It's OK to quit and change direction - with Rodric Lenheart

00:01
Greg Wilkes
Something a little bit different for you today on the podcast. Firstly, part one of this podcast, we’re going to be interviewing Rodric from million dollar flip flops. Now, Rodric works with custom home builders in the US, and he talks about how he managed to successfully scale and exit businesses. But he’s also changed directory in the course of his career many times, and often it’s because he wants to pursue his purpose, his passion, and find his true north star. So it’d be really interesting learning and listening to why Rodric has done that and some of the challenges he faced along the way. That’s all in part one. Part two of the podcast is Rodric interviewing me, and we talk about why I got into coaching initially. So hopefully you’ll find this one a little bit different. I hope you get some value from it.

00:50
Greg Wilkes
Rodric, it’s awesome to have you on the show, mate, and look forward to getting to know you a bit more and talking about your expertise. Thanks for coming on.

00:57
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah, Greg, thanks for having me, man. I love it when stuff just kind of comes together on the spot.

01:02
Greg Wilkes
That’s it, mate. It’s good to jam together for an hour or so. So, Rodric, let’s just introduce you to the audience. Do you want to tell me a little bit about yourself, what you’re currently doing, who are.

01:14
Rodric Lenhart
Sure, sure. Life’s great questions, right? Rodric Lenhart, lifelong entrepreneur. I spent about three years in a job. I always say that’s the bad word of the day, is job. And it literally almost killed me. And I write about that a lot in the book, and it really all came down to, I was chasing money. I was making more in a month than my parents ever made in a year. We grew up with nothing. And then on its face, I had everything you could ever want. And I was depressed and anxious and had suicidal thoughts and worse. And I just found myself in this really terrible place and quit that job. I’d been a student of life since I was a kid. I’ve probably read 2000 books at this point, all nonfiction.

02:01
Rodric Lenhart
I nerd out on human behavior and psychology and why we do what we do. And I went back to being an entrepreneur and never looked back. And that journey led me to selling my last business about 18 months ago now. And I was on a beach in Thailand with Nicole and said, look over at her and said, we got to give it all away. And she’s like, what? No idea what’s going on in my head. And like most entrepreneurs, I lasted all of about three days in, quote unquote, retirement before I was already building the next thing in my head, and that is what this thing is. So I coach other entrepreneurs, specifically custom home builders, states based custom home builders, and I wrote a book called million Dollar Flip Flops. Peace, prosperity, and the courage to change course in life and business.

02:51
Rodric Lenhart
I didn’t know if only my grandma would buy the book. And we ended up hitting number one in seven categories on Amazon. We were best been released bestseller in seven categories. So it’s just been this kind of wild ride that I’m on. And we donate everything we do. So that’s an important piece of this, too, is we donate 100% of our proceeds to send a student leader abroad, which is our foundation in partnership with EF tours. So that is a little bit about me up to this morning.

03:18
Greg Wilkes
Wow. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Really interesting what you’re talking about there, about not being happy in a job. I don’t know about you, but do you think that we’re born with this entrepreneur tendency, because some people have a job and it just isn’t congruent for what they really want in life and they’re just fighting against it constantly and they think, no, actually I want more. I know I’ve got more to give back to the world, mate. What was the pain points for you of why you wanted to get out of a job and start your own business?

03:47
Rodric Lenhart
Oh, man, that is a monstrously long story. But to answer your first question, and I ask this question a lot on my show, I don’t think, and people will not like this opinion, but I don’t think everyone’s cut out to be an entrepreneur, and I don’t think that you can necessarily learn it. I think there’s at least to be good, at least to survive, at least I’ve done this for 39 or 42 years, if you count diaper time. But there’s something inside that lets you’re so unafraid of failure. And I was just talking with Laura, one of our colleagues, about this last hour and knowing that’s what leads to the success and not worrying what other people think and being called wishy washy or the reason. The book’s called peace, prosperity, and the courage to change course in life and business.

04:40
Rodric Lenhart
The courage to change course is because that’s so required. I’ve had businesses in every industry you can imagine. And if I didn’t like it or it wasn’t serving me, I either sold it or I quit or I started something else. And I just kept moving myself forward because I knew who I wanted to end up as a person. And during that time that I had all of these businesses, I also visited 60 countries on six continents and I’ve been to 44 states and I’ve been to the World Series and the Super bowl and the Grand Prix of Monaco. And name it, I’ve done it. And if I die tomorrow, had a really good run. And I don’t think we’re not taught to think that way, that both of those things are possible at the same time.

05:19
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, 100%. Interesting talking about the courage to change course, because I think so many of us get different viewpoints on this, don’t we? Of like, you leave school, you pick your career, and that’s it. That’s it for life. And some people won’t change because maybe they feel like it’s a little bit of a failure. They give something a go, it’s not worked. And they think, well, I don’t want to be viewed as a failure, so I’m just going to keep going and grinding and they can end up spending years doing something they don’t like. What’s led you to change course? Is it that you hadn’t found what your true calling was? Or is it that you’ve just grown and changed as a person and think, right, I’m done with that industry now. That’s not serving me anymore.

05:57
Greg Wilkes
I need to do something else that now aligns with my current phase in life. Where did that change come from?

06:03
Rodric Lenhart
I think it’s a little bit of both. I think I was that person who I call it right map, wrong mountain. In my world, you’re given this map and you get to the top and you realize you were on the wrong mountain the whole time. And it’s because we take this prescription from our parents or our partners or our pastors, or we’re constantly doing things that aren’t. We never take the time to think about what we really want from our life, and we don’t do that in our business. We will forecast a year and five years out and we’ll say, here’s where we need to be, and here we work backwards and here’s how many sales calls we have to make to hit that number.

06:43
Rodric Lenhart
And we never think, here’s who I want to end up as a human being, and here’s all the things I need to do in the next year or five years to be that kind of human being when I’m done. We don’t think that way. And the reason I work with entrepreneurs, other than being one my whole life, is because we are uniquely apt to be able to change our circumstance. And corporate people can too. They can quit and go get another job. But there’s 1000 reasons that doesn’t happen. To your point, those are the people that end up miserable for 40 years. And I start my book, and I start a lot of keynotes and other things that I do with. It’s a Tolstoy book called the death of Ivan Ilige. And Ivan is the main character.

07:23
Rodric Lenhart
He’s on his deathbed and he looks up at his wife and he says, what if my whole life was wrong? And that’s terrifying, isn’t it, Greg? And I read that when I was 19 or 20 years old. And not a day has gone by I haven’t thought about it. And so I live my life in that way. And everything in life just comes down to decisions. The reason I’ve changed things is because multiple different businesses have gone multiple different ways. Some I sold, some I just quit, some I wrapped up, started something new. But I knew that it wasn’t leading to the type of life I wanted to live and the type of person I wanted to become. And all of that comes down to your values, your why, your statement of purpose.

08:06
Rodric Lenhart
A lot of things we do in the waves method that’s part of the book. And the work I do with clients is helping them figure that out, because we aren’t taught to think that way. And then you can read all the books all day. This is another thing I was talking to Laura about was sales. Right? You can read 100 books on sales, but you will learn more making 100 sales calls, even if all of those people say no than you will from the 100 books. And it’s the exact same thing with life. Like, I’m going to try it. If it doesn’t work, well, I need to change it. Do something else that might work. And every time I get better.

08:37
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, I love that you’ve got to try. I mean, I’m a big believer in that. You can’t live life in regret. And I would rather regret making the wrong decision than not making any decision at all and just run along. I mean, that’s one of the big reasons I moved out to Sydney from London. Massive change in my lifestyle. But we thought, look, if we give it a go for a year, it doesn’t work out, what does it matter? Go back to London and try again. But I’d rather have that regret than not trying at all. Really interesting what you’re saying about the businesses that you’ve managed to sell and some that you’ve just let go. Because they weren’t serving you anymore. To be able to sell a business is a fantastic achievement.

09:15
Greg Wilkes
And a lot of people think about that, think, I’d love to build a business and then sell it. When you were building your businesses, were you building them with that in mind that you wanted to sell them, or did it just come that I’m done now, let’s find a buyer. How did you navigate that?

09:30
Rodric Lenhart
Only the last one. The last one I built specifically to sell. And that was because I knew it wasn’t a forever thing. But I was harnessing all the talent and connections and the things I had built. I was in charlote, North Carolina at the time, and I was a custom home builder and a realtor for 20 years. And what I ended up building was the first short term, full scale, short term management company. So think Airbnb, Vrbo, that was also a brokerage. We were the only one in a city of 2 million. It was. I built that up. I knew how many income properties I had to have in order to have a saleable business because I wanted a sabbatical. I knew I wanted to do something different.

10:15
Rodric Lenhart
I knew it would look partially like what this looks like now, but you would hear me say all the time, I don’t know what chapter two looks like, but I know I can’t see it while I’m in chapter one. And I was able to give myself a lifestyle where I was probably out of the country four to six months of every year for 15 years. I’ve been around the world multiple times, east and west, but I never had that huge break. And I know entrepreneurs listen to this. They hear exactly what I’m saying. I call it the phoneless vacation. Like, when’s the last time you could put your phone away for a week and go somewhere, not pick it up, and things didn’t explode by the time you got back.

10:54
Rodric Lenhart
And so that’s ultimately now what I want to help people with, certainly in the building industry, because they’re the same thing. The guy who can build or gal, they can build a business that they can go on a two week vacation and not have to pick up the phone. That’s also a saleable business. They’re one and the same thing. So then it just depends on what your goal is.

11:16
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, that’s so true. And I think a lot of people forget when they’re running their business that is a big goal, isn’t it? To have that time and freedom? You’ve got to be able to create that for yourself. And then the value that then creates in the business, if you’ve got the systems and processes to be able to do that. That’s so true. Just something I wanted to dive into that you mentioned earlier, you talked about helping people find their passion, purpose, values as a business owner and as a business. How do you find that when you’re dealing with builders as a whole? Because I guess you get different industries, maybe more in different industries. They’re more attuned to it than maybe what builders are. How do you navigate that with builders about finding their passion and purpose in an industry?

11:58
Greg Wilkes
Because a lot of us fall into this industry just because our parents were builders, our father was a builder and our great grandfather was a builder, and we just maybe didn’t do too well at school. So you’ve become a builder. That can be the general route for many people. So they haven’t necessarily chosen it. So how does then someone who hasn’t chosen the industry then find their passion and purpose and values in that industry?

12:20
Rodric Lenhart
I think it’s a case of, I think there’s two people. There’s the person you’re talking about where it’s a family thing, and then there’s the tradie who was just good at building things, and then suddenly they’re doing bathrooms and now they’re doing kitchens and bathrooms and now, well, once you can do a kitchen and bathroom, you’re not that far away from a custom home, you know what I mean? Arguably, those are the two hardest parts, so they kind of work themselves into it. And what I have found, and this was certainly the case in my building business, is that it’s a really hard business to leave, especially when you get to that level where you’re doing year and two and three year long projects. I know you do a little bit bigger stuff, right? Like, you’re like big dog stuff. Yeah.

13:00
Rodric Lenhart
Where this was more, I work with single family home builders. They’re not track builders. They might be doing three or four builds a year, but they’re big in scale. And most of those folks, they don’t have really an official financing background. They don’t have a sales background, they might not have a customer service background. They’re just really good at what they did. And so they find themselves in these pitfalls that are completely avoidable. But none of their buddies do this either, or their friendly competition isn’t going to give them all the secrets. Right. And there’s just a few things that they keep them out of the cash crunch cycles. It keeps them from customers screaming at them on Sunday nights.

13:41
Rodric Lenhart
It keeps them from not having enough leads beaten down their door so they can be selective about who they work with because they know that person is going to be a psycho for two years, but they have to take the job. Raise your hand if you’ve been there. And ultimately, those are the people that I want to help. And I think it goes part and parcel to selling them what they think they need and then giving them what they need. To answer your question. So they think they want time off and friendlier customers and more leads. What they really need is to look at the type of projects they’re building.

14:15
Rodric Lenhart
Maybe smaller projects, maybe going back to kitchens and baths, the highly profitable in and out in six week type things that are more in line with who they want to be as a person. And that’s where the work comes in. That’s where somebody like you or I comes in. Because a coach forces you to take the ego out of it. If nobody knew how much money you made and nobody knew what kind of projects you were building and you just did something for fun to make money that would give you time with your family, what would you do? And the answer is usually very different from what they’re doing.

14:43
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, it’s so true that people think they need something and do they need something else. What I generally find, and you probably see this, that when people come to you for coaching, like for me, it’s, I need to grow my business. I want to scale, I want to get bigger, I want to do this and do that. And then sometimes when we dive into it and we actually ask, well, why do you want to do that? What you actually trying to achieve? And oftentimes there’s an easier way of getting there. You don’t have to scale for scale’s sake. We don’t have to create a 510 million pound company or dollar company. If you’re here to achieve time, freedom and money in your business and that’s what you want, you can do it another way. It doesn’t have to be the big way.

15:17
Greg Wilkes
So sometimes we get wrapped up in what we see on social media and what we hear from other people, but I guess a good coach will really dive into what do you really want out of life? Is it more about your family? Is it that you have this massive ambition to grow a business? Is it something else and help people unpick that and unpack that? Because I guess people don’t know, do they? Sometimes they don’t know what direction they’re going in.

15:38
Rodric Lenhart
No. And it’s not their fault. We’re just not taught to think that way because by nature it’s a selfish way of thinking. But it’s that old know, put your oxygen mask on before you put on the one know. If you put on little Johnny’s mask and then you die. Well, Johnny doesn’t have a dad. So it’s important that you have oxygen first and then you figure it out. And it’s the same thing for your know, if you’re doing something that you truly enjoy and you’re also living a life to where you’re showing up every day rested and excited, how much better do you do for your customers? And then by nature, that business grows because that’s infectious and you are able to fill others cups more readily. And there’s a system to this. That’s why I built the waves method.

16:25
Rodric Lenhart
It was what I used. I dove into probably a hundred books when I left that job to make sure that never happened again. And all I ultimately built, Greg, was a decision filter. And that’s what we don’t have. We have a pros and cons list. We talk to our drunk budy at the bar, the ladies at Pilates, and then we make major life. It’s how about something built by you for you when you’re not in a decision making or cris mode that you can go, oh, does this meet my why? Yes, it does. Does it meet my top five values? Yes, it does. Does it meet my statement of purpose? Yes, it does. Well, then the answer is yes. It’s very simple. It takes four minutes because you’ve done the work before. There’s no toil to it.

17:04
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, that’s really interesting. So that’s obviously the foundational part of what you’re coaching. And I guess you start there. Do you? I guess you have to start up that before you then look at other things. What else do you do as part of your coaching program to help custom builders? Do you look at the operations and the sales and all that side of things? Or is it mainly focused around your.

17:22
Rodric Lenhart
Why and your know, the waves method and your why and your values and your statement of all? They’re the underlying of whether I’m working with a builder or like one of my best clients right now is a danish musician. His name’s Gregor’s. He’s amazing. Same work, right? It’s all the same stuff. But you’ll find that the sales and the operations side and how to handle customers and some of the little tweaks and things, they all come from this place of being on purpose, being in alignment with what it is you want to do, because you just start to attract the right type of customer to you. I can show you how to get more leads. But if you’re in the middle of a random cash flow crunch, you’re going to take the bad one.

18:05
Rodric Lenhart
You’re going to be paying for it 18 months from now, and you don’t know why. And it’s because you went out and spent money you didn’t have to impress people you didn’t like. So, you know, it. It all goes back to, why are you doing any of this? Who do you want to become in a year or five years? What does it take to get there? And then all the other pieces are just tweaks. You know what to do in your business. If you’re a custom home builder, assuming it’s not your first home, and it probably isn’t, you understand what to do. You just might not know the little tweaks that are involved in making it serve you as a person and also build the best home.

18:41
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, I love that. So what is the big goal for when people are working with you and whether it’s one to three year? I don’t know what your time frames are of how long you generally work with people. What do they get out of it? What would someone start with and what would they end with?

18:56
Rodric Lenhart
No, we laugh internally and we call it the phoneless vacation. Ultimately, that’s what we’re after. It’s that they have happier customers, they’ve got more money and they’ve got more time, but that leads to the phoneless vacation. So if my goal is that we have a six week program and then it’s 15 minutes check ins for the rest of the year to make sure you’re on pace and there’s some graduate stuff you can do beyond that. But ultimately, the goal is that you’re building six week triangles. Right, to talk lingo, but you’re building six week triangles for yourself. All you’re doing is checking in with me, and we know that big one, I call it the big triangle for the year, all of those six weeks are pointing to that thing.

19:39
Rodric Lenhart
And I think that’s what people do by nature in their business, and they never think to do it for themselves.

19:46
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, absolutely love that, Rodric. So how would people learn more about what you’re doing? Where would they get a bit more resources? You said you got a book out there, have you?

19:54
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah. Super easy to find me at. Million dollar flip flops on every channel. Million dollarflipflops.com and if you go to slash quiz, you can take the five phases of the entrepreneur quiz. It’s free. And then the book. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere you can buy a book. Walmart, anywhere you can buy a book, you can buy a million dollar flip flops. And then we’ve got the journal coming out, depending on when you listen to this mid March 24 journal comes out, but super easy to find, man.

20:25
Greg Wilkes
Awesome. Yeah, sounds great, Rodric, and really appreciate what you’re doing to help the industry and help home builders. Sounds great. And I know that a lot of people that are working, you’re in great success, so keep it up, mate.

20:35
Rodric Lenhart
All right, thanks, buddy. Appreciate it.

20:39
Greg Wilkes
All right, let’s switch this podcast up. That’s enough about Rodric. Now, Rodric is going to interview me. Can I just quickly interrupt this podcast and ask you, please, for a favour? We’re constantly trying to bring you the best value and the best specialist guests to come on this show, but the only way we can do that is if we start growing this channel. So could you please subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already? And we’d love it if you could give us a review. These reviews really help promote the algorithm and promote engagement. And it means that our guests can see that we’ve got a really successful show. I hear from you in the background that you’re enjoying it. So please take five minutes to do this. It will really mean a lot to me and help the show going forwards.

21:21
Rodric Lenhart
So I started this new thing last week and I used to just say, we’re in an elevator, we’re going to the 13th floor. Who are you? What do you do? But I’m trying to change it up. So I’m going to say you’re riding horseback through the alps. We’re 45 seconds away from the turn. We just met. Who are you? What do you do?

21:43
Greg Wilkes
Wow, mate. You like to ask the hard question. So when you say 45 seconds, I’ve got to punch this out.

21:50
Rodric Lenhart
Only for your whole life, just toss it in there.

21:53
Greg Wilkes
Yeah. So I help builders and trades create one to 5 million pound companies, but we’re doing that to give them more time, freedom and money. It’s not scaling for scale’s sake. I’m big in helping people really have the right family life. And it’s not about the flashy cars and the big houses and whatever else. It’s about creating a life where you can really have some meaning and enjoy it and spend time with the family. That’s what it’s all about. And having the best experiences. So something that just really fires me up and gets me going is when I get a client that will tell me that they’ve got enough profits in their business to take their kids to Disney World and they’ve been able to enjoy a great holiday. And that’s just what it’s all about for me. That’s what I absolutely love.

22:37
Rodric Lenhart
Amazing. It’s no wonder we get along. Right?

22:42
Greg Wilkes
Similar.

22:43
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah. For real. So what led you to that? Was it a personal experience or did you see somebody else kind of suffering? We’ll say suffering from the phone vacation. Is that how I’m going to put it today?

22:57
Greg Wilkes
I suffered from it, yeah. So I grew up and got into a building company straight away. When I left school, my dad was a bricklayer and he taught me how to be a carpenter. So that’s why I had an apprenticeship from a bricklayer learning carpentry. So that’s why I’m an absolute useless carpenter. But it was good. It was good fun working my dad for a bit. Created a pretty decent business quite early on. Got pretty big, had some challenges with it because I went into partnership with someone and we’d done really well together. But then we just went in different directions, or we wanted to go in different directions. So I had to basically split a partnership up with my best friend. And that’s always a challenge. So often I’m talking to clients I work with now who are in partnerships.

23:40
Greg Wilkes
They’ve got into them because they felt they’ve needed someone to rely on. And then all of a sudden, they realize a year or two years later that actually that they want to go in different directions. It gets really messy and awkward to break those partnerships up. So I’ve experienced the pain of that. And then when I did go on my own, I bought my business partner out, decided that I really had to go gung ho, create a huge business. I always thought I wanted a massive company. Scaled it quick, really quick. And were really successful. And then I scaled it too fast and I started losing control of it. Didn’t really have the foundations in place and cracks started to appear in the business that I was trying to paper over. And we got it big.

24:20
Greg Wilkes
And then we just had a series of events that all kicked in. The economy started slowing down. We had certain sales orders we had to meet every month, and we couldn’t hit those sales orders. We had a project manager stole, like, a half a million pound contract off of me. I had a customer die on me that owed me a few hundred thousand. Our quality of work was going down and we had people complaining and wanting to take us to court and all this stuff. So we had this perfect storm of events that were going wrong. But really it was all down to me. I’d lost control because I’d got too big too quick and didn’t have those foundations in place. And the business ended up going bust. And it was the worst experience of my life.

25:00
Greg Wilkes
I’ve never been so stressed, never put my family through so much. It was horrible, absolutely horrible. So I’ve carried the pain of that experience, but learned a ton of stuff. I learned from it. And then I really went back to the drawing board and thought, well, what now? What do I do? And all I knew was construction at the time. I thought, where do I go from here? And I sort of had this thing inside me that I knew I was doing a lot right. I knew how to run a business and I knew how to get clients. But there were just a few things that I hadn’t quite mastered and I didn’t want to give up. It felt like a big fail. But I was a big believer in, well, you just learn from it and go again.

25:42
Greg Wilkes
And so I did something that you said, read a lot of books, hundreds of books, on how to grow your business the right way, the foundations to put in place. And I thought, right, this time I’m going to do it the right way and I’m going to document my process, like, how am I going to grow the business? And we grew that business to seven figures in under twelve months. And what was more important was that it was a business that served me. I had time, freedom, and it was so easy to create the second business because I did it the right way. And it was fantastic. And then since then, I’ve gone on to do my own developments, like built my own houses and sold them and all that sort of stuff, and keeping all those principles in mind.

26:23
Greg Wilkes
So every business I’ve had since then, I’ve managed to create, I think it’s four, seven figure businesses since then that have been done the right way. This time I don’t scale too fast. I’ll do it slowly, but it’s got to serve me and my family. So, yeah, that’s my story. That’s how it went.

26:39
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah, man, so much to unback there. So much to unback there when the last construction company goes bust. And I understand that pain to some degree went through myself, certainly through eight, nine, and then new guys, I mean, they killed themselves. They were developers. They just hung themselves in the closet. There was so much went through during that time. Why would you do it again?

27:13
Greg Wilkes
It’s so true. Yeah. Such a big question. Because I was close to just getting out of it. There was two reasons. One, I had a really loyal team around me that I felt really responsible for, and they had their mortgages to pay. They’d stuck with me through thick and thin, and I thought, I want to help them. And at the end of the day, I’m not responsible for their lives. But I did feel an obligation to them in some way. So that was burning in my mind. Also, there was creditors that I wanted to pay down. So even though the business went bust, there were still people that I had money to that I felt an obligation that I had to pay back. So we had to try and do that in some way, create a new business to pay some of them down.

28:01
Greg Wilkes
But I think the biggest thing for me was that I had something unfulfilled inside me that I felt that I’d failed. And the problem is, I think a lot of men, they attach significance to their business. They feel significant if they can create a good business. And I think, looking back, and this is something I’ve been working on with myself over the years, is that I shouldn’t have my identity tied up in my business. But at the time it was, and I felt that it wasn’t right. My identity had been stained, and I needed to make right the wrong. And so that’s why I went back into it again and gave it another go. So they’re probably the reasons. Whether it was right or wrong, I don’t know.

28:42
Greg Wilkes
I mean, looking back, I guess it was right because I got it right the next time. But at the time, it was touch and go. I didn’t know what to do. But I also didn’t have many other options. I thought, where do I go from here? Because that’s all I knew.

28:54
Rodric Lenhart
Construction man, I commend you, because there’s, and you know this as well as me, but so many builders that would go belly up, and you’d see them on Facebook, in Santra pay, and yet they screwed the Electrician, they screwed the plumber, they screwed all these people. And there was plenty of jobs I didn’t make a nickel on or I lost money on, but everybody got paid. I think it’s one of those sleep at night factors, and that’s kind of what I hear in you there, is that I need to make this right. And what’s the fastest way I know how to make this right? Kudos to you.

29:31
Greg Wilkes
Wanted to make it right, but being completely honest about it, I couldn’t make it right with everyone. It just couldn’t do it. There’s a reason why the business went bust, because we couldn’t pay everybody. So that was awful. And a lot of people talk about going bust as an easy way out, but I would say it’s one of the hardest things to do. It’s not an easy way out at all. And the repercussions of it stick with you for years because you’ve got bad credit and bad reputation and whatever else, there’s not an easy way out of it. And we see builders doing it all the time, going bus and then thinking they could just start again and do the same thing again. It’s not the way. So, yeah, it’s taking lessons from these things, isn’t it? And moving forward.

30:12
Greg Wilkes
So, yeah, it took a lot of lessons from it, that’s for sure.

30:14
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah. A bit of a karma callback there, I think, for some of those. Again, sleep at night. How do those people sleep at night? We could do a whole episode on that. There’s just this lack of moral structure that makes it. Anybody who thinks bankruptcy or a dying business is an easy way out is a terrible human being. Like I’m saying it here, you can listen, I’ll take it to the bank. You know what I mean? A terrible human being.

30:47
Greg Wilkes
I think people justify it. There are some bad people out there and they’re trying to actively think of ways of screwing people over. But I do think the majority of people are all of us. We justify our actions in our head to why we’re going to do something. And probably if you were speaking to that person, you might look on the outside and think, well, that’s a scumbag. Like he’s just done that. But actually, if you sat down and spoke to that person, they probably got their reasons whether they’re right or wrong, but they’ve got their own reasons why they’re justifying why they’re taking this action. So, yeah, sometimes you have to see it from other people’s perspective. But, yeah, it’s interesting.

31:27
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah, for real, that same kind of vein when you’re working with your builders, how does that play into your coaching? How does that play into the advice you give them? That kind of do what’s right attitude? Are you ever butting heads with people on stuff like they want to do things that clearly you’re not in agreement with?

31:53
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, I mean, you’re treading a fine line, aren’t you? Because I’m not the moral agent of my clients. I can’t speak to their morals on what they want to do. But what we do with all our coaching is that we’re getting the foundations right and making sure that they’re not taking too many risks. They have a proper plan of how it’s going to go. But ultimately, if a person decides to go one way or another, they’re not like the naughty school kid. They’re adults. And I’m not the teacher to say, you can’t do that. It’s their lives, isn’t it? And they’ve got to step up and be responsible for their actions. But we would certainly guide them in the way we think it should be done. And I think really it’s about getting those foundations right.

32:35
Greg Wilkes
We really just don’t want people in that position in the first place. If you can make sure they’re not in that position, it makes the conversations a lot easier.

32:42
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah, I love that. Where do you think most builders go wrong? Is your client somebody that’s been doing it for a handful of years, or are they a newbie that you’re scaling up?

32:54
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, they’ve been doing it for a while. So generally our clients come in at around 1 million pounds, $2 million, sort of level, that sort of thing. And we’re trying to triple them in size, quadruple them in size. So they’ve been doing it a bit. And they’re off the tools, generally, which is good. I would say the main place they go wrong is that they haven’t been trained in how to run a business, so they generally have come off the tools. So they’re excellent tradespeople and craftspeople, but they don’t know the logistics of how to run a business the right way. So they don’t know how to control their finances. That’s probably the big thing. How do you track project costs and phases in projects? And what are the KPI metrics we should be tracking financially?

33:38
Greg Wilkes
So that’s probably the big mistake, is the finances. And then they’ve obviously sometimes got a problem with people management because they’ve been on the tools. They’re very matey and pally with their staff. They’re one of the lads. And then how do they then transition into. Actually, I’m a manager now, I’m a director of a business. How do I help this person with their career and make sure I can retain them and move them forward? So they’re probably the big ones. And then maybe the last thing that they struggle with, which were talking about earlier, is the time. The time and freedom. And they go all in because they’re obsessed with creating the business that they want and they don’t realize how hard it is.

34:15
Greg Wilkes
And all of a sudden they’re working 16 hours, days not seeing their family, and then they’re looking back questioning, why am I even doing this? I could go and earn just as much money working for someone else if you actually worked out the time they’re putting into it. So they’re the big mistakes.

34:28
Rodric Lenhart
I’m going to ask you the same question you asked me, and you can probably see it coming. But I think I saw this in the trades a ton, and I would see it in the trades, my subs, employees, and we’ll use an electrician as an example. You’ve got the couple of guys there wiring up the house and they’re, well, I’m just going to be the boss. Then I won’t just be making $30 an hour, then I’ll be the boss. And look how much he makes per house. And then they get into the nuts and bolts of what it actually costs to run a business. And they get to the end and they go, I was making more and I had no responsibility and I had benefits and all these things. And the grass is not always greener, especially in those fields.

35:12
Rodric Lenhart
But do you think you can learn to be an entrepreneur, or do you think you’re born to be a good entrepreneur? I think anybody could take a stab at it, but to be successful at.

35:22
Greg Wilkes
It, yeah, I think some people have natural abilities and talents. So there are some people that you could say are born to do it because they just find it easy. They can take risk. They’re not afraid of failing. So those things might be more natural abilities, but I do believe you can teach it as well. You can teach people the way to do it. And because we get a lot of entrepreneurs that can be really great at some things. They might be great at sales, but they’re useless at other stuff. And then as a good entrepreneur, you then need to know how to hire people that are better than you in certain areas. So I believe in both. I believe that just like Venus and Serena Williams, they obviously had natural ability, but they were taught to become unbelievable world class tennis players.

36:08
Greg Wilkes
And I believe anyone can do that if you have the right training and the right framework. But maybe you’re not going to be as successful as someone who is naturally gifted at that and has the training. They’re always going to do better. But I believe both could be successful.

36:24
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah. Where do you think customer management comes into some of this? Where the tradies in particular, maybe they aren’t used to kind of that glad handing and setting expectations from the outset. And boundaries with customers was a big one for me when I was in the. What? What do you think, Joe Builder, who hasn’t hired you yet? What are they lacking in that area?

36:52
Greg Wilkes
Well, customers makes or breaks the business, doesn’t it? If you can’t get your customer service right, there’s so much you can do with marketing and sales and bringing new businesses on. But if you can get word of mouth recommendations and repeat business, that’s where a business really thrives. It’s the same with us, with our coaching businesses, isn’t it? When you retain clients, we can bring new clients on, but when you actually retain people because you’re giving them great results and they’re loving the program, that’s a business that can scale and is successful. So, yeah, mastering customer services is so important. But also, like what you said, the boundaries are so important too. So one thing that we always encourage our clients is don’t be giving your mobile Hondas out to clients because they’re going to take liberties with that.

37:37
Greg Wilkes
All of a sudden we see sometimes people are getting WhatsApp groups going and then the clients text them at 10:00 at night, oh, my power is not working and my water is out, things like that. All right, so you’ve then got to balance that, haven’t you? Because that’s maybe potentially viewed as great customer service because you’re on hand at 10:00 at night. But then where’s that boundary for your family life? So I think you’ve got to have both, but you clearly have to set those boundaries. And I think that can be set by giving the customer the right expectation. So something we always teach is before you start any project, you go in and have a site meeting with the clients and you sit down and you run through all these things like what are the boundaries? Here’s my mobile.

38:16
Greg Wilkes
If you are going to give your mobile out, but at 05:00 that gets turned off. But we have got an emergency number or emergency email you can send if something serious happens. So I think you have to do stuff like that. Otherwise you never break free from the business. It’s all consuming.

38:31
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah, I think by and large those customers, when you set those boundaries, they respect you more. They mostly honor them and they see you as a business person, not just as somebody. They’re like toddlers. They’ll take as much as that you’re willing to give?

38:51
Greg Wilkes
Oh, yeah. They’ll push the boundaries for sure if they can get away with it.

38:56
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah. So what’s it look like on your end for your program? Builder comes to you. They’re at 2 million. They want to scale to ten. What does graduation look like? Or is there a graduation or isn’t an ongoing process?

39:12
Greg Wilkes
Yes, we really focus on the foundation, so we’ll actually map out a strategy for them, a financial strategy of how we’re going to get them to their goal. So actually we can break this down month by month and show you what you’re going to get to in year one, year two, year three. That’s really important to get the finances right. Then we show them how to find their ideal clients and win the right type of leads oftentimes. It’s interesting what you said earlier about big companies when I was interviewing you. We’re talking about big companies that then want to scale back to do smaller work. We sometimes go the other way.

39:45
Greg Wilkes
We actually believe that if you want to create a 5 million pound business, it’s going to be much easier to do that with 5 million pound jobs than it is doing whatever, 100 smaller jobs. So we generally encourage people to level up the type of projects that they’re bringing on board and then we show them how to get the operations and whatever else right so that they’re running like a well awarded machine both on site and off site. But the graduation, which is a great question, something that is really interesting is we do map out the big ten year plan for them and where do they want to go in ten years. And what’s interesting is 80% to 90% of people that are working with us in our mastermind community say that their big goal is to do property development for themselves.

40:27
Greg Wilkes
So they’re no longer working for clients, but they’re building their own homes and selling them. And I don’t know whether that’s just because they followed my journey and that I’m attracting those type of people or whether that’s just generally what builders actually want, because that’s what I wanted since when I first ever started in the business, just build my own homes. So we then showed them the strategy of how they then do that, how we then take profits and start developing. So the graduation would be, let’s get you into property developing so that then you can decide, do I want to work for clients anymore or am I going to make this side of the business great?

40:59
Greg Wilkes
And the good thing about that is you’re now creating intergenerational wealth, which is what it’s really about, because we’re working with a lot of family owners and things. So that’s what we want. We want you to create a nice portfolio of property that you can then pass on to your kids.

41:15
Rodric Lenhart
Beautiful. I think the reason they don’t want to work with customers is because customers are generally terrible.

41:21
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, that’s the hard bit.

41:22
Rodric Lenhart
And the longer you’re working with them, the worse it is.

41:25
Greg Wilkes
Yeah. They’re sometimes really tough to deal with. And you’re dealing with personalities, aren’t you? So the bigger you get, the more personalities you’ve got to deal with, and oftentimes, that’s the frustration. So that’s why I got out of the industry. To be fair, I created a really good construction business the second time around, but that’s not what I actually wanted. I wanted to build my own homes, and there was nothing better than building my first home. I remember the first one we built. We had to move it. It wasn’t in the right position. I had to move these walls. And I thought, do you know how nice it was just to make the decision without asking anyone? Just go, right. It’s my decision. I’m moving it there. I didn’t have to check with anybody, and I thought, this is great.

42:03
Greg Wilkes
And I’ve never had a time where I had no stress at all. I mean, you did get different stresses in the sense that you got to pay the bank and you got to do this and you got to hit timelines. But generally speaking, it wasn’t stressful. I loved it. And so, yeah, we encourage our clients to think about that might be a path they want to go down.

42:20
Rodric Lenhart
Yeah, for sure. You spend 80% of your time explaining what you’re going to do, and then 20% of the time doing it when you’re working with a customer.

42:28
Greg Wilkes
Frustrating.

42:29
Rodric Lenhart
Awesome. Well, dude, we could talk for another hour, I am quite sure. But how can people find you? How can they get in touch?

42:36
Greg Wilkes
Sure. Yeah. So just search me up on Wilkes. You know, I don’t even know what my Instagram handle is, but I’ve got a book called building your future, and that was Amazon number one bestseller, which I’m really pleased with that outlines bit of our framework. Got the podcast, too, called develop your construction business. So if you’re listening to this, yeah, pop over onto that one as well and subscribe, and vice versa for Rodric, because he’s obviously got the awesome channel here. So, yeah, that’s how you can find me. I’m around. Just give me a Google and you’ll find it somewhere awesome.

43:08
Rodric Lenhart
Well, we’ll have all that in the show notes. And Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was a blast. I love doing the back and second, 2nd, 3rd time I guess I’ve done it, and it’s always a lot of fun for me and for listeners.

43:20
Greg Wilkes
Yeah, I love the format. Thanks for having us on.

43:22
Rodric Lenhart
All right, bud.