Notes to Myself Dear Jameson, You started West Coast Deck just about 4 years ago, and it’s time for your annual summer break. Most people give the advice that they themselves wish somebody would give them or that they would like to receive - I sat down this week and made a list of a few things I would tell you if you hired me as your business coach. If your name isn't Jameson, but you’re in the messy middle of the SMB world ($3-7M of revenue), some of this might be valuable to you. Not sure if this will reach any of you as it is Friday going into a holiday weekend (America forever!). If you're neither of those things, put your phone away and go buy some fireworks. As always, buyer beware. Get Your Head Right Remember that problems are blessings. No work means no problems, and no work is the wrong type of problem to have. The presence of problems is evidence of good things happening to you. Remember that. Attack them with joy and optimism, and it'll help your mental state. While problems are evidence that you have work and good things are happening for your business, you should also pay very close attention to them without letting them disturb your mental state. Just like action produces information, chaos can also tell you that maybe something's broken. Something isn't working, and somewhere you need a course correction. Pay attention to chaos. Lean into it, try to control it, and believe that when chaos exists, you're able to improve it and get to a better state. Action produces information, and that information can be used to improve things. Don't wait until you have all the answers before you move. Move first, then learn from the outcome. When You Woke Up Today, Your Business Was Dead Every day you wake up and your business is dead by default, and you have to breathe life into it. The way you breathe life into it is by going out and hunting new revenue. This will never stop. You can never rest. You can never take a day off. You always have to be hunting more, better, higher-quality revenue and new projects. Never stop hunting. If you can't accept that and you're not willing to do that, just close up shop and go home. There is nothing more important to your business than new sales. Nothing comes even remotely close as a distant second. Not only do sales bring revenue, they bring energy, excitement, and momentum. They improve your mood. They improve your team's mood. They also provide information about how to improve your business. You need an offer: the offer could be a square or rectangle deck. It doesn't have to be rocket science. The way that you turn it into a rinse-and-repeat business is by developing a sales process. When people say "sales process," it means that you take control of the sales dialogue with a set of steps that you repeat each time you go on a sales call. You're not just showing up loosey-goosey, listening to somebody talk about their problems, trying to diagnose the problem, and haphazardly offering a price. You are the driver of the outcome, you are the expert: You show up, you listen, you provide three solutions or options, you make it easy for them to buy, and then you ask for the order. That's a sales process. Also: if you cannot look a customer in the eyes, present pricing (multiple options) to them in person, and then ask for the order, you should close up shop and go get a job somewhere. If you don't have the balls to do that, you don't have any business being an entrepreneur. Crumbl Cookies >>> Wedding Cakes Lean into uniformity and repeatability, particularly with respect to the type of jobs you say yes to. With decks, this means trying to find as many squares and rectangles as possible and avoiding super crazy custom projects where you'll be developing brand-new skills that you'll never use again. Try to find things that you've done before, then do them faster, better, quicker, or cheaper. I think I've already said this, and I should probably make it the number one point and say it three different ways until sundown. The way that you make money in a home services business—or selling some sort of home improvement product—is with a rinse-and-repeat offer that you just do over and over again. Reinventing the wheel and being high craft is a good way to generate word of mouth and maybe always have consistent work, but it's going to be subsistence work that barely keeps the lights on and is a pretty stressful way to live with no safety net. If you can figure out a rinse-and-repeat offer that, pardon my French, any idiot can install, that's when you can really make money for yourself, create enterprise value, take care of your kids, and put money away for the future. CHOP WOOD, CARRY WATER Similar to how you should do everything you can to avoid super crazy edge cases and custom work, do everything you can to establish consistency for your team on a day-in and day-out basis. You should be doing your very best to perform the same activities every single day. A day on a West Coast Deck job site should look and feel the same every single time. Your job as the manager and leader is to perform the same set of activities every single day: review the same KPIs, do the same actions, perform the same sales activities. Every behavior throughout the organization should be governed by a set of standard operating procedures—or, said differently, a set of consistent behaviors for how you do things. Every production site visit should go exactly the same way. Every sales meeting should go exactly the same way. Every day, in terms of the communications your team receives, should be exactly the same. Chop wood, carry water. Figure out what works, then just do it over and over again. Making micro-adjustments and micro-improvements along the way leads to victory. BE THE THERMOSTAT, NOT A THERMOMETER Your entire team looks to you to set the temperature of the room. Your customers look to you to set the temperature of the room. It's your job to make everybody believe that it's going to be okay because it is going to be okay. You're in charge. You always make things happen. You always win in the end, and you need to be the one who makes your team feel that way. Connected to the idea of being the thermostat is that it's not enough just to have the energy. You have to make a conscious effort to transmit that energy to your team through constant communication of: positive feedback, constructive feedback, compliments Tell them you're excited about what they're doing. Tell them you're stoked about their efforts. Just be a source of energy for them and communicate it verbally. If you're not on site with your team, this can happen through: group messages, video content, phone calls Make sure that you consciously give kudos. ON TO CINCINNATI I try to tell my team that my job is to be a high-performance, high-demanding sports coach who's trying to win the league championship. You/re not there to baby them and be nice. Your job is to create top performers, and sometimes that means giving hard feedback and always pushing them. We're not a family; we're a team. You don’t win the Super Bowl by skipping out on conditioning drills. SHARPEN THE AXE BLAH BLAH This is a Stephen Covey (sharpen your saw) or Abraham Lincoln (spend most of the time sharpening your axe) thing: you need to do everything in your power to keep yourself in top operating condition - on all dimensions. Don’t be so vain as to call yourself a “cognition athlete” but you better take care of your body so that your mind can handle the load you’re carrying. You can get lost going down rabbit holes on this, but most of them boil down to: >get good sleep >try to eat well >drink lots of water >lift heavy weights >go for walks on the beach I should probably have led with this. You just have to take care of yourself. If you don't take care of yourself, you'll burn out, you'll run into health issues, and you'll lose. You have to start by winning here. STOP NEEDING TO BE LIKED Another thing that will hopefully happen for your in your journey as a business owner is that you’ll evolve from wanting everybody to love you—and thinking that universal affection from employees, partners, investors, and clients is what will make your business successful—to becoming somebody who understands what the real drivers of profit are for the business and then being ruthlessly protective of those things - and realizing that this has nothing to do with being nice and being liked. A lot of that comes from shifting from being nice to being, for lack of a better term, right—and making the correct decisions for maximizing profit. You grow to understand that it is only through maximizing profit that you can maximize benefits and outcomes for your team members, yourself, and your customers. I know that's not universally true, but I think in the case of this specific type of micro business, when we are profitable, we do a better job and generally produce a better product for our customers. We're able to give our employees better stability, better benefits, and better working conditions. As the owner, you're in a better mental state, which makes everybody's life better. BE THE CLEAN GAS STATION There are a million different places for people to get gas. Most have a bunch of grime and gunk and gross bathrooms. You want to be the place where people feel comfortable eating off the floor. You don't have to be Buc-ee's, but you want to be the clean gas station with the best snacks. CHEAP AF FTW The last thing I'll say is that you cannot be too frugal as an owner, operator, or entrepreneur. Sure, you'll see people online talk about the things you need to spend money on and how you have to spend money to make money. In your case, you need to pay attention to every wasted screw, negotiate every last deck board, and save costs wherever you can so that you can invest money into the things that really move the needle: your people and the quality of craftsmanship that you bring to the market. Being frugal also protects you against the inevitable unexpected expenses that come with running a business. It is an essential way of living for an entrepreneur. In a business that doesn't have software economics or massive economies of scale, it may be the only durable way to produce consistent profit—by building a low-cost provider whose internal cost structure is as lean as possible. (highly recommend the book Art of Profitability for additional reading on this) TL;DR If you want to have 1% outcomes, you have to do things that 99% aren’t willing to do. BUT, for SMB, you’re not figuring out how to go to Mars: you’re figuring out which single task, if repeated 10,000 times in a row, will give you the outcome you want - and then somehow figuring out how to find the strength to avoid distractions and just putting in those 10,000 reps. Anyways, I hope you have a great fourth of July. I’m proud of you, and rooting for you. You got this. -Jameson