his number on auto. Um, but, uh, he kind of told me, you know, that II I came from the Department of Corrections where the systems are in place, you know, for, for everything, you know.
And, uh, he, he kind of said he’s like, why don’t you just make all your, the systems policies and procedures like the prison has, make it into a painting in the painting world, you know, and it was just like a light switch clicked, like, why am I dealing with all these different things? Just, you know, make a system like that, that lays out everything from, you know, the way we want our, our foreman, you know, um, going to the job site, you know, none of our foreman, you know, only on the first day they will come to the shop to pick up uh possibly materials or, you know, uh, some kind of, uh, uh, equipment that is, you know, pressure washers or something like that.
But then after that, you know, they go straight to the job sites every morning after that. And so when he said that a light switch and then I just started to just start pulling, putting these, you know, systems in place about the same time when Cody, you know, joined, uh Sequoia painting and, and he helped, you know, uh put in those in play as well. And, um, and now, ever since then, I mean, we, we, we stop and we always are looking at what kind of problems or what kind of issues are we having right now as, you know, grow what we call growing pains, you know, and how can we put that into a system or, you know, policy or procedure?
Um, and, um, um, anyways, you know, and, and make that more, um, presentable to our team, you know, And I mean, it was, it sometimes it’s as little as, you know, I remember back when I first opened little thing like gas, getting a gas for a company vehicle, I would, someone would call me and say, hey, I need gas and I’d go to the gas station with them and use my debit card to get gas in them, you know, and finally I found a little local gas, uh, store here and they had kind of a, a good old boy handshake type credit to where you have your employees go there.
They sign, you know, how many gallons they use and then he bills you at the end of the day to where now we have, you know, company gas cards for every foreman that has a vehicle that is tracked e every way, shape or form, you know, what time, how many gallons, how often do they go to the gas station? Um, so it just, yeah, putting those all into play. Yeah, I would say, uh, you know, when I came on, Joshua had several well in motion already, you know, as far as, uh, sop for is exterior process SOP for an interior process sop for a cabinet refinishing.
Um, and the way I kind of looked at those, I came from a very, um, procedure regulated field. The couple that I have worked in, there’s a order to install a water main, there is in a order to grade a subdivision, right? So those kind of things he had in play here made perfect sense to me because there’s an efficient way. And then, uh, the two fur in a service based business of having those sops is they are, um, customer satisfaction, almost guarantors, right? Because if we follow this sop, we head off the things that have caused the, the aches and pains in the back.
You know, Mrs Jones calling at 250 in the morning mad because I didn’t know your guys were showing up at seven o’clock this morning. I haven’t even gotten a shower. They weren’t here till, you know, they were here at 2100 yesterday and they’re here at seven o’clock to, ok. Well, there’s a reason to be upset me as a consumer would be as well. Right. So we have a mandatory contact and, or it’s laid out with the foreman on day one, what his wished start time is, which we strongly influence the hope on that start time also, you know, but that’s it’s not a gray area now, between the crew and the customer that’s, uh, it’s a guarantee.
They’re, they’re gonna make that known on day one. What the plan for that start time is moving forward. No more. Mrs Jones getting her shower interrupted or not even in the shower yet in the morning and during her normal get going routine, you know, and then, uh, off to a rocky start as it were any time you have to start a service with the customer, not appreciating the first step, you know what I mean? So the sops are, I mean, obviously a, a quality controller, right? Everybody is aware of the processes.
Those are those quarterly trainings and recaps a culmination of industry standards and sequoia standards. You know, we refer to sequoia industry plus because there’s some things we set a little higher criteria for than what your industry standard layout may be of. It controls the quality and like something when we go through these uh quarterly trainings, I don’t want anybody listening to things like they, they can be tedious, they can be kind of monotonous, right? So for some of these guys, they have sat in these quarterly trainings a dozen times, you know what I mean?
They’re aware, like there’s little changes here and there, you know, as things get can get better and involved. But it, it’s a lot of the same information. So it’s something I always try to make sure that my perspective of these things is because I care about you guys enough to know I can back you up no matter what. Right. And if we do what sequoia expects in these sops, I know 1003% what we’re doing out there. I don’t have to see you do it. So I know when, um, we’re gonna pick on Mrs Jones today.
So when Mrs Jones calls and says they didn’t put two coats on my window trim. I know they didn’t, it doesn’t look like two coats got put on it. Right. Oh, Mrs Jones, I, it sounds like we may have a communication barrier. So we need to get together and talk about this because we have standards in play. And, you know, Mr Mendoza is one of our top guys. He is well aware of the standards and I just, um, from the employer standpoint, I don’t see that being what took place.
Maybe he hasn’t got to that second coat or maybe it got the, it more than likely got the two coats and maybe we need to add a third coat to your work order if it still doesn’t look like a nice finished product for us, but we have things in play that I can guarantee you that that’s not what happened. You know what I mean? So giving guys in the field that reassurance that, hey, this isn’t just, this isn’t a way for us to control every little thing going on out there.
No, this is a way for me to guarantee that we can all have each other’s back in this crazy thing we call business, right? That I know I can back any one of my guys up. If there is any kind of, uh, what’s, what all adopt Mr Nick Slavic people be crazy, right? You’re gonna get them every once in a while. It’s, it’s a law of averages, you know, every once in a while you’re gonna get that customer that the sky is falling every other day. You know what I mean?
And when you have those kind of things in play, um you get a real good reaction out of your teams when they know. Yes, the customer is right. But I know that we did it the right way and the way it was presented to you, we were gonna do it, you know, I mean, it provides, go ahead. We, we always inform all of our uh you know, our team out there on the field to see Y A, you know, cover your own ass, you know, that’s why we have these policies and procedures in place.
You know, it’s yeah, on the during the training part or whatever it may be like. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, I mean we have uh we have a three step uh pre inspection uh policy in place sop um you know, you go around and you and you’re kind of pre inspecting the place. If you see paint, you know, on a tile roof or you see paint, you know, on, on the uh, tile inside or anywhere, you know, that doesn’t, you know, know that we did put it on there, take pictures of that immediately and, and notify the customer, let them know.
Hey, just to let you know, we haven’t, you know, busted out any kind of pain, anything right now and there’s a bunch of paint on your tile, uh, tile roof. You know, I just wanna make sure that’s clear before we go into it and then we get blamed for it, you know. So, uh, we’re always telling them these things are in play for, you know, the cy A to cover your ass bottom line, you know. Yeah, it’s, it’s gonna lend your, I mean, your team, all they need to do then is follow the Sop and there’s no risk that, ok, Mrs Jones sounds like she might be a little bit of a handful.
She’s upset but there’s no, there’s no need to panic or worry about job security or am I not doing a good job when you have that clear structure? 2100%? Man? That’s exactly it. And nine times out of 2100 Mrs Jones is always, it’s a misconception. Exactly. You know, she’s already, they, they haven’t even put the second coat on yet, you know, type thing and, but she’s going into the panic mode because she’s seeing, you know, streaks or, or whatever that she’s seeing and, and most of the time the foreman, you know, can reassure.
No, we’re still gotta do a second code and we still gotta go through and do a touch up, you know. So, so I like one of the things you guys have been focused on is when things go wrong, you build some sop or process around it and there’s this idea, you want to be a fire marshal, not a firefighter. And so you just have fires all the time, but you actually want to come up with a plan and, and fix the actual problem is has that been the way that the majority of your sops have been created?
Ok. We’re going to run the company. Oh, there’s an issue. Let’s circle up and figure out how to never have that issue occur again. I I definitely, definitely a big influence on it. Most definitely because like you said, hey, mow, that overgrown field before it catches fire and we got a problem on our hands, right? So, um I, I think a lot of the we will take a step back and look at it. How often does this happen? Right. And if something goes from man, that was just an extremely special case to that has potential to repeat, um Then absolutely, let’s get in front of that, right?
Um Create happiness, right? So keep the stress of the crews minimal. Keep the stress to the customer minimal, you know, and that’s really what the, the evolving of those sop si is trying to guarantee, you know, and we’re always thinking outside of the box, I’ll give you an example of this last year on our fourth, last year, our last fourth quarter training. Um, we were getting that in 28020. We’re getting kind of a bit of uh a lot of calls from the foreman’s um in regard to their, their spray pumps, you know, um it’s not pumping, it’s not doing this, it’s not doing that.
So Cody and I had a meeting on it. It was like, man, we’re getting a lot of these coming in and uh phone calls, you know, and doing these troubleshooting over the phone and what can we do to fix that, you know. And so I ju I jump on the phone, we come up with an idea. I jump on the phone to our Draco rep here and said, hey, what kind of resources can we use from you? You know, and, and I said these are the issues we’re having and he goes, not a problem, dude.
He goes, why don’t I just come in and train your guys how to repack AAA spray gun. And I said, awesome. So he came in here on our fourth quarter training and spent a couple of two hours, you know, uh having the guys break down the, the piston and, and repacking the, the spray rigs and troubleshooting different things and we did not get knock on wood. We did not get one call this whole entire year about a spray pump not working, you know, uh, they troubleshoot it out there on the job site now and we’re gonna turn it into an annual thing.
He’s already scheduled to come to our fourth quarter training, December 13th, uh, to do another hour or two hour training to, to keep that, you know, reinsure that the guys kind of know what they’re doing out there on the field. And I love that. I think one of the reasons that a lot of companies don’t provide training is because they’re not actually sure what to train on, which can happen if you don’t have a ton of sops, don’t have a ton of processes, then obviously, training might be a little bit difficult, but I think that’s not thought of too frequently.
Like let’s tap our vendors, let’s tap the other businesses that were that we’re partnered with and actually involve them and have them come in and, and train our guys. And I also, we, we have learned through those growing paintings, right? That Josh mentioned earlier, quarterly training, we have made a priority and we’re gonna do it because rewind a few years ago, we still had quarterly training that I just a little too busy to shut down for that right now. So we’ll, we’ll let’s reschedule that, let’s reschedule that, let’s reschedule that. Right.
And then that quarterly training happened twice that year or ultimate, just one time that year. And, and then we find ourselves beating our heads against the wall on the things that quarterly training helps bring back in line, helps it come back in line, helps it come back in line. You know, so there was no denying the importance of it, you know, and any business owner out there, I if you have a concept of your numbers and you break it all the way down to what painters are, are bringing in per hour, you know, and you got 1314 guys in the field and you wanna shut that down in the heart of busy time, you know, potentially two of them are gonna happen during really busy times to have them all sitting in a room to go over this stuff.
Yeah, that’s, that’s hard. That can be hard to stomach. Like I just can’t justify it. I can’t justify it. But peace of mind is a hard thing to put a number on, you know, and we learned that the hard way getting callbacks or incomplete close outs and, you know, things left open ended that were oh on breaks of sop, but we were not getting those freshen up courses. We were not doing it quarterly. You know what I mean? Growth is not linear. A lot of times, a lot of times you’ll have to take, you know, a little bit of a step back, take a step forward.
And if you’re that temptation is strong, you know, the business is there. Let’s keep selling, let’s keep producing it. Stupid to stop during this time. But then like you said, there’s gonna be callbacks, we’re gonna be the satisfied customers. Now you have a negative review. Now you’re actually not landing some of those projects that you otherwise would have landed if your quality control were in place. Now, you have more uh higher employee turnover. You maybe have some theft or some other things that are happening on the employee side, all that stuff that could have been avoided by biting the bullet and, and being willing to take that small step back.
That’s right. Absolutely. And, you know, uh you’re exactly right, Brandon. The, I mean, even the callbacks, I ain’t trying to toot our own horn by no means, but I don’t, I could probably count on one hand how many callbacks we’ve had it this year. You know, it’s, it’s not very rare. I mean, it’s not very common, it’s very rare that we have a call back, you know. Uh that’s wild for your uh size. Yeah. And I, and I really feel that and going back, that’s just the training that we, we give, you know. Yeah.
Yeah, I love it. So we’ve talked about the importance of processes, how you guys generally create them, generally creating them as you go. You’re finding problems and then you’re permanently solving those problems or at least doing your best to let’s get into some of the actual sops. So I know one that was interesting was, hey, we’re gonna call the, the day before we’re gonna always make sure that we clarify the start time. It’s generally good practice, but not every company does it. And we gave the reason why Mrs Jones doesn’t want to be surprised and probably the homeowner is naturally going to assume that the start time is going to be consistent between days and that may not always be the case.
What other, what other sops do you guys have that, that you find very beneficial and, or that you think might be a little bit uncommon. So, like I, I’m gonna look at one right now so I can, uh, kind of glance through it and what maybe out of the ordinary. Um, so say, for instance, interior painting part of that SOP is for our crew to know customers responsibilities versus theirs. That’s kind of a gray area in the painting industry, right? Like, um, and, and these are things that the customers informed of through the sales process.
And if there’s any changes to the customer’s responsibilities, the crew will find it in their work order. If they don’t find it in their work order, that leaves reason to contact, uh, sales or Joshua myself, um, through the Slack channel that’s created for that job. And I don’t see anything about, um, taking down TV. S but they’re not taken down customers. Not here. Please advise. Right. Or they have the conversation with the customer because they are there. Are you guys taking these TV S down tomorrow? Like we won’t be in this area today but, you know, will the TV S be taken down by tomorrow morning or whatever it is.
So, um, letting them know what the customer’s responsibility as far as Sequoia painting is concerned as a general statement, unless there’s any modifications through the sales process. Um, that’s a big part of the SOP, whether it’s inside cabinets outside, right? Because the gray area just leaves the door wide open for uh customer dissatisfaction. But Cody, let’s explore that one for a second. So let’s say, let’s say you’re in the house, the TV S are up. Um, you’re fortunate enough in this position in this hypothetical example that you don’t need to paint right there right now.
You’ll come back in the morning, talk with the customer and, and uh, you know, they’re not going to take the TV S down. Right. Well, so now we have AAA scope creep, right? Change of scope. So what is the SOP then? So the SOP on that is you, we have all in our sales statements, release the liabilities for those types of items, right? So it, it’s a, a re inquiry to the customer, I can move these for you if you’re unable to get them out of the way.
But just to remind you, we release reliability on these types of items. That’s why they’re, so, that’s why they’re viewed as the customer’s responsibility. I mean, these days, right. TV, mounts, they’re all pretty similar to each other. And typically you can get a flat screen TV, off the wall in 10 minutes or less. Right. On average. They’re, they’re not a big task, but it’s the, it’s the release of liability, you know, so the documentations in the proposal about all that kind of stuff. So if the foreman is able to, they just that, that’s the sop part is the foreman to reiterate that like, hey, I am gonna need these out of my way.
I can take them off. I can place them wherever you would like them placed. Just know we sequoia painting, we have, we release liability of that TV, in this process. Sure. Most of the time, I mean, and again, and we’ve never had to buy a TV. Brandon. We’ve never, you know what I mean? These things, it’s all for the, like you said, it’s, it’s the fire marshal, not firefighting, right? So it, it’s, it’s in the open. It’s, it’s known we can take a TV off and set it down and not have any issues 99% of the time.
But reiterating what they signed on their contractual agreement, um brings it back to the front of their mind. And they can say, ok, it’s worth the risk to have them go ahead and do it. Um, if it accidentally gets dropped or kicked or something, like I understand, I’m gonna have to buy myself a new TV because that wasn’t their responsibility to have that thing moved. Yeah, I can. Uh, so I think, I, I think some people will be listening. I think this is kind of a silly example. Right.
Like, oh, we could just take the TV down. It’s not a huge deal while you guys focused on this. But I think that’s, that’s sort of the point with sops and, and processes, right? You start with the things that are most flagrant, biggest things showing up while Mrs Jones is in the shower is obviously gonna be a pretty big deal. She’s not happy about that. Something like this. It could be. Well, hey, man, if there, if there are little things just go ahead and knock them out.
But when I’m thinking about processes, like, do I need to build a system around this? I 10 X my business or 100 X my business if we’re doing 1003 million? Yeah, maybe it’s not a big deal. II, I know our crews will take care of it. What if we’re doing 20 million? What if we’re doing 200 million? But I feel the same way about taking down the TV. Or every little thing I, I want the mcdonald’s Hamburger model, right? II, I have never, I have no idea who’s there. I’ve never talked with that person.
I’ve not talked with the person that talks with the person, but I know that it’s going to be handled correctly. I think that’s the, the kind of peak level of sops, no doubt. A and um something we adopted from, uh our, the, our biggest mentor that I adopted from him being Joshua’s mentor is the argument of if it’s not on paper, it doesn’t exist about that, right? So I may fool, I may have all the faith in the world that Mr Mendoza has taken down 100 TV. And he’s never had an issue or he’s moved couches with no collateral damage, they pull the refrigerator out of its little spot.
We haven’t ever had to replace any flooring, right? I know he is amazing at it and he makes sure things are done carefully like they were his own. Like you stated, I’m not always, you may not always be in a position to know each person individually that deeply. I mean, I know that may sound kind of, I don’t ever want to sound disconnected from the company, but that’s kind of the the that can happen, right? Especially depending on what your end goals are, what you’re what you’re trying to end up as, right?
So you gotta have it, it’s gotta be written now, there’s gotta be a way to cover that even if it’s blanket you know, it doesn’t have to be ok. Now, we gotta write one for a TV. Now we gotta write one for a refrigerator. Now we gotta write, they’re grouped customers responsibilities. Sequoia’s responsibilities. Right. And, and if it falls in those, then we know the answer. If it falls over here, well, we know Sequoia’s responsibility. That’s ours. We don’t even have to talk to the customer about that.
You know what I mean? How do you, how do you store your sops? Got a book, a Google drive folder. How do, how everything we have everything on, go on Google. So we have created uh slide shows, of course, for all the training or Josh should say Joshua has, he’s got a large amount of his time invested in a lot of the slide shows. Um and he updates them, tries to keep them looking a little different and that kind of thing, you know what I mean? Um So slide shows for all those for the quarterly trainings and then each van or, or company vehicle has laminated sets of the Sops, right?
Um Because there should be back to the, if it’s not physical, it doesn’t exist. I mean, we’re, we have a large digital platform there. We have a whole Slack channel that is again, all the SOPS can all be found in that Slack Channel also. And everybody that is at Sequoia painting has, that’s not a private channel. It’s a public channel for all eyes. It’s an sop channel. Yep. So, yep. So it’s there, there’s copies laminated copies in every vehicle’s binder because every vehicle has a binder. Right?
That has safety, the safety handbook in it. It’s got the sops, it’s got all the foreman, all this stuff for the foreman where you may need to take somebody in the event of an accident. I mean, everything, everything that should be in that binder that is important and of legal purposes. Every vehicle has one that’s thorough. You guys are, I it’s gotta be, it has to be available, right? That’s the thing. I it’s gotta be available and you, so you make it available in as many ways as you can.
So, um, someday we may be all digital base and not have as much of the physical hard stuff out there. But um, I think some of those guys, especially if they have that new hire that maybe has never done a cabinet job yet. And that way now it’s not just them following the foreman’s lead. The foreman could hand them that sop and say, hey, you’re doing these first three lines for me today. This is, this is your part of that. This is your part of the detail today.
It’s these first three lines, I mean, that can sit right on the countertop in the kitchen, right? He can look back and refer to it as many times as needed to know that he’s doing what what the expectations, how frequently are you guys updating these, how frequently are you updating these? Like, do you have an sop for updating your sops? We, we actually created one at Painter Mars. Yeah, it was a frequent, it’s a frequent activity and it seems, which is ironic, but it seemed a little half hazard how we were doing it.
Like, if we’re trying to document everything, we should probably have a documented way of documenting everything and changing, right? Um I would say at this point, it, it has been um to be that fire marshal, you know, so luckily, I would say there has been many less updates to them in our recent years compared to at the conception of them, right? So they um I, I have a weird mindset about things. I, I don’t think there’s such thing as like perfect and finished for certain stuff, you know.
So I kind of think SOPS will be ever evolving to some aspect, you know, of course, you, what controls your finished product that may just change as products change you, you know, that may be the real, you know, a real reason to change the controllers of your quality. Um But I would hope majority of it’s gonna always be very, very similar, you know, that you, you learn from mistakes and uh become better at cutting them off before they happen. Right. Sure. So let’s, let’s get into some more.
Are there some more of the SOPS in the processes or a general kind of overview, you know, like here’s how we break them up. Here’s, you know, we have sales or we have, we have admin sops something so that the people listening can really get a better sense of what’s in that binder and what they might be, be wanting to develop on their end. So le let me, I’ll let me read through some titles of our slide shows for you, right? That so or let’s start with this.
So what is in all the, the vehicles that’s readily available? Cabinet painting. Sop you got exterior sop checklist and you have an interior SOP checklist and then other nuggets that we have as part of our SOP training and uh presentations. We do efficiency and productivity. We do white glove cleaning, we do the spray rig cleaning that Joshua spoke of um leadership, leadership and managing your team. Um And they all are pretty effect. They, they all kind of segue some materials repeating that’s kind of by design. Also, you know, the things that repeat within those are obviously of importance to sequoia.
So we do a whole slide show just on white glove cleaning and then white glove cleaning is still everywhere that pertains in the, in an sop that it belongs to. You know what I mean? So, uh he said it, it, it can feel kind of redundant. I’m sure to a lot of the guys that have been through it several times at this point. But, um, we know it’s a huge part of what makes us sequoia painting. You know what I mean? There’s no denying that to us. Yeah.
People have to hear things a lot more than you think that they do understand and actually be able to do it and then somehow it’s just a, a defect of our human condition maybe is that we’ll just sort of stop doing it. I just asked my wife about that comment, right? How many times how many times you got to hear something? You know, that that’s it. Well, we, we refer that to muscle memory, you know, in the department, the same thing, go training over training, over training and you’re like, gosh, dang, this is crazy.
But then like when you’re actually involved in an incident and, you know, everything is going 1000 miles an hour. Thank goodness. Yeah, you’ll be surprised on how natural things just happened. Like, oh, shoot, I didn’t realize I can swing the baton like that and hit a person like that with a baton, you know, and it’s just muscle memory. So the more you hear it, the, you know, again, like Cody was saying, we, we may have a sop on like job start up, right? So we’ll be talking about the whole job start up program.
Uh But then in every interior exterior cabinet sops, they’re gonna have the job start up form in there that we’re gonna go over through again. So they’re gonna hear the job start up three or four times in that, that day. Yeah, I think so. That’s interesting. You, you say that Josh? So the, um, so I was in the army for a bit and in the military they talk about how in the high tempo situation you’re gonna default to your basically lowest level of training. So you are kind of how you’re gonna perform on a bad day in training is how you’re gonna per perform at that moment.
Whereas I think we, we like to think we’ll all rise to the occasion, but that’s not really actually how things play out. And I think from a business perspective, I think that’s a really good thing to keep in mind when you, when you’re talking about processes. Because if we have Kodiak, what was the, the gentleman’s name? Who you, you said took down all the TV? Si know it was a hypothetical example, but he’s actually a good, a good team member. Right. Right. Yeah. So, so you have certain guys like that, right?
That have been working with you for a long time that you personally know that, OK, if there’s an issue or a curveball, I know it will get handled. I trust this person, but then you have to actually build the system for the opposite of that person. What, what would somebody, I don’t trust somebody? I don’t know that much, maybe they slid through the hiring and actually turns out we have a gap in our hiring funnel in our process and we’re gonna have to go back and fix that.
But this person did come on board, you know, what happens then? And that’s what, that’s the sort of lowest level of training or the muscle memory that I think these processes need to build, need to be built to support. Right. I mean, it, you’re absolutely right. The other thing, you know, this is making everything so child proof, as I say, throughout the whole company, you know, where uh people may think about it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, people may think we’re wrong with doing this but like finding an exterior paint, that’s a primer finish because you’ll have some painters will say, oh, everything’s gotta be primed, you know, and you have some painters that will spot prime the raw wood, you know.
So for example, with that, we use a product that’s a primer finish, you know, to where I can give it to a person that’s got six months painting or a person that has 30 years painting, put three coats of this paint on there, period, you know, and so we, we try to make everything simple, very simple. Say I uh we, we use the child proof is not the most flattering term, right? But I do have a believing a a belief in if you can explain it to a three year old, usually it’s short and simple enough. Right.
That it’s not forgotten. So, that’s kind of the, that’s, that’s the trade off, you know what I mean? So, we childproof isn’t the most flattering. But if, if you can get the point across two or three year old, then, then an adult mind should have no problem, uh, understanding and retaining the information. Yeah, I think another thing too is when you, when you create, you know, these childproof sops, these, these things that are short and simple and easy to remember, it allows your employees to actually focus and, and allows you to actually focus when you’re hiring them on a different skill set.
So for example, if, if we already know exactly what’s gonna happen in terms of the communication uh with the customer of, of how the project is gonna be laid out and run. Um There’s no question about this, right? If there’s a, if there’s an issue of scope, what are we gonna do with that? So then when you’re hiring people, you can really focus on their ability to communicate their ability to be responsible and timely and detail oriented, you don’t actually have to worry about necessarily how organized they are.
Uh You don’t have to worry about uh some of these other aspects that if your sops weren’t dialed in, you would actually need them to have a skill set that you don’t really need them to have because you’ve already fixed it for them. Does that make sense? 0 100% right. The, that’s the backbone for, like you’re saying, for, for, for the masses, you know, the, the sop, you, you’re trained on it, you know, it, you follow it following the sop meets the expectation of sequoia painting and what a relief, right?
To not have to, like you’re saying to, to be in the field and think that’s your entire weight to bear. I mean, your weight to bear as a foreman for us is to run an efficient job site. We do the absolute best we can to give you every tool available to be able to meet that need and, and, and kind of, uh, with what you’re talking about, we also look at this too like our sops are very, again, I don’t know if it’s the right term childproof, right?
If, if we’re going with it at this point, Josh, it’s too late. Yeah. Yeah. Back pal that up. Yeah. If, if we have a purse, a foreman that has a hard time constantly going over our sop and our work order for a small residential house, whether it’s small or large. Well, we will have some concerns being able to send that form to a commercial job that you’re gonna be reading a 50 to 100 page spec book, you know, and, and a set of blueprints, you know, um, if you can’t handle these little sops, what makes you think I’m gonna send you to a, a commercial project that again is gonna be way more, you know, especially the government work the prevailing wage stuff.
I mean, it’s, uh, it’s crazy, you know, the spec book on those ones that makes sense guys, this is, uh, this has been super informative. Are there any other sops or processes you guys wanna cover? You know, I think, uh, for anybody that does not do sop si I don’t think there’s a, well, I don’t have that many people so I don’t need to worry about it. Like I don’t think SOPS fit that, right? I, I think if you’re a sole proprietor with two helpers put some Sops together, um uh that’s just how strongly I believe in them.
And obviously Joshua is the one that initiated the entire SOP program here with his uh background where he came from with. I mean, there’s an effective efficient way to do everything, right? So II, I think my feelings, I believe that sops are paramount and even if you only employ a couple people in the field with you, why not take the time to lay those sops out? You know. Um There’s no, I mean, uh I think everything is a math equation that, that can be solved, but I don’t know the, the dollar amount that sops save, which just adds to profitability.
You know, we noticed firsthand, uh the effects of not doing them regularly, you know, I talked about that earlier. I think that the, the having them regularly and making it a priority is huge. And we, we learned that through trial and error, you know, by putting it on the back burner because man, we got, we got way too much on the calendar. I can’t shut everything down for a day. Like there’s no way, you know, we learned that the hard way we had, uh, when we started pulling our hair out, you know, towards the end of that year for all the, you know, callbacks and what, uh anything else that was going on that we could directly link back to.
Um, and sop not being followed. I mean, there, there was no more validation needed than like, I wish I could do that over again because we’d be shut down doing sop training, you know, because this, this is for the birds. We set ourselves up here. This is not, this is not enjoyable, you know. So that’s, that’s my two cents, man is make them a priority, put them together. I mean, if you got 10 years in the industry, you can be considered a master everything you do. Just put it, put it to, put it to paper, make it, make, make it, make it a thing, you know, write it down, write down what you do.
If you believe in what you do, write it down, make it a process. There’s your sop, you know, I think we stop and we look to when, when we have some, some type of an issue or something, sometimes it may not even be an issue. It may be, um, something minute we’ll stop and we’ll, we’ll ask each other, where did we fail? How did that happen? Why did that happen? You know, and we’ll get on here and we’ll create an sop for that and, and do training on it and that way it bites it in the butt and we no longer have that issue again.
You know, because it’s, you know, your team, if they do something wrong or something is not playing out like a company wants it to be, you gotta stop and look at the ownership of that, you know, and be like, what could I do different to fix that problem, to fix that issue, you know? You know, and again, they don’t have to always necessarily be something that’s, you know, happening on a job site or something. It, I’ll tell you for the longest time, the painters did not understand.
You do not clock in until you get to the job site. And it’s just because over the years, the way the painter do it, you know, you get paid to drive to the job site, you know, and, and we, I don’t know how many conversations hundreds of conversations we had with everybody. It’s like you find me a job that will pay you to drive there. Tell him finally find me one. You know, it just, you know, and, but guys just didn’t understand it and, and finally it was sop, training, training, training conversation meetings.
I mean, hundreds of them finally now everybody understands the way it works, you know, some people might have not wanted to understand that one. Well, of course not, you know, conversations for sure. You know, because they actually have to be there on site working for eight hours, you know. Yeah. Yeah. The, um, I think a lot of people get intimidated too by this idea of creating sops or, you know, I don’t know where to start but Cody, what you said you just hate document what you do.
That’s it. But there’s your, s, your first estimate, that’s it in a nutshell. 100%. Mr Pierpont, 100%. You’re, you’re doing it right. If you don’t have an sop, you’re doing it, you have a way you do things document and then once it’s on paper then you kind of see it come to life and then you can, well, why do I waste time doing that? Or? Man, I should probably, I should probably do what I did on Mrs Jones House. It went really well for whatever reason that was the only job I did that on, uh, you know, I, it just, how good of a point documented.
You’re, you’re already doing it. Yeah. How good of a point is that too? Because we, we talk about doing it for the team. And you mentioned even, even if you have two helpers, but even if you have zero helpers and you’re just, you’re a one man band when, like you just said, when you write it down, you might look at it and be like that doesn’t make sense and you actually might free up a bunch of time like the Pareto principle, the 8020 you might realize your, your time is not being used effectively or you’re doing things that are counterproductive and, and actually make your life better.
And I’m a, I’m a believer in the confidence that it instills in your teams, right? I, I mean, they know they have a sop, that’s what the customer bought. Now again, we can go over the laws of averages. You’re always gonna have the, the people be crazies occasionally. You’re those, that’s just life, right where, where you’re gonna have things to work through, but it, in it, in it instills confidence, you know, they have an sop, this is, this is the way sequoia painting operates. Like it’s, they’re good.
They’re a good thing to have. Yeah. Yeah. You have baseline quality control already established. You know, you guys wanna add anything else before we wrap up this episode. No, just do them make them, you know, that’s, that’s what it comes down to make them, just start writing down what you’re already doing and that’s how they start that advice is Good Cody. It’s AAA lot of people listen and, and go to workshops and even, you know, the PC A events but don’t necessarily implement. So when you hear stuff that like this, that’s valuable, just do it, just do it.
I appreciate you guys. Thank you for another wonderful episode. No, thank you, sir. It’s been fun.
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