Jason Phillips of Phillips home improvements will be discussing how to escape contractor prison and build the 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 two 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 long term and big time growth.
In episode five, Jason elaborated on the disc 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, this episode, episode six, Jason will take a deep dive into motivators, how to 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 forum on Facebook. Just search for Pain and marketing mastermind podcast forum on Facebook and request to join the group or type in the URL facebook dot com forward slash groups forward slash painter.
Marketing mastermind. Again that URL is facebook dot com forward slash groups forward slash painter, marketing mastermind. 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 episode six. Hey, Brandon. Well, I’m glad I’m glad to be back here for episode six. You know, I love filming with you, man. I absolutely love film with you. These are my favorites. I, I like, I like all the guests that we’ve had, you know, some, some more than others.
Some I do do prefer as, as, as, as natural but you, I, you’re my favorite man. Wow. Wow. What a, what a, what a, what an honor to hear that. Thank you. Thank you. I love it. So motivating people. Yeah, let’s get into it. You’re motivating me. As I just said, you’re motivating me to do this podcast. Here’s the longest one we’ve ever done. How do we motivate the team members? Well, you know, OK, let’s, let’s, let’s back up for just a second. Let’s start here. Right.
You know, why do we care if people are motivated? Well, you know, our business isn’t gonna run itself, not in our business. You know, our business is not gonna run itself and we rely on people, we rely on people to run our systemss to represent us in the community. We rely on people to problem solve and maybe put out the fires, handle the 2100 ones, all of those things who’s gonna run the business while we’re on vacation for a day for, for a week, for two weeks, for a month, it all comes down to the people.
We are in the people business and after you get, you know, after you get done mastering, making your widget or delivering your product painting in this case, right? Uh, you, you begin to work on business skills like sales and marketing and finance and, and, and, and gain a proficiency in those areas. Well, the, the the people skills are, I feel like the most neglected skills in small business, especially with, with contractors and, uh, but, but we, we need to build people to build our business. You know, it sure is nice to be able to, uh, you know, sit and do these podcasts with you.
Uh, Brandon and, and, and I don’t, my phone’s not ringing and, or to go on or to go on vacation or, or to, you know, take some time off. How about just take some time off to out, out of the whirlwind of, of the day for strategic planning for my company? There’s so many reasons why you as an owner need to not be buried in the day to day of your business because if you, if you are, then you can’t actually be building your business beyond, beyond just that, that effort level of, of delivering your widget, right?
So, and let me ask you a question, you know, if, if we have a loved one that’s sick, what do we do? We take them to the doctor, right? For a diagnosis and a, and a prescribed treatment. We don’t just, uh, you know, um, you know, take them out back, shoot him in the head and, you know, dump them at the train station if you know what I’m talking about there, right? Dump, dump them over the, over the cliff, you know, or if our car isn’t running well, you know, we, we need a mechanic, we don’t just throw it out and, and, and, and get a new one.
But when, when our, when our employees and, and, or their performance is limping along down the road. What do we do? We blame it on them, we fire them. Um, we, we, you know, we, or we let them burn out and we just start over with someone new and it’s a vicious cycle and it always is about them. Them, I didn’t hire the right person. I didn’t have the right person. They’re lazy, they’re G X Y Z, whatever. Ok. And it’s always about them. And uh it’s, and regardless, even if it was really about them, that is a vicious cycle that is going to eat your profits away and, and take your peace of mind.
It will take your peace of mind. And I, I believe that, that we as, as business leaders, Brandon, we need to, we need to think differently and we need to understand that our most uh expensive resource is not the paint. You know, we, we’ll spend a lot of time, you know, trying to figure out how we can save two pennies on a gallon of paint or a tube of cow. But our, but our biggest expense, we do not work on mastering that and optimizing that. And that’s, that’s people.
So I just, I’m calling on, I’m calling on business leaders to, to grow in their people skills in their leadership skills. So that’s just, that’s kind of some background, you know, and, and you know, the question that, that we talked about is, you know, how do we motivate? How do we motivate people? Right? I’m gonna suggest uh Brandon that maybe that’s, that’s we need to turn that question on its head, turned it inside out and instead say, what are people motivated by? What’s this individual already motivated by?
You know, I’m, I’m gonna use a uh just a uh a little simple a, a while back. I OK. I’ve got this dog, oh, an old bulldog. Her name, her name is Spike. Ok. And she’s grumpy. She’s very grumpy. And if she doesn’t want to do it, she’s not gonna do it. And I needed her to go outside because we were gonna be out of, we were gonna be out, out of the house for a while. We need to make sure that she was outside when she needed to go. Right.
Well, I’m like, hey, come on, let’s go, let’s go. And she did not want to go outside. She’s just growling at me. And so I go around behind her and I kind of try to nudge her in the, she’s sitting down nudging the behind with my foot and then she’s kind of snapping at me. She doesn’t want to do what I wanna do. I’m like, why am I being so stupid here? No, I did. I went and got a potato chip and I showed it to her and I just walked out the door with it and she followed me right out the door.
Ok. And I’m like, why am I? So, you know, it was such a basic thing but, but not, I’m not trying to relate, you know, people to such rudimentary uh or, or such carnal desires, right? But, but people have uh uh each person has an internal drive and they’re motivated by certain things and that’s different based on different personalities. And when we can start uh understanding how these things work and we can, we can see uh what’s likely to work in and start matching up in certain positions.
If that, if that makes sense, it does, man, you’ve got my mind, you’ve got my mind racing right now. So you, you’re basically saying that obviously people are motivated by different things as opposed to saying, hey, how can I, how can I motivate them? Which is in, in selling would be like, hey, how can I sell them this thing? Right? It’d be like, hey, here’s what I have. Here’s what’s so awesome. Here are the features about it, buy it, here’s the price, you should buy it as opposed to something more like consultative sales just like, hey, what are your needs?
What are you looking for? Ok. Here’s what we do and here’s why that’s a fit, you know, do you want to go ahead and proceed? You’re basically approaching, approaching your employee motivation, kind of how you incentivize and motivate your team in a similar approach. So, yes, absolutely. Let me, let me, let’s just take a very basic uh very, another very basic one, a real world one that let’s just say that you have um a part-time administrative position in your office and you’re looking for someone to come and just get certain things done.
Well, let’s, let’s take someone that is maybe a single mom and think of, think of the things that are important in a single mom’s life. Her, her Children, right, are probably the most important thing in her life. And sometimes they’re sick from school, sometimes they have a doctor’s appointment. And so she may need flexibility of scheduling. That could be a high, it probably is very, very high on her wants and needs list. Right? And so that’s, that’s, that’s not necessarily um uh an intrinsic motivator. I, I guess it could be, it, it, it, it, it because she’s a mother, but that’s just one example.
So if we start asking ourselves a couple of questions, you know, this position at my company, maybe it’s painter, maybe it’s salesperson, maybe it’s appointment setter, whatever it is, what, you know, what does this job really need from a person? Know? Does, does like in, for instance, in my call center, I need that call center to open right on time every single day. There’s no, hey, we’re going to open an hour late because we’ve got all kinds of systems and paid ads and, you know, 270 different places that say we open up at, you know, a certain time of day and, and if someone doesn’t show up all that messaging is broken, so I that flexibility in that position, at least start time for sure is not an option.
So when you start looking at, you know, you know, motivating people, OK, they, they need, we need to consider the environment that we’re putting them in. What does that job need? What do they need are those two things at odds? That’s, that’s a good place to start or do they synergize with one another? Ok. Hey, wow, we’ve got a, we’ve got a, I need someone to come in and, and run our newsletter and do some uh and, and address some postcards, right? Gee, that doesn’t matter what time of day that really gets done it, that it just gets done.
Matter of fact, it could probably even still be done tomorrow. Guess what? That would be a great match for someone who needs flexibility in their schedule. That would be a great one and not all positions are like that. And you know, if, if you, let’s, let’s talk about, let’s talk about the painter. If you, let’s say you do really high end painting, high end painting, you’re gonna want a person who is uh speed is not their number one thing they want. They, that person loves to work with accuracy and a someone with patience.
So again, these things don’t become obvious to us until we go through repeated failures of trying to put people in positions. And we’re like, why didn’t it work out or they’re lazy or they’re not detailed oriented or they, they move too fast or they need to, they move too slow and, and we don’t, you know, I’m gonna say, man, up as business owners and leaders that we need to take control and understand people, we need to understand the way, the way humans tick, the way people are wired and get an x-ray into their, into their being.
You know, if, if, if all of a sudden we, you know, brought some uh new bucket of paint and said, oh, this is some amazing paint. We want you to try it out. Ok. And we’re gonna, you know, give you a great deal on it. What’s the painter gonna do? He’s gonna, he’s gonna read the label. He’s gonna say, well, um, what surface is this for? How do I need to prepare the substrate? Tell me about the, the, the uh the humidity, the temperature that it needs to be in the, the drying time?
Do I need to do? I need to cut it with anything? How, how long till I can re coat it? How long does it last? What are all of those different things? How do I clean it up when I’m done? It’s all gonna be right there on the label. But humans don’t come with a manufacturer’s label. OK. Don’t, don’t come with AAA data sheet. Right. And that’s, that’s the power that right there, the power of personality assessments gives you that for people. It gives you that. And we’ve talked a lot about, you know, disc, which is just the basic thing to start with.
Everybody should be doing disc assessments on all of their people and every, uh, every potential hire should always be doing that now. Um, and there’s, and there’s other ones as well. Ok. But disc is just basic, you’ve got to start there and it’s not even expensive. It’s way less, it’s way less to, to as, you know, provide assessments to several people than it is to make one miss hire. Yeah. Ok. But let’s go back, let’s go back to, let’s go back to motivating, motivating people for a moment.
Um What does that job need and what do they need? Let’s look at it another way. What does that job provide? For instance, a sales position, the sales position needs someone who’s not afraid to keep pushing through when they get a constant, no, you know, your salespeople literally are losing more than they’re winning. And if you’re winning more than you’re losing, you need to raise your price. Yeah. Ok. So you’re, you need to be able to overcome, uh, the, no, as a salesperson. But what does that job provide?
That job provides the, the harder you work, the more you can make. And so, so people that people that, uh love sales jobs. One of the things they like, they like to be in control of their own destiny. They like to know that, hey, if I work harder and smarter than that guy over there, I’m gonna make more money. Guess what is so demotivating to people is two people working the same job, one’s working hard and the other one’s not, and they’re making the same amount of money in what world is that justice for them.
It’s not, it’s just, it’s just not justice for them. So, you know, just step back and, and just make a list. Hey, I need to, you know, take one particular position that your team you’re trying to fill, say what does this job need, what type of person or, you know, is gonna fit this role and again that you can still do this with your existing team members and you probably should because you don’t want them to burn out, you don’t want them to burn out. So, um you know, other people are motivated by uh being in control.
Some people are motivated by uh um autonomy and there’s, there’s all of these, there’s, there’s like seven dimensions of, of uh of, of motivation. I’m I, we maybe we’ll get into those another time. OK. Which that, you know, motivators is technically technically, actually, it’s another assessment that complements disc, but I, I don’t recommend doing that unless you’re already going well with, with uh disk assessments. Oh there’s another assessment. Yes, there’s not only, not only there’s motivators, there’s, there’s emotional I Q um, there’s, you know, there’s, there’s several different types of assessments that help you fill in the gaps in this stuff and it’s almost, it’s like the owner’s manual to, to people.
It’s like the owner’s manual and, and when people read these assessments it’s like reading their mail. It’s like, wow, how do they know me? How does this little report know me so well. Right. You know how we behave, Brandon is, is uh is determined by like how we feel by our emotions. And uh so you know, what, what do we value and what are we motivated by? Some people? Uh Some people need uh we, we call, we call this the economic, the economic motivator. Some people need to get a return on investment for their effort for their money and some people don’t really care that about that as much.
And learning this really is gonna help us, you know, not necessarily motivate people, but what we can do is create an environment where that motivation will be satisfied. That makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. So, and, and, and the work, the workplace is filled with people that are working in jobs that require things that, that they’re not good at and that uh uh that require things that they’re not that, that they’re not good at and, and things that don’t satisfy what they really seek. OK. Some people love harmony.
Some people could give a rip about harmony. Some people they just want to win. OK. Some people want, they want to learn all the data and the details and they want things to be absolutely correct and, and, and that’s why I just, hey, what do I need in this position? So let’s create this position just like, you know, you, you, you can’t, you can’t throw a fish in a flower pot with dirt in it and tell them to thrive. You know, you gotta, you, you need to, what, what’s gonna thrive in the, in the, in a, in a flower pot, a seed, you put a seed in there with some water and some sunlight, some soil and it’s gonna thrive.
So, understanding what each of our jobs or our positions at our company are, is very important. Now, the, the once you get that far, you’re like, OK, now I know I need someone that can meet this criteria. How do I know what, how do I know what’s coming in the door? Because when people show up for your interview, they’re gonna show up with a resume and that resume is the highlights reel of all the great things they’ve done in their life and maybe the great things they’ve even been just tiny bit a part of, right?
You know, do you know um how uh how well do you know S E O uh for this marketing position? Uh Uh, well, yeah. Uh, I know S E O, I’ve, I’ve done this S E O before. Uh, right. I mean, how many, how many times have you heard that? Right. And then you start asking them technical questions about it now, they just, maybe, uh, looked at S E 01 time. It’s kind of scary when you start to pull the layers back. Yeah, exactly. So, you know what, what do, what do all employees want?
Let’s just start there. What do all employees want? They want to, uh, work for an ethical company that treats its customers well, ethical leaders. They don’t wanna work for cheaters, they, they wanna work in an environment where employees are treated fairly and consistently. Ok? And you talk about situations where there’s nepotism that’s not fair treatment and that’s, that’s a huge downer to people. Um, of course my daughter, she’s like, no dad, it’s reverse nepotism at our company. I have to prove myself. I don’t get, I don’t get away with anything.
I’m like, well, that way, at least you only have one dissatisfied employee. That’s exactly right. Yeah. But you know, some, something else that’s going to help motivation thrive is clarity. Clarity. How about clear goals, clear responsibilities, you know, employees need a clear understanding of, of what’s expected of them. Well, I want them to come and to, to work on time and I want them to work hard. Ok? What do you want them to accomplish. What does it look like when it’s done? Well, can you write that down into a few simple bullet points?
OK. We call those K R A s at our company and uh key result areas, area results. Yeah, your guys play on K P I. Uh no, we have K P I S. OK. So the, the, the K P I S are key performance indicators which is uh whi which is typically is, is a number, right? And um which it could be a measure or a metric, but that’s another story. But uh you know, a, a key, a key result area could be um uh the I want, you know, let’s just, let’s, let’s take this down to the painting world. OK?
And Brandon, you’re, you’re, for instance, you’re, you’re, you’re my, my painter and Brandon, one of the keys that a, that a crew leader does is they make sure that every day when the spray machine, equipment’s put away, the spray machine is completely cleaned out, is completely clean and ready to roll for the next day. So all of the other tasks that you need to do, I need you to own and just that, that it’s gonna look like this every morning for the, for the next day. And I’m starting to wonder how well our company is gonna do with me as the, as the painter.
But let’s keep going. I think you’re making bad. Yeah, I think you’re making bad, uh, ownership. I made a bad, bad, bad choice right there. But, but that’s, you know, it’s, it’s not always easy to create simple clarity for people. You know. Do we want to tell people to mow the yard edge it and pick up the trash or do we want to walk them around a yard that is freshly mown and all the trash is picked up and say, look how clean this yard is. I want it to always look like this.
Every Friday when I get home from work, it’s two different things. One is to do a task and one is to get a result. Yeah. Right. And so, uh so that’s the first thing is, is just create clarity. You know, one of the things that we have, uh uh it’s just been a game changer at my company in a, in a positive way is we have these automated scoreboards that uh literally track everything from leads to inbound calls, to outbound calls to appointment sets, to appointments issued to contracted sales projects, started projects collected over two jobs, everything you could imagine in each department and every one of them has a daily goal, a weekly goal and um uh a monthly goal and a yearly goal.
And it’s, it’s these little indicators like a, like a speedometer. And if it’s, if it’s below where it should be for today, it’s red. If it’s above where it should be for today, it’s green and that way anybody can look up at any time and they know clearly I need to set this many appointments for today. It’s, it’s easy. It’s clear, what do I need to, you know, what do I need to accomplish? That’s what I need to accomplish. And so when you, when you, when you do that, uh you know, it, it helps motivation thrive because people have a sense of winning and they don’t have to win all the time.
They just need to be in control of their winning. And if they have a, if they have a vague target, what are they gonna hit? How do they know if they won? How do they know if they lost that? Probably took you guys a long time to create that, that automated scoreboard system. Uh No, it’s not that bad. Once, once you, if you’re a pretty techie guy, it’s pretty easy. Yeah. Yeah, I love it, man. You have the right systems in place. So pick your brain about that.
You know, another thing that uh is let’s talk about feedback and recognition and, and some companies are great at this and some companies are not so great at this and uh you know, recognizing a job well done, it sounds so basic but so many people. Uh you, you, your, your typical salesperson, the recognition they want is Benjamin’s OK. They, they, they want the money but other people are not motivated by money, you know, what they want, they, they want, they want appreciation. Um, you know, it, it goes a long way and feedback.
Am I doing a good job? Am I supporting the team? Well, you know, do you like me? Am I adding value to this team? Those are questions that people have and if we’re one of those, if we’re one of those business owners, that’s just, hey, I’m a task oriented guy. I’m getting it done. I’m driving, driving, driving. We don’t ever, we don’t ever step back to slow down and, and talk to people on our team. They’re, they’re gonna, they’re, they’re gonna become demotivated. And so, uh you know, another, another key is, uh, and, and man, I, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve failed.
I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, learned, learned a lot of things the hard way. But, you know, give people, you know, the support and resources are you too busy to meet with your people when they need you. Sometimes, sometimes they need you, they’re trying to get things done for your company and they can’t solve a problem and you’re too busy, maybe you’re too busy painting, running appointments, whatever. And you got people back at the office or even people in the field that can’t get things done, You know, do they, do they have the, do they have the tools that they, that they need to get the job done.
So I just call it support and resources, give them support and give them, give them resources. And some sometimes that supports technology. Sometimes that support is simply writing it clearly down in, you know, 10 steps how to do something. One of the things that you’ve said that that really resonates with me this key result areas and, and you’re going through that example of the lawn and as opposed to telling them what needs to be done, showing them the result, one of the things that stands out to me, there’s is kind of the why behind it, right?
When you show them, hey, this is what I want it to look like. You’re basically showing them the result that you’re trying to get and they’re understanding why they’re doing what they’re doing and that gonna really apply to anything. And so when they’re, when they’re mowing, obviously, it’s pretty obvious in that example, why you’re doing what you’re doing. But in some other examples, it’s a lot less obvious. And I think if people understand how it’s contributing to the overall cause of the company and what their efforts are really producing in the long run, they’re far more motivated, they feel a purpose to what they’re doing as opposed to, hey, you need to, you need to keep entering that data into that spreadsheet.
You have to keep doing it for all the roasts 100 per cent. Everybody. I see the right people for your team, they want to add value, they want to know that their work has meaning that it’s valuable and that they’re making a contribution and that, that their contribution is seen. Everybody wants that, you know. Um here, you know, the other thing is this, if you’ve got a job that’s very repetitive and monotonous, you know, maybe it’s addressing envelopes, maybe it’s, maybe it’s the helper on your crew that’s just masking or talking or whatever you’ve got him doing, right.
Everybody needs to uh have some sense of autonomy and empowerment uh and control over over how they do the work. I mean, some, some, some jobs you can give them more latitude than others. But at the end of the day, I mean, a lot of times I look at my people and I say, look, I trust you. I don’t care, just get it done. I trust you. No, no, it’s OK. I trust you that period. That’s freeing as a business owner too. It is like you don’t have to come with me with this and I want them to, I want them to have confidence, knowing that they have competence and that, that I believe in them.
And of course, that’s something that has to grow and trust has to grow and build over time, right? But uh you know, building that trust and, and, and believing in people that’s powerful, that’s powerful stuff, you know, and now let’s, let’s talk about the idea also of uh of work life balance. Some people thrive being a workaholic. No, no, I’m not kidding. Some people literally literally have a need to work a lot because they find it rewarding in working hard and that’s ok. That’s ok. But sometimes we, you know, when the, when the heat is on, we ask a lot of people and uh uh for a season and we need to remember that.
And, you know, hey, like for instance, if, if we, if we run a, if we run a home show all weekend, that’s a lot of hours, we’re gonna give, give some people some time off. The next week, we accept this last one because we had our grand opening the next weekend in ribbon cutting for. So our, our marketing team got no rest. OK? They got no rest at that time. But, but, but it’s, but giving some people, you know, some work life balance, it might mean, hey, they really are working their tail off.
Why is this person constantly staying late? We need to bring some reinforcements in for them. Yeah. And I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got some of that on my team right now. I need to recognize that and I need to give them support and resources. Maybe it’s an additional helping hand or part timer to help them in their job, right? Because I can’t just say work faster. I can’t, I can’t just do that. But uh you know, there’s, there’s something else uh Brandon that’s, that’s really hard to measure.
And it, it’s the positivity in your work environment is, is um is your work environment one where people are excited to get up and join, go to work each day or is it a drag? Is your, is your company a place that is filling them up or is it using them up? See, we need, we need to build people and let them build the company instead of um use people, use people up, expend people to build the company. Then you’re just going to have a revolving door and I want to build people and make them stronger and build more leaders and share the load and help everybody be successful.
But uh you know, a positive work environment really that just that you could just say culture, what’s the culture, what’s the personality of your, of your environment at work? And that could be on the job site that could be in the office, it could be in the van. Is, is it positive or you just always slamming people? Are you always negative? Are you always, you know, demanding results or are you chastising them when they make mistakes? Is it safe for them to make mistakes? If you really want people to grow and push the needle forward, you’ve got to make it safe for them to make some mistakes that doesn’t mean continue to make the same mistake over and over ok.
But let them, let them make some, let them make some mistakes. Yeah, I like the idea that that mistakes are ok. But continuing to repeat mistakes is not ok. I have to learn and, and, and when people make a mistake, I’m also very big into ownership. You know, in terms of if you own the company, unfortunately, for you or fortunately I, I like to take ownership of my life. Um, Every mistake that happens is, is your fault because you, you built the company, you, you’re responsible for the S O P s if people came through the door and like you said, sometimes, maybe they weren’t the right person.
Guess what? It’s your fault because you, you hired them, right? They came through under your company. So every single thing that happens is your fault. So there’s a way for, for us at painting marketing pros when we have a mistake, we try to figure out what happened with the S O P s or what was missing and then try to plug it, right? Try to fix it, then talk with the team member. Hey, here’s what happened. Here’s why it’s a problem. Here’s why it goes against what needs to happen.
And, and how do you think we need to fix it? And one of our approaches is, is, is we’re big into ownership, we say own your space, right? And drive the truck. These are some analogies we use. So when people make a mistake that is clearly against the S O P. You know, it really wasn’t a documentation problem. We say, OK, this mistake happened craft a solution for how you are not going to make it again. So we kind of give it to them, you know what happened, you know, somewhere in this, in this, the a mistake was made that you made you better than anyone else, better than me, better than your direct supervisor.
Know why the mistake was made. So I need you to sit down and come up with the, with the way that you’re not going to make that mistake again. I love it. Yes. And that’s, that’s empowerment. It, it’s empowerment, it’s, it, it’s taking what was a negative situation, which was a mistake, which was a, you know, a boo boo. Uh and it’s basically giving them the opportunity, hey, go ahead and, and improve our process because something here fell through the cracks. So it’s your space. Please go ahead and improve the process and now they’re actually helping to build the company.
And the, and the opposite of that is they made a mistake. You come in, tell them what they did wrong, tell them how they’re gonna do it. Maybe you can jump in and do it yourself because they’re stupid and they don’t know what they’re doing. Feel incompetent. Yes, micromanage. And that’s right. And so when we, you know, like you said, we collaborate with them and let them teach them. How about teach them your thinking process? Not just teach, not, don’t give them necessarily the solution to the problem.
Teach them how this thinking process goes so they can start solving that problem while you’re on vacation. I like all this talk about vacation. Jason, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do joint family vacation. But you, you live in vacation, right? I do, I do live in vacation. Um, but one of the things, one of the things you, you said that I’m curious how you’d actually implemented, um, is you talked about existing team members, how if you hadn’t run the personality assessments, if you haven’t, maybe, uh, dived exactly into what each position requires and make sure you match it with the right person and their needs.
What do you, how do you approach this idea of, hey, we’re gonna roll out a disc personality assessment for everyone who’s working at the company and, and make sure that the, you know, your needs are, are lined up correctly with your position. How do you do that without disrupting your entire company? Well, you, you want to help them see that it’s that you want to be a better leader and you want to be a better manager that you want to be a better communicator. And what you don’t want this to be is you don’t want it to be, um, something perceived as or real in reality, be threatening like they’re gonna be removed or something. Yeah.
And so you don’t, you don’t want to do that but you can, you can really help, help that person better. And may you know what? Maybe you have the wrong person in this, the, the, the person in the wrong seat on your company. Maybe you could change some of the motivations of that, you know, hey, interesting story. One of my guys recently, you know, we’re talking about all of hitting, hitting all of our green goals. We, uh, we, we say we go all green. That doesn’t mean like green, environmentally friendly.
That means we’re going green because our score, our dials turn green when they hit goals and you know, when they say all green that’s talking about for the day for the week, for the month and for the year. And, uh, he, he said, uh, um, we talk about putting stretch goals. He’s like, well, if you would, if you would have just put that stretch goal up there, we’d already been hitting it too, man. I love it. Oh, ok. Well, guess what? We’re, guess what Jason is about to do.
We’re about to have that stretch goal up there as well because because some people they just, no matter what the target is, they just want to hit the target, they won’t hit the target, they’re gonna do whatever it takes to hit the target. Of course, you need to make it rewarding for them and and figure out what that is and, you know, when, when it sales people reward them with, you know, financial incentives. So sales people in, in most organizations, uh and not, I don’t, I don’t wanna say most in many organizations are 100% commission and they need to be high earners when they’re succeeding.
They need to be higher earners. Guess what if they’re not, if, if, if, if their paychecks aren’t the same day in day out, they can deal with instability. Some people uh that they, they, they would rather, let’s just, let’s just say, uh in a year, let’s take a whole, let’s annualize some income and let’s just, let’s just use some easy round numbers. Ok? Let’s just say that uh A salesperson in a year could make $100,000 but they’re gonna, their, their paychecks are gonna be up and down different every week.
It’s gonna be very volatile. Makes it kind of hard to budget at home. Ok? Some people would rather take 1003,000 as a salary than the opportunity to make 100,000 on commission. Some people may even take 60 because they value stability. So if you take someone who really values stability and you put them in 100% commission job, well, it’s not gonna be good because they’re not your, not your killers on the sales, right? So guess what? They’re probably not the right person to be in that position. So don’t put them in that sales position because in sales, at least in most sales you want hunters, you want hunters with a high dominance factor, OK?
People that want an R O I on their time, people that, uh, you know, love power and control and controlling outcomes kind of sounds really all sounds kind of negative really. But it’s really great stuff. OK. Dominant. It’s really great stuff because, you know, they can, they, they’re out there working hard to, to uh deliver presentations to people that build value so that people are gonna say yes, you know, that’s what they’re doing. They’re out there, they’re trying to get the Yes. Yeah. So, but at the, at the end of the day, you know, employees will, will, will be motivated when, when they feel valued, when they feel supported and they have a sense of purpose in their work and uh the, the rewards that, that match their motivations. Yeah.
So you, you have, I, I have a follow up to all this. So, so you have a, a couple of things here that need to be done to do this correctly. You have the disk personality assessment basically figure out what makes this person tick, that’s their, their label, you know, on, on the pink, on the pink and that’s, that’s what you get. Um It’s understanding at a very deep level, the requirements of the position for what you are hiring. Obviously, if it’s, if it’s someone answering the phones and then you open at a certain time uh or, or they’re addressing people in the office.
They ob obviously need to be at work right at that time. Uh One other thing that you mentioned was this example of a single mother, right? And, and her needing some flexibility, obviously, kids get sick, things happen. And when kids understands why the single mother would need flexibility in her schedule. I’m wondering how you go about deciphering or extracting that information that in the single mother’s example wouldn’t have necessarily been relayed to you through disc because it’s not necessarily inherent to her personality. It, it’s more inherent to her situation and there might be things that, that somebody really values for X Y or Z, but you don’t actually know because it’s maybe not quite as obvious as an example as a single mother, maybe there’s something else in their life or, or some other thing.
Um But it’s not really directly uh tied to their personality. Do you have a process for, for kind of figuring? Do you sit down with people and you say, hey, what do you want, what’s important to you or what’s your process? Um We have, we have a, a whole process by which people are, you know, interviewed by. But, you know, Brandon, we, we would say something like um you know, Brandon, when it, when it comes time to choose the company you’re gonna work for, I mean, what are your expectations?
What are you looking for? Yeah, just some basic questions and get them talking. And so many times in, in job interviews when we’re interviewing people, we’re trying to sell that person on why this is, oh, we do this, we do that. We’re trying to sell them on how great we are. It’s the same thing we tend to do. When we’re selling paint jobs, we try to tell them how great we are. We are, this is the cost by it. That’s right. And instead we need to be getting them talking in your sales process.
Do you do more of the talking or does the prospective client do more of the talking in your interviews? Do you do more of the talking or do they do more of the talking? Yeah. And if you don’t get them talking, you’re not going to uh get these things out of them and the longer you keep people talking and you’re just having a great conversation, they’re just gonna start talking about things, you know, and there’s, and there’s definitely you need to be careful about what questions you can and can’t ask in, in interviews, right?
But, but just get people talking and you’ll start to figure out is this a fast paced person? Is this a slow paced person? No, that, that is the, the disk profiles like that label start there, start there. So that’s, that’s about getting, you know, getting people on your, on your team. But then even when you’re, you know, when you’re, I know we, we already covered disc in a previous episode. So I don’t wanna dive too deep into that. But, but when you, when you understand the, the uh the inner workings of people, the people x-ray, I guess we could say the personality X ray, when you understand the way people work, the way people are built, the way people are, they tick on the inside that they’re unique per individual.
And you can, you can use assessments and interviews to extract that information. You, you know, you, it can be predictable. They’re indicators of certain of, of the, of what they value, of what they believe and of, of what their behavior is gonna be. Ok. And so then when you look at your job position, what is, what does this job need? What do I need in this place? You know, give you, give you a little example here, for instance, um, for a call center, when you’re interviewing for a call center, there’s, there’s, I kind of see two extremities of call centers.
One is someone who uh is in a customer support roll and they’re, they’re, they’re talking to customers that are dissatisfied and their job is to diffuse and settle down and, and be all warm and inviting and make them feel better and kind of give them a hug. Right. Then the other end of call centers, you have bill collectors. Do you think that’s the same person making those calls? It’s not. Ok. So what are those different positions again? You know, I want people at my company who want to grow that want to use their skills and pe people do.
And, and I don’t think Brandon here’s the thing. I don’t really think there’s unmotivated people. I believe there are people that aren’t motivated by what we want them to be motivated by or they’re not motivated by the, the position that they’re in with our company or the rewards of it. Some people maybe don’t fully understand what they’re motivated by yet. Hopefully they’ll find it out. But I believe that everybody’s motivated by something. It could be, it could be by, by fun, it could be by results. It could be by caring for others.
There’s so many things that people can, can be uh uh motivated by and they’re passionate about just understanding, just understanding that. So why not as business owners, you know, if you, if you think about uh an individual is going to have a, you know, a few jobs in their lifetime, I don’t know what a dozen or less in their lifetime. As business owners, we are going to be constantly interviewing and hiring people who, who is the one who really should be getting good at people’s skills. The business people should really be good at it.
So we need, we need to learn business, we need to learn people skills. We need to learn business skills too, but we need to learn people skills. Great man. 90 98% of the people that are gonna walk in your door have very little self awareness of their motivators of their personality, styles of their needs and their wants that, you know what they so many people want, they want a job because they have bills and they don’t really understand. There’s a huge opportunity for us to, to take great people, put them in the right spot so they can grow.
And then in turn in, turn our team, our company is going to flourish. And when that happens, that’s when we break out of contractor prison and we are in contractor freedom before you know it. I love it, man. Yeah, the a as business owners, we have at least there are some business owners who are not super abundance or you know, mindset oriented, not super forward thinking, but I think most of our listeners are and, and we know we, we need to learn um general leadership, we need to learn our finances and know our numbers.
We need to learn sales and marketing and, and how do you position to sell on value and, and make your company valuable. You know, we, we need to, to know how to, to file taxes or find the right bookkeeper. Make sure that we’re making smart business decision. We need to know all this stuff. But I think we don’t, we don’t really recognize on a, on a wide scale the importance of people and getting good with people. Because as you said, that is business. It’s fundamentally every single interaction, whether it’s your team, whether it’s with a prospective customer, whether it’s with a vendor, ultimately, it’s with a human being.
No, no, not one of us interacts with just a company. Google is probably as close to it as possible. You know, you get the kind of the stone wall and the you know, you get the get the customer automated algorithm and updates from the email. You know, that’s probably about as close as as there is to just interacting with a, with a nonhuman entity. But other than that, we’re all interacting with he with people. So if you want to be a super successful business owner, you should probably get really, really good at people.
No better time to start than now. Yeah, I love it man. And it’s just not preached enough, you know, people talk culture and, and workplace environment and, and this and that and then there’s, you know, the the stuff that Silicon Valley was real focused on with the cakes and the the ping pong tables and this and that. But at the end of the day, it’s kind of missing the forest through the trees when you start to talk about these perks and everything, but not really understand people at a fundamental level.
And one of the things that really stood out to me that you just said was, was you getting so good at understanding people that when you’re sitting there interviewing them? So they haven’t even necessarily conducted a, a disc personality assessment or really any personality assessment. But you are able to actually ask questions in a way that gives you the information that you need to know a whole lot about this person and what role they may or may not be a good fit for. Absolutely. And if that’s headed in the right direction, then we go ahead and uh give them an assessment right there in our, our, our uh interview office, give them, give them the assessment, takes, you know, 15, 20 minutes to, to complete the assessment and then we get the report and uh we’ll review it with them, you know, but you guys will do it.
So you’ll talk with them and you’ll make sure they kind of have to, to sort of, I’m not necessarily gonna say pass but be be a fit in the conversation for you to then move forward with the actual personality assessment. Yes, because we, you know, we also want to talk about their values and things like that, not just uh you know, there, there’s the skills, there’s ok. Do they fit our company? Do they seem like they have the same values as us? And does it seem like again, it just at the interview that they might fit in our culture.
And do they have the skills? Could I give them the skills? And then, then the, the last one is, is, will they do the job? Will they do the job? Is it, there’s a difference between, can they do the job and will they do the job? There’s a lot of things any of us can, can look in our lives and you know, say, can we clean the garage but will we do it? Will we keep it clean? I don’t know. It depends on what type of person we are.
Ok. Some people for sure will. And, but each of us, my point is each of us have things that, that we can do that we hate doing or maybe we don’t even hate them that much. We just love doing other things better and we’re gonna be drawn to doing the things that we love. And so, you know, think about this also just as another example, um who doesn’t love to go on vacation? How much work can you get done the day before vacation? You can probably get an entire week’s worth of de week’s worth of work done in one day, the day before vacation. Yeah.
Ok. So when you are motivated, You can probably be up to 10 times as productive. Think about that, it’s powerful and, and if you’ve got a team of, of people that, that uh are not motivated, maybe they’re they don’t have the, they don’t have clarity and you’ve got a negative culture and they’re just kind of there for the paycheck. They’re just pounding away at the keyboard or the phones or the paintbrush, whatever it is, just moving slow, working at their plate, working at their pace. I mean, do you think that’s, is, is that really gonna be a big benefit to your team?
Is that gonna drive your vision, build your culture through your customers and make more profits for you? It’s not, it’s not, you know, got me thinking about a movie office space or the DMV or something having all this. Yeah, precisely. Um OK. So I wanna, I wanna dive into this requirements versus maybe nice to haves. So when we’re looking at a, a job, you talked about the, the one position requiring that you be there on time because you have that in all your marketing materials, 10 different places.
So what time you open, you should probably make really, really sure that you actually open at that time and that people are available to, to talk with people. Um Where do you kind of draw the line or, or do you draw a line between sort of, hey, here are the requirements for position X, position Y, position Z and here are the nice to haves, but if the person is the right value uh fit, if we like them, we think they’re good culturally, even if they’re maybe not 100% aligned with this.
Nice to have. We, we’re willing to overlook that. Do you have any kind of scale like that? We don’t have a scale but, you know, we, we have definitely certain things that are non negotiables and we’re very upfront with people on that. If, if, you know, it’s, if, if it’s a non-negotiable, it’s not fair. If I don’t tell you, I don’t bring it and I don’t bring it out in the open. I would, I, I would rather Disqualify a candidate earlier rather than after they’ve been working three weeks and then we have to start over and that’s bad for them.
It’s bad for us. And so we, you know, we disqualify a lot of candidates for a lot of different reasons, not because they’re not good people because they need to, they, they need to fit our culture and they need to be able to do the job and we need to believe that that they’re going to do the job. And I want, you know, Brandon, I want people, I don’t want people to just do a job in my company anymore. Back in the day I did, I want people that are going to add to my culture, they’re gonna build my culture, they’re gonna champion the vision of my company.
That’s the kind of people I want, I want people that are, you know, uh that I like working with every and every really everybody wants that right. So culture is becoming more and more of uh carrying more and more weight on who we hire than ever before. Because as we get better and better with training people in different positions, We can take someone that’s maybe, you know, has 70% of the skills that we really want or depending on the position, even less and we can train them those skills.
And the right person that is, uh in, in the right position will be absolutely thrilled to attack and learn everything they need to learn to master that position. If it’s the right person with the right motivations. Yeah. So if somebody is listening to this and they really haven’t done any of this before and they, they have some people who think their team is, is doing ok, but there’s room for improvement. What would be, what, what would be the approach would it be? Hey, sit down, look at the positions and really get clear on what you need.
And then from there, look into kind of what personality type you need there or what, what sequence, what order should they approach this in? Ok. So, um to some extent, you need to dance with what you have. OK? Your team is your team, you’re not gonna go fire everybody, right? It’s not, you’re not gonna be very productive probably at this point, not really ethical either just to go fire everybody for because you were stupid and didn’t know this stuff before and that’s a little harsh to say that.
Um But I guess who, guess who I’m saying that in the mirror because that used to be me, that used to be me. Start just give everybody on your team a disc assessment. Have him take a dis dis assessment and start to read through. Don’t just look at the graph, read through their, their strengths, the keys to working with them, their opportunities for excellence and that’s growth areas for them for each of your people. And what you’re gonna find is as you read these, you’re gonna find your frustrations with that person in writing.
That’s why I’m always frustrated with this person here. That’s why I’m constantly having to talk to them about that there or wow, that’s why this person is so amazing doing this particular task and light bulbs are gonna go off, light bulbs are gonna go off in your head and you’re gonna start to learn and um have, have your people read theirs as well and, and start just get this going and make this a part of your process to do these assessments. And uh that right there will, will be huge.
Then what you learn from that. OK. You can now go back and look at your job descriptions or your, as we call them K R A s because they’re not necessarily descriptions and, and look through and start updating and clarifying things in there based on that. And now when you’re hiring someone, you’re, you’re looking at an ideal candidate to, to meet that position. Right. And, uh, a lot of people have these ideal candidate, you know, profiles or avatars for positions. And that can be really hard to do when you are a small company.
And almost every position is a jack of all trades, really hard to do. And some, some personality profiles are, are, are pretty good at being a jack of all trades. But the more you can help people uh their role specialize like a big mistake I made back in the day. And so many contractors do this. I had my salesperson also um be responsible for managing the project, so not actually doing the work but managing the project, putting all the details in the system um going out and starting walking through and delivering, you know, making sure all the promises were delivered.
And that was uh a huge, huge, huge fail because people that are are really good at selling are typically not the detail oriented customer service type of people that are gonna be really good at making sure that you deliver every promise to your client and communicate super well with them and on time and vice versa, the people that are really good at managing projects in this space are typically not going to be really good at uh the sales process. So just start with looking at what you have.
Hey, what do I have? Who are these people and, and just read through them one at a time and start connecting the dots, make notes on the pages, you know, print them out and then start looking at the job descriptions. It will, it will be, it will be eye opening and it’s gonna be work. It’s not, you’re not gonna fix it overnight. What you need to do is start, just start and start considering these things as you go through your review process, through your, you know, correctional process, through your hiring process.
And over time you’re gonna get slowly better and better. You’re gonna gain more knowledge and get better and better progress over perfection. Yes, I love it. Jason, as we wrap up this episode six motivators, do you have anything else you wanna add? Just that, that reminder, it’s the people, the people, if you will build the people and, and you will empower them with simple systems with clarity, then then you’re going to be able to scale your company without scaling your headaches and get some freedom. I like that shirt too.
Is that a, a contractor, prison shirt? What do we got here? Contractor freedom with the chain breaking in the middle. So when you get out of contractor prison, you are in Contractor Freedom Man. It’s awesome. All right. So this is technically the end of our six episode series, but Jason, you and I have been flirting with this idea of a bonus episode since really episode one. Who would, who would think that the marketing guy has a bonus episode? Who would think? Right. And then, but if you order now, but just wait, right.
Bonus episode. Are we doing it? Let’s do it. I, I’m Brandon. I enjoy, I enjoy our chats. I do too. I do too. I love them, man. That’s why, that’s why this series is so long. Well, you have a lot of value to add too, but I also love it. So. All right, bonus episode coming up. So it’s turning from a six to a seven, seven uh episodes. It’s, it’s our podcast. We can do what we want, right? You can do what you want. Let’s do it, let’s do it. All right, Jason, thank you, man. Super excited. Not really sure what we’re gonna cover, but I’m sure episode seven is gonna be killer. Um Appreciate you, be good. Thank you. Thank you, 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.
