Episode 147 - The Laws of Time, Biz, & Delegation

Hello, hello, hello and welcome back. It is Thursday and it is another great episode of Electricpreneur Secrets, the Electricians podcast, where your host, clay Neumeier, and my esteemed co-host, joseph the salesbot Lucani, go live with you five days a week to help you master sales, simplify pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. Today is no exception, as we run through the laws of time, business and delegation. When I say laws, I've literally got two laws to introduce you guys to today. I know Joe knows what I'm talking about. Joseph, how the hell are you brother?

I'm doing amazing. It's an awesome Thursday, but I got to admit, the little things make me happy. When we got the cadence down, perfect, I was just like, yeah, it felt good. So I'm honestly strong cup of coffee, feeling good, ready to kick this week's ass. Let's go.

We're celebrating and, if you're just joining us for the first time, we're also live in the Facebook group Electricpreneur Secrets Group. Right now People are engaging. They're saying hello. Yesterday they would have been able to get our value piece where we gave away the Make it Count Offense over Overwhelm value piece a seven page guide to help you defeat this. If you didn't hear yesterday's episode, you might want to go back and catch that one, because it's fundamental to exactly where we're taking off from today. As you know, I'm over here West Coast Canada, joe's over there East Coast United States. We're covering the whole of North America for electricians everywhere with this one. I want to start us off by talking about something that's pretty near and dear to me and you, joe, and it's the law of open cycles.

Oh my God. Yes, we need to touch on this. This is an absolute must.

Okay, so here's the law the things left undone become open cycles essentially, which are vampires to our livelihood. What does that mean, Joe?

Okay. This is so near and dear to me because if I operate on this, it's the only way I can get through the day. The law of open cycles is a concept that says if you don't do the thing, that thing will eventually drain your mental equity. So for those of you who are like, well, what does that mean? Imagine we have a to-do list If you're a business owner, you likely have a to-do list and it's probably a long flowing sheet that you can roll out like a cartoon character.

And probably still a honey-do list on top of that.

That's stapled to it.

Yeah, it's no problem, it's on the back right next to the seats.

The problem is is that when you look at that list and you don't see the things getting crossed off, but only see them being added to, how does that make you feel? Clear Overwhelmed? It's just looking at it, not even doing the thing. Just looking at it makes us overwhelmed, and the way that we handle that overwhelm, by our natural default, determines how we're going to succeed. Some people ignore it, some people try to rush towards it, some people try to complain about it. Regardless, those things need and I stress need with underlying bold italic exclamations everything needs to be off that list.

Definitely, and today's all about a tactical and a strategic approach to annihilate that list and make that list your bitch, because if we don't, what's going to happen?

Really, what's going to end up happening is not only will it drain our mental equity, but it is actually going to hinder us from receiving any sort of relief break, like anything that's going to give us any sort of relief we're not going to be able to receive because if the list keeps growing, it grows in our minds exponentially larger than it does on paper.

Totally man. Our energy is different, which means that we're received different by our clients. We're received differently, negatively, by our staff. We're received negatively, differently by your family. When you go home, at the end of the day, anyone ever feel like hitting that switch. You know the switch I'm talking about. It starts with you're getting out of the truck, you take it, or the van, rather, you take a deep breath. It's still not enough. You're still feeling the weight of the day. You're still feeling the weight of everything you didn't get done. You're still feeling the weight of all these open cycles. Next thing, you know you're walking up your pathway to your own door. You see the hedges and that reminds you that the switch still hasn't been flicked. You're staring at the hedges, you take another breath. It's still there, it's not going away. And you walk in the house and everyone's going Hi dear. They've all got the energy, excitement to see you and you're going, hey, guys.

There's a sound effect that's going into my mind at this point that I think might also help. The moment you're getting out of the van, what I heard was thuck, thuck, thuck, thuck, thuck, thuck of me opening and preparing my cigarettes to smoke. That's the first thing I haven't smoked in so long, but it's one of those things where, when you hear it, you're like, yeah, you get out of the van, you've been there all day and you're looking at the hedges and I'm like, oh, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. That's what I heard.

Totally, and for some people maybe it's a doobie, for some people maybe it's an alcoholic beverage, for some maybe something else, but for a lot of us we have this in common we're looking for a switch, a stimulant, something to just give us an edge on getting ourselves back, which, ironically, isn't what it does anyway. It actually only makes the open cycles worse.

It does, but it makes it feel better about it. And it doesn't matter how good you feel about it if the list keeps growing.

I know we've talked about the alcohol thing before and I hate to beat it to death because, hey, I still have the odd drink. I know that you don't. You've been sober for how long now.

So I've been sober since last November.

Nice Really really proud of that for you, by the way. Thank you, Because I know how difficult it is to just make a firm decision and stick to it. That's a hard thing for humans to do, but ultimately I'm always in balance and check, check and balance of why am I having this drink? A lot of times it's I want to have a drink because I want to hit the switch and I want to feel better with my evening and stop thinking about work.

That's why I would pour a double of bourbon instead of going for just the regular. Like 100%. It makes sense when people have that switch that they need to throw. It's the hardest thing to overcome because you mentally like I actually did an exercise which was do I want it or do I feel I need it? If I want it but don't need it, I can have it. If I want it because I need it, I can't.

And here's the rule that I use to follow. That same ground is in my mind. I go okay, is this me trying to hit the switch? Because if so, if this is me trying to bring happiness forward for my family to enjoy my evening more, then it's not applicable here. It's not appropriate. However, if this is me having a celebration for accomplishing a great day and finishing strong, and I'm already happy, then I'll allow myself that indulgence. That's a good call, Does that?

make sense. I like that a lot. That's actually a really noble thing.

So, when it comes to the list, when it comes to flipping this switch, when it comes to these open cycles that are draining you down, just like we spoke about yesterday, we're not actually good at multitasking. That's what the open cycles are. Think of it like on your computer, joe. I know you and I share this in common, working so much online with so many electric printers. But if you've ever had, even on your phone, your Safari or your Chrome browser and all of a sudden you realize, well, I've got 17 open windows and about nine of them have undone things and I don't want to close that, but on your computer it would start to smoke, really like the Chrome gets your computer hot, it overwhelms it. It's a huge process and every time you add a window and leave it open, you're just destined to blue screen again. I know.

And trust me, I mean, oh my God, yeah, I mean we have many times I mean you're saying that like, hey Joe, you wouldn't happen to have any blue screens in your life, right, literally. We had to learn how to get me to slow down, because I would try to do so much and have so many tabs open, because I'm relentless. I had to start closing things out and realizing, almost as Zen philosophy, I'm going to do the thing that I'm doing now until I can do it in a way of non doing, and until I get to that point, I'm going to close a damn screen.

Yeah, really important. What is that blue screen to a person and their life? What does that represent? What would that analogy be?

Okay, so everyone experiences it differently, so I can really only give my perspective of it, and I'm sure you can give yours differently. But the blue screen for me was a panic attack. It was the thought of something has happened to where now I need to stop and literally shut everything down in order to turn back on. And some people experience that differently, like, obviously, depression and anxiety is a different thing. But when you physically get your own blue screen, that is, I literally cannot do anything right now until I can step back and breathe through it or Medicaid or whatever you have to do, and then come back and figure out why the fuck did that happen? You're a look for the error code. You're like what happened, why did I get to this place, what sent me? And to understand that there's a lot of therapy and self engineering that needs to happen to find the path back to what broke the camel's back.

Totally, totally. I love that you brought that back. I was thinking the same thing. What was the straw that broke the camel's back? Which was it? Which little input overwhelmed the already Growing list of open cycles to cause that Mm-hmm? So here's the thing we don't want to just Explain what this does and how, how it feels, but also help you overcome it. So if you really made a list of all the open cycles, all the things that are being left undone, that you're not able to get through, Mm-hmm and I'm thinking of this money reference, and it happens often where I forget this person's name. But there's so many talks about how to pay your debts off. We've touched on this a couple times no yeah, so ball effect. Mm-hmm with your open cycles. The same principle applies when it comes to prioritization of tasks. Sometimes it's not like hey, let's keep chipping away at this big thing until it's done. Sometimes it's we need some freaking momentum right now, mm-hmm. And that falls under one of three categories that we're gonna actually attribute each item on this list to, and that's the fucking do-it list. Mm-hmm the do it now list. So if there are things on your list that only you can do as a metric to understand, like, who else could do this, is it just me? Would it take more to train this than it would to just get it done? Or is it a repeating task that I want someone else to do for me forever more, which I should train and take that effort towards Mm-hmm by putting these in order of how fast can I get this done and how much impact does it? Does it have Like an impact matrix? Does that make sense, joe?

Literally. I can give you a visual representation right over there. So for those of you, obviously, who haven't seen the story poster know what my office looks like. I have two whiteboards on my wall. One is high priority daily must-do right now. The other is broadband pretty much anything that's gonna go on that idea, and I have multi-colored Sharpies that I literally use to color code what priority task it is. Green, yellows and reds the greens have to be done today. They cannot close out until today is done. The yellows are I need to do them, but they can be moved to tomorrow. And the reds are usually the things that I wipe off the board because I'm either delegating them to someone else or I'm just not gonna do them because they're not productive tasks.

I Love that. You let us right into it. I love your color coding system. I know that's so effective for you and could be helpful for so many people and we've touched on it once before, I believe. But you also said this crazy word delegate, delegates, huge. We're actually gonna take this time to pivot and say something that might be pretty controversial for a lot of electricians. Joe, let me ask you this when it comes to hiring and growing your small business, your small electrical business, what's the common misconception of what people feel is the best? first hire to have in your business.

It's so funny because, like I know what you're, what we're thinking, and it's hard not to smile thinking about it, because we've all been that guy. We think, oh, I need another van, I need a guy to put in a van and we can do more jobs, or I could do my jobs faster, and then I'll get another guy and then another guy and another of it, and it grows and grows and grows. But the thing that actually needed to be first we don't think about until we had like six vans and we already need deep up to our ears in paperwork, if you get that far even yeah, or you go over, well, yeah yeah, like let's deep dive into it.

So why hire an office manager first? Office admin, csr, whatever you want to call it? This can be a blend roll at first. Much like you wear eight hats, this person can also take a lot of those hats off your head.

I can't if we speak to that.

Let me just finish this one thing for good. What the fuck is your queen B roll, mm-hmm? Excuse my French here, but you're the master electrician. How do you directly impact revenue in your business? I'm going to go ahead and give this feedback on my own, like a monologue that I often run. Your job is to attract, convert, deliver, collect. Most electrician strengths are not in attracting. Most electrician strengths aren't even in converting, but it's going to be a necessary evil, and the collecting is even awkward. There's a lot of business lessons that aren't intuitive to us, but I tell you what's got to be focused on here Converting and delivering. Oh my God, yeah, those are your two things that you have to do. It's hard to find someone else to do that for you, and if you don't have the system set up and you delegate that onto someone else, what's going to happen?

It's not going to go well because the person is not going to have the skills, the drive, the tenacity, anything that you have, your experiences, your training. You are the guy, and it's important to figure out who I need to replace myself with.

Totally. If you'll recognize then that a lot of the work you're doing like answering the phone, like any bit of marketing that you're still touching scheduling, setting calls up and all of this stuff follow up which you're not doing right. We've got a whole list called Service Leads Now which we've never given away. That's an absolute pipeline aggravator that this office person, that office manager, could be doing for you, from roles of marketing all the way to client success, following up with happy calls, following up the unsold jobs, following up unsold options, following up warranties, talking with club members. Should we continue here, all these roles that aren't being done? Sorry?

go ahead. No, no, by all means. The thing that I wanted to say was when you mentioned who the first person is and why it should be an office manager. It reminded me of a particular situation doing electric work that I was like. It screams this is the person. So for anyone who's ever had to wire a panel and you're your own business owner, like you're the one who answers the phone, like you're the new business person I remember doing panels with a headset on and my partner and I would race each other to see who could answer the phone first. The problem was is that when the phone rings, we do panels almost in autopilot. Right, I mean, you'd electric for enough years. It does not take the thought you can do this in your sleep. But then, if you have to consciously stop answer the phone, slip into your CSR process. Then take the call, put it on the calendar schedule. It then say oh yeah, where was I with the panel? You can actually have major issues like wait a second, which one of these was the multi liar circuit. Oh, was this a 20 or 15? I know it was on 14. Oh shit, which was it? And now you're doing a job that's so much harder because you can't be in the mental space that you need in order to thrive in it 100%.

We've seen it in our own clients. Man, great success with some of our clients saying that that office position being hired first just kept the schedule unbelievably full for one Totally changed the game, because now the problem is actually just managing that schedule and streamlining people through your club memberships to find your best customers first. Right, that's a good problem to have, isn't it, joe? Oh yeah, I love club memberships. So what's the reason why people are feeling against or feeling some resistance to hiring that office person first?

I can tell you my own personal beliefs, as well as what I've heard from other business owners, is that unfortunately, we have this societal pressure on us to be the guy, be the man who can do everything. So many times we, as business owners, put things on our shoulders and we believe it's almost a badge of honor to do everything. Like we'll brag and say I've got eight hats, I do the phone, the account, the install, the material, the order and you start bragging about it. But it's not something to be proud of, it's something to be ashamed of. You're doing everything when you didn't have to and you're killing yourself and your family relationships and your health and everything, just to thump your chest and say that you're that guy. If you can take the moment and step away and say I know what I'm great at and I'm going to channel everything towards that and I'm going to replace myself in the things I'm not amazing with with someone who's better than me, your business rises the whole tide and now you're operating above your competition because they're still in the muck and You're able to step out of it in a place of integrity and focus.

Yeah, totally, and I feel that people see it as a cost instead of the investment. They don't see how bringing someone in full-time to do what you're only doing half-ass is growth. That that is Refining your, your ability to reach your vision. And by Understanding all those things that were kind of mentioned before in brief about what they could be doing, they become an investment too. Like that office manager position could be 30 to 50k a year. It doesn't have to be a huge amount and they're less Technically specialized. You just need someone with a great attitude and some tech savvy to be able to run your phone system, run your CRM and Keep you guys growing. Now what happens when you're 100% focused in the field? Now you can refine your systems, now you can focus on client support and success. And when you now bring in the second van, that journey person, to help you maybe an install crew to start I would suggest You've got all the time in the world to focus on training them instead of trying to figure out how to run your business and Yelling at them over the phone for not doing what you asked them to do, because there's really no real bread come crumb trail or systems or operating procedures to follow. It's a mess and we see it time and time again. Now we're running out of time here. But to wrap up this law of open cycles, we only touched on two. There was the do it now's on your list of open cycles. There's the delegate now. So getting in, getting someone in a position to get rid of those Indirect tasks, the things that don't make you money right now, the things that aren't in your queen B role delegate that to someone. And Lastly, is the send it list, the eat crow list, the eye. Why the fuck are we doing this list? Sometimes that's relationships that don't serve you Right. Sometimes it's a task that's been sitting there, that you said yes to someone when you should have said no. So eating crow means wiping away the shame, excuse me, wiping away the shame. Making a coal or sending a message and saying I'm sorry, this no longer fits. Mm-hmm, whatever I can do to help you know, remediate this is fine, but this no longer fits. We've got to cut that shit out because things need to get done. This list keeps growing, your Overwhelmed continues and everyone around you suffers for it. Anything to add to that, joe?

I mean honestly. I just agree wholeheartedly, because it's hard to admit the things you don't have to do and it's even harder to recognize the things that you don't have to do. So that's why, when I color coded things, the reason I chose red is because I can't see red very well. So the benefit is is I'm actually using a level of color blindness to benefit it. So now the things that you're not able to see very well don't really matter when they're in that color. So if you're going to take it one step further, it's how do you even recognize the thing that's not supposed to be there? Ask yourself if I didn't do this today, what will happen If I didn't do this tomorrow? If I don't do this by end of week, if I don't do this by end of month, what will happen? Will this negatively impact my business or is it only going to impact my ego?

100% and, with that question, the fact that we're running out of time. I'm going to call that our first action item. Here's the all star action. Do the painful thing, guys Make your open cycles list and write one of those three categories all the way down and take action on something you can get done today and get momentum. And take action on something that you can cross off, eat crow and send it. That's a big list to make and it might be difficult for you guys, but make sure to do this to get out of this open cycle overwhelm. It's so important and here's what we're going to get into on tomorrow's episode. So the last episode of the week, tying perfectly into how to delegate this stuff, is something that we call the law of hindrance and what's really holding businesses back from getting off this first floor, from ever realizing the fishing test, from being bigger than just working in your business full time. What do you say, joe?

I love that. We're not going to be in the business, we're going to be on the business, and that's what really is the goal we want to get to.

Awesome, brother. Okay, guys, so thanks for joining us for another episode of Electric Pernurse Secrets, episode 147. 150 is just around the corner, so is September, and we've got some important stuff to talk about then, and that's going to continue here tomorrow, friday, my favorite day. Joe, and I cannot wait to serve you again and help you master sales, simplify pricing and deliver premium level service in your electrical business. We'll see you then. Till then, gents.