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Make Trades Great Again
Balancing Time & Tasks as a Small Business Owner
Ever felt bogged down by the chaos of running a business single-handedly, juggling between field operations and office tasks, with last-minute schedule changes throwing you off balance? You’re not alone. Join us as we draw from our own experiences and unravel effective strategies to manage time and streamline operations. It might surprise you to learn that Cheryl spends half her day just on scheduling, but we'll let you in on how managing it right can make a huge difference.
What if you had a magic tool to help organize your business, from scheduling to invoicing, and everything in between? Hold tight, as we introduce you to the life-changing benefits of software in business operations. Restocking, cleaning up the truck, staying organized... these all may seem mundane yet crucial aspects of fieldwork, but imagine all those ticking off smoothly with the right software. Yes, the initial investment might seem intimidating, but trust us, it's worth every penny.
We wrap up this episode on a powerful note, highlighting how effective time management, boosted with the power of software, can skyrocket your closing rates. Imagine the difference between a successful job and a failed one, just a click away. This journey does come with its own learning curve, and diligence in software setup becomes indispensable. So gear up to embrace this change and transform the way you manage your business. You'll not just survive, but thrive!
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Eric Aune @mechanicalhub
Andy Mickelson @mick_plumb
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Two, one we are recording. It's on. It's on, Andy how you doing, man, I'm doing good. How you doing, eric? I'm doing good, I'm doing good. It's not our usual day to record. Today it's like I'm I feel like I got like this weird bout of energy, like going at this even more, all amped up as if, yeah, as if I'm not excited on the days that we normally would yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, geez oh and there's your intro to the Make Trades Grading and podcast. Everybody thanks for joining us, Andy. Let's talk about something that's been on my mind and we were just kind of off air going through some notes on this, but I was just, you know, putting together notes, up coming topics to talk about. One of them was more or less how could I summarize it? Just time management, as like as the one man, one, you know, one woman kind of operation or not just one person, but when you're in the position, as you are as well actually, with you know you have three guys working for you, but and you have your wife and you operating the business. But I feel like the time management topic and just breaking it out on our businesses, where we're out in the field working the tools but also having to operate the business, you know, get the bids, get the calls to come in, that kind of stuff, and so I broke it out into some bullet points you and I did before we hit record, so we're hopefully a little more organized.
Speaker 2:We're maybe at least talking about the same afternoon of work. Yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:So basically, I wanted to like okay, you got two buckets right, and then those buckets are one is your field work, yeah, and then one is your office work. And so if I, if I kind of oversimplify the office side of things, and I mean this so anybody listening, I'm I know I'm glossing over the details here but like, basically, you've got kind of, let's say, four or five major tasks. Each one of those could be broken down and we're not going to get into that, but the like, basically, you've got to get the phone to ring and you've got to answer the phone, yeah, right, so that's going to be your marketing or whatever you're going to do, but you're responsible. Like, you got to get that going.
Speaker 2:Yeah, your website SEO, all that stuff is all the responsibility of the owner at that point.
Speaker 1:Social media if you're going to do it, all that kind of stuff, and it's a, it's a lot, it's a lot, you know you've got to acknowledge that there's no doubt about it.
Speaker 2:You know what's? What's interesting is probably one of the least, uh, or the not the least, probably one of the most neglected parts of our business. Yeah, um, and I say that just because I don't like it's not an active part of like. I know I'm going to go out and make a post on my Google business account because I should, because it would make me money. Yeah, and I don't, and I mean I don't know, about once a year I'll be like oh, I haven't done this in a year and I'm going to do it, do some sort of post and put a picture on there. I'm like, you know, I'm going to get really good about this and I'm going to do this every day.
Speaker 1:I'm going to do this once a month and I feel like you're inside my head right now speaking the words that it's so crazy. How, how, that is the same, so okay.
Speaker 2:Here's how much I pay for my Google business $0. $0 too. It's the freest thing you can do.
Speaker 1:Same same. Uh, no, you know what? We are paying indirectly. We're losing money, right, Right, okay, uh, on that note, I'm looking at my honey plumbing Facebook page and my last post is September 20th, 2022, nearly a year ago, yep, so basically it is a year. I mean, let's just call it is. And here I am, this dude that's like lives on social media. That's into social media. A little bit Just kind of into it a little bit.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah, crazy, but anyway.
Speaker 1:So yeah, acquiring the business base, acquiring uh leads, business marketing, answering the phone, which is a huge, huge task really, when, ultimately and one of the most uh important because, honestly, the the most work you lose is probably by not answering the phone Um, yeah, definitely, and following up on those calls and things like that, definitely.
Speaker 1:Then, of course, in the office side of things, the scheduling and the estimates. I kind of put those two together, okay, um, because I I kind of look at like in my head compartmentalizing these things, like put them in their own categories scheduling a job, scheduling an estimate going out and to do the estimate, taking the time to put that information together and share it with the cut, like that all is just like the same task to me, right? Uh, if I had somebody come into the office and work for me, I think the very first thing that they would uh have to learn, and we would learn together on the best, most efficient way to do it for my business, would be uh, estimates, yep, and, and you know, uh price book kind of stuff, and then just the scheduling like of time literally for logistics. Um, I mean, I would even answer the phone if I had somebody doing that side of everything. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Well, and I, so I would say, and I'd have to ask her, I would say that, cheryl, probably I would bet scheduling is a 50% of a day task.
Speaker 1:Well, just talking with her, uh, you know, in conversation and spending time around the two of you, I would. I would guess that that's a completely accurate statement. I feel like you guys are always working on like how to, how to get the next thing that needs to be finished for, or the next thing that needs to be in line for your, your guy, as he's finishing up the job he's on right now. That kind of right.
Speaker 2:And and that that's. That's one of those things. Um, that one of those, the little tasks that that a lot, a lot of people don't understand is, is how difficult it is to to maintain a flexible schedule. Um, you know, or flexible enough that you can get to an emergency call? You can get to, you know, or get to just hey, um, you're supposed to go to John's house and John just called and said he had a meeting, he's not going to be there. Can you come this afternoon? Yeah, yeah, and then you go.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, you know, on on the one man show side of it, you can go oh, yeah, uh, no, I've got something this afternoon. Or maybe I can move this afternoon schedule to this morning and I can do John this afternoon. And and sometimes that works out, when you put three or four guys on the schedule or text on the schedule, it all of a sudden you you've gained some flexibility, but sometimes it almost like hinders how you do it, because you might have certain projects that are going to be multiple people Locked up for three days.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, when you're one man show, you could also have like all day projects. Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2:It wouldn't allow you to move around. Yeah, yeah, absolutely it's tough.
Speaker 1:I think that's probably one of the bigger challenges I have, and, as I don't want to get too deep into that, but to acknowledge what you're saying, like, absolutely, I think one of my biggest challenges is how do I service customers and remain available as needed, you know, because a lot of times things are not emergencies, and so, although they may be in the head of your customer, you can usually talk through that initial interaction and be like, yeah, you know, look, we can take care of this, but it's going to be, you know, a day or so or whatever, but it's, I think. What added to that, though, is the idea that I have a project going, you know, 10 miles from my shop and somebody 30 miles calls me and it's like fix a leak under a sink, yeah, and the project 10 miles from my shop is three days of installing a boiler, so, like, where am I?
Speaker 1:going to make money, right, you know yeah. Yeah, you get $30,000 at this job or you have $225 at this point Exactly, that's a really hard part, because I do have a limited amount of time, so where do you spend the time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's hard. The thing that we've looked at, and I think probably the takeaway from the $225 job, is that, in the years that we've been doing this, if we take that $225 job and figure out how to make that work, one we've taken and we've capitalized on that lead. We've capitalized on that customer, you know coming, you know making the opportunity to call us and say, hey, we'd like to give you the opportunity to do this workforce. We trust you to come do this workforce. Yeah, and in the process of doing that, before we started recording, we were talking about like, costs of like, how do you figure out your hourly rate?
Speaker 2:You know, and there's so many of these things that inflate or whatever, and I think so much of keeping that lead, whether it's an existing customer or a new customer, but keeping that lead to be making each lead be as profitable as possible. Right, because in a roundabout way, you're going to spend money on every one of those calls. You don't, yeah, I mean you're not indirectly or directly saying hey, I want to call for 225 this afternoon or 200 or for, you know, 230 this afternoon because I have an opening. I'm going to find something for that slot. I mean, you're just hoping the phone rings at that point, or calling somebody on your list that you maybe weren't able to fit in last week and say, hey, did you get that taken care of? You know, we, we had an opening, and or we you know whatever, and I find myself doing that a lot.
Speaker 1:Um, I I feel like I'm thankful and, in a way, that customers are willing to text with me because that's feels like that's a form of communication. In this whole time management discussion of you know like, how do I, as a one man, show like, navigate these, you know these, um change last minute changes and schedule and stuff like that, cause that's really what sucks a lot of time out of your week honestly, and it happens all the time.
Speaker 1:You're not immune to it and, as a one man show, any more than you are with you know, 10 guys in the field, right, yeah, like you, it's just as likely. Well, not statistically, but you know what I mean. You're, you're going to encounter uh situations more than one time in a week where you're like, oh crap, I got a. You know they, they, they miss scheduled on their end and now I'm not, you know, welcome at their house until tomorrow. Or we got to reschedule for whatever you get it, right, yeah? Or just the idea where, uh, I just got a text while we were talking this morning already, um, from the supplier and he's like, look, your, your stuff isn't all here. I said it was going to be all here. It's not all here. It's not going to be all here until next, you know, tuesday, five days from now. And that's just the way it is. Yeah, you know. So what does that mean? That means the job that I had scheduled on Monday is now delayed until at minimum if the stuff comes in on Tuesday, until at minimum Wednesday, right? So now we're moving things around. It happens all the time, but that management of your time and how you handle it is is, um, really going to be what keeps you going.
Speaker 1:So like I kind of put that scheduling SMS together as one kind of bucket on this bullet point list. But the things that helped me stay on task we're going to get to, but I already mentioned one of them. Just like, being able to quickly communicate with your customer is super huge and there's some really good ways to do that. We can get into that in a minute, but I want to keep going on the list. Um, then you've got like as your office tasks as you're running your business. You've got and very simplified, you know list here the invoicing and bookkeeping. So like to me that's kind of like the same thing. Like, uh, you've got to do all your billing. You've got to then take in all you know there's, there's not, it's not one-sided here, you don't just get to send them a bill and then all of a sudden, everything magic happens in the background.
Speaker 1:Your bills are paid and the money goes in the bank. And you've got to. You know everybody like somebody comes in like the tooth fairy at night and like says this is what you had for your monthly expenses and here's where it was on each job and here's how much time.
Speaker 2:you know all of that you've got to do here's, here's, here's the position where the gazintas have to be greater than the gazoutas. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a little John Barbara reference there. And then you've got I think we both agreed like then, as part of the office task, you have to then consider like like the material ordering, and you know inventory, let's say, but like keeping, yeah, keeping the trucks or truck stocked, knowing what you have, and like staying on top of that, like that's not a nobody, nobody is directly. Like your customers don't know they're paying you for that, but like you're not billing them directly for like oh, you want your water heater, yeah, I'm going to bill you one hour of my like restocking time that I spend in a week or something. That doesn't. You know it goes into your hourly rate, but you know what I mean. And so like that's part of your admin, your office, kind of running the business side of things, so like there's a kind of. So you got answering your phones, getting the business coming in, you know basically marketing and being the face of your business, and then scheduling and estimates. Then you've got invoicing and bookkeeping after the work is done or kind of as you go all the time, and then you know staying on top of things so you can do your job. You have to have certain material in place. You know you can't be running to the supply house every time you get a call, like that's the most inefficient thing you could possibly ever do. I know when I started out I used to do that all the time. Yeah, we just talked about that with like Denver the other day. You know, like in a recent episode, just like how much you're going in and out of supply houses, stuff like that, but not even to get into that, let's get to the fieldwork or like the next kind of part of the job and that's the fieldwork, right.
Speaker 1:So like in my case and in yours too, like you're spending more time admin, you know in the office organizing, bidding, you know ordering that kind of thing and then helping you know logistics with the, with the guys out in the field, but ultimately you're still out turning wrenches too, and in my case no money is being made in looking for a job. No money is being made unless I am out turning to wrench, right, right. And so the fieldwork is probably well, it's not even close, it's it's number one to everything else I do. Like I spend more time 10 times maybe doing the fieldwork. I spend way less time on the admin stuff than I used to, and we're going to get into that in a minute but then you've got. So you've got your fieldwork, like literally doing the job. But then what did? What else did we say there? You've got like restocking the truck, not not ordering the materials and everything like we've already talked about, but like restocking and cleaning up. Cleaning up.
Speaker 2:Organizing Yep.
Speaker 1:Or, yeah, all of that stuff that really, ultimately, if you, if you're good at it, you see a huge benefit from it. Yeah, if you're not good at it, then you're going to argue with me till I'm blue in the face that you need to be better at it, but whatever, yep, I think that you know, just to get, not even to just touch on that, but like the efficiency is affected Definitely If you're not staying on top of things like keeping the truck organized and, yeah, making sure you have those materials and then not going to the, you know, to the hardware store in the middle of the day or something like that. But anyway, right, but you know. So ultimately we come down and I don't want to like hang our hat and walk away on this, but like the things that helped me stay organized and stay on top and manage my time best in each one of these categories, for the admin stuff is by far the software that we've started using over the last couple of years.
Speaker 1:Like I know we've talked about this a hundred times. Right, it feels like, but can you even imagine, andy, like today, going backwards and doing it the way you used to do it? I know I, or maybe I should. I feel like I led you with that question Right.
Speaker 2:You know it's fine. I can't. I would be distraught.
Speaker 1:I think if that's the appropriate work you could be like oh my God, I can't do this. What are we going to do? This is the worst thing. Sell the house, quit.
Speaker 2:We're out, quit, we're peace and out. Yeah, I think it totally is. It totally is one of those pieces of tech that we have at our disposal that is generally underappreciated, and I, you know, knowing the struggles from like where you know, those different pieces of software that we've used in the past moving towards where we're at, the amount of time it has allowed us to spend in other places is huge.
Speaker 1:I. It takes some time to build this stuff up, but the first initial hurdle I had was for years, thinking that this stuff cost me money. Right, oh, software, you know, service tighties and house call pro Watered some of the field edge all these things and you see these like fancy looking things. They must. They're fancy looking. They must be expensive, must be have to be expensive. Yeah, it's some of our. I've got quick books, that's all I mean, obviously, and then I don't even know how to run your quick books.
Speaker 2:So like right, I don't even use quick books anymore. I don't ever touch it. I, that's, that's Cheryl's realm and I, yeah, and I it's. It's interesting for me to have stepped out of that. I mean, I the only thing I do now is give you know, give her help, if you know. She's like, hey, I got this account screwed up. Can you, can you look at this and see what I'm missing? And then I'll go in and, you know, put a different set of eyes on it. But that rare is About the only time I'm in quick books anymore.
Speaker 1:I bet you, it's been two months since I logged into mine.
Speaker 2:I can't even get it to log in on my computer because our network between the two computers doesn't like it. I'm like I guess can't log into quick books. Yeah, that's the only thing that doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Well, we say okay, but we are, you and I are both using save software. They don't sponsor us or anything everybody listening. They don't give us a debt, they don't give us a dollar discount, they don't give us money to talk about this. We're truly talking about this to anybody it's willing to listen to my benefit, because we, we are benefits.
Speaker 1:So, like we talk about the price, initially I for years thought this was like oh my god, I can't afford something like that. That sounds expensive and you know what. I'm just gonna come out and tell everybody right now I pay 200 bucks a month For this software that I can guarantee you. I can't guarantee it. That's a stupid saying in my head. I can guarantee you that I earned that money back on almost every single job. Yeah, yeah, the amount of the amount of work I've won and understood and Learn how much money I can can make and what I wasn't making before, like in my small, little simple business, solely because of this software. Yeah, I make that money back on almost every single like normal Half-day job, would say you know right, right, yeah, no, we.
Speaker 2:I look at it the same thing at the same token, and go the amount of time that we've that we have Not spent Sending or like Just scheduling and and spent on the phone talking with customers about, oh hey, we're coming on this day. Yeah, just the text message that the software sends when we schedule a job, yeah, in my mind In the first week pays for whatever it is that we, we charge for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, little things that feature. Yeah, well, that's a. That's a great point, you're right. Well, I've got you know, only myself to pay, and everything like that. But yeah, I think also to just understanding and seeing all of the the pricing, like having a price book and building that price book and Seeing what margins are, understanding what that is and seeing how changing prices On both your labor side and your material costs and things like that changes how much money you're making. Seeing, like, just like that spelled out there. Right, like huge for me.
Speaker 1:But that's aside from, how do we like manage our time? Like you're talking about time, like Not spending a ton of time going back and forth with customers, like tracking people down. Like are you kidding me in 2023? It is everybody's as busy as they've ever been. Ever Nobody's been busier today than they were. You know they're busier today than they were yesterday, right, and so, like just trying to communicate with people in the hundreds of ways people are already trying to pull on you, yeah, able to send like automated messages and stuff like that and get replies back and forth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, hey, can I schedule by tick tock yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:And so, like it's funny, you bring up that text message thing, because that's what I wanted to say about like the, the estimates and scheduling and everything like that, and sure, communicating I brought up already. Like, uh, just texting somebody and saying like, hey, uh, changes schedule, can we make it this time? Or whatever. Yeah, uh, I, I do that all through house call pro, like you as well do, and so that. And here's why because a, I don't need that. You know my own text message app, like my own iMessage, being so full of customers text, like I don't know when we talked that I can't remember where it's a million texts in there already. Then, all of a sudden, your phone is full with texts. You know what I mean. Right, you gotta, you gotta delete some of these texts so you can keep using your phone or something you know. I mean, I've literally had that happen. Um, but the uh, it, I'll put them right in the software, which is just as easy to navigate as it is my text messages, to be honest with you.
Speaker 2:Well, and I guess the thing I I I find Beneficial from that, from using, utilizing that, like I don't want customers to text me on my phone no, I don't, you know and the the benefit, the reason for me, the primary reason for me, is is when I'm out in the field working with the tools, I'm working on a job for a customer who's paying me to be there doing that and they're not paying me to come be running my job so that I are running my business In their base, so that I can make you have right, make money For someone else or, you know, make money charging somebody else. That's not why I'm trying to get my money out of there. I'm trying to get my money out of there. I'm trying to get my money out of there.
Speaker 2:Okay, and somebody texts me and then we get this routine, pretty routinely, where I'll have a customer that'll be like, oh, I have Andy's cell phone number because he called me to ask a question, so I'm going to text him. You know, a job request on this Right. And so then I'll get this text and I'm like, okay, all right, well, whatever, I'm going to be here till 530 tonight. And then at 530, I look at my phone and I'm got, you know, 17 text messages and I'm like you know what? No, these, why are you know? Why are these people calling my phone? We have an office. Yeah, you know, and sometimes it gets frustrating on my part because you know it's like over and over and over again. You say, hey, would you call the office to schedule? And now I've got an automated Reply. Quick reply yeah, you want something. Here's the number.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well and that's a great time management tip too Like, if you've got the ability to push that off onto somebody else, then you should be doing that Right. I'm constantly like, like my voicemail is telling people if I can't answer the phone and it's unfortunate if I can't, but if I can't answer the phone, then obviously my voicemail is picking up and it tells people text, text me. That's nothing new. I mean, a few years ago people would be like are you telling your customers to text you? And I'm like, well, in this case it's way more efficient than listening to a voicemail calling them back, you know they didn't reply.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or they didn't answer yeah, yeah. But having all those messages. Basically so, when you've in your software, when you've got a customer established, you've got their information, you've created a file for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they can text you in this and that is. It's all in one spot. I'm just incredibly surprised how much of a difference that has made. But it's also like I'm not going to say that having this software or anything doesn't anything like I don't have to follow up with customers or anything like that, because I do. But when I send them an estimate I can see when they've viewed it. That's huge. I can see that it was delivered, I can see that they've opened it and then I can also give them the opportunity to accept an estimate.
Speaker 1:So let's say I wasn't there on site and it was just a transaction over the phone. Right, maybe it's an existing customer and I'm like, hey, we need this. You know, no problem, I'll send you a couple proposals and just take a look at them and whichever one you're happy with or, if you know, we can discuss it. But if you're happy with it, just hit the approve button Right. That approve button right there alone gets things rolling on my end.
Speaker 1:I started ordering materials, we're scheduling, they're going to send me a deposit, depending on the size of the job, and that alone, for time management, is huge. Having things done for you automatically in the background, no matter how small of a task it is, is now allowing me to walk in the door at the end of the day, give Heather a big old hug and smooch, you know, because she's always just waiting for me, like you know, the fifties and uh no, just kidding, getting home and petting the dog and be like I got five, 10 minutes before I got to like continue working for a little bit. Yeah, is huge because of those little things that do take five or 10 minutes, but they add up when there's 10 or 15 of them. Oh yeah. And now all of a sudden I've got jobs like sitting there waiting for us to schedule and stuff. But they you know the logistics are are some of the little details are taken care of. That'll save you so much time right right there.
Speaker 1:That 200 bucks man, it's nothing yeah.
Speaker 2:Um, I, I, I couldn't agree more with it. I mean, we, we pay because of the employees and a couple of the other things that we've added onto it. I don't even know what it is. It might be double that, but it's still. I mean, just like you're saying, I mean it, I look at it and go whatever it's out. I done been sure. Where do I pay? Can I pay for the year?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know, I know. I mean, if you give me five bucks off of a pay you know for the whole year, um, like I wouldn't even ask for it it's it's been so incredibly beneficial and off air. We were talking about it and you know the amount of money you spend on it is like I've said already in this recording. You said you would be distraught without it. It would just up and basically everything you guys are doing and how much it's improved things for you over the last almost two years or whatever.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to say I'd pay double for it because I don't want them to double my price, but I'll tell you what I'm serious when I say to people and I've said it in many DMs, people listening to have heard me say this or they've read my text with them like, look, I make that money back day in and day out it is. It has been such a minimal investment for me because of how much it's my return is in. I wish I could take that. I wish I could take a hundred grand and put it into the stock market and get even even one tenth of the return that I'm getting out of it, my monthly fee that I pay for this. It's crazy. It's crazy, yeah, but and it is about the money you know people want to. People say, well, you know, you know you're spending more money, so are you really making more? No, I'd spending a very minimal amount of money. It's coming back. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Right. Well, I mean, you look at that, that same same token, and say, well, okay, let's, let's just go back to your. You know your monthly, you know $200 a month. There are, I would say, a very, very high number of people, high number of families in this country who pay more than that a month for cable TV.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, what's that for you? Yeah?
Speaker 1:Think about that. Is that making you money?
Speaker 2:You know, or whatever I mean there's, it's, it's, it's a stat, it's not, it's not a huge amount for the, for the amount of organization that it brings. And and I think that you know, going back to, like you know, your, your primary topic, you know, like, how do you organize your time? All of all of these things that you're talking about just require you to be diligent. Yes, like you said, there's time spent setting the software up. When you get it out of the box, it is like overwhelming, like, oh my God, how do I do this, how do I, how do I get from where I'm at to making this thing work for me? And I would say I mean to this day, we're what, 18 months in now? Yeah, and I would say there are still things that I tweak weekly.
Speaker 1:I'm doing it all the time. I'm not even looking at it as much as you are. I don't even look at it, almost like I wouldn't say every single day Am I in, I am touching on it here and there, interactions with customers more than I am the rest of it, and then I'm not saying you know what I mean. I think it's. It's made my job so much easier that I don't have to constantly be in that software constantly to do every. You know what I mean. Yep, no, you're right, it is a little daunting, but you know we got that message in our DMs the other day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, asking about that's kind of what prompted this conversation.
Speaker 1:Right, and a friend of ours that follows along, listen to the show for a long time, message and says like how do you guys send the estimate?
Speaker 1:I was listening to the episode how do you guys send the estimate before you leave, and it made me realize like that's actually a really big deal. We made a big deal of it saying it in their conversation. But if you stop and you from this, from this guy's perspective, he's like well, I've been doing this, I know what I'm doing, you know, but I have to go back to my office, I have to look up the pricing and all this stuff. And I think you don't actually, because if you do that, if you stay on top of that and you input it into the software, like I'm literally standing in people's basements looking at their project going OK, here it is and I'm punching in my phone of all things. Yeah, maybe it's a little better for you as an iPad or something, but I can. I can, I can, with confidence, give them a proposal on a job within minutes, literally in our first interaction or first face to face meeting, and the closing rate because of that is like just so incredibly high.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:it is much higher 80, 90 percent at times, where it's like are you? And that the most successful companies service, especially those companies. That's their primary like, number one reason they're able to sell jobs, because they're able to not only support it on their end they're very capable, very sure, well built companies but because they're literally there with the price now I can do it, we can do it tomorrow, you ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is how much it costs, and that's huge. It's literally as simple as walking into the fast food joint order in a hamburger.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's a menu.
Speaker 2:It's a menu menu price, oh, you want, you want. What do you want on your burger? Oh, you want two patties and cheese, and you know. And no tomato. Yeah, we got you fam.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, you want a heater with a new shut off valve and you oh, you want to leak detection system.
Speaker 2:No problem here you go, yeah, yeah, talk about time management right there alone.
Speaker 1:Right, I look we're getting long in this, but just to drive that home, yeah, what a small investment that. Ultimately, I think I look at it as a small investment because of what I get out of it. Sure, put it that way, you're, you're not wrong. There is time involved. It takes a time to build up to this point to where you yourself would be walking around telling everybody you got to do this because that's how I get this, probably what we're at. We're probably a year and a half into using this, and I used one for a year prior to that.
Speaker 1:Sure, and I think it was a good time to start using this. It was a good time to start using this. It was a good time to start using this. Yeah, I think that's what I really like about this. I think it's a good time to start using this, yeah, so I think you and I are both at you and Cheryl and me and Heather and like we're finally at a point where like, okay, this is really, really working, yeah, yeah, and that's why I wanted to share so time management.
Speaker 2:Look at that stuff and look at how you can do things better, and I promise you, if you're not using something like this, this is a little bit of a daunting task as well. I was being able to be like how am I going to? So the only way I'm going to know if this works is if I put my feet in the water like up to the neck. Yeah, you know, I'm in the kiddie pool, you know, with just about ready to drown, and we're going to do this for 30 days. We're going to legit give this a try for 30 days.
Speaker 1:When we did the first one, heather and I, I said I'm going to do it for six months, yeah. And we thought like, oh my God, you're spending that much money for six months in a row. And yeah, honestly, it was like a month and we're like, oh, yeah, that's totally cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, oh boy.
Speaker 2:But yeah, that's, that's. That's kind of where you got to go. It's just you got to, you got to trust in the system for a little bit and then, and then you'll figure out the kinks and and, and I think the biggest thing, that that I see, you know, having people DM us and ask about this or well, how did you get around this? Is as a as a business owner. You have to understand that you have to be flexible on how you operate your business because, largely you may be, you may have developed habits or or work routines to work with what you have now. Right, yeah, and then you're going to put a piece of software in place that's going to say, well, you can't do that. What do you mean? I can't do that. You know that's. This is how I run my business.
Speaker 1:Well, it's like there's. It's likely that the new way is a better way.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, yeah, yeah, the. Why are you doing it that way? Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's what. That's what it's really trying to tell you, dummy, why or what?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're what you want to use how many Google platforms to do this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Oh okay, you're scheduling through email. How, what, right yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh boy, all right, dude, all right, that's it Good topic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm passionate about it. It's helped me a ton and I hope it helps somebody. I mean, honestly, I hope we have three people that listen to this and be like I'm screwed, I'm going to try it. Yeah, and thanks everybody for writing in and sending us your topic ideas and your questions and, of course, if you don't know already, hit us up over in the DMs on Instagram.
Speaker 1:There's a link right to our accounts in the show notes on your podcast app You're listening to yeah and start your message with the letters M, t, ga. Make trades great again, mtga. If you do that, it's so easy for us to find you and respond and use your information to make things better on the show. We appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Yep, all right, you'd shout out to a Sylvan, over there at Forrest City plumbing for DM, and so thank you yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for mentioning that man. All right, take it easy Later.
