Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome back to the Total Profit podcast. I'm your host, T2. And here's the man who never checks his email, but somehow still knows everything that's going on.
Tommy Fee. Hi.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: How's it going today?
[00:00:20] Speaker A: That's called margin based clairvoyance.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Exactly.
Intuition.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Well, today we're unpacking what we'll call the real win. And no, it's not driving a Ferrari or selling your company. It's when you wake up one day and you realize that your business is running without you micromanaging every hour of it. And it's that freedom that I think a lot of business owners look for.
And we had a client one time that was running a $6 million business, $6 million service company.
He hadn't taken a week off in, I want to say, five years.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: It was. Yeah, it was. It was a ridiculous number. His team was constantly texting him, what should we bid? Who's on this crew? Can I buy this tool?
His. His kids started calling him sir because it was the only time he paid attention. He was exhausted, though, and he was resentful. He was, you know, he was just angry about it all. And he was really, really close to quitting.
And he wasn't running a business. He was running a daycare for adults that had power tools, basically.
Harsh but true.
And when he came to total profit management, he was one of those guys that didn't need more hustle. He needed more systems. And we talk about that a lot. He needed visibility, and most of all, he needed trust.
He needed trust on his team. And so that's what we mean by the performance margin. Phase five. It's that emotional shift. All right? He went from this stressed out babysitter to a very confident leader. And the tool that helped him make that leap was our owner dashboards, our operational dashboards.
They give those owners real time visibility. Tell me what some of those dashboards look like for the owners.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. It gives you that. Those guardrails, as we keep talking about, of where your profitability is and how do you track that?
We have stops in place to.
After the job is complete. But before invoicing, you can check to see where your estimate is. And if there were change orders in the job, you'll capture them. Just through that prioritization and that overview, your employee cost, knowing that you're covering every cost in your cost of goods is huge.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Can you imagine a $5 missed cost every hour that you perform work? And if you have 10 employees, that's where those profit leaks turn into gushers.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
The margins by job, who's on schedule, which projects are bleeding cash. Like you said, those owner dashboards give you all of that information without asking a single employee for an update.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: That's right there.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: So in month one of onboarding, we install those dashboards for every client. And that job status overview tells you, are we ahead, are we on time, are we behind schedule? You get a crew level margin report, like which teams are profitable, which ones might need a little bit of coaching, a little bit of nudging, a little bit of accountability.
Maybe a change in their job definition so that they're focused more on outcomes versus a list of things to do.
Bid tracking versus margin performance. So are the jobs that we win actually worth it?
Weekly kind of profit pulse. So that five minute owner snapshot shows your cash, your accounts receivable, your active margin and a few red flags. Right. Numbers will turn red on that dashboard and so those get called out to you very quickly and then those role based permissions. So your team of lets your team see what they need to do and nothing that they don't.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: And if you have salespeople that are out in the field, you can have them price.
You've already established those margins that they can price too, and they won't go below that. So it's like an extension of yourself that you can trust.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Right.
It's not about spying or anything like that. It's about seeing clearly so that you don't have to hover over your team and dip a toe into that micromanaging zone.
So with those dashboards in place, we'll shift the conversation from did you do this? To the dashboard shows that we're off track. All right, what's the plan? It builds that culture of ownership, not excuses.
And guess what? When the employees know that you're watching the numbers, not just the clock, they perform differently. It's human nature.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Absolutely. And if they know they're doing a good job, it just everybody intention is to do a good job.
So once they get that affirmation that they're hitting their targets, it's going to.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: It'S a good thing.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Multiply.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: It's very moralizing and it's very building of the team and it creates momentum.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Totally.
Here's the finance piece that most owners miss. The highest paid person in your company should be focused on margin strategy, not inventory count. Okay. When we free up the owner's time, we redirect their energy over to the profit growth, not the details. And again, the micromanaging of the business.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Just think of how many times you answered the same question throughout the day. And that's probably an indicator that you need a bit of system management to help your day get back some of that time.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: All right.
Yeah. Our guy that I was referring to earlier went from 42 different texts a day to coaching his project manager on margin variance. And so one role makes you tired, the other one makes you money.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Right, I like that.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: So by month, two clients at Total Profit Management are seeing the ripple effects of this setup. All right? There are fewer emergencies, there's better forecasting, margin alerts before those mistakes happen. And owners who finally, they are learning as well in this process. They're learning to trust their team to, to handle it. And if they don't have the right team in place, we can help them kind of identify that so that they can make some changes.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Total Profit Management, our systems are not just a dashboard, it's a leadership platform, right?
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Absolutely. For sure.
We take a tool, which is the performance margin software, and integrate it, going right from the beginning of finding out where, what are your pinch points, what's your heartburn, what's keeping you up at night, and then working it into the performance margin zone.
And it's a process. And again, it's as we keep talking. These processes predict repeatability.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Predict repeatability. I like that.
So if you're checking in every five minutes, that's not leadership, that's dependency.
This week's challenge is to track how many decisions only you can make, figure out how many decisions only you can make and then ask yourself what system would make this not your problem anymore?
Okay. Dashboards replace a lot of drama in your life. Invest in the system and protect your energy.
Okay, Next week we're going to take that lens one level higher and we're going to talk about how to make a margin. How to make margin a company wide mission, not just the finance goal, not just the CEO goal, how to make it a company wide mission and kind of instill that into all of your employees. So if you haven't checked out the Total Profit Management onboarding roadmap, we're going to invite you to go to totalprofitmanagement.com and take a look at. Just reach out to us and inquire how to get started.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: No, that sounds fantastic. And the next time you go for your five minute check in, stop, take a breath and just think, take her. Cool. It's all gonna be okay.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: The real win isn't just more margin. It's more life. Exactly right. So it's all gonna be fine.
