If you want to grow your trades business into more than a job, if you want to grow it into something that can survive without you and make you money while you’re not there, if you want to get that magic thing called “leverage” which is when you can earn enormous amounts more than you could ever on your own by leveraging the labor and the work and the power of other people. And if you want to be able to step back from your business, and get out of the nitty-gritty, and the day to day, and build a cool thing in a business (not a house) rather than building a house then you’re going to need to use a framework to help you do that.

And:

1. I mean the bones
2. I mean by supporting structure
3. I mean the stuff other people have built before you so that you don’t have to start from scratch and think of it all yourself.

I’m Jon. I’m from Small Fish Business Coaching. I run a program called the ‘Tradies Toolbox’ and it’s for business owners of trades businesses who want to grow and scale, who want to make more money, who want to get more control, who want to work less hours or fewer hours, who want to be less in the nitty-gritty and working ON their business instead of IN the thick of it. And I use this framework here every single time with every client. What we do all day long is build these machines that I’m about to explain to you.

RECOMMENDED READING: You’re a bottleneck. What should you do? See what Jamie did.

So here we go.

You need a marketing machine. You need a machine that does marketing for you without you having to pick up a phone and call people and ask for work, without you having to do everything yourself, and it needs to find work for you to bid at, use to find leads, or enquiries, or opportunities. Jobs for you to quote.

You need to build a Sales machine that gets those quotes, all those opportunities, all those enquiries, puts them through a process and turn some of them into jobs you can do, win some of them at decent margins, without too much stress, without you doing your quotes at night.

You need to build an Operations machine that does that work, that does those jobs all those projects reliably, consistently, without many defects, on time, and on the budget that you did in your quote. If you’re quoting $50,000 and taking $60,000 worth of hours, you won’t win.

You need to build a Back Office or an administration machine that kind of holds it all together… That pays your bills, that collects your money, that raises your invoices, that pays your guys, gets you set for your tax and pays your tax, that does your books so you know how much tax to pay, that pays your insurances, that meet your compliance obligations for safety and for your employees, all that stuff.

And you need to Look After Yourself. We need to help you be efficient, and effective, and focus on the right work. And we need to help you delegate some of the wrong work away to other people in a managed way. We need to help you get over the control issues that you’ve probably got, that has probably got you to where you are now.

And we need to help You Manage Your Team so you’re a leader and a manager, and so you set the right culture in your business, and so that those people you employ do good work for you because they want to and because they know what good work is.

So there you go. That’s my framework in brief. That was what? Two minutes.

• You need to build a Marketing machine to find the work
• Sales machine to win it
• Operations machine to do it
• Back-office machine to glue it all together
• And you need to manage those people, you and your team
• And you need to build all those machines so they’re not just you.

We need to be extracting you from them. If it’s to be big enough, if it’s ever to grow, it can’t be you in every machine doing everything. That’s how you get leverage.

So guess what?

I’m running a workshop. If you can make it, then happy days. I’d love you to come. There’d be a link down the bottom for you to click on if you want to check it out.

Learn More about Tools Down Workshop

And if you can’t, I’m sorry.

Why don’t you book yourself an appointment with me and I’ll chat through this in a bit more detail.

See you later!