Ep 145 - Electrician Team Performance

Hello and welcome back. Happy Tuesday. It's a great day to have a great day here on Electric Preneur's Secrets, episode 145, how your electrician team performance equals your electrical client performance. You've got just a couple of master electricians here with you, with business addictions, trying to help you five days a week to master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium level service. As you know, if you've watched a few of these, we got rid of all the fancy shit, completely threw it out. The intro is a little bit unique every day, so is the outro. We try to blend it all together, hoping to circle back with some great value for you today. Joe, how the hell are you man?

I'm man, I said it on the live, but I'm going to say it again Literally I have not felt better in a long time and it's the weirdest thing. It's not like I just stayed and slept all day on vacation, like it was just one of those things where I just focused, from the moment I got up to the moment I went to sleep, on my two girls and my wife and I feel like literally there's a fire under my butt where I just wanted to liver and deliver, and deliver.

Yeah, you know what I'm feeling it too. I felt it this morning, I could feel it from your smile or first meeting, and the meetings have been off the hook. Today I'm actually on four hours and 36 minutes so far on the zoom call with various people various meetings and various intentions. Why not throw a podcast in the mix, Joe?

You know why not, Especially when we know for a fact that it's going to help the Elector of Norse listening.

Absolutely Okay. I'm pumped up I almost said pumped up about this one, but I'm actually pumped up about this one. It's static. Actually, I want to share a quick story with you, because we had thunderstorms last night and I shit you not. Something happened that was a little bit crazy. Okay, please drop it on me. Lightning strikes hit me. I'm outside with Mary Ellen, hannah, we're sitting on the deck. In fact, we saw some lightning, heard the thunder and we're like, okay, for sure there's a storm. We're interested. It's been a while since we've really experienced one. I mean, if you're with us and you go outside during the storms just to experience that sometimes, I mean I'm with you, so join me in this and this story. We go out to the deck, we're sitting there, we finish eating and I'm joking about being an electrician to my daughter, hannah, and to Maryl, and I literally reach up towards the sky and I look up and I say I'm and as I'm about to say, ready. Lightning strikes and I counted this. You know, you can count it right before the thunder. Three seconds really was not that far and it went off like a series of automatic shotguns. Of course, thunder in the house and I was like I'm not going to do that again. I'm like maybe that's not a good idea. You're kind of playing with some forces right now.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure someone was either telling you like egging you on or like like you got to stop at this right now Cause someone's going to blow up.

Yeah, yeah, we were trying to recall the odds of getting struck by lightning. I don't know the number, do you?

I mean check. I believe the number that comes to mind is 0.03%, because getting hit by lightning is double the chance that you would receive winning the lottery in the U S.

Yeah, and you know what we were talking about. That too, versus lottery chances. James is with us. Says stop bragging. We haven't had rain in four months. Apologies, don't worry, it only rained for about 10 minutes. We're right back to a dry spell, even north of the border. As you guys know from all the smoke we keep sending our way. Speaking of smoke signals, is your team sending you some? Are there messages you're not getting? Have you ever heard this phrase, joe? Your actions speak so loud I can't hear what you're saying. Yeah, that was my experience coming up as an electrician. Every single employer along the way like to talk about, especially in the hiring process, all the days off and your vacation paid and all the great things about working there. But the reality was and it was ingrained in the culture work, work, whip, work, work, whip, work, work, work, whip. Have you ever felt that? Or is this just a one off? Is it just me?

There's actually an expression that I heard speaking of work, work whip. It's where there's a whip, there is a way, and literally that's the messed up part, because we have, in this industry, have been conditioned to be put into the grindstone. I mean, you had it from the industrial background, I had it from the new construction background. Like you just go and if you needed even 15 minutes off to mourn your dead mother, it's like nope, you have to have a written, a sign off for that. That's not approved. You had to put that six months in advance.

That's tough.

So, yeah, it's incredibly tough.

Yeah, literally, and you know what I've experienced, that, too Literal funerals come down and you can't even get away. You're stuck, and my experience was always that it's not just someone with the whip as for the expression I made but also the accountability, the responsibility, the clients, the project, the whole thing, that you just get trapped in this. And that's why, again bring this back to yesterday and tie it into this topic this week really optimizing your team's performance through giving them a break, having insurance on proper rest and reserve to actually bring energy forth. So, again, to just reiterate this, and not just saying, but enforcing it, because if you don't enforce it and your project managers, your form and your lead electricians, your electricians, your apprentices if any of them are feeling that vacuum that sucks man, they're getting to the project and that project's sucking the life rate out of them.

And in addition to that I want to throw in it's not enough to just have vacation time, like I know some of you business owners right now that are listening or saying well, I give my guys two weeks, I give my guys three weeks. Of course we got all this time, they use it, it's great. But my question for you is this because I've been in these kinds of jobs, I remember I want to take two weeks off for my baby to be born and I remember taking the time and then finding out all my work was piled and shifted and delegated to when I needed to come back. That's not a vacation and that's not a way that works. So your employees, if they ever had to experience that, are very unlikely going to take the time Because when they're away, all they'll be thinking about is the pile they're going to have to expect to come back to, and that's not going to help anyone relax Like. Would that help you at all, clay?

Not at all. And just before we lose some of our solo electric printers, the guys that, honestly, are going back to bed at night losing sleep because they got into this for more flexibility, they got into business for more time, they got into business to have more money and what they're finding is that they themselves are driving themselves mad and they're going to bed at night rolling around unable to sleep from the lashes they're putting on their own backs and not having a plan, not being able to design a schedule or figure out a way to actually optimize this thing.

So that we can stop that, please jump in the closest thing that I can compare that to is I've been that guy before. Like remember, when I first started off, I was making $300 a month. Like literally, we were so poor we didn't know what to do with ourselves, but because of that we were working so hard to make something, to just do something with ourselves. And some of you, like myself, never get away to escape that internalized fear of the if I don't do everything, it won't be done. And that's why, when you I mean Clay, I'm sure you've experienced this as well, because we've talked about this that feeling of when you're in bed and you know you need to sleep, but you're so caught up on the day to day that you need to do that you won't and you're stuck losing sleep because you can't think about not missing this project or not filling out the right kind of paperwork, or is payroll happening, or is this working. We have to stop this and there's ways to do it.

In the word I would use to describe that feeling is sick to your stomach. I felt that in bed many nights. Right, Did I order all the breakers I need for tomorrow? And as your team expands, that doesn't necessarily go away. That's the whole reason to have SOPs and check some place so that you can sleep at night. But again, none of this happens automatically. And there's this fallacy that, hey, if I just work my frickin' ass off this year, I'll get to this place. And you know where we're going with this too. Cash reserves are gonna come up. It's getting that season, right. We're gonna be talking about this. If it's not this week getting hit hard, it's gonna be next week. But hey, we're gonna get to that place just from working so hard. Hey, and the money's just gonna add up, hey, and staff are just gonna come and the systems will just work out and the staff will take care of us. Everything will work out. And we get stuck working on the wrong shit, Joe, and instead of then planning a life, we have a business that's taking our life. And you end up working to live, Exactly working to live, living to work, rather, instead of working to live. Even Did I get that right?

Yeah, yeah. So the expression goes we work to live, not live to work. But the problem is, as a business owner, I was that guy. Like it's the worst feeling in the world, clay I mean, I'm sure you dealt with this too right when you feel like I have a certain amount of tasks. You remember the almost run through the profit first mentality where you're like I'm gonna pay all the bills first and then whatever leftovers, what I keep Yep, that's how we use to treat our time, where it'd be like I'm gonna do everything I need for the business and then anything left over my family gets. And my wife is way out of my league. She deserves more than just the leftovers of what I have. So it's important that we have to shift that mentality and I'm so glad that we did.

It all ties back to. I mean, this topic's so huge, joe, but really you said a couple of things, so let's tie into it For our clients. One of the early exercises we really have is a time management exercise, where we look at making it count, as we call it. Maybe you guys have seen this. If you're listening now or you're with us in the Facebook group, you may have seen this value piece. We'll send it out again this week tomorrow Action Wednesday. Making it count means accounting for your 24 coins a day, recognizing that that's the real currency and that I need to plan. I need to budget those coins, because if you don't, you're just gonna approach every day with a handful of coins. You're gonna wake up mad about work, start working and the coin deposits start happening every hour. This is not your traditional parking meter. This doesn't go without coins. Every time you put another hour in, another coin comes out. Next thing you know 12 coins are gone. 13 coins are gone. 14 coins are gone. We're trying to find a gap to fit in our wife or kids. Is this little action I'm doing with my hands really driving at home? Guys, we're out of coins and you're tired and you're beat up and you need to sleep and you can't. So more coins, right? If you're not sleeping, where do those coins going in?

then they usually go right back into work Like I remember doing option sheets in the middle of the night before I learned how to do them quickly where I'd be like, oh, I've got a project bid that I've gotta send in for some government facility that I'm probably not gonna get, but if I don't send all these bids out, it's not gonna work. And then the problem is your wife is like well, aren't you coming to bed? And your kids are like isn't dad coming? And the thing is you may think to yourself, well, if I don't do it, no one will do it, and the money's gotta come from somewhere. But the sad part is this you're right, the money's gotta come from somewhere, but so does the relationship with your family. That has to come somewhere too. And if you won't give it to them, where are they gonna get it from? What will they be carrying on into their futures? What will your children look for in their spouse when they see their father or their mother always working and prioritizing them last?

100%. Here's the hack for that. Again tying to make it count. I'm gonna get you guys laid right now. Guys or gals you're a list of this I'll say significant others, earmuffs we're just speaking to the one partner here right now. Take that coin, take an open time block, an open schedule, and start making a time management plan for your life, for your family and then for your business, and actually prioritize it in that way. But here's what's gonna get you frisky at home is, with the open time block, with the open schedule, go to your significant other first and say, hey, I want to plan us time for the week and over the weekend and make sure that we've got adequate connection time. Because if you don't do this, you don't feel the pressure of it because you're distracted by work. But they guarantee you feel distracted by your neglect. And whatever reason there actually is that you don't want to hang out with them actually does not make logical sense to them, because all they can perceive is your emotional disconnect from them and their needs. This is not rocket science. Guess what your staff have the same issue. It's a little different. You don't need to sleep with them. We're not trying to get laid there, but they also have emotional needs. So take that empty schedule, run it by your wife first and put her on the schedule first, or your husband first, put him on the schedule first. That's going to make them feel great. And then all you got to do is hold down that block like your life depends on it. Hold that block down, stay your ground. You ever run this exercise, joe.

Actually, yeah, I was going to say I've done a ton of different therapies in my life, but I keep saying the wife is out of my league because she stayed with me through so much neglect while I was running my own business, and I'm so grateful that I was able to learn the lessons without having to learn it the hard way. You know what I mean. Yeah, where the thought is is that you're right, if you don't take that time, it will never show up. And even worse is it's almost like an addictive cycle, right? Because I can imagine I'm going to get up at eight, or I'm going to give it six, or I'm going to give it five and I'm going to start working. Work before the kids get up. Kids go out to school, come back. Work a little bit more. Work through the day. They go to sleep, come back, work a little bit more. Yeah, your business is going to thrive. But if you're not emotionally satisfied and your relationship is not satisfied, eventually, when it falls apart, you're going to be paying for it financially, when instead you could be paying for it with your time. Yeah, so would you rather pay the time or would you rather pay the investment?

You know what. I'd rather not pay at all. I know the time's got to be in exchange, but I don't even want to look at it like a payment. I want it to appear as an investment. I want it to feel like an investment and for those reasons I really urge you guys to question what are the tasks I'm doing every day, what are the things that are draining me, and do I need to do those? Because what is the real point of building a business if you don't have the flexibility to be the architect for that business, meaning you do the designing, you control where this boat goes, where this plane flies. You get what I'm saying here. If you can't design your own role, then what the hell are we even doing?

We're living in, you say, in someone else's world.

Right, yeah, playing someone else's game, and wouldn't that be draining to you To just accept fate? And well, this is business. I have to do everything. That's insane Jumping back here because we're getting away from the team thing, but I want to get right back to it. Your team has needs too. Part of what they need is you. They need your insertion of energy or motivation. They need your skills, experience and stories. They need you to lead them with laughter and fun. They need you to lead them with sometimes a bit of a carrot and sometimes a little bit of a stick there's a good blend in leadership. But they most of all need you to lead by example, and that's what we started by saying. Right, your actions are so loud we can't hear what you're saying. If you're not leading them to a healthy schedule, which how could you? If you don't have one yourself, then where are you leading them? Joe, I have the answer to this.

Please, because we've been there. So the problem is this Imagine you yourself, as a business owner, are not taking the time because you have all these projects to do. Right, there's this that needs to be done, those need to be done. You have a whole list that never ends. Your employees probably see you burning the midnight oil, getting there early, staying late and probably complaining about it too. Now they're going to try to come to you and say Clay, I need the time. I've got a wedding in seven months. Okay, but that's right in the middle of your busy season, right in the middle of August, right in the middle of July. Your first thought is if you have to, that's not the way it's supposed to be, because what that communicates to them is if you have to be with your family and not going to work, all right, I get it. Instead, it should be. I'm so happy for you. So who's getting married? Who's the family? Congratulations, where can we?

send something. I think there's an alternative. There too, I'm open for it. The alternative could be worse. That becomes your culture and they don't want to take the time off. Someone important in their life's past is, and they don't take the time to grieve. Something important happens and they're missing it. Your family's growing up and they're missing it. Following your lead, because they look at you like a mentor, because you're the owner of your business, because you have impact and motivation and influence on these people. This is your army, your team, and you set the culture. So if you're not doing it by intention, it's going to happen accidentally. And that's almost twice as dangerous, if you ask me, because inevitably that great asset at some point will turn. They'll turn in the conflict of their own doing, led by you, and what will come forth is not the true feelings that they have, because they're not professional psychologists and first person's always the hardest. So how they're going to present is by showing up late, not showing up at all, throwing a tantrum drugs, alcohol, relationship problems and then any of the following, like it's textbook, joe. This happens all the time and they burn out and they fizzle out and their self-worth drives lower and your business suffers because they didn't have the time. Go ahead Exactly.

So a thought came to my mind. As you're going through this, I'm realizing what if we change the perspective for a moment and we say, all right, vacation may be hard for us to swallow for some Like, oh, I don't want to take it right, but let's say you're working on a generator system, take a break. We all do planned maintenance. Right, if we didn't schedule a time for planned downtime planned maintenance, I'm sure as an industrial background, you get this as well. But if you don't schedule for the planned downtime and then something instead breaks which is harder to deal with, would you rather schedule the time and have everyone in the team say, all right, we're all doing this, we're all prepared for this, compared to you run it to the rims and then it completely bottoms out on you and now you're sitting there going. Well, the team was not prepared for this, I was not prepared for this, and instead of taking a vacation, I'm now in fire control mode. So you lost the money, you lost the time, you lost the productivity, but the outcome was the same. Why not just take the time.

That's a great analogy and it was just like proactive versus reactive 100%. But when it comes to team building, there's a vast difference, because this one culture on the proactive side attracts more all stars, because it's a highly functional, productive and energetic environment where people and their time, their health and their family are respected and prioritized and people want to work there. It's not about money, guys, if we haven't figured this out. It's not just about money. Money won't get someone and money won't keep someone. Money is like just that little obstacle along the way. That lets me know that you're serious about me and my future, Not just you and yours Right Now. So on one side, the proactive can build a team and that team can continue to attract more staff and more clients. On the reactive side, I've seen this happen. A cyclical impact will happen. You may experience team growth and it may get to a certain level. But right when you least expect it, right when you need them most or the feeling is that you need them because you depend so heavily on your teams a whole washout will happen of multiple staff, because they'll all realize that health and family are more important than all these fucking hours they've been putting in because they got money in their accounts and they finally get it. The white picket fence, the house, the safety, the security, the connection amongst a culture of people that just grind their asses off isn't making them happy. All the money in their account isn't making them happy, naturally. Where does that person got to lose and what do they have to gain by sticking around?

I really don't. The problem is is that, like, money is a tool, money is not the goal, and I think a lot of people have confused that. In a lot of ways. They look at it and say like I want the white picket fence, I want to have the car, I want to have the house. Personally, I look at money as a path to freedom. You don't need to live outside your means. But at the same time, if you're only chasing money, that's all you'll end up with at the end of the race. And unfortunately, I've never seen a hearse with a toe behind. You've just never seen it, so you can't bring it with you. So why not be happy while you're here?

So here's the solution. To wrap this up, it's actually simple, and the only reason people don't do it is because it takes a little extra effort and it doesn't put money directly in your account. It's not a direct revenue generating activity, but you do get to design this company and the culture and the lives of your staff, and by paying attention to them and recognizing, hey, I need this and they do too. This is as simple as scheduling. This is as simple as, from the recruiting standpoint, putting vacation practice in play, hell. I challenge you to make it mandatory, like we do, so that your people for sure get rested, for certain get rested. And this proactive approach all comes back to guess what? Your pricing? Because it's no longer 1994, folks, it's 2024, just around the corner. My mechanic is more expensive, but guess what? He pays his guys 40 bucks an hour to stay and he gives them the time off they need. They work four day weeks because that's what they wanted. You can do that too. You can build a business, a fortress, around your vision, and you can fill it with people who share that vision with you and share that passion for life, that passion for a bit of variety in life, that passion for growth, the passion for connection and impact with your customers. You can build that fortress and it's all up to you to do it. No one's gonna do that for you, but I promise you, if you don't put the efforts towards that, everything will crumble around you. It's not sustainable, joe. We gotta crank out a couple of action items and say goodbye on this one.

I'm on, it All right. So would you rather basic or sorry, basic or all-star?

All-star today.

All right, basic sounds easy. I love it. So the biggest thing that I would recommend if you were gonna say what is the most bare minimum step that I can take, it's really just this you know that your hourly rate is associated for a certain amount of hours per week, hours per month and eventual hours per year. The thing is is that you can control that rate from the beginning. What I recommend doing is starting to allocate the bare minimum time for both you and your team. If you were gonna say just, let's say bare minimum one day, if you took one day for each one of your staff and you build it into your rate, would it be lost time or would it be productive time? My first basic action for you is this you need to establish a time on the schedule, whether you've accounted for it or otherwise, because if you don't, it's gonna come for you one way or the other. The proactive step is to say why not roll that downtime into your rate so that when you're prepared, the money lines up with it and you could say you know what, I'm taking the time and it's paid time off and it's already in the account set aside, because I know for a fact that it's ready. Even more so if I can dial in just a little bit more. Mike McCallowits produced the profit first method. You can apply this same bit towards your vacation. Imagine taking a percentage of your revenue and transferring it into a separate bank account just separate entirely. That could not be touched. In fact, you can even put a 90-day cap on it so you can't dip into it by mistake and saying this is the vacation fund. Whenever someone needs vacation, for whatever reason, you pull from that and now you know that you're not losing when someone needs to go on a wedding or needs to have a day or wants to have mental break.

Yep.

How's that for a?

basic. That's awesome, man. It's huge. You know what? It's not even just basic and we're going to tie it directly to All-Star by making this quick and easy. I'll give you a quick hack for this when you're figuring out that pricing I just take their hourly wage that you want to give. Times the 2,000 hours a year that the average person works full-time and I would consider that their salary. If you're paying someone 30 bucks an hour, you just put 60K down for your pricing. Done Now to add a little bit here add 10% for bonus and performance incentives. That way you've got money set aside to help this person vacate, as Joe said, whatever it takes to improve their well-being and essentially dangle the carrot in the direction that you want to give a positive reinforcement approach on that sound easy enough.

Yeah, I can get behind that.

That's simple. So, guys, we've just given you all the ammunition to make this happen. The only other thing you need we're going to give away tomorrow, and it's that make it count time management piece. So stick around, come back for episode 146 of Electric Printer Secrets, the Electricians podcast, where a couple of big-mose master electricians with business addictions tell you what to do every single day of the week. How to do it. It's not about control, guys. It's about absolutely providing the most value that we can, because we've been where you're at, we know how this feels, we've seen some results, and we just think you should see them too.

Amen.

Cheers to your success. We'll see you tomorrow. Take care, Jens.