Jason Phillips of Phillips Home Improvements will be discussing how to escape contractor prison and build a painting company of your dreams. It is a six part series. In episode one, Jason discussed key one to escaping contractor prison, true leadership in your painting company. In episode two, Jason covered key to to escaping contractor prison building. A highly effective team. In episode three, Jason deep dove into key three to escaping contractor prison, creating and implementing efficient systems. In episode four, Jason discussed how your painting company needs to market itself for a long time, long term and big time growth in episode five.

 

 

This episode, Jason will elaborate on the disk personality assessment and how to use it to ensure you have the right people in the right seats. And in the final episode of this series, episode six, Jason will take a deep dive into motivators. How do you get everyone excited and motivated to help your painting company grow and succeed? If you want to ask Jason questions related to anything in this podcast series, you can do so on our exclusive painter marketing mastermind podcast form 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.

 

Again that url is facebook.com/groups/paintermarketingmastermind. There you can ask Jason questions directly by tagging him with your question. So you can see how anything discussed here applies to your particular painting company. Jason, thank you for coming back man for episode five year. I’m excited Brandon to talk about something that’s near and dear to my heart today. This is your, this is your thing, DISC Personality assessment, you own this, you know, you know, you know, Brandon as a, as a leader, as a business owner, there’s, there’s like four categories of skills that, that we need.

One is what I call widget skills and that’s, you know, the how to deliver the paint job or whatever product or service. And as you grow your business, you need to forget about that skill. Did I really just say that here’s the deal. You need to know what should be done, how it should be done. But if you really want to grow your business, hanging on to that too much is going to hold you back and you need people. Obviously, your business needs to be excellent at delivering your promises, your quality, your service, wowing your clients, right?

So that the the other the other set of skills. The second one is you need personal skills like time management, adaptability, self discipline, positive attitude, you need to be resilient and you need to live a healthy lifestyle and those are personal skills and habits. You need business skills like financial literacy, accounting, marketing, sales, strategic planning, forecasting, goal setting, etcetera. And then there’s this last set which I say is the, you know, most neglected or the last one to be thought about as, as necessary as people skills, communication, relationship, building, negotiation, empathy, teamwork, leadership, networking, collaboration, delegation.

You know, it’s because what happens is we go out, we work hard, we deliver a product and service and then we get good at that, then we start, you know, marketing and selling and building our business and and before we know it, we have a whole quiver full of employees and with employees come problems comes, drama comes conflict okay and comes uh unmet expectations. And then we start realizing man, we’ve got a mess of people and, and I say this all the time, but the people is the best and the worst part of this business and the better you get at people skills, the more you’re gonna get the best part of that and not have to and not have to, you know, be going round and round in the in the sinkhole with, with, with the bad situations.

So if, if there was, you know, Brandon, if there was one thing that I could, you know, hop back 203 220 years ago in my business, not just in my business in my life and put one tool in my toolbox, it would be understanding uh personality styles, behavioral styles because that has literally been a power up for my life, for me, for my leadership. And it’s enabled me to, to raise up leaders and people and build teams and, and build a better family. It’s made a huge, huge difference in my life.

I love that. Yeah, I was, I was tuned into your life on Facebook a few nights ago with you and your wife and you were talking about the very funny, by the way I enjoy that, enjoy that kind of reminds me of my interaction with my wife, but you were talking about the different personality styles, right? And that kind of the conflicting, um not conflicting but sort of polar opposite type of people. Sort of, sort of the, I don’t remember exactly what they were. I know was one was dominant and the opposite was kind of more reserved.

And as you were going through this stuff, I was like, how, how does Jason know this? Because I felt like I was looking at a mirror with some of the things you were saying, it was just exactly like who I am was like, that is kind of crazy. I felt like I could not only learn about other people but almost about myself and how to motivate and improve myself through that. You know, it’s, it’s almost like these assessments. They’re so simple. It takes like 2100 minutes, right? To, to, to complete an assessment, but it’s like an X ray to your soul into the inner wiring of the way God made you.

And you know, the most successful people have a high level of self awareness that is a universal trait of very successful people. But most people do not have a high self awareness myself included until, until I discovered this and literally about 230 years ago. And I’m like, why did I not know about this so much earlier in my life? And it was like you said, looking into a mirror, I’m like, yeah, that’s, that’s the way I’m built. Yeah, that’s right. And you begin to recognize your, your uh we can see your shortcomings or your challenge is another way to look at it is your blind spots and you begin to recognize your strengths.

And you know, in so many areas of life were like we want straight a students. Well, we’re not well rounded people, okay. And something that’s well rounded is typically pretty dull. And you know, if we want to cut something, we want to make some progress, we want a sharp point or sharp, a sharp edge. And when we work on our strengths, we can really, we can cut through a lot more stuff. But understanding who we are instead of looking at, you know, I don’t need to look at Brandon and, and be like, oh man, I should be more like Brandon.

This guy is such a good talker. He’s so situation, you know. So, you know, but understanding who we are and that’s really, that’s really the first purpose. You know, there’s really, there’s three keys to a personality assessments. Again, there’s, there’s all types of assessments. There’s the, there’s the Myers, there’s the Myers Briggs, there’s the Kobe index, there’s the strength finder. There’s uh uh there’s a whole, a whole slew of them. There’s an angiogram and there’s disc, okay. I went through all of these and disk, I chose disk because one, it’s easy.

It’s, it’s easy to understand. It’s easy to teach my team, big key, easy to teach my team. It’s not okay if I’m the only one that knows this and it’s, it’s not just about me, it’s about understanding you as well. So, you know, if we look at this, there’s three things. The first thing with, with these assessments is helping, you know, begin to understand yourself, becoming more self aware. The second thing is understanding others. You know, and if you’re gonna build a high performing, high performing team, you need others.

Again, if you really want to build your company, get out of contractor prison, okay, you’re gonna need a team of people. And if you’re gonna build a team of people, you better put some emphasis on people, skills and leadership skills. Okay? So the first one to understand yourself, the second one is understand others. And the third one is this and this is really when the magic happens is you can now because you understand someone, you can, you can adapt your communication with them for better, for more positive interactions on a regular basis.

And the the reason Brandon is, you know, we tend to as people attract people that are just like us, they like the same things we like, they work at the pace or they the same uh you know, hey, if you know, if, if I’m a sports car guy, probably hang out with sports car guys, right? And whatever whatever that is, we attract people that are like us, but we are lopsided. We’re not well rounded people. Think about if you were going to build a, you know, uh, football team and everybody on the team was the quarterback.

That would be a terrible team. They could all pass really good and they could call the shots okay. But they couldn’t block, probably couldn’t catch and couldn’t, you know, couldn’t defend. So we have to have a well rounded team and that’s the way that, that our company is. Or even if you’re in a church organization, we need well rounded teams and, and if you, if you’re not good at people skills, then you’re not going to appreciate, you’re not going to attract and lead and manage and develop and raise up people that are different than you.

We need. I need people in my life that are going to fill in where my deficiencies. I’m great at starting things. I’m a driver, I’m a go getter, but, you know, I get bored pretty easy and I move on to the next thing when, when the thing I started yesterday isn’t fully baked and isn’t really running on autopilot. And there’s, there’s people that don’t like to start new things, but they love to keep things going and to manage things and to tune them up. There’s people that love that consistency and, but let’s, let’s back up for just a second.

Brandon, the, let’s talk about what, what disk is not okay and, and the, the D I S C, we’ll talk about what D I S C means here. In here in a moment. Um, but these are assessments, they’re not intelligence tests there. They don’t measure your education, they don’t measure your experience. They don’t, uh, they don’t measure your, your, your judging of right or wrong. Uh, and they’re not even a predictor of, of how, of how, well you do things but just how we do them and, but what disc is is, it’s a, it’s a predictor of how a person will behave in a given situation. Okay.

And in your business, every single role in your business encounters things over and over and over okay. And you know, if, if I know that I need to wash my hands after going to the bathroom or else that’s gonna, you know, transmit germs. Well, I don’t wash, you know, wash my hands, you learn from that. I don’t want to get sick or whatever. So I’m gonna wash my hands well. It’s the same thing when, when you are, you know, you’ve got this amazing S E O program running people are finding your pages organically because of painter marketing pros online and they’re calling or they’re going, you know, they’re getting on the phone with you and they’re asking questions, they’re wanting to set an appointment with you, those questions that get asked and the way that appointment is set, you’re not going to run into very many new questions or situations there and you want to have a person that’s equipped to deal with those things. Okay?

There’s repetitive situations there and and let, let me give you, let me give you an example. Okay. This is a real world example. When, when we set an appointment, we were gonna drive, we’re gonna drive to your house. Well, we’re gonna pay the tolls, pay the gas, take our time, we’re gonna drive to your house and, and walk around your house and evaluate everything that you need, that you need to have done or that you wanna have done. We’re gonna bring in samples and show you colors and photos and talk you all through this and we’re gonna do all of that for no charge to you.

But we just ask two simple things. First, we ask that we can meet with all of the homeowners, all the owners of the property or anybody else who, who’s part of the decision making process, maybe that’s a friend or designer or whatever, picking colors, right? And the other thing is that, we we, just we want you to set aside 60-90 minutes whether we need it or not and that you’re with us the whole time is that fair enough? We’re gonna do all this for free and that’s what we want from you. Okay.

So, yeah, well, you. Okay. Well, uh yeah, we’re gonna meet with uh you and your wife. Okay. So now my salesperson or in painter world estimator, we won’t talk about that. That’s in residential, that’s a dirty word to me. You go knock on that door, knock, knock, okay. And, uh, someone answers the door, let’s just say, let’s just say the lady answers the door. You know, we’ll just say, uh, is Miss Smith, Miss Smith, Miss Smith. I’m Jason. Thank you so much for inviting us out your home today.

Uh, now my paperwork here, Miss Smith says I’m supposed to be meeting with you and your husband. Is he available? Great. Would you go grab him real quick? Okay. Think about that. If you don’t have the right person with the right personality style, they will be terrified to ask that question. Terrified. Okay. And there’s little places all in your company. Okay. How about, how about someone that’s really good at serving and pleasing a client, but they can’t ask for final payment. It terrifies them to do that. Okay.

And so there’s these different personality styles and when you understand the styles and the personality blends that will succeed in certain roles, okay. You can, you can start to build a team in which the differences on your team are now force multipliers rather than force diminish. Urz. Okay. It’s, it’s, it’s real. So, uh when, when you know, if you look at this as a, as a business owner, what is your most costly resource? Is it paint, is it sundries? Is it marketing? What’s your most costly resource?

It’s your people, it’s your labor, it’s your payroll. Okay. And, and we’re gonna sit there and critique, you know, every, every S C O move that, that painter marketing pros makes for us. And we’re gonna, you know, look through those PPC campaign campaigns for cost per click and all of that and, and those costs pale in comparison to what we spend on payroll. We will optimize, we will optimize every gallon of paint that we can, but we don’t optimize our labor force and it okay. It’s, you know, if, if I’m going to cut down a tree, would I rather cut down a tree with a hatchet or an ax?

Right? And having the right tool for the job? I mean, a hatchet, you can cut a tree down with a hatchet, but it’s gonna take awhile versus an ax, right? And it’s the same thing with people. We’re all a little bit different and friends listen to me. Your company is only as good as your people. Your company is only as good as your people and optimizing the placement. The use of your most expensive expense, your, your greatest expense in your company is, is vital to your, to your growth.

Again, if you don’t want to grow your company, if you just want to remain an owner operator with a small team, then, then this may not be, may not be for you. I would, I would beg to differ with that anyways. But, but beginning to, I wanted to say the word master. You don’t even, you don’t even have to become a master to benefit from this. You can be a novice and get immediate traction with these types of things. Okay. Um, yeah, I love that. I think it’s so, this kind of stuff is so intimidating to, for people, you know, when you’re, when you’re hearing this stuff and you’ve never done it.

I know for me I was very intimidated. Um, you’re a, uh, human behavior consultant, right. Yeah. And, and to me it’s just like, okay, I feel like I need to go ahead and dedicate several years of my life if I want to actually be able to take advantage of this stuff. But you’re saying that you don’t, that, that you can actually start to read the benefits pretty quickly here. one, you know, one of the, there was a lot of value to be had in simply reading the assessment reports of you and your people of you and your people.

And, uh, you know, there’s all kinds of assessment reports out there. I’m not here to sell you one today there. I do. I, because I was speaking at the PC Expo. Um, I, the ones that offer in my website, I put them on sale and I never did mark them back up and I’m just gonna leave them, I’m just gonna leave them down for a little bit because I believe they’re so valuable and they’re, they’re, I think they’re $52 normally $74 that’s like 30% off and, or you can go, if you just, if you just go to Jason W Phillips dot B I O there’s a link on there that says disc assessment and you can grab it there.

It will send you a link, you fill it out online and emails you like this 30 page report and recommend getting one for you for your spouse and for every one of your teammates. Okay? And what you know, if you got a 1003 person team, it’s like 520 bucks. Trust me, it’ll be some of the best money you ever spent. And, uh, but if you read your report start by reading your report and read it again a couple days later and read it again a week later and read it again a month later and read again six months later, like literally put it, put a, put a reminder on your calendar and, and read those of your teammates. Okay.

There are such value you will, that will immediately get you to first base or a little past first base just reading the reports, okay? Because you’re gonna start to recognize patterns in people. You’re gonna see patterns in you. When you look in that mirror, as Brandon said, you’re gonna see patterns and you’re going to see patterns in your spouse, you’re gonna see patterns in your teammates, okay? And then once you see that these patterns are predictable. Okay. Once you see that it’s predictable now you can really, you can put it to use, you can put it to use.

I just look, I just went to this, so Jason W Phillips dot B I O bio, that, this personality profile. I’m gonna take that, um, today after this, my wife take it too. So I want to talk about that in episode six. Okay. We’ll see what comes back with will psychoanalyze you. Yeah, exactly. Way. Yeah, you’re going when you’re going through this stuff. Um Yeah, it was like an X ray. It was like an X ray and you’re talking about how people kind of balance you. I do have some man, I have so much that I want to say right now from so many questions.

So I’m gonna have to try to get through because you just dropped a lot. So one of the things that I just want to comment on not a question Is is I absolutely number one, I super appreciate your focus on the big picture with people. People are expensive. # two, you’re approaching it from a different viewpoint from most people. Most people are looking at reduction in cost. How can they reduce their payroll? How can they reduce their expense? You’re approaching it from? How do you actually maximize the benefit?

So you have this investment that you’re making? How do you, how do you, it’s a growth, more of a growth oriented approach. It’s something obviously you can, you can apply to anything, marketing or anything. But you’re not saying, hey, how do I reduce payroll or reduce taxes or you know, some contractor vs W two? What’s gonna be more affordable? You’re saying, hey, I have these, these costs obviously don’t wanna be irresponsible with that, but I have these, these costs. How do I actually get 2030% more productivity out of it because I treat people right?

Because I understand them because I communicate with them. I motivate them and we have a team that’s all, all moving in the same direction. Rock stars. So if you think about this, I’ve got people on my team through the years. Okay? I want you to think about your team. However, how many people you have on your team? Are you constantly trying to tell them to get up to hurry up to get things done or, or are you saying slow down? You know, in my company right now, we literally just had our first meeting for our quarter to, for a quarter to planning right yesterday.

And one of the topics was, uh Jason, we need to get you out of the way because you’re slowing us down in this, this area, in that area. Okay. So when you get the right people, everybody loves to do what they were made for. Okay. When you have people in a role that they were made for, they love it. And they’re gonna go and you’re like, man, I better just get out of your way. Here’s the keys. Take it, run with it. That is. So those people, I mean, are double or triple productive more than other people, right?

You get, now you get someone who’s not in the right role and you’re constantly trying, then you end up micromanaging them hovering over them and now you’re trying to constantly figure out what they’re not doing right and calling them on all their faults and having all these accountability conversations, which I mean, those are important, okay. But, but when you get people doing what they’re made for, they are energized and there’s a synergy that comes there and their eyes light up, you know, their eyes light up in those situations.

That’s so powerful man. I feel like you’re, you’re looking at my company’s work shirt here or something seeing like half and half because I got both going on here. Uh with that, we actually have an operations manager who didn’t, didn’t use disc personality assessment, didn’t use any personality assessment, but she is an incredible balance to me because I am. You talked about the D and and you know, very um worked super hard, right drive, super hard, tend to be pretty direct um to the to the point that it can come off come off wrong.

Sometimes she is much softer. So she almost serves sometimes as a bit of a buffer between what I’m doing and what the rest of the team needs to be doing. And sometimes we get lucky. There’s like 16 basics, you know, style blends and, uh, and sometimes, and sometimes you do get lucky. But if we look at that there’s really four basic D I S C. Okay. Um, the D really stands for, um, dominance or direct and people with a really high D on the chart. That’s another thing you can, you don’t even have to read a report.

Once you get pretty good at this, you can just look at the, at the bar chart and instantly know how to better interact with someone instantly. Okay. But like Heidi, people, their direct, their firm, they’re forceful, they’re competent, they’re competitive, they’re decisive and they take risks. Okay. They’re also impatient. Okay. They can be offensive. Hold on, hold on. We’re done with the DS. Let’s move on. Yeah, exactly. So then, then I really stands for influence and, and your, your people with a high, I, there, there, your socializes, they’re outgoing, they’re optimistic, enthusiastic.

Everybody wants to be around them. They have, they have a lot of ideas, they love to talk, they love to talk about themselves. Okay. Um, then, then s, uh, really the, the s stands for supportive, these people are warm people. They’re, they’re a little slower, they’re relate. Ear’s, they love stability. They, they, they have an aversion to risk. They care greatly about relationships. Okay. They can, they can also be timid. They can be, um, if, if, if there, if there s, is like, super high they can, they can be taken advantage of.

They don’t like, you know, the Heidi comes in there with a new idea, you know what’s changed? All these people? Oh, that’s, that freaks them out. No, no, no change. No. You know, that’s like, that’s like my, my wife, you know, me, I want the new iphone every year. She’s like, no, no, don’t take, don’t take my phone. I’ve got it just how I want it. Please don’t mess with my phone. Yeah. So, so then, so then the last one is C and C stands for, you know, conscientious, conscientious or compliant.

These people are thinkers, okay. They’re, they’re cautious, they’re uh, they, they’re analyzers, they can be fault finders if you want someone to find the fault in your system, let us see, look at it, let us see running okay. And they, they can, they can, they can come across as being stiff, right? And, and every one of these has just amazing, amazing strengths, but we all have a blind side and uh once you take a personality assessment, most everybody is a blend of 22 maybe three styles. That’s what most everybody is, is a blend and you can see these things at work, okay.

Um And if you guys want to see like the, the livestream that, that uh Brandon, that you mentioned Brandon, uh my wife and I, we’ve done two of them. We, we call it the love you long time live stream. And we, we walked through, we’ve been married, we’ve been married a minute, you know, and, and uh we have, we, and so we walked through visually. Uh I know, I know, I know most everybody when we listen to this podcast on audio, right? But if you want to see something visual, see us walk through it.

Um Maybe uh maybe we could post up a link to that or something because we’re gonna show some visuals in there that, that can also be very helpful. But again, start with your assessment report. Now, some of these free reports, they’re just gonna give you your graph and maybe a description. They’re not as good. Okay. They’re not, I’ve done a ton of these and the one that I use and the one that’s my favorite is the uh is actually the one I provide. Again, I’m not here to say anything but find one and use it.

That’s the first thing, find one and use it. This uh yeah, you, you run a, you know, eight plus million dollar company, but your whole angle here is to sell these $52 personality assessments where you’re making. I mean, by that, by the time, you know, the system that runs on and all that, I’m really, it’s about break even, right? So it’s just because I want to, I really, I want to, this was powerful to me and I want to make a difference in the lives of people. And again, this, this is something that’s, that goes well beyond business.

This is gonna help you in every relationship in your life if you can do this. Now, now, now, not if you can, if you will. The other thing Brandon is, you know, I talked to so many business owners and here’s the, here’s the question that I get. Hey, Jason, what disc profile do I need to hire for this position for a salesperson? Okay. And I get that and that is important, but also when it doesn’t end there, it’s kind of like saying, hey, what paint do I need to put on this surface?

Well, okay, let’s talk about it. You know, what’s the surface going to be used for? Um, is what’s the surface preparation? What are the features of the paint doesn’t need to be scrub, herbal doesn’t need to have fade resistance. You know, what type of sheen? You know, what’s the time, what’s the dry time? What’s the recode time? All of those things? And, and if you have those widget skills, you understand all of that, that goes into it. The same thing is true about personality profiles. Yeah, you need to, you need to choose the right profile for your position, but it’s not just about who to hire, it’s about how to, how to place them, how to lead them, how to manage, how to reward them, how to coach them, how to correct them, how to praise them, how to appreciate them and where to promote them and where not to promote them.

Okay, a lot of times we’re gonna take our best, our best person that’s maybe our best salesperson and we’re gonna make them the sales manager. Well, the, the skill set and the personality that succeeds in each of those positions is often vastly different, you know, uh just because you’re the best painter doesn’t mean you’re gonna be the best crew leader. Okay? And so knowing how to, how to, how to place people and, and coach people through those things, you know, and, uh, and you know, when, when we hire, when we hire people, we, we, uh we have a part of our conversation is, is, hey, look, we’re so, we’re so glad you’re here.

We believe you’re the right fit for this position. And, but I want you to know this up front. We’re gonna have some really difficult conversations and you’re gonna be expected to grow and you’re gonna stretch. We, we just tell them that right up front and the right people, they want to grow their like they’ll embrace that. Oh, I can handle that. Yeah, I want to be better. Help me grow the right people will want that. Okay. Hungry people will want that. And you know, again, that’s, you know this whole closed mindedness or, or I know it all is really not part of this conversation, but you don’t want people on your team who know it all.

You know? I don’t know. You know, I’ve been painting for this amount of years. I’ve been, I’ve led teams of this and that. Okay. Yeah. Well, if you’re not, if you’re not growth minded, if you’re not humble, hungry, smart coachable, you’re not, you’re, you’re not a good team player, okay? And you don’t just need a superstar, you need a team, you need a team that can be a superstar team. So, uh but you know, under, here’s the other thing, Brandon, when, when you start to understand others and you start to communicate using their language or at their pace or their priority, people begin to feel heard, they begin to feel understood and when, when they feel heard and understood, they’re gonna trust you more and when they trust you more, they’re gonna, they’re, they’re gonna be more inspired, more enthusiastic about you, your company, their job, your vision where you’re going and, and you’re just gonna get more of them and it’s not about just extracting more from people, okay.

But as people grow and, and give more, they’re, they’re gonna grow, your company’s gonna grow and literally everybody wins, everybody wins. It’s kind of, it’s, you’re not bleeding resources from them, you’re helping them grow and they end up enjoying it more that way. What Jason, one of the things you brought up that I want to talk about is people ask you okay, what’s the best personality assessment, you know, for uh an estimator for salesperson? Right? Project consultant for you. What, what’s the best sales personality for, for maybe, uh, you know, project manager or whatnot, right.

Sales manager. And I think there are probably certain and you can correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think there are probably certain elements that are pretty common, you know, for, for a salesperson, you’re probably gonna want to have um a good amount of grit, you know, you’re probably gonna want to be able to face failure and keep going because you are going to hear the word. No, you’re going to be rejected, things like that. But, but then there are other things that are going to be very variable depending on the company.

So for example, a lot of um cos I’m not gonna say competitors companies in the space of painter marketing pros, they, they’re hard driving, hard charging with their sales, right. That’s their sales approach. Our approach is very relationship. It’s soft, it’s making sure there’s a right fit for us to get a sales rep who is just trying to hit numbers, crank the phone, you know, in and out that that’s going to actually cause a lot of disruption for us. Whereas other companies it’ll be, it’ll make sense.

I think the same applies to painting companies to and to really every position. What’s your thoughts on that? What you hit a key, you hit a key part there is we have to know the sales process. You know, if you’re, if you are, um If your sales process is long and drawn out, let’s say you’re doing huge projects that are like $100,000 projects. Okay. You’re probably gonna need multiple visits, a lot of follow through. Okay? And you’re gonna need someone that’s slightly different than then than what we have.

What we we have at my company is short cycle sales. Everybody, I don’t wanna say everybody, the majority of people that we meet with make a decision within three days to buy from someone okay to buy from someone and, and I know that based on industry statistics, if they don’t buy from me, there’s a high priority that they’re going to um waste their money with an unscrupulous company or on subpar work. Okay. So I have an urgency to rescue them. They’re gonna, they’re gonna bite somewhere and I have a red we, we better rescue them.

So I need someone who can, who can uh a certain profile that’s, that’s going to work with urgency that’s gonna build, that’s gonna build, you know, trust rapport okay and not be afraid to ask for the sale. But again, it’s, you have to look at your sales process. Do you even have a sales process? Which is a whole another question. Okay. But if, if, if, if there’s a lot of design, if there’s a lot of design decisions and it takes multiple visits and, and, and, uh, a lot of time then your, your, your sales profile, the personality profile might be slightly different than mine. Okay.

And so, uh, it really just, I don’t want to tell you here’s what you need because I don’t know what you need because what you need may be different than what I need if that makes sense. Okay. But, but, but pretty much all of them are gonna need, uh let’s just say A D that’s above the middle line. Yeah. Yeah, I gotta, gotta go out and get it. Those particular people need to be a bit hungry. I like your shirt, by the way. Thank you. Pain on yourself.

But it was a very nice white shirt before all that paint got spilled on it. Well, you know, I can’t paint so I gotta make it look like I can paint. So I’m just with all the cool guys. I love it, man. So I uh you said something interesting. I’ve been meaning to circle back to it because I, I really want to dive into this. You talked about how one of the big benefits of, of learning disk and everyone taking this personality assessment is actually not just for you as the owner or the person running the business to understand it and how to interact with everyone to motivate and all the things you need to do.

But actually, it’s important for all your team members to understand it. I am curious what you expect or what you hope. So, let’s say that everyone in the organization takes this now, everyone knows. I don’t know if you publicize it, if everyone knows what happens next. How do they actually incorporate that? Okay. That’s a great question. Ultimately, you want the understanding, at least the basic understanding uh and, and language of disk to be throughout your whole company. Okay? And this, yeah, this isn’t just you should start with the managers or leaders start with you.

But, and as you get, you know, you don’t have to be an expert. You just need to be a little ahead of your people. Okay? Get, you know, get to second base and then, and then put them up to bat, right? But give them their assessment and, and they, they need to know themselves, they need to know their manager, they need to know you, okay? You can’t just overwhelm them with everybody’s profile at once, right? So which is the rollout plan? Okay? You create a little, yeah.

So here’s what we’re going to first. Everybody’s gonna take their assessment. Okay? And I just want you to read it and I want you to read it again. And some, one of the things that we would do is we would sit around or in the early days. Okay. We would sit around with, with our managers or our departments and, um, at, at the table and we would pick one little section of the assessment report and we would read our section to the team and, and say, do you see that in me?

They were in there or we’d say, do you see that in yourself? And we would have a discussion and you just see lightbulbs start going off. Yeah. It’s a round table and we, we would call them lunch and learns, we still call them lunch and learns when we do little things like this is just you listen to her and they just kind of talk at you the whole time. Yeah. I mean, we do, we do audio books as lunch and learns to, okay. But, but just any time we can give them snippets and tidbits, hey, we’ve all got to eat lunch.

Why don’t we just kind of do something a little interactive while we’re doing it. And, and so, and then once they really start understanding themselves, you know, you want them to understand the people, they work next to. You want them to understand the, uh, their, their leader, their manager and the people that report to them. But you can’t just flood them information. You need to start and have them read their profiles several times and tell them, hey, take this home after you’ve read it, read it tonight, then give it to your spouse and have your spouse read it and see and give you feedback and ask you questions. Okay.

And, and, and okay, here’s, here’s the thing. The first time Rachelle gave it to my wife, I didn’t give her the assessment. I gave her my assessment and she’s like reading it. She’s like I didn’t need a report to tell them all this about. You already knew all this about you. Okay. But, but to me, okay, I, I needed, I needed to hear this about me. It was things that I kind of felt and knew subconsciously but had not really discussed in my own brain about who I was and how it was created. Okay.

So because I was just blind to some of those things. Yeah, for anyone who has not taken this assessment who has not listened to Jason and Rochelle’s life, listen to it. Go to that, that portion of it because it, it was a very weird experience for me. I felt like Jason was like reaching through the computer and being like, hey, man, who here’s, here’s exactly who you are and why you’re that way. So it was enlightening to say the least. I had the same experience. I think most people have the same experience when, when, when they do it, you know.

So if we talk about just for a second, Brandon, like, you know, if the different people on your team, let’s just talk about the ways to appreciate them. And again, personality profiles is not just about creating all these warm and fuzzy environments. It’s not, but is a powerful tool in building culture and building team and really driving performance, really driving performance. But, you know, if you have someone that’s a high as a dominant person, you know, how can you, how can you recognize them? Well, one is to recognize when they’ve done a job.

Well, wow, you won. You did it? Oh my goodness, you did it. You’re a champion that really speaks to those people and those people they want to grow and they’re constantly in competition with themselves. Now, the high I or influential people, okay. The socialize Urz. You know what, you know what they love, they love flexibility because they hate pools. They hate rules, okay. Um But they give them flexibility in their schedules, make things fun at work, have a monthly potluck at work. Okay. They will love that, surprise them with, you know, donuts. Occasionally.

They love the unexpected. They thrive on the unexpected. Now, if you’ve got the someone that’s a high s on your team, that may be a little slower paced, warm personality, sometimes soft spoken, not always soft spoken, okay. But you know what they value, they value time, take them to coffee, take them to lunch, sit down and, and listen to them, they really value connection in relationships. Now, you know, another thing you can do is is uh write a handwritten note. You know, I, I occasionally write handwritten notes and a while back, you know, I wrote one and 2 to 1 of our ladies.

Uh, she, it was a job well done. I was, I was thanking her and, you know, after she’s all, thank you for the card. And I said, I said, well, I hope, you know, I’m just glad you could read it because I pretty much writing hieroglyphics. I write with my thumbs now. Right. And I said, so obviously it’s pretty painful just to write things out anymore. She said that makes it mean all the much more to me that I did that. Right. And so it wasn’t that she didn’t care that my handwriting wasn’t good.

She, she cared that I, that I did it in spite of my handwriting. So those, those little things. Yeah, the time and the effort. Now, now if you’ve got your high C type personality, those people, they, they’ve got a lot of, they’ve got ideas. You, you need to listen to their ideas and they want, you know, financial incentives and just simple. Thank you. Just a simple thank you. Goes a long way with those people. One of the takeaways I’m getting here, obviously knowing people on a deep level, you can interact with them a bit differently.

Another, another way to kinda, again, correct me if I’m off here. But it seems sort of a hack writer hack to probably improve things immediately, even if you don’t really understand the stuff yet, you know, not everyone has taken the test. You have really dove in yet. You could just start to have a mix of this stuff. You know, if you usually bring in food and that’s your big thing or you can also start spending, spending time with people. You start doing the handwritten note. If you kind of Sprinkle all of this, you’re at least gonna paying all these different personality types and, and probably everyone’s gonna really appreciate at least one of the things that you’re doing and those, those assessment reports will actually tell others how to interact with you.

There’s a section in there how to best interact with, with this person. That is neat. That is really neat. I need my wife to take it so that I can do better. Yeah. Yeah, I needed to do better. So this will help. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s powerful. You can really use this to power up your life, to power up your relationships, to become a better leader, to become a better business owner. And when you can really empower people, you’re going to increase your odds of success. Okay.

And, and you’re gonna have, I’m not gonna say you’re not gonna have people problems, but you’re gonna be better equipped to deal with them and to recognize them and uh put people in positions where they have a higher uh chances of winning or succeeding and staying in that position. Right. And you mean, you put, you put the wrong personality in this particular job, they’re gonna burn out really quick and quit. Now, guess what? They’ve got to start over in their job search and you’ve got to start over, you’ve lost traction.

Maybe, maybe you lost a season because you had the wrong person and, and that opportunity isn’t gonna come back till next spring. Wow, you just lost your opportunity not till you hire the next person, but until you until the next year. Okay. Businesses exponential growth. So that, that is not good, you know, and, and I, one of the common ones I hear from, from guys is uh, Jason, my salesperson, I think I need a new salesperson. Um and I just started asking them questions and about the salesperson will tell me how your, you know, tell me how you’re formulating your price.

What is your sales process? Look, you know, how, how often are they, you know, converting on the spot and asking questions? And, and then I just start realizing that the, that the only sales this person is getting is the ones that are given to them by the customer, not the ones that they’re asking for because they’re, they’re, they’re, they have a good person in the wrong seat on their, on their bus at their company. Okay? And that’s a hard pill to swallow when you realize you’ve got the wrong, the right person is a great person, but you’ve got them in the wrong seat on your team and, you know, you’ve got to make a change.

It takes a lot of courage to make that change. Like if you’re feeding all these expensive leads to a salesperson and, or an estimator, if you call them that and they’re not closing any of them, okay. There’s a good chance there’s a number of things that can go wrong with. There’s a great chance that you have the wrong person in that role. Yeah, but maybe they are fit for another role, potentially, maybe they’re not or maybe they’re not the. So, so another thing I want to, I want to kind of dive into because it’s, I’m not sure what the answer to this is.

So I want to get an answer. So I’ve mentioned him before. I’m a big follower of Alexa Mosey $100 million offers, guys, an all star entrepreneur podcaster. Um Love him, gives away a lot of free content, but he talks about most successful. Pretty much. All successful people are, are hard drivers and they demand a lot. So they demand excellence, they demand rock stars doesn’t mean they all need to be Heidi type people that would be really, really uh miss functioning, you know, bad functioning environment, but they demand rock stars.

So how do you interact with people? How do you incorporate disk? How do you make sure that, that, that you’re not just being domineering, you know, which isn’t going to work for a lot of people, but still command excellence from every member of your team. That’s a great question. You know, one of the things I start with being up front, I say guys, first of all, I’m fast paced and you’re gonna find me very demanding. You’re also going to find me. I hope very loving as well at the same time.

And I have conversations about here’s how I am and you know, I understand that, you know, is I’m reading your disc profile is, are these things about you? True? Okay. Well, here’s some possible friction points we may have and here’s how we’re gonna work through these. And I want you to know that sometimes I have a tendency to, you know, to whatever run over people and I want you to have the freedom to tell me if I’m moving too fast for you. I want, I want you to have the freedom to tell me if I’ve given you too much or if you’re drowning or if you’re overloaded because I, I care about you.

I want you to succeed in this position and I need you to succeed in this position. But a lot of times, I mean, I’ve got blindsides and, and, and if I’m stressed out, I’m a, I’m not trying to make excuses for myself, but I may end up communicating in this demanding short tempered way and, and it’s okay. You can call me on the carpet for that. Okay. You’re not gonna get fired for that. You’re not getting in trouble for that. I need, because I need to be on my best.

You need me. This whole team needs me to be at my best so that we have to create. I I believe that we need to shape an environment of safety where people can speak to us. What a start man. I mean, your, your own it from the beginning, you’re also addressing problems that haven’t even happened yet, just based on who you are based on who they are. You’re saying, hey, this is likely to occur and you’re proactively creating a strategy to successfully resolve potential issues. And the opposite of that is you get, you get managers or owners who or people in general, they just, they say, well, that’s just the way I am.

I’m just a, I’m just a demanding domineering boss and if they can’t deal with it out, they go, yeah. Well, guess what? You’re going to be in contractor prison because nobody’s gonna want to work for you, period. Yeah, you can do that. You can, you can do that all day long. There’s gonna be one brain at that company. One brain. Yeah, man, I love that. So you know how I like to sidetrack you basin because you drop these things. I do it almost every single time I think.

And it’s always, it’s, it’s oftentimes related to your sales process, I find it fascinating. I know you, you have this stuff really, really well built out and really well executed. You actually conduct regular sales training. You have a whole on boarding. I mean, it’s, it’s far more extensive than, than almost any other painting company I’ve ever encountered. Really. Um So you had talked about how you guys try to make sure that every decision maker is present at the meeting. My question to you is what do you do?

I have two questions. So start with that. First one is what do you do if you’re on the call and, and they say, oh, he’s not going to be home. Let’s say you’re speaking with Miss Smith. Mr Smith is not home. He’s away on business. Oh, well, let’s push it back to Mr Smith. Oh, well, he’s actually away for several weeks. Is not gonna be home for some time. You can come out in it and, and I’ll take a look at what you have. How do you handle something like that?

Well, at the end of the day, we’re there to serve them and we’re not gonna demand and require that, that there, there. Now some companies do. We don’t, but we at least try and we want them to see the value of having the other, the other spouse or the other interested party there. And we, you know, we, we, our call center, we have some, uh, what we might call rebuttals if they say he’s not going to be there or they might say, oh, well, he works late.

You know, we, we also offer evenings and weekends with Thursday or Saturday morning, work better for you. Give them an alternate choice. Sometimes they’re going to say that and at some point they might just say, look, you’re gonna have to meet with me. Ok. Hey, I’m so, man, I’m sorry. Yeah, absolutely. Let’s, let’s find a time on the calendar and then at the same time, you know, when our, when our project consultant gets out there, um they’re gonna, they’re gonna see that, well, that we really do need the other person here for some of these decisions.

And so they’re gonna try to set what we call A B back and if they can’t get a B back set with a second appointment with both parties, we may even say, um Brandon, do you think you, do you, do you think you could get her on the phone real quick? And we can just go over some of these and, and you know, if, if she likes what if you guys are good, we just go and get you guys on the schedule that we don’t have to wait till, you know, wait so long. Yeah.

So what one of the things I want to mention is you’re saying this kind of casually, but I know the way that you operate this stuff dialed in. So when, for people listening it’s not, oh, if this happens, what do we do? It’s not a game time decision. There’s gonna be a set series. It’s like decision trees. Certain thing, things are going to happen. They’re really not that many are insane. Typically. What do you do when those things happen? And for you, when you go out and there happens to only be one decision maker, but there is another one and then you try to try to connect again and it seems like that that’s creating difficulties.

Then you’ll just go and try to make the sale over the phone. But I think it’s important for people listening, map out those processes. Don’t just leave it. It goes back to the processes, the systems we talked about, I believe in episode that episode three, I think it was episode three, um systems and processes have that stuff mapped out. Don’t just leave it to the, you know, the project consultant, estimators discretion, don’t, don’t just leave it to the project manager’s discretion. Map out the decision tree if you encounter something and its new, say your, your company has never encountered this particular thing.

Well, then go ahead and make an S O P for it. Figure out it might not be how you handled it then, but figure out the best way to handle it and document it. Make sure you teach everybody that, that’s, that’s it. There’s no, you’re not gonna encounter anything new, You’re gonna encounter some things more than others. But if, if we know we’re gonna get, you know, one out of 20 times, we’re gonna get this run into this problem to stall this objection, whatever it is, why not pre plan, what we’re gonna say?

You know, and it’s, it’s, and at the end of the day, you know, you look at people that are master at their whatever, whether it’s the quarterback or the basketball player, they make it look easy. Why do they make it look easy because they’ve practiced and practiced and practiced all the time. So to them, it’s, it’s, I don’t want to say it’s on autopilot, they’re having to put their grit and their effort into it, but they’re not having to think. They’re not having to think because they’ve, they’ve done it on the practice field so many times.

Yeah, it’s the same concept as objection handling. Right. You’re gonna, you’re gonna meet the same objections over and over again. Well, I’m not sure that seems expensive. Well, you didn’t, you didn’t demonstrate the value. So what do you do if, if they say all that seems expensive or? Well, now might not be the right time. Well, what do you do? Right. If they’re all these objections, probably most of them are not actually the problem. So you learn to actually figure out what the, what the real problem is, not uncover them, but then you have things with project management.

Oh, no, there was a mess created the house or are the project running behind schedule? What do you do? So you can build these S O PS for all these, um, potential scenarios in every aspect of your business 100%. Now, let’s just say that, let’s just say there is a mess in the house and you’ve caused a huge delay for the homeowner and a huge inconvenience. Okay. Some, some personality styles, they just want to go clean up the mess. When in reality, you need to listen to the client and talk to them and repair the relationship that was broken with them before you go clean up the mess.

So sometimes you need to deal with that and depending on what your personality style is, you may just want to think that, hey, I’m gonna fix the problem. There’s two problems, there’s the mess and then there’s the stress you caused the homeowner. Those are two different things and, and, and having the, you know, I guess the emotional intelligence to see what’s going on there. Which one of these do I need to fix first. Yeah. And I think it goes back to you saying, you know, stage one in the beginning is the widget.

It’s the thing, you know, you’ve compared it to roofing God or whatever it’s painting here. It’s the thing. It’s, it’s your entry ticket into the game. If you can’t do that, you can’t play the game but people then get wrapped up and this idea, Okay, there’s a mess or the projects delayed or the estimators 30 minutes late, whatever it is. But then you think you just need to fix the thing, the thing went wrong but you’re not in, you’re not selling the thing. What you’re selling is the experience, the relationship.

That’s what you’re selling. So that’s actually what you need to fix. The thing maybe caused it. But, but we actually have to focus on is that relationship. Of course, the thing also needs to be repaired. It’s both. Yeah, you’re right. It’s both love it, man. It’s always an education. So we did, we did shoot episode for in person. I love our in person. A lot of fun. Well, it’s, it’s, it is always super fun. I really enjoy doing in person and then you don’t get a better backdrop than me because you don’t get your whole studio.

It evens the playing field between us. There’s that d coming out, right? Yesterday’s Brandon, man. He’s, he’s awful, but today’s Brandon, he’s doing better. The self competition. Hey, man, you, you are, you are inspiring your lightning. I really, really love everything you’re doing. What, what other do you have anything else you want to add to disc as we come up at the, at the end of this hour, just get started, just get started, read it, read it again. Give it a few days, read it again, give it to your people and read it and understand them and you’re gonna have a great start right there.

Yeah, I love it, man. So we have episode six coming up. This is the longest series that we’ve ever done by far because you have a lot of great content to share. So I’m super excited for that one. Jason. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your colorful, colorful shirt. Everything about you, appreciate your energy, man, your positivity and, and thank you so much, man. I’m proud to be here. Thank you for having me today, Brandon. If you want to learn more about the topics we discussed in this podcast and how you can use them to grow your painting business, visit painter marketing pros dot com forward slash podcast for free training, as well as the ability to schedule a personalized strategy session for your painting company. Again that URL is paintermarketingpros.com/podcast.

Hey there, painting company owners. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button, give us your feedback, let us know how we did. And also, if you’re interested in taking your painting business to the next level, make sure you visit the Painter Marketing Pros website at Painter marketing Pros dot com to learn more about our services. You can also reach out to me directly by emailing me at Brandon at Painter Marketing Pros.com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business until next time.