00:03

This is the Real Concrete Coating Talk Pod, a podcast created exclusively for concrete coating contractors, where we have real talks with industry pros about business fails, wins, and all that BS that everyone else don’t care about. all in an effort to inspire you, the entrepreneur, to keep moving the needle forward to success so that you can live out the dreams you intended to create for your life. I’m your host, Rudy Hettrick, the founder of Floor Coating Marketers, the one and only digital agency that specializes exclusively in growing concrete businesses online. So stick around for this episode. It’s not one you wanna miss.

00:44

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Real Concrete Coating Talk Pod. I’m really excited to do this episode. Today, it’s just gonna be me today. But I got something I want to share, I had some things I want to think about or that I’ve been thinking about that I really want to share with you guys, a lot of the stuff that I share with you, obviously, is stuff that you might already know, right? 

But it’s kind of nice to have a little bit of feedback from other perspectives in the industry that might be able to give you a gold nugget here or there or something that maybe you didn’t think about. And that’s kind of the purpose of this podcast is to provide as much value and information that I can to really help you guys out in the industry, whether it’s having a guest come on board, to really you know, give you some insight into something that maybe you didn’t realize was that important in your business. Or maybe they might come on board, because it might be a business that could help you, right, help you grow and take your business to the next level. 

So that’s kind of what we do with this podcast. And if you really, really like what we’re doing, you know, give us a review, let me know what you think of the podcast, maybe share it to some of your cohorts or others if you know anybody else that’s in the concrete coating business that, you know, might benefit from this podcast, you know, share it to them, and let them take a listen and see if there’s something that they can, you know, get some value out of it. And maybe it can help them out a lot. 

So, but in this episode, I really want to talk about systems, right? systems, it’s so important, every business needs to have systems. And if you don’t have systems, then you’re probably the person that’s working 18 hours every single day, barely getting enough sleep, super stressed out, very unhappy with your current situation in your life. And not even probably where you need to be like you, you probably don’t even love what you do, right?

Because I mean, at the end of the day, as a business owner, or a CEO, or however you want to label yourself, you want to be able to delegate and automate your business, right? If you’re doing everything yourself, and that’s including being out in the field and doing the work if you’re out grinding concrete in a garage, that’s probably not the best use of your time, you need to be building the foundation of your business, right. 

And I know I get it, I’m here, I own a business as well, I’ve owned service businesses in the past. And I can tell you is really, really hard to let go. But you don’t necessarily have to let go of everything at once, right? build systems and procedures that you can use to really help you write. Really, at the end of the day. I mean, let’s talk about what is a business system. So I’m on this website right now called successwise.com, I just found it online, I have no affiliation with them. But I really liked kind of how they wrote it, how they kind of laid it all out. 

And so they say a business system is a series of interdependent tasks, or documented procedures that outline exactly how to do something in an organization to achieve a business objective. Right? good business systems streamline workload, improve productivity and get results, right. So a business process or an SOP, right, standard operating procedures can be very, very simple. 

It can be something that you can hand off to your employee. And they can it can be implemented pretty much right away without even any large amounts of training, for example, you could have a checklist in your trailer that make sure that you know, they’re going to be putting this tool here putting this tool there Did you do a walk around the trailer to make sure that there are no flat tires? Did you do a walk around? Make sure there’s no damage from something right? Did you make sure that there’s enough inventory for the day or for the week or this or this or this that needs to be filled? Do you need more cups, right? whatever it might be.

04:37

And you have a checklist that they can check off every single day, you could simply laminate the checklist and then have a dry erase marker that’s attached to it with a string. You can screw it up to the side of the wall and that’s the something that they have to do and data inside it. Take a picture, send it off to you or whoever’s the manager. And it’s simple as that. 

A system like that keeps them organized keeps them all keeps him accountable and responsible as well. And tools don’t go missing, right tools don’t go missing thing you can’t, you know, oh no, I gotta go drive an hour across the city to go grab this one thing that we need and then our production is held up, right systems prevent all of that from happening for the most part not always. But having it is 99.9% way more important than not having one at all. 

And I know. And maybe I’m wrong on this, maybe I’m wrong on this. But a lot of times we don’t create the systems because we’re too busy doing the work, right? And then by the time we get home, we’re exhausted, right? We’re too tired to have to go back and figure out how to do it. So really, at the end of the day, the best way to do it, is to let your employees do it. Right, give them some kind of incentive say,  

05:49

Hey, listen, John, next time you’re, you’re out and about. I’ll tell you what, I need help making sure that this trailer is going to be organized. So the next time you’re there, can you please just create a checklist for me? Here’s some paper. When you’re there, here’s a clipboard, make it super easy for them to do it. Okay, and just get them to write out okay, what do they do want this next? What do they do here? What do they do there? Right? And then get them to create a checklist for you. You don’t have to do the checklist, right? Give them an incentive, buy him lunch, whatever it might be, it’s totally worth it. Right? 

And so stuff like that can be game-changing. So the other thing is automation, right? Let’s talk about that. So systems aren’t always going to be necessarily a checklist, right? You can have software that can help you achieve goals as well. So if you don’t have a CRM, so if you’re like sending invoices, you know, off of Excel spreadsheet that you made, or something like that, or a Word document that you made with your logo at the top from a template or something, and then you’re emailing it to them. 

Boy, I gotta tell you, you’re you are missing out on some serious, serious revenue and time management opportunities, right? Because a CRM automates a lot of your work, you just have to spend the time again, you have to spend the time to get it all set up first, having a CRM and getting it set up and it running for you. It’s like having an additional employee in your business at a very, very cheap rate. 

it automates all the emails, all the text messages, it sends out reminders for payment, it sends out invoices sends out estimates, right? You can book it out your book, your entire life on a calendar, right? All of this stuff happens behind the scenes, you don’t have to be doing it manually. And then you’re gonna forget to call these people or do this or do that, really a CRM is can save you 18 to 20 hours per week. Now, what can you do with 18 to 20 hours per week? Well, let’s talk about that. Well, you can spend that extra time to create more systems, you can spend that extra time to spend time with your family, maybe you can actually come home for dinner for once. 

Right? Whatever it might be on time, right? not let that you know, because that’s the thing, like, you know, if you got kids and things like that, they don’t want to be hearing about your day and how grumpy you are and everything else they want to spend time with you. And if you’re working 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, 60 80 hours a week, right? They’re not getting the quality from you, right? And I’m sure that you probably feel that a little bit, right. So there’s a lot of ways that you can change that you’re in control of your destiny when it comes to this stuff. So systems, systems, systems systems are very, very important. 

So like for us here at Floor Coating Marketers, we use systems for everything, we even have a what we call a Trello, board Trello, you can even sign up for it. It’s, it’s free. And it’s really, really cool. All it does is it’s very straightforward, streamlined, almost looks like a pipeline, if you’ve ever had seen a pipeline, in a software program, it’s just basically cards that you move from one column to the next, to go to the next stage. Right. So that helps us stay organized, it helps us really see what’s next and what we have to do next. And it’s still at a very basic level. But if you upgrade you can get automation hooked up to that. There’s there are so many things that you can do with that within those cards. You can do checklists, you can do all sorts of different things, right? So, you know, honestly, at the end of the day, if you’re not building systems, then you’re not building a business.

09:31

That’s pretty much all I can say. Because Think of it this way, every department, okay is a brick, right? Or let’s say one wall on a foundation, right? But the mortar, okay? The mortar is what holds everything together. The mortar is what holds the bricks together. Those are your systems, right? Keeping everything together as one, right? And so and for in The end result and that’s to achieve a common goal, right? So if you don’t know what asst is go on Google go onto Google and check it out. Listen to what they’re saying because these things are super, super important, right? You can even systematize systems, where you can interlink other systems within each other, right? 

Every single time you do something that can be repeatable, that’s a system, you should be documenting that all the time. And I know some of you guys know this stuff. But an easy way to do this. Another way to do this is if you’re, let’s say, on the computer, and you’re doing something that an administrative assistant can do is go to loom and basically record yourself doing it and you just say, this is where you go, you do this, you press this button, you click here, you go over here, and you do this. And then it’s on video, which you can store and save, put it in a training folder somewhere on Google Drive, or however you have it set up at your on your computer. And then you could hire somebody literally from Upwork and transcribe that, right. 

There are also software tools for that, you can use something called otter.ai, which is a really cool piece of software, which I use all the time, you can upload the audio or the video into otter.ai. And it will transcribe it for you. You can have someone else do that for you. You don’t have to be doing that stuff. I don’t do it for myself, I will have someone else do it for me, right. 

So for example, I’m doing this podcast right now. So I’m going to take this audio, and I’m going to give it to my assistant, I’m gonna say the podcast is done. Here’s the title, here’s the summary of it. And then she does the rest. Why? Because I trained her how to do it. And we created a system for it, she’s going to go back to the Trello board, and she’s going to follow the checklist on how to do it. Right, we created templates of some of the content that we put out on Instagram that you’re probably following, right, or Facebook, or whatever it is. So all of this stuff has been pre-designed. So it doesn’t take an absorbent amount of time. 

Not even a lot of time for my assistant, right. So she gets to do it. And then she can move on to everything else. So it systematizes not only for me but for her, right. And so that’s the benefit of having systems, systems free up time, not only for yourself as a business owner, but it also frees up a lot of time for your production team, who is the one that you know, is working. So if you have a step-by-step process, on how to do a garage floor, from top, from bottom to top, then it’s repeatable. 

And especially when they’re new coming in, you should be doing videos while you’re training them, right? Have someone hold the camera, while you’re showing them how to do things step by step, then you can document that you can put it in your folder as well, right? So when the next person comes in, you don’t have to do that training again, you could be out somewhere else maybe doing some estimates, right? 

They can be sitting in your office, watching all these training videos and taking notes for the exam that’s going to come up next Friday. Right, things like that. So I hope that helps. I hope you guys I know a lot of you already know this, you’re already at that level where this podcast probably doesn’t even matter. But maybe that gives you also the reaffirm reaffirmation that these are important for every single business that exists every single business. 

If they’re not systematized, it’s not scalable, you will never be able to grow without systems. So if you’re stuck, and you can’t take it to the next level, the first thing I would do is check out what are you spending your time on first? Can it be delegated? Can it be automated? If so, then you’re going to be able to move that next level a lot faster. So typically, we are our own bottleneck when it comes to running a business. So the first thing to do if your business is struggling is to look inward and find out what’s going on, and why you’re spending all this extra time on things that you should not be doing. There’s a little voice inside your head that we always try to refuse thinking oh, no, that’s whatever, and we ignore

14:09

1. But sometimes our voices saying I probably shouldn’t be spending time on this right now. If that’s happening to you, you need to build a system and you need to hire someone else to do it for you. So hope you have a great weekend. I know this is a long weekend. So if you’re working this weekend, that’s really, really too bad. I really feel sorry for you. But you know, all the best to you. And if you get to get the chance to have the weekend off. Awesome. We all need that kind of rest. And we will see you next week. Talk to you later.

14:42

Bye-bye.

14:46

Trying to figure out how digital marketing works, trying to figure out how to get a website to rank how to make a convert, trying to figure out how Facebook works, how Instagram works, how do you get engagement? How do you get followers, how do you get likes, how do you get reviews consistently in a single month. All of this can be extremely daunting for a business owner, especially if you’re just trying to grow your business. your job, your responsibility as a CEO is to automate delegate. Your job is to make sure that everyone is put in the right spots, having to spend all this time trying to figure out digital marketing tactics and skills. Honestly, it’s a complete waste of your time, resources, and money. You need to hire a company that is dedicated to you and to the industry. Like Floor Coating Marketers, stop trying to weigh your options. Just get on board, fire for according marketers for your agency. If you want a concrete coating business, this is your best shot at your success. If you want to three times or even up to 10 times your revenue. This is the best way to do it.