Full transcript10 chapters · 11,309 words
0:00Jujitsu as a masterclass in fear of failure
Josh Kelly: I’m built on momentum. I need to keep moving forward at a faster pace every day, constantly improving. If I do that, and I do that with my team, and I do that with my businesses, then the revenue takes care of itself. Then the profit takes care of itself.
Tyler Martin: Welcome to Profit and Grit with Tyler, where blue-collar owners and insiders spill the real story behind their hustle, building businesses that thrive through sweat and smarts. We’ll dig into their journeys from scaling chaos to growing the bottom line with lessons and grit that pay off
Tyler Martin: big. Here’s your host, the Blue Collar CFO, Tyler Martin. Josh Kelly went from struggling to make payroll to building home service businesses across the country that are on pace to do around $150 million this year. But this approach to growth isn’t built around chasing some massive revenue
Tyler Martin: target. It’s built around momentum, developing strong leaders, understanding the numbers, and continuously improving how the business operates. In this episode, we talk about why so many in the home services industry get stuck around the $8 to $10 million range, why middle management becomes such an important part of breaking through that ceiling, and why
Tyler Martin: Josh believes developing leaders is one of the highest value things an owner can do. We also get into pricing, vendor negotiations, sale systems, the numbers Josh watches every day, and how AI and automation are giving trades owners a faster visibility into what’s happening
Tyler Martin: inside the business. There’s a lot here for owners trying to build a business that can keep growing without every decision running through them. Let’s talk with Josh now.
Josh Kelly: Hey, Josh, welcome to The Profit and Great Show. How’s it going?
Tyler Martin: Good. So far, so good, man.
Josh Kelly: I’m enjoying the podcast for the first 10 seconds. You actually have just made my longest listener, I think, so I appreciate that.
Tyler Martin: There you go. Hey, so as I mentioned in our little pre-call here, I had the pleasure of speaking with your dad. Awesome dude.
Josh Kelly: Yeah.
Tyler Martin: I met with your wife. I think, I don’t remember the episode number, but it was probably about three months ago. Amazing conversation. And now getting to have a conversation with you is kind of my trifecta in terms of my bucket list.
Josh Kelly: Yeah.
Tyler Martin: I have a four-year-old and a three-year-old and a dog if you want to interview as well. But you can go all the way down the family tree if you want.
Josh Kelly: Don’t get me started on dogs. I have three dogs.
Tyler Martin: When can I schedule your dog?
Josh Kelly: Yeah. And he’s in the other room, but this could be figured out.
Tyler Martin: Okay.
Josh Kelly: Hey, just for the audience who maybe doesn’t know your name, even though I consider you a goat, share with me what you’re doing these days, what you guys do. And then I’d love to know something about you personally.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. So right now I have my hands in a lot of buckets. I’m pretty appreciative and really lucky is a word that you put yourself in a position to be lucky, but I’m super lucky. I’m on some pretty significant boards. I own home service businesses
Tyler Martin: across the United States. I run probably the most successful best practice group for the home service industry. I have real estate businesses. I have my hands in so much shit anymore. And I remember when we couldn’t make payroll. Things have changed slightly and a lot of pain
Tyler Martin: in between. But for the most part, I focus on the best practice group, Grow With Clover, and then my home service businesses that I own across the United States. That’s probably 85 to 90% of my bandwidth from a work standpoint. Something personal about me.
3:28What jujitsu taught him about staying bad at something
Tyler Martin: My wife is Irish. She’s crazy. She’s brilliant. You already had her on the podcast. She’s the most important thing in my life. I have two young kids, a three and a four-year-old. No one said I wasn’t ambitious. And then simple things like I like to work out and I like to
Tyler Martin: travel. I’m a jujitsu black belt, pretty legit one. And, you know, I like building things. I don’t
Josh Kelly: know. Does that help? Yeah. That’s good stuff. And one of my questions, a couple of warm up questions here. I did learn you were a black belt in jujitsu. What would you say outside of maybe discipline? Cause I think that might be the obvious one. What’s a trait from that that carries
Tyler Martin: over into the business world? Do you think? I think jujitsu is actually, it is not for everyone. In fact, it’s not for most people, but like if you could get yourself to go through the pain of it, it’s an incredible experience.
Josh Kelly: I wrestled as well. So I got a lot of discipline from wrestling. Jiu-jitsu gives you a ton of discipline. But at the end of the day, jujitsu is a extremely humbling experience. Like this is a real thing. I wrestled and I was a pretty good wrestler.
Tyler Martin: Right.
Josh Kelly: And I, after college, I had some of the same eating and drinking habits I had before, but I wasn’t working out like crazy.
Tyler Martin: Right.
Josh Kelly: So I put on weight.
Tyler Martin: So I’m like, I’m going to get into working out and I just didn’t want to lift weights. I wanted to do something relative. I was like, I’ll do jujitsu.
Josh Kelly: I kid you not.
Tyler Martin: This is not an exaggeration.
Josh Kelly: My first day in the jujitsu, I was a big dude, pretty strong, right? A little pudgy, but I rolled with like 120 pound Asian girl and she beat the crap out of me. Let’s check, she showed me out like five times in five minutes.
Tyler Martin: Right.
Josh Kelly: And like the first time, like I’m being too nice. So I got a harsh, she was being nice to me.
Tyler Martin: And like, it’s such a humbling experience. And every single day you go in there knowing like this was a real thing, you would die. That’s step one mentally is like, oh shit, I’m not really equipped for the world as much as I thought I was.
Tyler Martin: And number two, like, it’s just, just to go through that pain and just live and accept that you are not going to be good for this a very long time. And it’s so obvious that you’re not good. Like you’ve tapped. It’s a very visual, emotional experience to tap if you’re not used to it.
Josh Kelly: Right.
Tyler Martin: And then to slowly improve the progress and like be able to defend yourself and be able to really come after other people.
Josh Kelly: It’s one of the best disciplines I can’t, like most people who don’t do really well in life, and I’m generalizing to the extreme, but they have that fear of failure that holds them back from who they should be, who they wanna be. Like jujitsu is that ultimate attack of fear of failure
Josh Kelly: because it’s visceral when you lose. It’s painful, quite literally, right? It’s dangerous to a point, right? and you lose for years every day.
Tyler Martin: Wow.
Josh Kelly: So it’s a really good tool that I think has applied to business and really helped me in life too. Like it’s eliminated. One of my true gifts is like, I will bet on me over and over again. And I have no fear of losing
Josh Kelly: because I just learn and I keep moving forward. You know what I mean? So this 120 pound lady that basically-
Tyler Martin: She was a badass, by the way, with all fairness.
Josh Kelly: I didn’t know that at the time, but yes. I’m sure she beat me up.
Tyler Martin: Is it technique that?
Josh Kelly: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah.
Tyler Martin: Okay. Wow.
Josh Kelly: And I have bad habits because they’re wrestling too.
Tyler Martin: Okay.
Josh Kelly: Yes. Like a hundred pound, 120 pound person can beat up. Like I’m not huge. I’m not small by any means.
Tyler Martin: Right.
Josh Kelly: But like I NFL players come into that gym. I went to a very serious gym and they’d be like 300 pounds, solid muscle NFL players. And they think they’re going to be able, and I’ll beat the show. And they’ll roll with like 150,
Josh Kelly: 120 pound girl would probably be hard. because they just can’t wrap their legs around much. But a 150-pound man could beat the crap out of an NFL superstar.
Tyler Martin: Okay. Wow. That is just crazy. Wow. So it sounds like, I mean, and recapping on my question, obviously the discipline’s huge. It sounds like just staying with it, staying with something that you’re going to really suck at for a long time really is applicable to business.
Tyler Martin: Because how many, you know, everybody, I can’t tell you how many times. I still suck at it sometimes, man. Like every once in a while I was like, what? What am I doing? But how many times do you get this? You probably get this more than me.
Tyler Martin: Do you have business owners come to you and they feel like they suck? They’re like, man, I just can’t make, I don’t get it. Why am I seeing everything on the internet? Everybody’s making a ton of money. I’m not making any money. I’m doing everything right.
Tyler Martin: I’m doing all these things I’m following. And they give up. I don’t want to say they give up, but they don’t try to get to the next level because they’re convinced that’s where they should be at. Do you see that a lot? Because I think that’s applicable kind of to this.
Josh Kelly: Of course. I mean, the thing is, no matter how successful you are, you always have caps and the cap is always mental, right? It’s rarely skills. Like, I’m in the home service space. And the truth is, you do not have to be a genius to do really well.
Josh Kelly: Like, I know people who run $50 million shops. I’ve helped grow their business. I’ve helped a few of them grow past $100 million. And I swear to God, they can’t use email, right? Like, it’s just, like, outside of their capability. You know what I mean? Like, it’s like, there’s too complicated for them.
Josh Kelly: It’s like, okay, but they’re a really good leader. They’re really good sales. Like there’s other pieces to it. So you don’t have to be a genius to be successful. You have to be willing to work hard and you have to be willing to consistently expand yourself.
Josh Kelly: So yeah, that happens literally all the time. The most important thing you could do to help a business owner succeed is to help adjust and change their mindset. The tools and the systems in the process are entirely secondary, usually tertiary. At the end of the day, like when I think about what I do now, like this sounds weird, but
Josh Kelly: And it sounds like good if you don’t know what I’m actually saying, but like, I don’t do anything anymore. Like there’s nothing physical. I don’t even answer my own emails for the most part. Right. Like that sounds, oh, that’s so cool. It’s like, actually I get no dopamine hits.
Josh Kelly: Like, like not a thing. Like I’m constantly battling stuff. Right. My whole job, a hundred percent of the time is finding and developing leaders and critically thinking. And then I wipe my hands of it. And that sounds amazing, but like, it’s also really terrible sometimes too.
Josh Kelly: It’s taxing. Because there’s never a win ever, ever, ever. There’s a bunch of wins in the businesses, but not for me personally, because those wins are given to others. And they should be. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Yeah. Okay. I don’t know. Did I answer that or not?
Tyler Martin: Yeah, that was awesome. You gave me like way more than I was even envisioning originally in that question. So the second one would be, has there been a book or a mentor that’s really imprinted on you the success that you’ve had? Like, and outside of family, because your dad has gotten to be someone.
Josh Kelly: Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. My father, obviously, is my original mentor, and I learned a ton from him.
10:02Keeping a life mentor and a skill mentor at all times
Josh Kelly: You know, that role’s kind of shifted now, but, like, I’m, you know, it’s different stages in life, right? But I’ve had the benefit of having a ton of mentors in my career. I try to keep two mentors at all time, a life mentor, like someone I want to be like, and a skill mentor.
Josh Kelly: And I’ve done that for 15 years now, right? And I try to shift them out pretty, like, at least once a year. I’ve read a business book or a self-help book a month since I was 13. I wrote my own book, actually. We’re actually going through the process.
Josh Kelly: I’m meeting with publishers next week to try to get it pushed, but I have a whole kind of book. I’m not promoting right now, but will be promoting and pushing, hopefully, by the end of the year. This is a process. Writing the book was a nightmare.
Josh Kelly: I got talked into that, by the way. But yeah, there’s a ton of people that had a ton of influence in my life, all the way back to Rick Hutcherson, which I skipped school and got in trouble for to go to a sales training when I was 13, to obviously my father, to Dave Geiger, to Tom Boyce, to Rusty Cochran.
Josh Kelly: And now, like, the shoes fit. Like, I meet with Dave Geiger every other week, and probably 90% of the time he’s asking me questions. You know what I mean? Which is, like, a really cool experience. And, you know, I’m not necessarily starstruck there with my friends, right?
Josh Kelly: But, like, there was a time it was.
Tyler Martin: Yeah.
Josh Kelly: But, yeah, no, at the end of the day, this is going to sound weird. I actually don’t think who your mentor is as important as having one and understanding that no matter who they are, there’s things that you should take. there’s things you shouldn’t. And really critically thinking, does this person have what I want?
Josh Kelly: And if the answer on that specific thing, and if the answer is that, then you should really consider listening to them. And even if it’s an amazing mentor, but they don’t have that piece of what you want, maybe you shouldn’t take that advice. You should still consider it, but mentors
Tyler Martin: come in all different shapes and sizes. Yeah. I think that that’s a great point. Because I think sometimes we think if we hire a coach or we hire a mentor or we have a mentor, or whatever, however you want to word it. Sometimes we assume everything they say is perfect for our business
Tyler Martin: or is the exact right thing. And that’s not necessarily… There’s no such thing as one size fits all. There’s patterns. Like one of the best business skills you can learn is pattern recognition. Eventually, if you’re really a badass, pattern creation, right? But there’s patterns to things, but there is no…
Tyler Martin: This is the way it is. It just doesn’t exist in life. Okay. This is the last question before we get into it. That brings us into the first segment. And that’s about Parker and Sons.
Josh Kelly: is there anything that almost broke you so to speak during those years of parker and sons where you’re just like man this is like just almost too much yeah of course like um i i tell people this
12:41The house fire and van explosion moments at Parker and Sons
Josh Kelly: is like for the most part i mean i wanted the stuff you know i’m trying to expand myself all the time right always always always so like there’s things i run into i don’t know what to do and they they bug me and i make mistakes just like everybody else but way less mistakes than i used to but like
Josh Kelly: I tell business owners, this is like a thing that comes as like, how do you have this figured out? Whatever is like, what makes you think I have, I just have more figured out than you maybe. But like every entrepreneur I’ve ever met, it’s either, you’re either lying or like every once
Josh Kelly: in a while, you’re going to have a thought that crossed your mind. It’s like, screw this. I should just sell this. We should just get like, I’m done with this. I’m going to go work for somebody else. And if somebody says that hasn’t happened to them, it’s like, yeah, they’re full of shit.
Josh Kelly: Like everybody has those moments It just how often and how long do you stay in those Now I get those like two or three times a year and it like an hour But there were times like a Parkinson yeah I was less developed right
Josh Kelly: And there’d be days where I would sit in a, you know what I mean, sometimes. But yeah, there were things that stressed me out. Just expansion, you know, leaders that didn’t work out and frustrate bad hires are a big piece of it. Theft, you know what I mean?
Josh Kelly: Like people stealing from you that you, you know, you pour a lot into and sometimes just shitty luck, you know. bad luck. Hey, being totally prepared and, and, you know, accidents happen. And sometimes those accidents are fairly serious. Like at Parkinson’s, there was a house we burnt down a long time ago.
Josh Kelly: And like, holy shit, like that, that puts you in a, no one was hurt, thankfully, but like that puts you in a really scary place. Like I just, I was telling you before, like literally this week, first time has ever happened. I actually had a van literally physically blow up.
Josh Kelly: Oh, like, I didn’t even know that was a thing. So, so like, you know, it’s, yeah, there’s lots of times in, in your life where you get punched in the gut and that’s part of life. In fact, you want that.
Tyler Martin: I’m not a fan.
Josh Kelly: A lot of people think like life should be easy. And I think those people haven’t fully thought through.
Tyler Martin: Yeah.
Josh Kelly: You don’t want life to be easy. You don’t want business to be easy. You want it to be worth it.
Tyler Martin: Yeah.
Josh Kelly: And that’s way more important.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. I love that. That’s a good way to say it. Parker and Sons scaled, I think, to 250 million is a number that gets thrown around.
Josh Kelly: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They’re dancing at 300 million this year.
Tyler Martin: That’s crazy.
Josh Kelly: Awareness.
14:59Growing to nine figures without ever setting a revenue goal
Josh Kelly: I have respect for my father because he gets upset. Like, awareness. I don’t do anything day to day. Parker and Sons haven’t for years. When I left, we were over 100 million.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Which is giant. And it’s so relevant to what I’m about to ask you. Was it conscious? So thinking to the typical client that I interact with and prospect that comes my way, they’re going to be somewhere three to 15 million a year. And a lot of times they’re kind of at that
Tyler Martin: ceiling where they’re like, oh man, like, how do I get through that ceiling? How do I get through 5 million? How do I get through 10 million? Were you guys like conscious? Like I want, we want to
Josh Kelly: become a nine figure company someday. No. Okay. No, no, no. Like, like a lot of people will teach you like, you know, shoot for the stars. You fall short, you hit the moon. That’s pretty far. I just don’t, my mind doesn’t work that way. Okay. I’m not saying it doesn’t work for other people. It’s
Josh Kelly: just not how I’m built. I’m built on momentum, right? Like I need to keep moving forward at a faster pace every day, constantly improving. If I do that and I do that with my team and I do that with my businesses, then the revenue takes care of itself. Okay. Then the profit takes care of
Josh Kelly: itself. So then there was never a goal. And like, you know, I’ve helped at this point, I think 28 companies get to nine figures. Wow. And like, I, you know, myself is this year we should do about 150 million, the home service businesses I own, it was zero three years ago, or like three and a
Josh Kelly: half years ago now, three and a half years ago. So like you never set those goals. Like what you do is like, Hey, let’s, let’s just grow by 50% this month. We’ll look at these opportunities we have and you just keep driving and driving and driving. So no, I’ve never been that big audacious goal.
Josh Kelly: I know BHAGs, people love them. I set year and two year goals. I really can’t imagine setting goals effectively beyond that. I’ve always underestimated as much as I’ve tried. I’ve always underestimated what I do now and what I’m capable of now was unimaginable five years ago.
Josh Kelly: So I try not to set myself up for failure because I think some people set these big audacious goals and then what they do is they get fixated on them, right? And they forget they’ve missed the opportunities that are walking right past them because they’re fixated on this specific goal
Josh Kelly: because they have it envisioned in their mind, this is the way it’s going to happen. I’m an opportunist. You know what I mean? Like, we’ll grow. Like, if I got a company and they’re HVAC and plumbing, and HVAC is supposed to grow 50% this year.
Josh Kelly: Plumbing is supposed to grow 45%, right? Like, I’m not against, oh, a great electrical manager comes in the door. Like, I could change all those plans. You know what I mean?
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So, Josh, like, what would you say to folks that, because a lot of times what I’ll hear is, oh, yeah, this company grew to $100 million because they have capital behind them. or they sold.
Josh Kelly: I didn’t have any capital, nothing. We didn’t have shit. We struggled to make payroll. When I relaunched, like I didn’t put money into when I started launching the businesses or partnering in the businesses I currently work with, right? Some people, you know, using capital is a great way to grow.
Josh Kelly: I’m not pushing back and having a bunch of money, but I actually think it creates bad habits. And it just doesn’t excite me the same way. Like, you know, somebody who’s running at 20, 25% marketing and I know people and they’re growing like crazy.
Josh Kelly: And I look at that, like I’ll grow 90% as large as you with 10% because I’ll just be more effective at it because I have to be. So yeah, it wasn’t a capital thing. It was a combination of, I was consistently growing. My team around me is consistently growing.
Josh Kelly: We’re making a lot effort to improve people, to improve processes, to improve systems. you know real story luck has a piece to the two but you know it’s just kind of same conversation like you gotta see lucky things when it walks across your desk but yeah no anybody who thinks
Josh Kelly: if you grow a 100 million dollar business you can just hey the right the stars aligned when you do it dozens of times you’ve got something figured out at least maybe not everything trust me i do We’re going to have everything, but, you know.
Josh Kelly: Especially in the changing times with AI and blah, blah, blah. I mean, the whole change. Dude, this is the best time ever. It is so exciting. This is going to be cake. It’s going to be beautiful.
Tyler Martin: I have a theory, and I’d be curious if you think I’m getting way off on the tangent here, but I’m going to go here. My mantra has become, if we don’t automate our back offices as much as possible, as a small business, just Joe, Jane, business owner.
Tyler Martin: If they don’t do that in this space, they literally will get devoured in the next five to 10 years because all these other companies that have the resources are spending time in automation, automatically categorizing their accounting transactions, creating back-end financial reports, having dashboards, any bottlenecks within their business they’re improving.
Tyler Martin: Not probably eliminating, but improving. That’s my theory. Am I crazy? Or am I way over the top? Where do you think it fits in there?
Josh Kelly: So I don’t think you’re over the top.
19:59Why AI just made a $150k dashboard buildable solo
Josh Kelly: I would say with a caveat, right? Like there’ll be really large companies. They’ll be really small. A truck in a truck is going to exist for a long time, like a long, long time. So you can be really unsophisticated and really small. If you want to be, you know, more than $2 million.
Josh Kelly: Yeah. You got, you got to build this stuff. It’s not like, I remember when I first got in this industry, the largest company I really knew of at the time was a company called George Brazil was based in Phoenix and was a $30
Josh Kelly: million shop. And I remember thinking out loud, like how the F is that possible? Like it was unimaginary, but things have changed so much. Software, definitely AI now, the tools, the processes, the access, the information, everything’s so different. Like even I’ll give you this simple example, right?
Josh Kelly: I tried to hire a programmer to make a BI. So business intelligence, this really sexy dashboard with all this kind of crazy ass detailed information, super UX friendly. And I got like four quotes for him a year and a half ago. And like the lowest quote was 150 grand.
Josh Kelly: Today, one of my partners built it by himself with Vibe Boating. And to kick it off, it was probably to start 20 hours work. He probably, he’s obsessed with it. So maybe it’s a couple hundred hours now. But your capability to do things is a hundred fold.
Tyler Martin: Oh, it’s crazy.
Josh Kelly: Yeah. It’s like having a torque wrench versus regular wrench. Can you get away with a regular wrench? Yeah. But you’re going to make a lot more mistakes. It’s going to be a lot less clean. And you’re going to screw things up and take longer.
Josh Kelly: Just get a torque wrench.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, yeah.
Josh Kelly: And these APIs, I mean, like, you know, a year ago, two years ago, you couldn’t talk with all these different softwares without hiring. That’s why you’re getting bids so high. And now it’s like you literally just hit a button and it connects and talks to it.
Josh Kelly: Our dashboard, like, not to go crazy deep, but it’s essentially a DP report. It’s revenue per department every single day compared to goal. It’s, did they check in outside the office? It ties in with their GPS and their van, so I know if they checked in and checked out earlier.
Josh Kelly: Are the pictures in there within 30 minutes? If it’s between 30 and 45 minutes, it gets a clear check. If they get in 15 minutes, I know they didn’t follow the process. After 45 minutes, the manager calls them, where’s those pictures? Because I want to start cross-selling off it.
Josh Kelly: We use a great call-by-call system to generate more calls, right? The payroll is all tied to it. It ties to QuickBooks, to Payroll, to Service Titan, to our Google Drive. Everything is fully connected on one sexy dashboard. And yeah, there’s a lot of pages on that dashboard.
Josh Kelly: Even our recruiting pipeline, literally our marketing pipeline, cost per hours, everything is in there. And that was impossible a year ago. Now, I can do it without any programming experience whatsoever.
Tyler Martin: See, I feel like if we aren’t this efficient, we’re just not going to be able to compete on pricing. Because if it takes us five people to do that…
Josh Kelly: I don’t know if it’s pricing that you want to be comparable. It’ll be experience.
Tyler Martin: Okay.
Josh Kelly: Your ability to create a good experience for both your team members, which is highly, highly important, and for customers, is drastically better when you don’t have to focus on minutia.
Tyler Martin: It’s true. True. Yeah. That’s good stuff. Okay, I want to go back to one thing as it comes to scaling and kind of getting stuck at levels. What do you think is the hardest step when you’re trying to break through that 10 million?
Tyler Martin: Is it people? Is it building that small leadership team? Is it cash flow?
23:26Middle management is the real ceiling at $8-10 million
Tyler Martin: It might be all of the above, but if you had to pick one, what’s the one that you think you got to really overcome outside of mindset? You got to really overcome in order to get through that.
Josh Kelly: Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s mindset first, but outside of mindset for, you know, Most people get stuck in the eight to $10 million range. And by the way, that like scales as inflation happens. But 10 is not as big as it used to be five years ago.
Josh Kelly: Right. Equipment price is crazy. So like a $6 million business, now a $10 million business. So it’s not great caveat. But for that 10 million, it’s middle managers. It’s your ability to recruit, retain, and honestly develop leaders inside the business. I think the biggest jump is like the very small, like getting out of the truck.
Josh Kelly: That’s just a big mindset shift. That’s very difficult. And then when you start handing stuff like a $10 million shop has managers, usually overwhelmingly. But if you’re not, that’s its own problem. But they don’t have a recruiter. They don’t have a marketing person.
Josh Kelly: Should they? 100%, if they want to grow and be successful, right? They have a service manager, but like they’re probably not following the processes that you would want. They’re not doing the touch points. But at the core of it, most people don’t invest in those managers, don’t train them, don’t use proximity training.
Josh Kelly: They send them like a best practice group, but most best practice groups are just focusing on tools. That’s not where, at the end of the day, I’ll take someone totally outside the industry that’s a great leader over a really experienced service manager who knows what to do but isn’t a great leader.
Josh Kelly: So it’s that middle management is where I think that specific place, people get stuff. it’s not cash flow. If you know what you’re doing, you have cash. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re on that break. That’s a whole different process, but that happens all the time. If you’re
Josh Kelly: capable and had good advice and you know what you’re doing, you do not have a cash flow issue
Tyler Martin: at 10 million. You just don’t. It’s not possible. Right. Right. Okay. That makes a lot of sense.
Josh Kelly: And who, in terms of that development of that middle manager, is it your belief that’s the owner needs to get really good at that? Absolutely. You cannot rely on them to do themselves. Now, awareness, some people will, and those are awesome people to have on your team,
Josh Kelly: but it works even better if you help them with it. But yes, it is the owner, the GM’s responsibility to develop the leaders underneath them. The role I have, I mean, 90% of my time is developing leaders and that has such a higher return than going in and fixing individual issues.
Josh Kelly: Yeah. I fix the individual issues too, but only by first teaching someone how to think through it. And then I help them come up with a solution that I already knew from the very beginning. But if I give them the solution, then I am the solution.
Josh Kelly: And that doesn’t solve it next time it comes up or next time something looks similar. So this is an area most owners, and not so much GMs, because GMs should know this. But although I’ve seen many that get hired that don’t necessarily.
Tyler Martin: Well, I see your look. It makes me laugh. How do they develop those skills? Like, what is your recommendation? What should someone be doing as an owner to become a better leader to develop those middle managers? Because I do feel that’s a big bottleneck.
Josh Kelly: Yeah. So it’s two things. Number one is they need to develop themselves. Okay. Right. Like you need to consistently grow to be worth, to be someone worth following. That’s the honest truth. That’s my personal belief. The moment that you stop growing, you start dying.
Josh Kelly: and lots of people say that but I really live that And most people do not So number one is you have to consistently develop Number two is you have to have a plan like an actual so many people like do not doing something by accident, even okay by accident is not nearly as valuable as doing something
Josh Kelly: with purpose. So they don’t have thinking time where they think about like, Hey, this service manager, like he’s really good at this, this, he’s struggling with this. How can I help him be more successful in this? not just tools, but like really deep, consistently thinking that through and,
Josh Kelly: and creating the tools and process or finding and buying the cruels or processes to whatever that needs to be. But it’s, it’s mainly like most people don’t have a plan. They don’t have a system. They, they send them to some guy in a different state and it’s like, okay, I hope that’s good.
Josh Kelly: But that’s just, you would never do that with any other piece of your business. That’s crazy. I would hope you wouldn’t like hire a digital marketing team and like send them money and just assume everything’s working well. Right. Like people do it. It’s done.
Josh Kelly: You know what I mean? So it’s just having that thinking time, developing yourself and having that thinking time of like, how do I make this real at scale? How do I make this successful? How do I know if it’s successful? Really thinking through that whole process, creating a hypothesis and following through it.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Yeah. Getting into Clover a little bit, like what problem are you guys trying to solve? Like if someone that comes to you, is it mostly mindset that you’re trying to help with? Or does it go a lot deeper than that? I know you have the dashboards and the processes.
Tyler Martin: Like, what does that look like?
Josh Kelly: Oh, yeah. It’s all the way up and down the pipeline of a business. So my theory on this is, yes, we absolutely have to develop their mindset. Without that, nothing else works. But like mindset has long-term wins and is a huge success. But I also have to fill it with a ton of short-term successes.
Josh Kelly: So like, yeah, we’ll fix your marketing. We’ll fix your sales process. We’ll fix every piece of your business. We have the potential to end the systems and the processes from really large, successful businesses that didn’t start that way and exactly how they fixed it.
Josh Kelly: We have thousands of pieces of content on how to fix virtually everything in your business. If you haven’t found something, then it ends up going on my desk. Like if you have a problem that the team doesn’t have, it ends up on my desk and probably 99.9%, I dealt with some version of that.
Josh Kelly: If not, I started asking all of my friends. You know what I mean? Like these are real solutions for real people. But we handle both sides because to keep momentum, you have to have constant wins. And mindset’s a huge win, but it’s a long-term win.
Josh Kelly: Yeah.
Tyler Martin: What do you find? Like when clients come to you, what’s the most reoccurring problem that they’re having? Is it cash flow? Is it people? Do you, is there a theme? There’s patterns, right?
Josh Kelly: So like when most people come in, it’s really like financials. There’s not a lot of financial understanding, like how to effectively set pricing, how to set sales systems, how to track things and drive things. But after that, it could really kind of, it could be all over the board.
Josh Kelly: It depends on the leader. Some people are really good at attracting talent. Some people really struggle recruiting. Most of the time it’s because they’re not spending time on the effort, but that’s not necessarily the case, right? but uh every single one it’s a customized plan because every business is different every leader
Josh Kelly: is different so i don’t have like a these are the there’s patterns like lots of people are underpriced lots of people don’t really have a really thought through and clean cut ux experience most people don’t have really good marketing most people don’t have a really good sales process
Josh Kelly: a lot of people do the work pretty well but like the scalability of work making things simplistic Most people don’t do well on that. But it really depends on your size and where you’re at and what type of leader you are. No matter how successful you are, you have to augment.
Josh Kelly: I could not go back into owning a home server business outright right now and just run it without help. I need to put people around me that compliment me too. So it depends on the team. What’s your favorite, HVAC plumbing or electrical?
Tyler Martin: I like them all. You know, I’ll get myself in trouble here, but HVAC techs think plumbers are gross. Plumbers think HVAC techs are lazy and no one likes electricians. But honestly, I get in trouble for this, but they’re not real complicated businesses. Right. But they’re all good businesses with great people in them.
Tyler Martin: I don’t really have a favorite between the three. Electrical and plumbing have higher margins, but they don’t have the big ticket. They don’t have seasonality. I’m a fan of like, if you could do one pretty well, you could do the others pretty well.
Tyler Martin: Not that they’re the same business, but almost every business that’s really growing and scaling, the best way to make more money is to make money off, get more out of the customers you already have. Whether that’s turning one call in two by having multiple services, getting those reviews,
Tyler Martin: getting referrals, you know, doing, being more thorough and, you know, increasing your average ticket. So like, I’m not like a plumbing is way better. And they’re, they all have great things and some drawbacks to them. And, and you could run a $50 million shop with any individual you
Tyler Martin: won, but it’s a lot easier to run a hundred million dollar shop with all three. When you guys are
32:12Why three pricing options beat five for most sales teams
Josh Kelly: doing a system, an HVAC system, do you fall under the methodology of like six pricing options or do you do three or how do you guys tend to think of it?
Tyler Martin: Three. So three, it’s like, here’s, and I’m not going to call anybody out by name, but like, there’s a lot of people who suggest things that just have not done it and have not done it a long time. Like every industry in the world presents three options, right?
Tyler Martin: And there’s so much data to back that up. Like study after study, after study, after study that you will have a much higher closing percentage if you have three options versus five or six. Five or six is what’s happening as you’re going after average ticket instead of closing percentage. And here’s the simple truth. The
Tyler Martin: very best salespeople in the United States do do five options. They are the very best salespeople and closing percentage is not an issue for them. They already close at crazy high amounts. And like, I don’t have teams of all $15 million plus salespeople.
Tyler Martin: Right. So I have to build systems that work for everyone. Back to that kind of simplifying concept.
Josh Kelly: You got to keep it simple enough to be executable.
Tyler Martin: Right. A hundred percent. Anybody who suggests more than three, like for any individual salesperson, you’re selling 12, 15, $18 million a year. I’m not going to mess with you. Good for you. You’re killing it. No arguments. If you’re selling $3 million a year and your closing percentage is 48%, you should not be selling five options.
Tyler Martin: Like, facts. And that sounds like a lot of money to people, but if you move from five to three, you’ll instantly add a million and a half dollars in revenue. It’s a much easier process to go through and customers get less confused. So three options is not my stat.
Tyler Martin: People are weird about this, but this is very scientifically proven that three is better than five.
Josh Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. Are you guys, in terms of on the HVAC side of things, are you big on like the tune-up to system type process? So you go out and do a tune-up, you know, that $49 tune-up, $99 tune-up, and then it leads to a system.
Josh Kelly: Is that kind of your methodology or is it more of like the way Brody Pinnell has been explained to me?
Tyler Martin: I don’t, you know, I’ve never verified this, but they’re more like, you know, service, service, service, service, service until they wear you out and then they sell you a system.
Josh Kelly: Where do you guys fall in in that range, would you say?
Tyler Martin: It’s a hybrid, right?
Josh Kelly: Yeah.
Tyler Martin: So you need to, when it financially makes sense to change systems, which it usually, like in Phoenix, is usually about eight years. And other places is 10 years old. Your electric bill, and you can tell a really strong story. You need to start bringing it up.
Tyler Martin: But you don’t have to force that. Like, I’m not a big fan of pressure sales. I don’t think it works. But more importantly, like, it can work. But, like, sleeping at night and feeling good about the way we do business is more important to me.
Tyler Martin: And like a lot of people will do a lot of revenue, but not a lot of people do, you know, a ton of revenue and a ton of profit by doing pressure sales. I’ve seen it over and over again. I run circles around people that believe in the high pressure sales tactics.
Tyler Martin: So kind of an in-between, like, yeah, from a tune-up on a 10-year-old system, I expect them to talk about a new piece of equipment because it financially makes sense, right? The savings or utility bill, you break it down to a daily amount. It’s a very easy conversation to have.
Tyler Martin: but do we have to force them into it? No, that’s not cool. Right. If someone wants to get service for 15 years. Right. And for the last five years, we’ve talked to them twice a year, but Hey, you really, it’s time to replace. It makes a lot of sense. It’s still that customer’s
Josh Kelly: decision what to do. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Hey, one other thing you talked about pricing as being one of the levers, how much do you guys get into? Cause I see this a lot where the smaller shop isn’t really paying close attention to what they’re actually
Josh Kelly: paying for things with their suppliers and they’re just getting hammered. What’s your feeling on that? Is that like, yeah, it’s good to look at it at a certain level, but deal with pricing first, or is it like, Hey, you got to get that in order and really get your pricing right and negotiate
Tyler Martin: it. Where do you stand on that? Oh, I mean, that’s a weird question, right? Because what’s a bigger lever? What do I react to faster? Because pricing, I have total control over. I go into pricing first and then negotiate with my vendors afterwards.
Tyler Martin: Most people, if you’re asked a hundred contractors, if they have a good deal with their distributor, like 99 says, like, I got the best deal. It’s like, that can’t be true. Right. That’s physically impossible that, yeah, you all have better deals than that one guy who thinks he has a shitty deal,
Tyler Martin: but you all like most people just don’t know how to go. She don’t really price shop effectively. Don’t know how to, there’s things you could drive on a manufacturer. There’s things you can’t. And like, they try and negotiate everything. Like I just try and negotiate the piece of equipment I sell.
Tyler Martin: And I purposely let them inflate the ones I have no intention of selling. Right. So they still get to the average they want, but it’s not going to affect me. Right. Or, you know, pre-base versus rebates. And like, there’s just so much details to this, but I think you have to do both.
Tyler Martin: And what I would say too, is even if you negotiate with your vendor, like most people never check to make sure they actually got that price in. And the cool thing now is like, you couldn’t use AI.
37:26Short-paying distributors when they miss negotiated pricing
Tyler Martin: It doesn’t matter whether you’re a million-dollar shop or a $50 million shop. There’s AI tools that automatically check that and make it so clean and instantaneous. That report that we have for that specific one updates every single minute. And then does a reference report for anything that’s out of whack, high or low, and sends
Tyler Martin: an email to the manager. And then if it’s high, we just underpay the distributor and tell them, here’s what happened. Here’s where our pricing is. And by the way, Hooli, no one types that email. right? It just goes. And then we get their response.
Josh Kelly: What’s typically the response? Do they negotiate with you at that point? Or how does that play out
Tyler Martin: usually? No, a lot of times, like distributors, there’s exceptions to every rule. I don’t think they’re disowned. What they’re doing is like, that person at that parts house didn’t check your pricing versus their normal pricing. They just gave the normal pricing without ever thinking
Tyler Martin: about going through, that’s not my problem. Right. I have negotiated pricing, so I’m going to pay the price that I did. And even though you invoice me for this amount, it doesn’t mean I’m going to pay it. So without a doubt, once you start going through this process, the first time you start doing
Tyler Martin: that and you hold them accountable, they do get upset because they’re not used to being held accountable. But as soon as you’re like, listen, this part’s supposed to be $42 and you charge me $48. It’s $6. Bye-bye a lot of these. And this is a trend.
Tyler Martin: So like I’m paying 42. That’s what we agreed on. No one really fights that.
Josh Kelly: Yeah, that’s great. That’s a great way to deal with it. You short pay their invoice and that gets their attention. And then you move the ball to their problem, not your problem. And sometimes, by the way, it’s like you short pay for months before they really catch it.
Tyler Martin: Yeah.
Josh Kelly: Hey, I had a funny thing I did recently is I had two different HVAC shops and they use the same components, systems, I’ll say. And I actually got their data and I compared it. One shop is about half as big as the other.
Josh Kelly: So one’s about 10 million, one’s about 20. Exact same system, same supplier. One was paying 40% less than the other. And the sole difference between the two is, well, one is a lot harder negotiator. But two, they also made a $2 million purchase commitment.
Josh Kelly: But the reason I did this exercise.
Tyler Martin: But those purchase commitments aren’t enforceable anyway.
Josh Kelly: That’s the thing. That’s the whole thing. But what really made me do it is I always agonize over GP. How can we improve our GP? Obviously, price is one, but cost plays a role in that. There’s only two ways to increase profit, whether it’s gross profit or net profit.
Josh Kelly: It’s increased revenue and decreased cost. Yeah. And if you think the same companies, one’s paying 40% more than the other, I mean, you’re leaving a lot of money on this. where you’re working way harder than the other company to make the same amount of money.
Tyler Martin: And so any assumption would be that the larger company got a better deal That not necessarily the case Talk to me No it has nothing The buying power is only a small piece of the negotiation process
Josh Kelly: Right. You’re really selling where the business is going more than business currently is. That’s where I thought you were taking this. So it’s the story, basically.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, for sure.
Josh Kelly: Yeah, okay, got it. Okay, yeah.
Tyler Martin: It’s huge.
Josh Kelly: Yeah, but how’s that different with a customer?
Tyler Martin: I mean, it’s the same thing. But I think we don’t do that on this. Like, I don’t see that being done a lot on the spending side, like, or on the buying side. It’s just that it’s just we forget to do that a lot.
Josh Kelly: I agree.
Tyler Martin: And like, and the reason is, is because, because it’s just not as obvious to them and it’s not in their face as much.
Josh Kelly: Right.
Tyler Martin: And then stupid things like they’ll negotiate equipment, but they’ll never negotiate parts.
Josh Kelly: Yeah. That’s a big one.
Tyler Martin: You buy a lot of parts too. You know what I mean? Like they won’t negotiate with software. They won’t negotiate. They just accept pricing. I’m understanding that, like, no, that’s just the price they take. That’s the price they’re asking. You know what I mean?
Josh Kelly: Yeah. Okay. I got one last segment here, and then we’ll wrap up. I want to just talk about, you have a daily progress report. It sounds like it might have changed a lot with AI.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. There’s a lot more data now.
41:35Live dashboards, daily huddles, and not overreacting to one bad day
Josh Kelly: But generally, for folks listening, what would be, like, on a daily progress report, things that you would really recommend they’re looking at, either daily or weekly, religiously?
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Yeah. So, so for daily progress reports, the specific revenue report, like I think you’re kind of talking about what reports do we look at daily?
Josh Kelly: Sure. Yeah. That’s what I mean. Yeah.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. So the daily things I’m looking at is what we would call a DP report. It’s revenue per department compared to goals. So like, Hey, we’re going to do $2 million in sales this month. I want to be able to react on day four, if we’re behind not day 25, because it’s much harder to
Tyler Martin: turnaround at that point, right? So it’s per department, how much revenue was I supposed to do? How much revenue did we do? Did we win the day? Are we falling behind? What levers are we going to pull to make up the difference? So it’s a forcing activity in the business, right?
Tyler Martin: Obviously for most of this industry, most of your revenue is driven off the install board. So I checked the install board multiple times a day, right? And then we do have like a daily huddle that we do every day that walks through the major metrics from the day before and what
Tyler Martin: today is going to look like, creating commitments. And that’s from marketing to call center, all the way down to recruiting, like every major department, you know, gives that information, but it’s not like reading report. Lots of those daily huddles are like reading report and they’re just terrible huddles. It’s meant to be, you know, collaborative,
Tyler Martin: exciting, fun, getting people involved, getting people to help each other. So those are the things I do daily, every single department without exception, whether that’s my maintenance agreements, whether that’s my inside sales, certainly my service, my plumbing, my install, inventory. Every single department period has four to five KPIs and has
Tyler Martin: a weekly report every single week that not only gets filled out, really automatically gets filled out now, but I require every single manager, whoever’s in charge of that department to give me a video assessment of what’s going on and why and what’s working, what’s not working,
Tyler Martin: what they’re going to consider changing, what they’re going to test. So we do that every single week. And that’s the majority of what I focus on. Obviously, I get monthly financials. And really, financials are the main thing I look at month to month.
Tyler Martin: But it’s a trailing number. I do automatic job costing after every single job now. that was impossible three months ago or a very expensive. Now it’s cake with AI. But even before that I was doing job costing. I was spot checking job costing manually every single week because that’s an
Tyler Martin: important report for me. Right. So I wouldn’t have to wait 30 days to figure out if my gross margins off.
Josh Kelly: How is it affecting your behavior and what you’re doing, getting this data so much faster? Like do you, is it changing anything that you do?
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Oh, it’s making me, you know, I’m a big, like most people are passive in their business. Like, Oh, we don’t have calls today. Hopefully tomorrow’s better. That’s not cool. Right.
Josh Kelly: It’s the successful companies are reactionary. So like, Oh shit, we didn’t have calls. We need to do something about yesterday today. It’s made me much more proactive. I’ve been able to attack things much, much faster. Like halfway through the day, I know something’s off.
Tyler Martin: Right.
Josh Kelly: Which is really, really valuable, but there’s actually a balance to that. Like I’ve learned, like, you never want to, like the general rule is anything can happen once, you know, in fact, anything can happen twice. It should never happen a third time because now I have a system process to make a case.
Josh Kelly: So like, as an example, and I’m not going to name a company, but one of my companies had a shit day yesterday. They did. They put on like, I think like 70 grand for the day, which is not good for them. Like that’s a, that’s a very bad day.
Josh Kelly: And like I could go in there and I could tear it apart, but I already got the reports. They were on top of it. They knew what happened. They knew it was adjusting. I saw the video. They let me know what was going on.
Tyler Martin: Right.
Josh Kelly: And the other owners.
Tyler Martin: Right.
Josh Kelly: So it’s not like I’m a individual owner in these businesses. And I could have went in and like really pressed on. I can’t. But can’t is not the right word. It’s not healthy for me to. One day is an anomaly. Two day catch my attention.
Josh Kelly: Three days is a trend. so that third day if there’s a if they have a bad day today yeah i’m gonna pay a lot of attention to it right if they have a bad day on saturday yep monday we’re having a meeting something’s going on
Josh Kelly: three days in a row is a trend it won’t happen that way but sure sure sure but it’s interesting if you kind of look even three months ago you might have been a month later you could even be thinking about uh usually you know because the way we were structuring this up a week later
Josh Kelly: We were reactive. Minus the revenue. The revenue we’re still doing daily. Right. But now, like, I don’t want to share the dashboard for obvious reasons, but like, I know every five minutes what revenue is like directly. What’s gross margin? What’s gross profit? What’s my conversion rate?
Josh Kelly: What’s my average ticket for every single tech and as a group, as every single department, like live. So it’s really, really valuable. Also, if you’re not disciplined, you could really overreact sometimes, right? And overreacting systematically is actually okay. Overreacting on individual situations is a couple of problems.
Josh Kelly: A good example of this, a company I partner with, I took it from them, brilliant. But they do four calls a day for their HVAC techs and for their electricians, plumbers, it’s two and a half. But the rule is you get three calls a day.
Josh Kelly: If you work for that company, you get three calls, you earn a fourth. So if you’re 0 for 3, you do not get a fourth call. You get to come into the office and talk about it. That’s like a systematic overreaction. That’s healthy, right?
Josh Kelly: If I didn’t do that, but John Smith, one of my techs, was 0 for 3, I was like, get your ass in the office. Something’s going on, right? Like, not the same experience, right? Okay.
Tyler Martin: as we wrap up here, is this the type of thing does Clover get in to helping companies have more automation and this backend? Is that part of the processes that you help them with? I just want to wrap up and learn about what you do
Tyler Martin: in case there’s someone out in the audience that might be able to benefit from your services.
Josh Kelly: Yeah, of course. Like we have a bunch of AI tools and automations like the job costing, like price, like all that stuff. And we’re building that stuff all the time. Like it’s because I’m building it for my own businesses. I build it for my own.
Josh Kelly: I should share with other people too. So, yes, we do a lot of that. But really, it’s a full-on coaching consulting business where we do lifting for you. But this is a perfect example. Some people come to the team. They’re like, hey, I have a marketing problem.
Josh Kelly: It’s like, okay, tell me about it. You start digging in. They don’t have good reporting. They don’t know what’s working, what’s not working. And then you discover, yeah, they have a marketing problem maybe. They’re supposed to get 25 calls a day. They’re averaging 20.
Josh Kelly: Not good. Okay, we have a problem. but they’re only closing 10 of those 20. It’s like, no, you do not have a marketing problem. You have a marketing problem as well. Right. Right. So really what we need to focus on is what’s going on with your closing percentage, right? What’s going on with your sales process.
Josh Kelly: We fix that. Then the truth is you probably can’t run 25 calls because you’re out doing the work. Right. So it’s a lot of that assessing what’s actually happening in your business, helping you think through how your business should run and what you would want,
Josh Kelly: what you would want it to look like, what your ideal business, not what we think, but what you think your ideal business should run like, and then helping you bridge that gap. And yes, of course, we have AI tools because everybody should have AI tools right now.
Josh Kelly: And yeah, you could use the tools we give you very easily and simply. A year ago, those were on automated spreadsheets. Now they’re in sexy dashboards because you can’t.
Tyler Martin: Right.
Josh Kelly: But that data, I mean, just having, I’m just such a big, I want to see everybody. like every business have access to this. Cause I feel like it’s just, it just changes your whole ability to understand your business and make decisions. It’s just overwhelming.
Tyler Martin: But I also love that you brought up that now that you have this, it’s the data, you also have to stand back and go, well, I can’t just react off one day. I got to kind of look at the big mixture. Maybe it’s three days,
Tyler Martin: maybe it’s four days, whatever that is.
Josh Kelly: That was it. That was a catch. Like I didn’t really, that was my fault for not thinking through all the way. Right. But like you sometimes messed up. I was like, this is going to be really good data. I like it. And then I gave it to partners and some of them started really overreacting to stuff.
Josh Kelly: And I had to like dial it back. I had to train them.
Tyler Martin: Right.
Josh Kelly: But yeah, like when you have live data, you can make live decisions, but live decisions can be really anecdotal sometimes. You know what I mean?
Tyler Martin: Yeah, totally.
Josh Kelly: Enough data for it to be something, something worth changing. You know? Yeah.
Tyler Martin: Okay. Your website growwithclover.com is your main website. I’ll put your LinkedIn, your personal LinkedIn in the show notes. if people want to reach out to you anywhere else or are those the two best spots?
Josh Kelly: Those are probably the two best spots. If you really want to get ahold of me, it’s not hard to get ahold of me. You can always email me to josh at growwithclover.com. Total transparency. I have an executive assistant that’s going to, if you want to talk to me, if you have issues,
Josh Kelly: I’m happy to have a conversation. I appreciate people who are ballsy enough to ask, as weird as that sounds, but it will be somewhat on a schedule, right? If you need help right now, the team will take care of you immediately. You know what I mean?
Tyler Martin: Awesome.
Josh Kelly: Okay. Well, I appreciated you being on the show. You’re as awesome as I expected. I can’t wait to interview your dog. I know I have to work on that.
Tyler Martin: Rocket right here. He’s a murder poodle. This is a real thing. You know what I mean?
Josh Kelly: Rocket? Rocket?
Tyler Martin: He’s a protection trained, like same dog that like Bill Gates buys dogs or Tony Robbins buys dogs. I got this from a trainer. A buddy of mine set me up. I did not pay as much as I did by paying way too much for a dog.
Tyler Martin: But he’s like, he’s a murder poodle. All his commands are in French. It’s weird as shit.
Josh Kelly: Well, you probably do too. Doesn’t your wife have no like four or five languages? Am I remembering correctly?
Tyler Martin: Isn’t she? No. Okay. I thought she was multiple. One language, which is Irish English, which isn’t even great English, you know. Okay. I got to translate the pigeon. She does know some Irish, but no, she’s not fluent. Okay. Okay. I speak more languages
Tyler Martin: than she does, and she’s from Europe.
Josh Kelly: Yeah. Okay, man. Hey, thank you so much. Hope you have a great one. I appreciate you being on the show. I appreciate your time, man. One of the biggest things I’m taking away from this conversation with Josh is that as your trade business grows, the owner’s role has to grow
Josh Kelly: with it. At some point, being the person who solves every problem starts working against you. Josh spends so much of his time developing leaders because if you keep giving your managers the answer, you remain the answer. The better approach is teaching them how to think through problems,
Josh Kelly: make decisions, and take responsibility for their part of the business. I also really liked his approach to the numbers. He wants to know early when revenue, margins, conversion rates, or average tickets are moving in the wrong direction without overreacting to one bad day. Good reporting helps
Josh Kelly: you respond faster and good leadership helps you know when to respond. That combination matters as you scale. Strong managers, clear systems, and financial visibility give you a much better chance of catching problems early and making decisions based on what is actually happening in the
Josh Kelly: business. Hey, that’s also a big part of the work that we do with trade owners at Profit and Grit CFOs. We help you get a clear handle on your margins, cashflow, profitability, and the financial decisions behind your growth. You can learn more at ProfitAndGrit.com or feel free to book a free
Josh Kelly: intro call at CFOIntroCall.com. Most of all, thank you so much for listening to the show. I sincerely appreciate it. And I’ll catch you on the next episode.
