How Construction Companies Cure Profititis And Keep More Cash With Ben Hansen

Profit can feel weirdly random in construction: one month you’re slammed, the next you’re chasing late payments, and somehow “growth” still doesn’t show up in your personal bank account. We sit down with Dr. Ben Ashikoi, the Profit Doctor, to name the problem and fix the thinking behind it: profititis, when revenue rises but net profit stays flat or slides backward.

We dig into a simple but powerful practice Ben calls Operation Dog Catcher: reviewing your last few years of projects to find the worst jobs that quietly cancel out the wins. From there we talk real-world constraints contractors live with, especially payroll and overhead that can’t be switched off. Ben shares the “No Bad Months” mindset, pipeline KPIs, and ways to reduce feast-and-famine by making part of your delivery capacity more variable with subcontractors or on-demand labor, plus the discipline to say no to work that forces you to overstaff.

We also get tactical on cash flow and money management. If you’re managing by bank balance, you’re not alone, but it can hide serious issues. We talk Profit First-style account structure, spending psychology, and how to keep leadership focused. Then we go into job costing and field accountability: man-hours versus budget, percent complete versus percent spent, and incentive systems that drive productivity without destroying quality or creating toxic “A team vs B team” dynamics.

If you want stronger construction profit margins, cleaner job costing, better cash flow, and a company that actually rewards the owner and the team, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a contractor friend, and leave a review with the one profit lever you’re going to pull next.

Ben Hansen
The Profit Doctor https://profitdoctor.com/

PODCAST INFO:
the Site Visit Website: https://www.sitemaxsystems.com/podcast
the Site Visit on Buzzsprout: https://thesitevisit.buzzsprout.com/269424
the Site Visit on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-site-visit/id1456494446
the Site Visit on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5cp4qJE5ExZmO3EwldN1HH

FOLLOW ALONG:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thesitevisit
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesitevisit

Transcript

Profit Should Not Be Accidental

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hey, maybe sometimes profit is an accident, or God forbid, some things go right, like we have a few profitable jobs, we we end up with some profit. So then we feel like we should spend it on something like marketing. I mean, I would probably take that whole frame and tip it 180 degrees. First of all, profit shouldn't be an accident, it should be happening all the time. And the vast majority of the projects should in fact be profitable. And I'd like to kind of link that into a story of a of a prior client to the site visit.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Are you like an electric bike guy or is it just full-on analog?

SPEAKER_03 1:54

Uh, this one's analog. I'm actually enjoying both. I like the electric bike as maybe a car alternative to do like a short trip with no parking, but uh it's not really much of an exercise vehicle.

SPEAKER_02 2:08

Nice, nice. That's cool. And so you and your uh your dog Cash and your wife Ginger, it sounds like Gilligan's Island. You got ginger on the island. That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_03 2:15

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Here in Austin, Texas, uh, we are ready for a three-hour tour, or at least in this case, maybe uh a 40-minute tour.

SPEAKER_02 2:24

Nice, perfect. So is Austin booming as uh as all the podcast pros say it is?

SPEAKER_03 2:29

You know, I think yes and no. It definitely felt like it was exploding, you know, over the last five, 10 years in terms of people coming in. And then I think with the behavior of COVID, where people are like, oh, wait a minute, maybe I either need to go back to work or maybe I want to go back home or whatever. I think it's cooled a little bit, you know, housing market-wise. I think it was meteoric for maybe, you know, 2015 to 2023 or four. Yeah, and maybe it's given back some of that ground, which probably has something to do with a slowing of in migration. But I think uh Elon Musk and then uh Samsung announced, you know, a couple of like giant new facilities coming in here. So uh I think the momentum is still rolling.

SPEAKER_02 3:15

Cool. That's uh that's awesome. So yeah, I want to get down there. It seems like it's uh like been the comedy, the mecca, uh, because of I think Jerry Rogan's thing and all of her stuff.

SPEAKER_03 3:26

So yeah, yeah, pretty cool stuff. Coming to Austin.

Profititis And The Low P Problem

SPEAKER_02 3:32

Oh, yeah, yeah. Mega influencers. Well, some influence, hopefully. I don't know about the mega part. But uh okay, so I'm pretty excited to chat about what you with you because I did listen to, I think it was was it the site Hut? Is that what it was called? You were on a different podcast, construction one? Was it the Hut?

SPEAKER_03 3:47

Yeah. Well, I've been on uh maybe a dozen or so construction uh podcasts. I can't remember exactly which one you're talking about. All right.

SPEAKER_02 3:55

All right, I got a link on the on the intro email, but I listened to you a little bit um before this, and uh just to get to know you audibly, uh, figure out what Ben is all about. Yeah, um, so you are the profit doctor. And I even when I Googled you, I've thought, you know, a profit doctor. God, how many profit doctors must there be? I mean, it's a pretty awesome name. And boom, there you are, number one. Good job on that.

SPEAKER_03 4:21

Thank you, thank you. Not hard to find from Ken. It's somewhat ironic to me that um almost every business owner I talk about is so gung-ho about revenue as a and growth and sales and marketing and so forth. And so there's like an infinite number of agencies and consultants and salespeople trying to push, you know, growth, marketing, lead generation, that sort of thing. Uh, but it's actually kind of thin in terms of the ranks of the people who are like, let's help you improve profitability. And uh that actually kind of that duality between revenue focus and profit focus is, I think, something we'll talk about. But it's kind of one of the biggest myths that I see among um those business owners who are not really that effective in terms of turning top line revenue into bottom line, you know, profitability and compensation typically uh for themselves and the other uh business owners.

SPEAKER_02 5:19

Well, I got lots and lots of questions.

SPEAKER_03 5:23

All right.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

Okay. So let's talk about you call it the P. No, was it the P word? No, it's not the P word. Profititus? Profit. I heard profititis, and then the other thing was it the the uh the the low P? That was it. Low P. Okay. Low P. Yeah, it's it's it's very phallic. This is this whole reference you got there.

SPEAKER_03 5:43

Yeah, I don't know if they're allowed to be like naughty and tongue in cheek up in Canada, but I thought it was hysterical to uh make like a little ad on LinkedIn that said, Do you suffer from low P? And then it was about like low profit. Um, and then we took it one step forward, and you know, you know, you've heard of like tendinitis and prosthetitis. This is profitis, yeah. Um, and so we call profititis this symptom when people have strong growing uh revenue and top line, but okay, sorry, weak, flagging, um, not very strong uh profit to go with that. So, you know, revenue is going up or staying steady, and uh profit is going down or staying flat. Um, and so we call it profititis, and we see it very commonly, um, you know, with about half of the market. You know, half of the market's usually pretty good with profit, kind of above average.

SPEAKER_04 6:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:41

And then half, uh, you know, right out of like third grade math, half of companies are below average when it comes to profitability. And those are the guys that typically we're helping get into the top half of profitability.

SPEAKER_02 6:54

Right. So with profititis, you're talking about when you when you do have something versus you don't have something. Because I like if itis is usually you have something. So if like elephantitis, you means you have that problem. But this is the lack of profit.

SPEAKER_03 7:09

So this is the like Oh well, you have crappy profit, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 7:13

No, it's it's uh it's it's a really it's a really interesting thing. So I I was I've got lots of questions here. Um and some of them dovetailing some of the things that you were talking about on that other podcast. But um what it seems to be in construction, it's a very difficult um it's a it's a difficult term in terms of profit for how people deal with that. Because often when they get a bit of profit, they're like, okay, now we can do things that they haven't been doing in the past, and then it kind of levels up. For instance, marketing. Marketing is a very uh hard thing in construction because it's not like you're selling you're selling a service, and that service is pretty much just your value proposition of your quality of work, uh your reliability, um, your uh professionalism, uh, your craft, all of those types of things in terms of being um like having this sense of trust that especially on the subtrade side of things or or on the um general contractor side of things, that you are a good steward of money, steward of time, and that you're going to be a reliable component of a project. And to market that, there's only so many channels. So like you're gonna I guess you can do LinkedIn, I suppose. Um But like what are your in terms of the marketing side, uh I know I'm not suggesting that you are marketing, you're the profit guy, but when it comes to let's say you have a couple of successful jobs and then you know this the bank account's full because you have actually made good margin, and then you're thinking, well, we need more of that. Okay, so now we start the marketing machine or whatever they consider that marketing machine to be. Would you say that um one of the biggest issues of the profit part is is that it kind of happens haphazardly just from the luck of jobs going well and it is not a focus?

SPEAKER_03 9:16

Well boy, there's there's like five things wrapped up in there. And please bring me back if uh if I miss three or four of those five by getting too excited about one thing.

SPEAKER_04 9:26

Okay, cool.

SPEAKER_03 9:26

One of the things you said is that hey, maybe sometimes profit is an accident, or God forbid, some things go right, like we have a few profitable jobs, we we end up with some profit, so then we feel like we should spend it on something like marketing. Yeah, I mean, I would probably take that whole frame and tip it 180 degrees. First of all, profit shouldn't be an accident, it should be happening all the time. And the vast majority of the projects should in fact be profitable. And I'd like to kind of link that into a story of a of a prior client. So I was working with uh with a hundred million dollar uh construction services company. They're more of a sub to people doing high-rise buildings and like uh mid-range, whatever, you know, three to six story stuff, apartment complex and stuff like that. And um, you know, very low net profitability. Um what what we've what we instituted there is we called it operation dog catcher. It's like go back over the last two years, look at all those projects that you've done, and kind of do a little bit of a post-mortem on the profitability of them, if you will, project by project. And what we found, I I thought to me this was fascinating. I'd be very curious uh what your listeners see or if they have experienced this, that the top 25%, like most profitable of their jobs, were essentially responsible for a hundred percent of all the profit that they had made over the last couple of years. Right. Yeah. And then the middle half, if you will, uh of their projects were equally in total as profitable. You're like, wait a minute, how can a hundred plus a hundred like equal a hundred? And it's because their worst 25% of projects basically canceled out a hundred percent of their profitability. So it's like they they netted, say, 5 million from the top quartile, 5 million from the middle, and they lost 5 million on the bottom. And so what uh my my news you can use out of all that is I think if you're in the construction business, if you're delivering project-based work, to really have sort of an operation dog catcher, which would start by looking backward so you can start figuring out what is it that happens and how to identify ideally in advance um the dogs and then avoid accepting them in the future or figure out how to correct them as quickly as possible, because it's highly likely that you know, roughly a quarter of your jobs are costing you a ton. And if you could either never have accepted them or reframe, excuse me, reframed them when you were taking them on, like a higher price, or you know, more change orders that you required, or before you accepted a change, you're like, hey, we're not gonna do this unless stuff like that.

Payroll Reality And No Bad Months

SPEAKER_02 12:31

Okay. So I would say one of the biggest challenges for companies is their workforce because of the fact it's not as uh turn on and offable in terms of their costs that they would like to. So it's there are there's obviously gonna be these dynamic things that are going to change in any job. You don't know how many changes or orders you're gonna get, you don't know what delays are gonna be there, you don't know scheduling problems you're gonna have. Um and you might have you know material costs that you know by the time you get the stuff, the shipping charge was too much. Like who knows? Like there's so many different things that can happen there in terms of those costs that are unforeseen. But what is foreseen is your core staff burn rate that you have of okay, we have to keep all of these people. And often they're great people. Like if you're lucky, you've got a lot of great people working at your company and you respect those people. So what you can't do is have them on call. You don't get good people on call, but people want to have reliability. They work for a company, they wear the logo on their hard hat or on their shirt, and they want to be part of a tribe. And in order to do that, you have to sync and commit to people and have for them to have regular income. And that means that you need regular jobs that are going so even in the slow time, you can't just fire people. Because and and this is but this works really it this happens a lot in this once you get out of that um sort of cottage kind of I don't say cottage, but like you know, this small family business, you know, that's got maybe five or ten employees. When you start to get into the 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 employees, and we start to get in there, and that's not even like a massive construction company. This is this is where that becomes a real issue because you have this workforce that is this mouth you have to feed. So you have to actually take jobs that that just pay that payroll. Because otherwise you lose great people. What do you say about that?

SPEAKER_03 14:51

You know, first of all, I appreciate the the difficulty of the situation you're describing. And I've had plenty of clients who, quote, took jobs that they didn't think were great, you know, to keep people busy, right?

SPEAKER_04 15:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:02

Um the the the challenge, I think, again, is how you frame it, and maybe it's a matter of degree. Um, if you frame it as we know we're gonna have some terrible months because it's gonna be some feast and famine, and in those terrible months, we're gonna take a big hit because we've got a lot of fixed cost. I think to an extent, you are setting yourself up for very poor profitability. And uh, you know, part of the part of what we train people on is, you know, is revenue the name of the game for you? And I would say that most people in construction or the owners of construction businesses, I don't know that dramatic revenue gains is really what is going to solve all their problems as compared to maybe dramatically more consistent profitability. Um, I do think that the more you push for growth, probably the more, a little bit more feast and famine. We also do offer some strategies on how you can maybe convert some of that fixed cost, you know, your nut, if you will, yeah, for every month, into maybe some more variable cost. Um that that can be a powerful strategy. And so I don't want to, I don't want to step over what you said as like it's a trivial situation and not a problem, but but I do think it's very important on how you frame it. Um, I think it's also very important how deep you go into quote that hole. You know, we actually offer uh a program where we help owners who are not super confident in evaluating their financials and managing from the numbers, you know, pretty much most, well, about two-thirds of construction CEOs that started, you know, being a construction guy and now they're a CEO, probably didn't grow up with Excel and charts and finances and Wharton MBA and all that kind of stuff, and often not real comfortable with some of those. So we help kind of show them that. But in that program, we have a module we call No Bad Months, which is a whole series of strategies to avoid going negative. Or, you know, if your average, let's say, is$50,000 of net income a month, how not to go to zero, right? Or 10. And what I would just say there is, you know, it's one thing if you know you're gonna have some up and down, and you have some down that's like a month down, and then you're right back up. But what we saw a lot, and maybe many of you saw, for example, in COVID or I don't know what's going on in the Gulf these days and where that's going. But you know, you don't want to go negative month after month after month, thinking it's like a one-month blip, but really it's the beginning of a big old trend. And then you suck those losses up and give away all your gains for the last three to five years, you know, six, 12 months before you're like, holy crap, I wish we didn't have to make a 20% riff. But I mean, we've been going negative the last seven months. We got to do something, you know. Um, so it's a there, there's a bunch that goes in there. I don't want to trivialize it, but I will say keeping a very close eye on those finances, having both you and your team confident and comfortable in analyzing that, not waiting too long. And sometimes I do think it's a bit of a false thing that that that a lot of business owners tell themselves that I know I'm gonna have some great months and I just need to stock up some cash because I'm gonna have some crappy months and I'm gonna like take it in the teeth. And I'm not always sure that that's the right way to look at it.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

Hmm. Okay, so what is the other way to look at it?

SPEAKER_03 18:44

Well, uh, I have a client right now, a little bit of a smaller company there in the in the kind of design build space.

SPEAKER_05 18:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:52

And um, you know, they want to maintain an enough pipeline of future work so that there's not guys like on payroll not doing jobs, then they start, you know, go over to the owner's house and put on an addition because we're paying you on salary, but we don't have a penny job or whatever, right?

SPEAKER_04 19:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:12

Um and so, you know, we're sort of implementing for them some KPIs to keep that pipeline of future work healthy. And you could imagine when that pipeline, you know, let's say we our target is X. If it's 0.9x or 0.8x, you know, we got to do something. If it's 0.7x or 0.6x, we got to do a lot more. And, you know, one option, of course, is to fire people. I'm not always saying that's the right thing to do. Um, but but I just don't like it when people start with a with like a philosophy that I'm gonna have a lot of bad months. And I really dislike when they don't have the systems in place to to really track that, forecast it coming, and then act quickly. And so even if there are some bad months, I'd rather you have one rather than three, or one that, you know, dips by 30% rather than dips by 130%.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

So, what are some of the um the variable strategies you had?

SPEAKER_03 20:15

Well, I mean, the the reason why so many of your clients are subcontractors uh are because the contractors don't want to bear the weight of the risk of up and down, right? And so when you're a sub and there's no work, you don't have a job from at least that, you know, person who's subcontracting to you. What's to say that uh that a healthy fraction of your team couldn't also be some kind of subcontractor of some arrangement? So what I see very, very often is companies they want to bring folks in-house because they think that when they bring them in-house, we'll get we'll get will get cheaper because instead of playing like some kind of cost plus, we'll bring them in and we'll be able to manage it great, right? Um, and we'll they'll have more, you know, skin in the game and all that kind of stuff. One option might be maybe, maybe on average, every month last year, you guys did uh a million dollars worth of work. So you're like, okay, we need enough um people to deliver a million dollars worth of work a month. Well, another way, maybe, is to say we need enough people internally to deliver about$750,000 of work a month. And then a quarter of our delivery is gonna be subs of different flavors. And so then if our low month is$750 and our high month is 1.25, we're gonna kind of buffer that volatility with subs. And then, you know, we're gonna do the first 750 with our own guys. I mean, that that's like one approach, right? Uh, another approach, which people don't love, is maybe sometimes saying. No to projects that are going to require you to quote overstaff because then you're going to be way out on a limb. And if that volume declines, you're going to take a big hit. Um, I'm not an expert in Canadian uh employment law, but my understanding is it can be pretty darn tricky. And if you've got a lull in demand and a big payroll, it's not as easy as just even if you wanted to turn it off. I don't know that you can turn it off with a week's notice. No, like California, terrible for that. I'm gonna guess uh Canada, semi-equally terrible. And I know Europe is maybe even worse.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

Yeah, no, it is uh it is not is not does not favor the employer here. Um so have you heard of um this they're a friend of the of the podcast. Uh, I've had them on many times. Faber, have you heard of that? I don't believe uh Faber is really, really cool. It is a on-demand um uh like job network for construction. So basically really, really cool. So for for that variable part that you're talking about, they actually are in Texas. Uh they're in Canada and in Texas. It's kind of interesting. And um, so what they have is a two-sided marketplace. They have people who want to do gig work in construction, and then you can basically just on-demand labor that is construction focused. So it's called Faber technologies. Yeah, super cool.

SPEAKER_03 23:28

I've seen a building here that says Faver. I thought F-A-V-O-R, I thought it was sort of like Doordash and errand running. No, that's there's a version of it that does that, but no, this is um Faber with a B.

unknown 23:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 23:40

Faber. Yeah, anyway, really, really cool. So that's that I mean that that's an idea of that of that variable part.

SPEAKER_03 23:45

Um, I I think the key there is what's most important to you as an owner? Is it the ability to um guarantee you can always do it with your own guys, keep your own guys working, be able to accept more work. Sometimes there's that, or have consistent, steady, profitable months. What I'll also tell you is that when you build a profitable, consistent, and steady company, it gives you some pretty cool things to work with, like over time being able to get better and the right people, um, being able to maintain them. Because you can imagine if you're starting to take jobs that suck to keep people busy, I mean, at some point, some of your people are going to be looking over their shoulders like, whoa, I'm I'm a little concerned about the stability of where I'm at.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

You know, I have always thought as running a business that the banking system, the way banks work with bank accounts, doesn't really favor the way business the way business works in terms of the different budgets you have. So like if you because like bank accounts, every account you have costs money. If you have a checking account and then you have another investment account, like if you have multiple corporate accounts, they all cost money to run them every single month. And you have statements, you have different cards, all this kind of stuff. But you know, on your uh in your accounting software, whether that's Sage or whether it's QuickBooks or whatever it is, or Zero, you obviously have your budgets that you allocate for for marketing, for other expenses, et cetera, you make profits, it goes into another account. But the banking system doesn't really uh cooperate with that money actually moving. It's just moving on paper, if that makes any sense. So the accounts and and just keep this in mind, because a lot of uh construction companies do say what's our bank balance right now? Yeah, not bank balance management, right? Bank exactly. It's not like okay, what does our accounting software say? So there's there's it can get into that trap. So I think that the it's uh the money management side of things, I think gets a lot of people in trouble in terms of hey, um we had to pay our payroll and we didn't get paid for 90 days, 108, like who knows? Like it can be terrible. Yeah, collecting. And then do banks really, really like uh the construction company in terms of risk? Uh kind of, not really, unless they have some crazy assets to back it up.

SPEAKER_03 26:38

So I'll share a couple things, yeah. For for smaller firms that really are managing based on their quote bank balance. Um, there is a book called Profit First, it's hiding right over there. It's written by a guy named Michael McAllowitz or Mike McAllowitz. Great book, and it does talk about creating maybe five different accounts to help you make it it's it's almost like if you can't run accounting, just use five bank accounts to kind of keep money in the right place. Um, and I would recommend it if you're at that level where you don't really have kind of accounting happening in a significant way. Um, here in the United States, it might be different, but often the the fees for having you know five accounts versus one, at least in the United States, is not super significant. I used to do that a little bit, uh have three or four different accounts to kind of keep track of money. And where it can be very, very powerful, again, is kind of the psychology. If you're the business owner where when you've got a lot of money in the bank account, you're like going on a spending spree. And then when you don't have a lot of money in the bank, you are calling and collecting and going to sell more work. You need to make those accounts drive the proper psychology for you, which means when you've got too much money in that account, you probably need to get that out of sight, out of mind in your rainy day fund. So you go sell some more jobs, right?

SPEAKER_04 28:03

Yeah.

Open Books Debate And Job KPIs

SPEAKER_03 28:03

Um, and of course, you don't want to be in a situation where you can't make payroll, can't make taxes, et cetera, because somehow you spent it all on a new uh new truck because you thought it was a tax deduction or whatever. I don't know. Um, but as you get a little bit bigger, often that works a little bit less effectively. But in all cases, if you've got a lot of money sloshing around, I do invite people to maybe drain the water on that a little bit, put that off to the side because both the psychology may be applying on you, but now if you're a bigger company with maybe more cash sloshing around, um, sometimes it kind of takes the heat off your executive leadership team, which we don't want the heat off them either. We want everybody, you know, hustling. Um but uh yeah, so that's kind of a commentary on bank balance management. Um, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

Um, so what do you what do you think about uh enabling the entire organization to know how much money there is? And when there were there is not.

SPEAKER_03 29:11

Um, I I actually uh just had this question on uh on a group consulting program call that I had a few days ago, where somebody said, Hey, two years ago, all these high-price consultants told me we should do open book management. I tried it, it was a disaster. Half of my employees were like scared crazy, and the other half were like, why don't I get a raise? And I'm like, Well, I am not uh I'm not a hardcore advocate of you know open book management uh in the sense that every employee kind of knows what your profitability and bank balances look like. I'm not saying it's a it's a bad idea. I'm saying it's incredibly case by case and should not be like rolled out lightly. That being said, I definitely do think that some amount of where are we at, what numbers are we tracking to, and how does your job ladder up or align to those KPIs or tracking numbers is incredibly, incredibly important. And I'll share just a couple of examples. Um, one of our great customer success stories that's on the on the website, you can see it yourself. It's from Cliff, he's in New York. They have a commercial security systems company. And installing commercial security systems isn't exactly construction, but it's not so far off when you think it's like a custom project and you bid it and it's a variable set of hours, and guys roll out in trucks and they do it, and one day the facility is closed, or the next day the electricity's out and you can't do it, you know, stuff. Um and one of the things they found is that when they started communicating with their team about how, hey, this job has been quoted at this many hours to deliver, and we need to hit that number or less, you know, that made a huge difference in getting the team dialed into like, we don't need to just deliver on the jobs with good customer satisfaction. We need to deliver with good customer satisfaction or quality, profitably. And maybe another example that could really drive this home, that company that I was mentioning, the like the construction services that installed a lot of stuff for large GCs, you know, they would have teams of, you know, 20, 30 guys working for months installing these things. These are, you know, multi-hundred thousand dollar projects. And as you can imagine, they're they're jostling with a lot of other trades, trying to get those different things in and the right sequence and all that. And so again, they would have an estimate, you know, let's call it a thousand man hours to deliver something, right? And, you know, they didn't have great visibility into we're X, you know, we're 50% through the man hours of the budget, but we're only 30% of the way through the work. Like that should tell you something. Yeah, I'm a so one of the things that they did is on a weekly basis, they started quote reporting back up job by job to quote headquarters, you know, how far through the process are we in terms of the work or the scope? And then how and then they would kind of hear back how far you are through the money. And you know, we need to start marching together, right? And once they started marching together, you know, some of your clients, I'm sure, or some of your listeners, I'm sure, are like, duh, how else could you be successful? But I would imagine that half of your listeners are like, huh, we might not be doing that. And so you definitely want people in the field and the foreman, if you will, running that crew, um, you know, to have a clear sense of we're X through the work and we're Y through the money, and how do we, you know, land on time. I'd also say you probably want to get 100% through the work and 90% through the money so that when you get to the other 10% on the punch list, you're not, you know, routinely uh upside down.

SPEAKER_02 33:00

That's uh you've just yeah, I've got some really good uh thoughts around this in terms of the the different teams. So if you have different jobs with different teams and different team leaders, like superintendents or foreman, for instance, who are having to report back that profitability number of where they're at, where's the spend at, um you're gonna have a spectrum of who's good at that and who's not good at that. Um and uh within a company, you can start to get this tribalism of oh, I gotta go work on Stefan's job. And Stefan's is he's he's never we never make our numbers. But yeah, okay, I'll gotta go to his job again. And then there's like I prefer to work at Michael's job because Michael's job that you know it's always it's run like a top every single time. Um and then you end up with this hopefully, I mean it works support from from top down, but is that the you do you attract more Michaels, hopefully, or the ones that are it can create tension, I think. Because the there's there's never there's and it could be Stefan's communication style when it comes to um project consciousness, for instance, in terms of how they're dealing with the job. So there it could be a oh yeah, yeah, we'll we'll deal with that later. Yeah, let's just focus on this right now. And then the Michael is like, no, no, no, we need to actually look at this right now because there's gonna be an impact.

SPEAKER_05 34:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:43

So there's an entire there's an entire method around and maybe um depending on how big the company is, the casualness of Stefan versus Michael thinking that well, the company can handle this. Like the overall company can handle this. You know, what do you say about this training about the psychology of money and project management and accountability has to go with that?

Estimator Accuracy And Foreman Accountability

SPEAKER_03 35:12

Otherwise, you you you unearthed um, you know, kind of the central key to successfully delivering on the jobs and hitting your estimates and making money, right? You know, to some extent, if you bid here, thinking we'll just say it's a it's a thousand man hours and you know, five hundred thousand dollars worth of materials or whatever, so that's gonna be this much cost and we're gonna have this kind of price. But your estimate, like your estimator, right, um, is routinely under, happens a lot. Um, you know, what does that mean about your estimator? So hopefully if you're big enough and let's say you've got five estimators, when you start doing Operation Dog Catcher, you realize one of those five. Um, well, usually what you'll realize a couple are great, they're always under. Yay, love these guys. A couple in the middle, a couple on the bottom. Can we train them out of that? Or do we need to train them into finding a job somewhere else? Um, I don't know. Um, and then you've got your foreman who theoretically, you know, in that kind of business, let's say you got five estimators and five mythical foremen, um, and they've got their teams. You know, some of those foremen are routinely delivering against what is a reasonable estimate, let's just say, and some are always going over budget. And then you as a business owner need to decide what do you want to do with a foreman who routinely goes, let's say 20% over budget? Because that is, I mean, I'm pretty sure that's coming out of your pocket. I don't know where else it would come out of. Um, and so again, there's a training opportunity. Can you train them uh either out of that or into you know the right set of best practices? Or do you want to basically fund their poor performance out of your pocketbook? It can get very, very expensive. Um, or do you want to invite them to, you know, find an amazing job somewhere else? Uh, but the, I mean, the way these things go together is exactly what we train our clients on, which is hey, it's not all about, you know, more work, delivery, firefighting. We have to balance that lens of top line with bottom line, and of course, cash flow, which is something you were talking about. I have a whole suite of tools around how to modify and improve cash flow. But um, even before you get to cash flow, is like, hey, are your projects, you know, dogs, right? I mean, I uh what what percent and how bad are the projects that are losing you money? And how are you parsing that apart? Is it a bad estimate to start with? Was it a bad client? Is it a type of work that you got no business doing? Or was the the way it was delivered from your team, you know, way over budget for reasons that have more to do with like poor performance of your foreman or your guys on the team or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

It it is interesting that the how well you do a job tends to be the moving target of the next job you get. And you just keep funny.

SPEAKER_03 38:18

I think the best way to have terrible marketing is to deliver with poor quality, which is either I said poor quality, but deliver poorly, whether it's not against the target expectation or late or poor quality or in fill in the blank. And so again, we we try to guide our clients into you know avoiding taking on jobs that they've got no business being in, avoiding having people on their team that routinely deliver poor outcomes for their clients, and avoid taking on clients. I'm sure some I'm sure somebody's gonna be scratching their head, like, of course, I mean, there's certain clients that that somewhere between there is no pleasing and there's no way you're gonna please them. You know, they like vanilla, and you're an expert in strawberry. I you just you just can't win there, you know? Um, and so you kind of have to have that that right mix of of what you're doing, who you're doing it with, who you're doing it for. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:21

All right, I'm probably gonna put this at the beginning of the podcast. So I'm gonna edit this. So I'm gonna start here.

SPEAKER_03 39:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 39:28

So how did you get into this?

SPEAKER_03 39:30

Uh yeah. So my background is sales and marketing. I worked at Dell, I worked at Microsoft, I worked at a lot of smaller companies, uh, startups here in Austin.

SPEAKER_04 39:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:42

And uh when I was at Microsoft, we hired a lot of contract consultants. And after a while, I was like, man, this could be a good business. I left Microsoft to sell what I used to buy to the people that I used to work with. Um, and that worked out pretty well. We grew that business. I grew that business. I was the founder and president to uh 100 employees and 13 million US uh over the period of about eight years. Got a lot of awards for like fastest growing and best place to work and stuff like that. Um, but I'll tell you, you know, kind of a negative out of that is one of the things I didn't do a good job of is taking a breath or a pause, you know, every six months, three months, a year to figure out what were the things that we were doing that were not working and get rid of them. And uh as a result of that, I got so much burnout and fatigue. I just stopped enjoying coming to work uh every day. Um, on the positive side, I did a bunch of other good things: pricing, client selection, project and service selection, um, things like that. So ultimately the company was very successful. Um, but about five or six years ago, I exited from that business. Now, over the last 15 years, I've been a member of a group called the Entrepreneurs Organization.

SPEAKER_04 41:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:04

That's about 18,000 business owners around the world, including a whole bunch in Canada. And um and in all those conversations with so many business owners, I realized not everybody thought like me. Shocker. Um, when I started my business, I literally started out with a fancy Excel pricing model on how I was going to guarantee 100% utilization and a really good profitability number based on my pricing and my pricing model and our business model. And I realized 15 years later, having worked with you know so many business owners, a lot of people didn't start like that. A lot of people started as like the best foreman in their construction company. And after a while, they're like, I could run my own company. And now they're so focused on getting new clients and doing great work for their clients, maybe they're not equally skilled at delivering profitability. And so when I exited from my old company, MACDS Group, I was like, what is something that I'm really good at, really passionate about, and that there's a need for, and I could help other people. And I realized that there were so many of my uh friends and colleagues in EO and outside of EO, business owners, that's so good at delivering for their teams, delivering for their customers with quality and growing, but wow, they were not delivering for themselves and their families in terms of profitability, personal compensation, you know, building up their financial uh future for their family and themselves. And I'm like, wow, I can help you keep more of what you make by applying the lessons, the smart things I did, and now not, you know, the opposite of the dumb things I did. I've I've learned from that, um, to kind of apply that profit prescription, if you will. We call it a profit RX. Um and we help diagnose what's uh working what, working right and working wrong. And in many cases, especially in construction, you know, like 90% of what you guys are doing is really, really good, but it's not translating to keeping a lot of the money that you're quote, making for yourselves. And we help you identify kind of the blind spots and things that maybe you're not doing quite right there, kind of coach you through how to do it right. And then, you know, very frequently we can add another five percentage points, sometimes 10. God forbid. I tell you, we've got a lot of cases where it's even 20%. So that's for example, break-even to 10% net profit would be, you know, another$100,000 a year of net profitability unlocked for you and your family and the other owners uh per million in revenue.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

So what what what's the focus on construction when you came into this? Was it like you decided you know this this sector could really use my help or and and just as a side to that I remember when I got into construction, you know I was a technologist. I wasn't a construction guy um even though I can build things um and have built things. Um no I didn't come from the field. I didn't start that way. Did do you did you get any of that like well you you know you haven't done your you came from Microsoft blah blah blah. Do you get that at all?

SPEAKER_03 44:31

Um a little I I think I get it from some people who just never call me but um the the people the people who speak to me on the phone they they very quickly get that we have a a toolkit that has some incredibly universal levers and not every lever is right for every industry or every company. But let's just make it up you got a team of a hundred people the fact that 10 to 20 of them are superstars and 10 to 20 of them are the opposite of superstars is certainly not unique to construction. You know, we see that across the every industry that that we work in. I'll also say that some of my earliest clients just kind of by accident were in construction. And I love it because I know a guy who I know if a guy built let's just say a$30 million plumbing company and is not you know genius at the finance and the and the business background stuff, I know that person is hardworking, ready to put new information to work and is probably amazing at delivering with quality, picking great people, making sure that the customers are happy and able to get new revenue and if we just give them a little bit more like here's our key toolkit pull these two levers in your business and you'll unlock five or 10% of additional net profitability. It's like these guys make some of the fastest turnaround. I find them to be incredibly coachable because they're so talented, they just have an information gap. It's not like I know everything and I'm just gonna try to convince you that you don't know what you're talking about. It's like well you know when I was a journeyman carpenter they absolutely never talked about cash conversion cycles thanks for sharing that with me and now we can go fix our cash position.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

One of the earlier observations I had sort of getting into this industry was that uh from the outset and it's not that I thought this but you would always hear anecdotes of people talking about the word contractory you would see it in TV shows of oh the contractor said this and then they said that sort of this untrustworthy kind of a situation that was akin to like the you know the the transmission mechanic oh that's gonna cost you you know that kind of thing um I found the total opposite of that what I found is I found salt of the earth people who were very honest and had to be really honest to be successful because the project doesn't lie.

The Biggest Places Profit Leaks

SPEAKER_03 47:16

The project always tells the truth and I think broadly the the folks you're working with are maybe just a little bit larger. They're not you know one guy with a crew of three people and a couple day laborers sort of thing. And so once you get a little larger um you know you're you're you're mostly trading on your reputation you know and people are buying from you because somebody they trust already bought from you. And that's why we love that's why we love business services. We love this kind of repetitive not repetitive um you know people who are like repeat our clients who are working with repeat buyers where the quality of what they do being on time delivering kind of according to specification whatever is so important. And so they they've got to be doing that. It's like the table stakes to stay in that business and grow you know beyond a couple million dollars in revenue. And so what I like about that is you know in that world just a few tweaks on the profit side can really unlock so much additional wealth for the business owners. That's what I love. I love working with somebody who for 15 years has been you know blood, sweat and tears helping everybody else but has kind of been getting killed themselves and then like unlocking the door for them to like you know see a path for themselves and their family you know to like to to share in in the in the financial outcomes of all that good work they've been doing.

SPEAKER_02 48:43

Where do you find a lot of the profit is is in this um the change order side of things.

Incentives That Don’t Backfire

SPEAKER_03 48:51

I mean how how much of that is lost gained do you find with the clients that you've seen I I I don't know that I can answer that it's in the change orders. I'm gonna kind of bubble up a little bit broader to that I think where the the profit is lost is uh first there's just again I wanna I don't want to ever insult your audience and say like you guys are construction guys so clearly you don't know profitability. That's just flat out not true. You know, whether it's attorneys literally accountants um you know or construction or plumbers or whatever, you know, there's a there's a group we'll call it a third to a quarter to a third incredibly incredibly sophisticated about profitability across every industry. And then there's that big chunk in the middle that's you know kind of in the middle and then there's that chunk on the bottom that is just not real real wired for that or not real successful at that. And so I don't want to say like because you're in construction you can't be good at the numbers you can't be good at profitability. It's not true. But there's at least a third to a half of your audience that is most likely really struggling with that piece. And so where are they struggling or what is the the main contributor to them struggling? Some big ones are um some of the folks on their team are not delivering effectively. And so that is going to be a big problem. In many cases some of the projects that they're doing like the Operation Dog Catcher or just some of the kinds of work that they do we're just not very good at frankly and then lastly some of the clients that they're doing that work for are just not a fit for what who who they are and what they're good at, right? And so if you can profit optimize more effectively your team uh the services you deliver or quote the projects that you take on um and then the customers you're doing it for. And we've got a handful of other levers don't don't get me wrong but those three like the first oh the first one is just focusing on profitability. Some people are just so focused on revenue selling more stuff and fighting fires they they don't have enough hours at the end of the day if you will to like tune into profit. And if you're not tuning into profit surprise it's not just gonna show up for you right so that's like a big first thing. And then the three biggest areas for optimization are what you're delivering who you're delivering it for excuse me and who's doing the work so when it comes to having profit sharing have you seen that being part of the model for companies um effective metrics and incentives so tracking what's important or identifying what's important tracking it reporting on it and tying that out you know tying that performance to something meaningful for the people doing it um I think is uh 100% a a key element to being successful. Now is that profit sharing or is that a bonus for delivering your project under budget? I don't know which one's better for you I don't know you know profit sharing tends to be more of a big team based goal versus direct incentives tend to be you know more closely tying the reward to a little bit more individual or small team metrics. Yeah I would probably say somewhere in the middle you know you want everybody rowing together. So theoretically the whole team profit sharing whatever and and again profit sharing doesn't necessarily need to be you know we made a million dollars worth of profit you guys get a share of 2000 of that. Yeah no I got it be you know we we delivered X and so therefore you guys get Y there's a lot that goes into that but I would I would broadly say um incentive structures that are tied very closely to key performance indicators that matter and the right outcomes some more either individual or small team some maybe bigger team or the whole company and those KPIs and metrics need to be real clear and I would say you want to incent people for the lift not what got done last year.

SPEAKER_04 53:40

Right.

SPEAKER_03 53:41

Okay so if last year we delivered five I don't know that I want to incent you to just deliver five I want to maybe incent you on how well you do from five to six. But since I'm only incenting on five to six I could you know I could give you 25% of that lift rather than you know four or five percent on all five and then the next and so it's actually a lot more leverage to drive people to improvement when you're only making an incentive on the lift.

SPEAKER_02 54:11

Yeah I think if you should probably do it via what somebody's responsible for on the particular project or projects that they're that they're doing you have those metrics in place.

SPEAKER_03 54:21

Um I mean you know the the plumbers like literally the guys who go and like attach pipes and and all that I mean do we want to incent them on the same things that the white collar guys who are you know estimating jobs or whatever probably not. So we we need to we need to be very just I just I'd say careful uh or deliberate on who's being metricked on what and then I just say that a good caveat there or warning is don't don't you know people have a tendency to actually do the do what gets them the payout so don't create it in a way that they can gain you and give you the wrong thing. I like a balance between like a a productivity efficiency output volume kind of set of metrics and then like a a companion that is quality customer service lack of rework you know like a you know two together whereas if it's just output you could get like terrible quality and customer satisfaction if it's just satisfaction and quality you know you could get very slow and poor inefficient outcomes.

SPEAKER_02 55:29

The reason I bring that up is because especially the younger the workforce gets the more impatient um there is or impatience there is uh in terms of staying at a company or like moving on or trying to move up in your career that is that is like really really volatile and you have to find a way to keep good people. Now it's very difficult because not everybody performs the same way. So let's say that one guy's got a job and um you know there's a there's a bonus to be paid and that person's gonna be like well do I get to choose who's on my team because I know who can help me with that and I know who will hurt me from that.

SPEAKER_03 56:12

So then there becomes these tribes of these A teams B teams and then the person that you brought in who has to lead the B team is like yeah I'm gonna go somewhere else um yeah I mean you brought up two things one is uh trying to keep the attention of your team and then the other one is that you were using tribalism but you know if uh if the best project manager or foreman could pick uh the best workers and then each foreman and their team are gold based on some set of outputs you would imagine if the best foreman picked the best team and then delivered with the best results all the time and then other people were you know short bus and not getting any any benefits I would first say maybe you need to restructure your incentives but also I would say if there is quote the the terrible foreman with the C team I mean I would I would um consider them not working for you as a as a good thing. And then the other thing I'll just say is probably the the thing that drives away high performers the fastest is having to work with low performers. Oh for that a key part of our training with with our clients is how to attract maintain and keep their best performers um and certainly a great way to lose let's just say your brightest up and come up and coming 20 year old is to have them working for your you know C minus foreman.

Sharing Wins Without Pay Drama

SPEAKER_02 57:55

Yeah. So one last thing I want to chat with you about is what is the signaling around profitability. So let's just say that you know you're doing pretty well and your high P as you would prefer to go high P bring it full circle. The old high P if you start to signal that yeah we're doing great we're doing this we're doing that and uh we've m made some great profits and and you know we're gonna have a barbecue and thank everybody and it was all great is it how much communication of how well we're doing is really good and how much is there you're like eh I'm just gonna end up with a lot of hey can we uh can we chat about my compensation?

SPEAKER_03 58:42

Yeah how much of it turns into more headache if you're celebrating too much well you know there's certainly going to be some uh subtlety or nuance on how to do that effectively um in our in our program we do we we call it the profit bus. You know how do you communicate in a way to get your team on the bus uh pushing for profitability. And for example that conversation we just had a second ago about incentives um is closely aligned with that. So I mean I don't think you want your owner you know rumming it in everybody's nose while they're coming into the office wearing ugly golf clothes saying how like they're buying a jet well sorry we we can't give you cost of living adjustments. I don't know that that is the right thing. But I think most people want to work for a company that is quote doing well and how you go about signaling that you're doing well. I don't think we want to be crass about it. And I'll also say that your A players will just make it up let's say you got a project manager who's a superstar and you're paying them 100 and you know and they know and the market knows that they're worth 125 all day long. Maybe you ought to pay them 125 because whether or not you are signaling you're doing great or not doing great what what are they thinking you know and so I'll I'll just be um but but but uh I don't want to step over the fact that some of your lower end people may think they're worth 125 but they're not right or$45 an hour when they're really worth 30. And those people when they see you taking the company out for a barbecue um they're like where's my$15 an hour? The other thing I would say is even when it comes to the the company barbecue like when we used to do the equivalent of the company barbecue you know we brought the liquor because we didn't want to pay a catering company you know whatever it was 10 bucks a drink to serve people. So people saw that even when we wanted to kind of invest back with them, we were you know conscientious with the money whether it's a company barbecue or you know snacks in the break room or whatever. So I think that you know all those things go together.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:08

I feel like I may be wandering in this uh no you're not no you hit on something very you hit on something very important there is that nothing is more irritating to a workforce than an overpaid perk and it could be the barbecue or whatever that they're like the company just went way overboard on this I would have rather just have five bucks an hour more yeah you know and and you see that quite a bit and you see that with the interiors of new office and you see that with uh you know the the vehicles they're getting and then the technology they're getting and they're like Jesus do we do we really need to have all this that good you know I had a a a relatively younger workforce 20s and 30s you know in in my business and we were you know there's a lot of pressure to give some really outstanding benefits packages 401k like retirement matching and fancier healthcare and stuff like that I'm like well I have a budget that I can pay out right so let's say for this role I can afford let's pick a number$50,000 a year and I'm like hey John I mean you're in that role if my budget were$50 would you rather have$50,000 in you on your paycheck zero benefits we'll say$48,000 on your paycheck$2,000 and you know some healthcare and some other stuff or you know$45 and five or whatever you get the idea.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:41

And and we found that you know some of us managers who like maybe valued 401k match from our old big company and whatever were like whoa you know a guy is making$50,000 a year I'm not that worried about a 401k match and some crazy health coverage like I need the$50 you know and so that it's it's it's a similar version of don't spend a thousand bucks a head on barbecues because that guy needs a thousand dollars to pay rent.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:09

And so I'll just say you know uh I mean there is value in a company barbecue everybody gets together and quote drinks the Kool-Aid and you hear some speeches and you know some teamwork and whatever um but maybe it could be hot dogs instead of steaks and everybody can make another three bucks an hour you know metaphorically right yeah so that's good.

Free Profit Leaks Assessment Offer

SPEAKER_02 1:03:29

All right so um I think that this is a very very important thing you're doing and I think I think a lot of people need to call you that's what I think don't do it.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:42

It's terrible it's a bad idea okay now we are uh just gonna make you more profitable it's not it's not uh not good for anybody uh hey thanks for thanks thanks for uh that invitation um we have a free tool for your listeners yeah it's called our profit leaks assessment in honor of all the plumbers out there is that the low the low P leak yeah yeah um and it it is uh it's a one-page tool that could help you find where maybe your business is leaking profitability and uh where there's like a leak in your bucket and what's coming out is the profit that otherwise you would keep. You can find it at profitdoctor.com slash leaks L-E-K-S um and profit doctor probably be in the notes of your program or whatever but E-R-O-F-I-T and then doctor D O C T O R dot com slash leaks or leak I think they all go the same place now. Very very powerful tool. It's the kind of thing you could download in 15 minutes. Well it's probably not true. You probably what need to watch 15 minutes of videos that are on that page and then take the 15 minutes to fill it out. But in 30 minutes it could give you a pretty good first cut at you know do you have a problem? How bad is it and where is it? We're happy to do a 15 minute call with you as well. I'm pretty sure somewhere in there it'll say hey would you like some help and we'd be happy to to do that. We routinely help companies you know 5 million to 50 million we also work with a few smaller companies routinely get another five or 10 percentage points of incremental profitability back in their pocket. If you are in negative break even low single digits you owe it to yourself to to pull down this thing and and check it out. And then just one more thing I see a lot with smaller companies CEOs give themselves a crappy W2 salary I don't know what they call it in Canada but like a regular paycheck and then take out some money in distribution and by doing it that way they trick themselves into thinking that their company More profitable than it really is. If you've got a$2 million plumbing company and you're also like in the field or whatever, and you are giving yourself a paycheck, let's say$50,000 a month, sorry, a year, and then you're get you've got, you know,$300,000 of net profitability at the end on that two million, like woohoo, we're 15%, we're killing it. It's like, man, before you quit your old job to do this, you were making 250, right? As a good plumber, as the best plumber in the old company. If you were getting a$250,000 salary, your company would be netting$30,000 on$2 million, which would tell everybody who cared to look that your profitability is crap. And then you'd be like, whoa, we've got to fix it. But my my point here of that is not to make you feel bad about yourself, but to flip it around. Because whenever I see like a big problem, I know that there's an opportunity to fix that problem and then go find that$250 that you should be getting as a company, so that you get the$250 salary and the$250 that your company is generating. Because those smaller companies, it's the company that's supposed to be making a lot of money as well as your paycheck. It's not one or the other. And we see that a lot with uh companies under five or 10 million, where the owners are taking terrible salaries and subsidizing that net profit line. And it's just giving them an artificial sense that the company is operating effectively from a profit point of view. Um, and it isn't. And so we have a thing that we do uh where we work with people for about 90 minutes and help them kind of walk through that and walk through that leakage detector that I was talking about so they can estimate how much money they're leaving on the table, um, where it is, and uh if there's a a pr a fairly simple pathway to uh scoop that money up.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:05

That's pretty cool. Is that a real bonsai tree behind you?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:10

It's a real fake one, I'm pretty sure. I'm not sure. Yeah, I think that's a fake one.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:15

I was gonna say, I guess.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:16

The real ones are hiding over there, but I was in Mexico last week and they all withered, but they I strategically picked those plants that even when they're almost nearly completely dead, if you water them in like two hours, they're like, oh, just kidding.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:29

Well, you get the real rewards behind you. I like those uh awards there. You get the uh that's pretty cool. Got a good little set there, Ben. That's very awesome. Dr.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:37

Ben Ashikoi. Gosh, 2000 and I don't know, 10 to 2015. I mean, we were growing 40% a year and everything looked great, at least everybody on the outside. Um, but we tripled in size and made no more money. And I that is where I coined the term profititis. And uh, I bet half your listeners uh are feeling that exact pain where they're three times larger or 13 times larger than they were, you know, three, five, 10 years ago, but it's not showing up in their personal bank account.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:11

I love it. Okay, Dr. Ben, this has been awesome. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:16

Thanks, James. I appreciate it. And uh looking forward to helping your listeners uh uh pump up their low P, cure their prophetitis, and uh get their family's financial future, you know, back on track.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:28

All right, rock and roll. Okay, I'm gonna uh press pause, just one for a sec. And can you just like look into the screen for me? I'm gonna take a screenshot of you, like this is your photo. So here we go. Wow, look at that smile. Jesus.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:41

There we go. She's gonna turn the wattage up.

Aftershow Logistics And Farewell

SPEAKER_02 1:09:44

You know, I think you're the first one more, one more, one more. Okay, here we go. All right, got it. Okay, go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:51

I think you are the first podcast I've done over Google.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:56

Yeah, well, we used to use that. Um, what do you call it? Yeah, but I just fucking, I don't know, I can't handle it. I'm done. I just this is cost zero, first of all. I have everything running into a a memory card, and I've got all these like this is a full-on studio in here. I've got cameras and all I don't usually do the camera thing often because it's just such a hassle. Um, but uh yeah, it's um yeah, it kind of kind of just works, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:10:21

What'd you think? Did we uh did we deliver what you're hoping for? Totally, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:24

Yeah, that was awesome. Yeah, see, time went by like that.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:28

Yeah, I wasn't sure if you were saying 40 minutes because you're just like, oh, I don't know about this guy and you went over because it was so great, or uh, or what?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:37

No, I always think that there's conversations are amazing. And you know what? I think this the the podcast format is so important just to pigeonhole the fact you have to talk.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:53

And it's and and I like the fact there's no time limit. I mean, even though this, you know, we're gonna not gonna talk about four hours, but at the same time, there's not this clock, and I'm going, okay, well, this segment's gotta end. There's none of that. It's like whatever I want to get into, we can chat if we because sometimes you find that you go down one direction and you end up in a cul-de-sac, or sometimes you end up on a on a on the autobahn and you're onto another amazing vector of conversation. So I really like the open format.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:22

I thought you did a nice job of you know exploring some avenues and like bringing it back to Main Street and whatnot. Um, I thought you were a great interviewer.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:30

Oh, thanks, man. I appreciate it. Well, you're an amazing guest, Dr. Ben. So that was good.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:34

Can I get your mailing address to send you a thank you card? Is that allowed? Of course, yeah. Yeah. You want to drop it in the chat or you want to just rattle it off?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:44

Um, I can rattle it off. It is unit number nine three zero three two zero Granville Street. G-R-A-N V-I-L-L-E. Vancouver. B C and the zip code or postal code, we call it here in Canada, is Victor6 Charlie 1 Sam9.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:20

Cool. And what's your mobile number?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:22

My mobile number is 6047259659.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:32

9659, you said? Yeah.

unknown 1:12:34

Cool.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:35

Um, I'll just drop your text so uh we could talk over the phone or whatever. Um, and then you'll know what my info is. Um do you see opportunity for the stuff we're talking about for, I don't know, folks that use your software or uh folks on your who listen. I mean, I I find that a lot of times when people listen to these appearances on podcasts, it seems to maybe bounce off them. I'm not sure that it sometimes it doesn't it doesn't get the phone to ring for me, which means I know that that there's people that that need the help that aren't getting it.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:12

Yeah, I think that there is I think you're helping people, it's just you're not getting the money from it. Because it's a it's any anything when people get on the phone and they go, okay, let's reach out. Even the reach out part, you're like, okay, I know what this is gonna turn into. And sometimes it's it's like a it's nothing to do with you, it's them. It's like this fear, fear of a new initiative.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:36

Yeah, I mean, I I mean I get it. Obviously, if they call me, the theory is that God forbid they might want my help and then they might want to pay for it, and then somehow they're gonna have to pay for something. Yeah, but I mean, the R, I don't know how to say this, the ROI of fixing profit is like I I just can barely even charge enough to uh to make it not a brain-dead decision for everybody. Um because like trying to fix revenue, I I I call it the 10x rule. If if you're at if you're at 10% net revenue or net profit, if you sell a million dollars more stuff, you keep like 100K, right? If I turn your profit a million, like you know, I only have to turn your profit a hundred thousand to get the same as that million of revenue. And for those companies that have not been focusing on fixing profit like forever, um I mean there's just so much low-hanging fruit. We we get them five or ten points in three to six months. It's just ridiculous.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:42

Yeah. Well, I think you're your um, I used to run a marketing agency and I was a marketing consultant, a brand brand consultant. And I found that I was more of a leadership psychologist often than doing the core thing that I do. Um, I think that this is probably the similar similar with you is huge. Is you need to to definitely um signal that you are the CEO or the CFO's ally and not just this kind of consultant that comes in or sometimes I say an insultant. Um but uh I don't know, it seems to me like I look at you know, I'm highly critical on a lot of things, and I look at you know, you and the way you present yourself, I look at your website, I look it's all very well done. Like I don't think you could really do it any better. Um so but the thing is, you know, pep people are cagey, it's just the way it is. Yeah, you let them into your business, they'd be like, wow, I think they know all and sometimes it's they're ashamed. Yeah, but you know, there's that too. How many of them?

SPEAKER_05 1:16:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:07

We don't disclose our exact client count, but lots. So yeah, it's a it's it's a thing. So yeah, we've got uh 15% of our customer bases in the US. So yeah, I could look at, you know, we could add you in a newsletter or something.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:19

Yeah, I'd love it. I mean, we're happy to help people in Canada. Most of our work is uh is over Zoom. We've got a client right now in South Africa. Um, you know, yeah, my job.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:29

I like that.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:30

Fixing profit is not border specific. No, it's not.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:35

All right. Well, this has been awesome. Thanks, Ben. Thanks for the uh schedule swap. I appreciate it. It was well worth the uh getting us to know each other. And uh yeah, maybe we'll do it again.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:46

Come down to Austin. I mean, uh, how can you call yourself a mega influencer without at least, you know, getting some barbecue and some text mechs down here and you know, check it out.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:56

Hey man, I don't get I don't get paid to do this. I just do it because I like I like meeting people like you and and uh I like the industry and it was all good.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:05

So thanks, James. I appreciate it. I really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:07

Likewise. See you then, have a good weekend. Well, that does it for another episode of the Playboy. Thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us by following up.