You dependent on your team for your success. It’s important to remember that.

A trade business, in particular, more than many other businesses is a people business.

You only make money when your people are out there in the world doing work, don’t you?

So it makes sense (I hope) when I say, you should put some effort into looking after your people, so they perform well.

One way you can help them perform is by helping them understand the bigger picture.

Good leadership involves sharing your strategy for your business, and involving your people in it, then making sure everybody stays involved and sees the program you’re making.

What I’m talking about here is a broader view of business – teaching your people how business works. Because they probably don’t know. Let’s face it, until you learned, you didn’t know, did you? And, like me, you probably didn’t learn until you started your own business. So your people probably don’t know either.

And having an understanding of how business works will help them do their jobs better and understand your strategy better.

Particularly, you can help clear up some misconceptions people have.

For example, do your people think you’re much richer than you actually are?

Do they think your business makes much more money than it actually does?

They probably do.

In the absence of real information, people make up their own interpretations based on what little information they have.

They know what you pay them and they know what you charge them out at… the difference is a lot! You’re probably making a lot.

They’re on job sites doing the work that you get paid for and if you’re not there doing the work with them then you’re probably sitting with your feet up thinking about what you’re going to spend all that money on, right?

For many employees, business money feels somehow different to real money – their money or your money. It’s kind of like magic money and they don’t care about it as much.

So let’s teach them.

The guide you can ask us for is a short summary of a training module our clients can use to teach business to their team. Ask for Business Birds & Bees if you want it.

We teach them how much employees really cost a business (because it’s much more than the hourly rate they get); we show them all the other costs a business has to cover before it makes any profit and we show them all the things that can go wrong and make that profit disappear. We also show them all the other work that goes in a business – because there’s a lot more than just what happens on-site, right?

We finish off by sharing the strategy (the real one, in a workshop) and bringing people into it.

Get the guide or join my program and get the real thing.