Latest / Remodelers On The Rise / Kyle's Reminders from The Rise Conference
Transcript
- Kyle: If you're at the RISE conference this year, you may have caught Logan Shinholser's breakout session. He runs contractor growth network, and his whole talk came down to one premise. Your next project is probably within a mile of the project you're finishing right now. That's what CGN builds for modelers, a system where your finished work does the selling so that the job you're wrapping up brings you the next one. Instead of worrying about a list of tactics to market your company, you need a system of marketing your individual projects to the neighborhoods that you want to be in. To learn more about this strategy, or if you want to watch Logan's talk, you can find both on contractorgrowth network.com in the resources section. That's contractorgrowthnetwork.com. Hello, friends. if you're a golf fan, you would you would think that that was Jim Nance. That's his opening tagline. Hello, friends. Welcome to the Masters Tournament. but that's not that's not Jim Nance, it's Kyle Hunt. I do not have as eloquent of a sounding voice as him. I'll actually kick off this this recap of the Rise Conference by telling you about what happened the day after the Rise Conference. Yours truly, who likes to run his mouth about said golf. And say, I have never lost to a client. pride comes before the fall. Gary Houghton with Houghton contract and out in New Jersey. Took me down. Four of us played golf the day after the rise conference. I knew I was in trouble when he hit a beautiful little drive, stuck it to five feet on hole number one. I thought, this is gonna be a problem. I held my own. We were tied at the turn. He pulled away at the end. and I think it's important in life to turn lemons into lemonade. So how did I do that? One, I gave him his flowers. That's that's what the kids say when you're when you're putting somebody on a pedestal or giving them kudos for a victory. And I spun it as, you know, the good thing about this is that I no longer have to carry the weight of the undefeated streak. And I know that's kind of silly, but I was talking to my buddy Andy about it. Him and I golf a lot. And he goes, Kyle, you're not supposed to lose. And I said, Well, it happens. And then I told him that line about not carrying the weight. And he goes, I need to do a little bit more of that. Instead of, you know, turning a negative into more negative or letting something that didn't go well really fester and stress me out and and add anxiety. You know what? Keep it in its proper place. Even try to turn a little bit of lemons into lemonade. I think that's important for us as entrepreneurs, as business people. I think that's important for us as leaders. It's not that we pretend it didn't happen, it's not that we ignore negativity, but how do we bounce back from it? How do we spin a negative into a positive? How do we find a little bit of positivity in amongst a little bit of frustration? I think that's a skill that we can develop. So there's there's the recap of the Rise Conference. Post-Rise conference. I also got this beautiful hat from one of our modelers on the rise coaches, Curtis Lawson, crafted custom homes. If you're watching the video version, you're going, wow, Kyle, that's kind of a cool hat. It's even got a little camo on it. The last time I wore camo, I was 19 years old going to Western Michigan University and I took a semester ROTC class. And pretty sure that was the last time I wore camo. Shout out to all the veterans and active duty out there. I show it my two youngest kids said, I don't like it. That doesn't look like you, Dad. Whatever. I'm wearing it. I like it. I think it looks fresh. again, that's another phrase that the kids use. Talks about flowers, give them your flowers and fresh. Pretty sure that fresh thing was actually from the 90s. All right, so we're off and rolling. I just wanted to spend 15, 18 minutes or so recapping the Rise conference from a vein of how do I deliver some value in this. I'm not just looking to recap it and go, and here's everything that happened, and then we did this, and then we did that. No, no, no, no. You are listening to the Remodelers on the Rise show. You are a remodeler or an employee for a remodeler, and you're listening to this to hear some good ideas, to get some perspective, to get some encouragement, to think more clearly about how to improve your business and become a remodeler on the rise. So I'm gonna do that in that. Vein, and I'm going to walk through just different aspects of the sessions that we covered and some of the key takeaways from each. I'm not going to cover all of them, but I'll cover a good number of them. We had 114 people in attendance. last year was our first annual Rise conference, and I think we had 100 people plus six sponsors. This year we had 114 people plus seven sponsors. And somebody asked me about that, and I thought, you know what, that's actually quite like remodelers on the rise. My business has been very much a slow and steady kind of brick by brick, brick, brick by brick. There's other companies, even in the coaching world, were, you know, colleagues of mine who have grown really fast. and one of the beautiful things about business is that there's not one right way to do it. There's not one right way to do it. You can grow slow and steady. Some might even say slow and steady wins the race. You may be super ambitious and you've put in a lot of time and you started your business, and bam, you come right out the chute and grow it really quick. There's a lot of ways to do this. What is your desire for your business? What is your desire for where you want to take your business in the future? What is your desire for how fast you want to get there? You have a lot of levers you can adjust, dials you can adjust to make those things happen, but it's good to think about it. I personally have enjoyed a slow and steady business. I started this business with no money in the bank, with a stay-at-home wife, with one kid, another one on the way. I was going to be very careful and not take a lot of risk because I was already taking a lot of risk and I've very much gone slow and steady. Now I can look back and think, maybe you should have put a little more pedal to the metal that year. Maybe you should have taken a little bit more risk. Maybe you should have hired that team member a little bit earlier. Yeah, water under the bridge. we're not going to sit here and play this should a game. I should have done this. Don't should on yourself, people. Don't should on yourself. but I share that just because I think it's a good word for people to hear. And that's kind of how Rise Conference 2.0 went. It's just a nice little steady growth. Now. I want 150 attendees next year. I want some more sponsors. I wanted to share this excellent two-day experience with more people in RISE Conference 2027 3.0. All right. So I kicked off the I kicked off the RISE conference with a story about John and Susan. It was a fictional tale. And what I wanted to do is walk through the remodeling process that John and Susan went through from start to To finish. We highlighted all of the different participants in the room, whether they were marketing focused or sales people or estimators and designers and production managers and carpenters and lead carpenters, office team members. We covered kind of the whole thing by going through this process. The reminder is something that you probably already know, there's not a magic bullet. It's not do this one thing and everything falls into Place. Running a successful remodeling business is a combination of what? Combination of a lot of little things. Continue to tweak your process. You don't have 8,000 different main areas of your business. No. You have your marketing area, your sales and design development area. You have your production area. You have your people area. You have your your process and your system area. There's not 8,000 main areas. Now there are a lot, hundreds of things you can do underneath each of those, but that's the great game of business. That's what makes this enjoyable to continue to tweak and improve. I loved that there was a remodeler there that was doing $700,000 of revenue and $17 million of revenue. I loved that the $17 million remodeler was having little takeaways of things like We should tweak how we do that. we used to do that. We've kind of gotten away from it. Just like the $700,000 annual remodeler was getting some maybe some bigger things that they're not doing that they're going to implement. There's always things to tinker and improve to help you be a remodeler on the rise. So we kicked off with with that session. one thing that I did, one thing that I did and I like to do at the start of things, and I had two people comment to me about it. I start my events. By just straight up starting. my daughter Piper happened to be there, and I started the entire event by going in 2008. I started my business. I had a stay-at-home wife. We had one kid, and it the room goes from super loud to instantly quiet in about five seconds, sometimes six seconds. And I had a couple of people comment on that. I don't know why I started doing that at events or I started doing that even in my coaching. but I think part of it is all right, we're starting. We're not gonna ease into this, let's get after it, let's set a tone, let's set an expectation. And maybe there's something for you to grab there with your team meetings of, you know, start with a little bit of clarity, of a little bit of oomph, oomph. instead of, all right, guys, let's let's kind of gather up. I think we're gonna get started. Man, start on the downbeat of the time you're supposed to start. And start and get going. So there you go. There's a little takeaway. Pete Burk, outside speaker who I had come in, talked about serve. We really lined up our event around results, improve, serve, engage, which are our core values. Pete took on serve and came to it from a standpoint of kind of sharing stories and sharing his heart. He talked about generosity always wins. He Talk through whether it be clients or employees or trade partners, what would be a blessing to them? And really thinking through that from a service standpoint. He also talked to us about humble confidence. We need to be confident. We need to not shy away from the giftings that we have and the skills that we have, but we do it with humility. That's how we can serve really well as humble confidence. So those were a few things that he touched on. All right, so now we're getting into the sessions. I'm literally going to spend 30, 40 seconds on about 10 or 12 of them here. Laurel Winkle with She Builds, she did a breakout session around the design side of things. Master the Madness, practical systems for high volume design management. Laurel runs She Builds Kitchen. She's got designers, she's got all these different design projects that they're working to get into production. How do you keep all of that under? control. A couple things she mentioned. One, batch, don't bounce. Batch, don't bounce. Instead of jumping around from client to client doing what seems most urgent, batch like related tasks to keep your brain focused. Work on multiple projects, but do the design work or the ordering work or the scheduling work. Batch don't bounce when it comes to your email. Don't check your email 72 times a day. Batch it. Check your email three times a day and knock them all out that you need to respond to at once. And then get into another little focused session. I think that's really good advice, not just for the design side, but in general. She also emphasized protecting your focus time. Understand that design work needs different attention than email. What she's getting at there is when you're doing estimating work as another example or design work, there's a Deeper deeper level of focus that's required versus I'm responding to some emails. I think those of you listening can totally understand that. You have to be pretty immersed. You have to be a little bit in the zone to really be estimating and designing well. So protect that focus time. Have a system for capturing errant thoughts that come to you. A lot of us, if we're not careful, we'll be working on something. We finally get into that focus time. And then we think of something, and now all of a sudden we're down that rabbit trail. No, no, no. Laurel was telling them have a sheet of paper off to the side. As you have an errant thought, write it down, capture it, but then keep focused. Make sure you plan the day or the day will run you over. Whatever works for you as far as focus time, set a timer, wear earbuds and have some music going. Silence the phone. I like to call it put yourself in cocoon mode. So was interesting as she was talking about mastering the madness of all these different demands of these different projects and design and development. There's a lot of focus on batching, not bouncing, and a lot of focus on protecting your focus time. Ooh, so that was a good one. I ended up talking about how to make more money in your remodeling business. I went through in one of my breakout sessions six different dials that you can adjust. And Probably the one that I tried to focus on the most was the gross profit dial. You have gross profit dollars in your remodeling business. You have gross profit margin in your remodeling business. And that dial right there, that number and that percent is extremely important. How you get it to where you need it to be relates to your top line revenue. It relates to your job costing on all of your projects. It relates to what you're actually charging and what your pricing is on clients. There's a lot of different ways to adjust it. There's a bunch of you listening to this that really need to pay closer attention to your gross profit dollars and margin, dollars and percent. when it comes to your individual projects, maybe you're selling a project and you're expecting a gross profit margin or percent of 30%. But it comes in at 24%. You've got slippage of 6%. Why? Where did that occur? Was it bad estimating? Was it bad project management? How do we fix that? Some of you just need to flat out charge more is part of it. And then we need to look at how all those different projects come together to get our overall gross profit on a project. we talked about that quite a bit, had some good takeaways from that. another session that was in the morning breakouts. was Matt Jenkins with MJ Kitchen in Bath. And he did production systems that deliver great work. He did a tremendous job, a lot of production guys in this session. by the way, it's Rise Conference is wonderful to bring your designers, estimators, lead carpenters, project managers. I loved there was a lot of companies that brought team members or just flat out sent team members where the owner didn't even come. And we had breakout sessions and roundtable times and a lot of conversation. I loved going up to a couple employees from MSC Enterprises, a peer group client of ours down in Missouri. And I was listening to one of their designers share with another team member. man, I was just talking to this designer in Iowa and she was saying one one of the things that they do is the following. And I thought, yes. It's so good when your team members are learning and hearing ideas, and they're not coming from you, they're coming from colleagues of theirs. There's tremendous power in that. So consider that for Rise Conference 2027. Bring and send your team members. Matt talked about how to structure your production team depending on the different size company you are. Which meetings are worth it? How do we handle the scheduling side? He talked about meetings, which was the project. Pass from the sales and design to production. They talked about the importance and how they operate when it comes to their pre-construction meeting when we're getting close to the project starting. Talked about the prep day before the project, talked about the punch list at the end of the project and how we really finish the projects with some fury in a good way. And then talked about a post-job review. folks, a post-job review after a project is done. We need to be doing that more consistently. So much improvement can come when you are taking your post-job review seriously. It helps us underestimating our design and development, improving our project management, so many things. Yet, understandably so, we're moving on to the next project. We have other demands. Here's a takeaway from you listening to this today: take more time on your post-job project. Review. If you're at the RISE conference this year, you may have caught Logan Shinholser's breakout session. He runs contractor growth network, and his whole talk came down to one premise. Your next project is probably within a mile of the project you're finishing right now. That's what CGN builds for modelers, a system where your finished work does the selling so that the job you're wrapping up brings you the next one. Instead of worrying about a list of tactics to market your company, you need a system of marketing your individual projects to the neighborhoods that you want to be in. To learn more about this strategy, or if you want to watch Logan's talk, you can find both on contractorgrowth network.com in the resources section. That's contractorgrowthnetwork.com. Okay. All right. I'm gonna cover a few more. Again, I wanted this to be about a twenty, twenty-five minute recording. Part of that is just because I have a next meeting to attend to after this. Again, as I'm sitting here, I'm sitting here by myself in my office. I'm recording a podcast. I'm looking at myself on this little screen. I have kind of the you know, recap of the Rise conference in front of me. I'm just talking to myself. But boy, boy, even at the start and right now, I'm literally thinking there are people across America, maybe around the world. I don't think there's many people around the world, that are listening to this. Hundreds and hundreds of people over af after this has been out. And I'm just thinking about you right now. I'm making sure that what I'm saying is are some clear takeaways. I want you, as you listen to the Ramalers on the Rise show, to Be entertained a little bit, hopefully. but mostly to get some good ideas, to get some good takeaways. And hopefully there's something already shared that was a good reminder for you. The lemons versus lemonades, the meeting cadence, the cocoon mode, all kinds of goodies. Mark Dixon with Oddfellows Contracting, he did a session on story selling. He shared about how stories are. Remembered 22 times better than facts. He talked about story selling builds trust, it reduces price sensitivity, it makes you memorable, it differentiates you. If you reach out to me and say, Kyle, you didn't share it on the podcast. I want to hear more about this spaghetti story. I will send you a link to Mark Sharing, the spaghetti story. It is a great one that every single salesperson that sells remodeling will want to hear. Kyle, that wasn't nice of you not to share the spaghetti story. What can I say? We also need to take action in life. You send me a note, you send me an email, Kyle at RemodelersonthRise.com and you write spaghetti story in the subject line. I bet you you're going to get it right back to you that day. All right, rock and roll. Victor out in Colorado. I haven't tried to pronounce his last name yet. L E B E G U E. I've just avoided it. I think I'm just going to continue to avoid it. but Victor did a tremendous job. He has implemented EOS into his remodeling company very, very well. He talked about the EOS model, vision, data, process, traction, issues, people. And he really highlighted what's worked, what was a little clunky that they had to work through. And how they've integrated EOS as their entrepreneurial operating system, that's what it stands for, into the business. He did a tremendous job. In particular, a couple tools that he mentioned that were really impactful for him and his company: accountability chart, their overall focus on SOPs and process. The EOS tool that's called Quarterly Rocks. Each person on your team has a quarterly rock. An important on-the-business task that they are going to work through and complete each quarter. It takes that annual strategic plan and breaks it up so that we're actually implementing that plan. It's very powerful. It's worked tremendously at Ramaler's on the rise as well. And then he talks about level 10 meetings, L10 meetings. Go to ChatGPT, go to Claude, say, hey, what are level 10 meetings? What are L10 meetings with EOS? Why should I consider it for my company? We, Victor and I, we. Highly recommend that tool. So we talked quite a bit about that. I ended up talking about results, in particular, about key KPIs, key performance indicators. What do designers, what are two or three things that designers need to track? What are the two or three KPIs that our project managers need to track? For example, our projects on time. If we're measuring that and tracking that and reporting that, that's huge to getting the result. That we want. Project manager, if the project's staying on budget, this is my expected cost. This is my actual cost. If we're hitting that KPI, the good result of the project staying on time, on budget, and a happy client will be achieved. So KPIs, they're not the sexiest topic in the world, but they are so important. one of the other things that we did is we did some some round tables, some peer groups. related to different topics. We had 11 different groups, Savannah Thomas and Danielle Russell and Brian Williams and Peter Rainey and Curtis and Brian Sebring and Lonan Logan Schinholzer and Mark Dixon and Matt Jenkins and Bailey Curtin and Eric Fortenberry. We had experts at each of these tables around various topics. And each they they divided up beautifully, about 10, 12 people in each group. And it just really allowed us to expand and And have a lot of different conversation around topics that they like. Probably the biggest piece of feedback we got when we put up the feedback form and had everybody fill it out near the end of the deal is we want to do another one or two roundtables, peer groups. Those conversations were excellent. So we will do that next year. so those were a few. Patrick and Jenna with the Zangle group, they presented their crafting the next generation, their training program. They've spent a tremendous amount of focus on making a training program to take a pretty green carp, you know, apprentice and move them up the ranks and have been super thoughtful about that, which is a tremendous thing to focus on, especially if you're planning on growing your Romali company through in-house team members. They did an outstanding job with that. Logan Schinholzer with CGN shared, let your work sell for itself. project first marketing playbook for remodelers, all the things that you can do with a project from when it starts to when it's finished, all the different marketing things you could do. Danielle with Builder Funnel talked about their five pillars of growth in sales and marketing. Number one, attract, which is the traffic, convert, and really paying attention to our conversion rate of a visitor into a lead. Nurture, how do we nurture them and improve our close rate. number four was close rates and number five is measure, track everything. And Danielle did an awesome job of showing, guys, what gets measured gets improved. Let's track these important marketing metrics. You want to grow your remodeling business in a meaningful way, you need to start looking at these five pillars. So that was great. Ashley Favorite from from Lakefront over in Wisconsin. they're doautiful custom homes. She came in and did a session on letting go to grow, how delegation and simple systems. unlock growth and had everybody consider doing a time audit. Track your tasks for two weeks. What do you love doing? What do you put off slash dislike slash struggle with? Look for patterns. Could it be a new hire? Do you need to reshape a role? and walk through that process. Folks, the Rise conference was outstanding. It was a ton of fun. We had a strengthening company culture panel. We had all three of our Remoteers on the Rise coaches come up for some teaching. we had Eric Fortenberry come up and talk about how remodelers are winning with AI. we had a ton of fun. There's more that I could share, but again, keeping it to a certain length today. And hopefully that gave you a taste of what you missed or a recap of what you experienced if you were there. and more than anything else, hopefully there was an idea in there that reminded you, I need to do that. I need to dig into that. Please do not be overwhelmed by that. There is a never-ending list of things that we can do to improve our business. Do not let that cripple you. Do not let that worry you. Just continue to figure out what's the next right thing for me to work on? What is the next right thing? What is the bottleneck that my company has right now and how can I open it up and alleviate it? What is the biggest constraint that my business has that's holding us back? And I need to put some focused effort on it. Maybe you would say, you know what, more than anything, I need to generate some leads. And maybe you don't love wearing that marketing hat, but don't shy away from that. Go, that's my biggest constraint right now. We need to focus all hands on deck related to generating some quality leads. Let's get after it. Figure out whatever that constraint is for you, whether it's sales, whether it's production management, whether it's capacity out in the field and not having enough team members and trade partners to get the work done. There's some maybe it's not understanding your financials, whatever that constraint is, figure out the next right thing to do. And don't be it's okay to to to be a little frustrated or to be a little anxious about things, but let's not sit in that. Let's do something about it. Ten percent of life is what happens to you, 90% is how you respond to it. Your attitude that you bring to the day absolutely matters. So I'll leave you with that, that thought of think through your biggest constraint, your biggest bottleneck, think through the next right thing to do and approach the rest of today and Your start of tomorrow with an attitude that's focused on some positivity, with an attitude that says, you know what? I'm gonna stink and be a winner today. I'm gonna be a winner today. I'm not gonna be a loser today. I'm not gonna be putting off, getting distracted, not doing the work that I need to do. I'm gonna stink and be a winner today. And then go do it. You absolutely can. All right. That's your buddy Kyle signing off. Reach out anytime. If you want to talk a little more, talk about your business, talk about the coaching that we offer, reach out. Go about your day, kick some butt. Shia. Kyle Hunt: Thanks for tuning into the Remodelers on the Rise show. Whether you're listening or watching, I appreciate you being here. If this was helpful, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next one. We're putting out new episodes every single week focused on helping you build a better remodeling business with real stories, practical ideas, and things you can actually take and use. If you're on YouTube, hit that like button and turn on notifications so you know when new episodes drop. If you're listening on a podcast app, a five-star review goes a long way and helps more remodelers find the show. We've got great links below or in the show notes where you can connect with us, check out our remodelers community and learn more about our coaching and resources. Appreciate you very much. See you on the next episode.