We grew because of our focus on service and relationships, which turned one-time customers into long-term relationships.
Chad Collins, Bone Dry Roofing
Josh: At what point did you decide to be your own boss? Was it something you planned for when you moved to Athens and you thought it would be the right time, or did it just come about?
Chad Collins: It really was something that just happened. What I found out is that the thing I really enjoyed was creating opportunity. I didn’t have that identified at the time, but in hindsight I can see that was what I wanted.
As we got started and began to grow and hire, it became pretty evident pretty quickly that my passion lay in how to grow and develop opportunities for other people.
Chad Brown: Once you got started, were you seeing a multi-million dollar company, or were you still just trying to build enough money to sustain the life you wanted?
Chad Collins: If I had any kind of context or any kind of vision, it was probably to recreate the roofing company I worked at before I moved to Athens. I had no vision beyond that, and I thought it was almost unattainable.
Josh: So how long did you think it might’ve taken to rebuild that original company?
Chad Collins: Maybe retirement? There was no part of me that thought I could get there in any kind of relative short term. And one of our biggest obstacles was the lack of finances or funding for what we were doing. The money from the work we were doing was what we had to fund growth.
Chad Brown: How did you get the confidence and the skill and the success for it to happen so much faster than you thought at the time it would?
Josh: I want to add to that. At some point you set a goal and decided what you thought your company could look like in ten years. And then you crushed that goal in three years. What happened from day one to crazy momentum, explosive growth, to hitting your goal in three years? How did you get to that big goal? What changed?
Chad Collins: Several things. We’ve talked in the past about Traction and the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and I don’t think there’s anything unique about Traction in and of itself over other operating systems out there. What attracted me to that book was that our growth came from us committing fully to this process. Had we committed to another system, I think the results would’ve been the same, but this is the one we chose and it stuck.
It wasn’t the specific process we chose so much as the act of following a process and committing to doing what we said we’d do.
This was the first time that we as an organization really sat down and spent the time and energy to clarifying and writing down what we wanted to do. And that is a huge step.
It was the first time we got really intentional about claiming where we wanted to go. It also was the first time that there was a real clear understanding that we couldn’t get there by ourselves.
One of the steps in this process was creating a leadership team. It was a very simplistic model, really easy to understand. It was very easy for me to envision this being implemented in our organization.
So in order to create this leadership team you had to find an Operations, a Sales, and a Finance + Admin person who could take the lead on those three areas. They’d have people reporting to them about everything that flowed through those boxes. It was these three core business functions that made perfect sense for us.
Chad Brown: Was bringing on these people a financial risk at the time? Obviously a leadership team isn’t going to be out there putting on roofs, so they have no immediate income, they’re an expense item from the start. Were you all in a place where that was comfortable or was that an entrepreneurial risk?
Chad Collins: We looked at where we were going over the next several years and saw the need for these people and considered bringing them on as another version of a “gear upgrade,” so to speak. It felt scarier because the numbers were bigger, but it was the same concept. We weren’t introducing new risks or bringing on additional services, just creating ways to do more of what we already were doing successfully.
So part of the Traction process is writing out a ten-year goal. And we got a year or two into this process and we were seeing success. The things we had started lining up were happening.
And the biggest realization that hit me in the middle of all this was that we were getting to a point where we would have to be careful with our leadership team because they didn’t necessarily sign up from day one to be going where we were going or doing what we were doing.
Chad Brown: So you were realizing that your technicians had to turn into managers or leaders and you had to reevaluate whether they had the capacity for those kinds of roles? What was your success rate with that process?
Chad Collins: There are individuals who are just wired to handle whatever comes their way. Then there are others who won’t be convinced or sold on the idea that it’s a better way, so either they’ll walk on their own or over time they’ll cause enough friction that you’ll show them the door. We had some people who adapted and are still with us and people who left.
We also had a leadership team member leave for that same reason. He liked things the way they were and decided one day that the new version of the company didn’t fit him the way he wanted. And it was hard but it was absolutely the right thing. We understood going in that change was part of the deal.
Somewhere in the first year and a half, we saw that the ten year target had not been a big enough target. And that ten year target is supposed to be almost unattainable, just a “throw it out there.”
The way we managed the momentum building we had boils down to the fact that with more work creates the need for more supervision and more labor. We’ve always tried to lead growth with sales and estimating, so that became the first place we hired.
For us we realized early on that there was never an off-season for hiring, because by the time you need somebody, it’s too late. We are constantly searching and looking and interviewing team members.
Josh: With the scaling, did the size of the jobs you were going after change dramatically, or did you just start producing more of the same thing you had been producing?
Chad Collins: Yes. To both.
We did not intentionally start working for bigger work, larger revenue, or larger square footage jobs. But we started doing larger jobs around the same time that our growth really took off, and I know there was a correlation.
Once we started the ball rolling on the side of hiring, there was no slowing it down. We had made the commitment to hire labor and then purchased equipment for the labor, so we had to find more work to keep the labor we hired and trained.
So once we did one huge job, we somehow found ourselves in the environment to pick up more work of the same size. It all happened all at once. The economy was good, there were just a lot of right time, right place, right opportunity things happening for us and we rode the wave.
Chad Brown: You’ve managed to keep the “pedal to the metal” on both the hiring and the sales side, which is extremely difficult. And to be able to do that is a great growth skill to have.
Chad Collins: That’s been a deliberate approach. The tendencies for small businesses are that you sell, get a hit, sell, get a hit, then over time the sales person is selling less because they’ve started managing the projects they’ve already sold, but that project will eventually end and they’ll be in a dead zone.
We knew that we couldn’t let that happen, so we had to minimize the project management function for our sales people to keep them focused on getting more work and opportunity and keep the ball rolling.
These are the things that can be scary in the beginning, but at the end of the day it’s just math.
My advice to entrepreneurs: if you are not happy where you’re at, make the intentional effort to figure out where it is you want to go. Take a day and write down the roadmap to where you want to end up.
Resources:
“Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” by Gino Wickman : https://amzn.to/3cbJypF
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