About Us
Why Us
Newly married, working like crazy, going to school full time and both of my little boys were diagnosed with special needs. My neighbor worked for the state and he came over to let me know that parents of two children with disabilities have a 95% divorce rate. My first thought was how cool it is to be in the top five percent. Because their is no way my marriage is going to fail. My wife was nervous because we were already struggling to keep it together. I saw real concern on her face and knew that I had to take action. I couldn’t be normal. I knew I needed something bigger in my life. I dove into personal development and coaching with both feet. I read every book, watched every video and attended every event I could find. I was a black hole absorbing as much knowledge about life, relationships and transformation as possible. For the first time in my life, I found a place where I belonged. These were my people. I received so much from this world that I feel like I can't help but share. At the same time I was on my journey of discovery, even more stress was thrown into my life. I was thrust into a new leadership position in my family’s construction business. My entire life I said I would never go into construction. But it happened. I felt tremendous pressure to perform and deliver.
I didn’t want everyone thinking that I had a position I didn’t deserve simple because of the circumstance of my birth. Working my way up the company, I felt trapped. We had too many employees and there was no incentive for them to do anything productive. They would come into the shop and watch the clock until it was time to go home. They would put in their hours, maybe spend some time cleaning, but really they weren’t doing anything productive. We basically had thirty paid janitors on staff. No one wanted to cut costs by letting all these unnecessary workers go, but no one was doing anything to try and fix the situation. After draining most of the companies savings out, the cuts started happening… and I was put in charge of the process. I vowed I’d never let anything like that happen on my watch, but things didn’t get much better and I wondered if I’d ever even get an opportunity to run the business. We all cut back to working 3 days a week. I had a mortgage and a young family to take care of. I started looking for work in any place that was hiring. It was so discouraging to realize that in spite of all the time and energy that I’d put into a college education, there weren’t any positions paying much over minimum wage. The only place actually excited to hire me told me I could start delivering pizzas that night. It was a challenging time for me, and I felt lost and confused. However, looking back now, I realize that it was also a defining moment in my life. Despite what I thought were noble and selfless sacrifices that I’d made to build the family business and provide for my own family, I had actually become totally dependent on the validation of others and too afraid to let anyone see my flaws. I dove into personal development and entrepreneurship. I knew I had to find a way off the ladder I’d been climbing because I knew it was leaning against the wrong wall. I started working crazy hours and looking for any opportunity to build a side hustle outside of my life as an employee. I learned a lot of hard lessons and spent a lot of time and money, not just on business ideas and tools and schemes. I also sought out books and coaches and programs to try and fix myself. I was living off of 4 hours of sleep and sacrificing my health and my relationships trying to find some magical cure that would fix it all. Over the next couple of years, the business was getting a little better.
The economy was still flat, but I was working like crazy and we had a bunch of great people who just kept doing their jobs. The company culture was pretty bad. When trust is low, then everything costs more and takes longer. I learned that from one of the many business books I’d studied, but was having a really hard time trying to figure out how to change anything. Then it was my turn. I suddenly found myself running the company and decided to go all in. I dropped all my other endevors and worked like crazy to make changes. I’d already seen so many incentive programs and management techniques that didn’t work so I thought I’d just try to swing the pendulum and do the opposite. We grew sales over that 1st year period by almost 20% even though the market hadn’t improved at all. The problem is that at the end of that year I found that I had more full time employees than we’d ever had before, more trucks and equipment - a lot of it in worse condition than ever, and lower profits than we’d had in the last 5 years. The truly maddening part was that I was working 70-80 hours a week to try and keep it all together. I felt like I was losing everything. Then my wife told me she’d considered leaving and it just broke me. I was praying for a miracle because I knew I couldn’t keep living like this. A friend of mine introduced me to a leadership group and I plunged once more into the world of personal development, but this time more focused on character development and leadership - foundational stuff instead of techniques or quick fixes. I approached my company with a completely new strategy. I focused on upskilling my employees and implemented a profit sharing program. I wanted them invested in the company and to have the ability to earn even during lean times. Constructions is a fickle and seasonal business. There are stretches of months or even years where there simply isn’t enough work to go around. Most construction happens during a short window of time each year. Things really slow down for large parts of the year and companies try different approaches to the problem. There are big costs associated with keeping employees on the books who aren’t doing anything. There are massive training and retention costs and if you let go of those employees during the slow months you have to try and replace them when the work picks back up again.
I figured out that if I put everyone on partial commission it would lower our overhead and give us some breathing room on expenses. The only way I could get the staff and my family on board was to give myself the highest exposure. I put myself at the highest level of commission. It's fascinating how much trust you can get when you put yourself in danger. Firemen don’t have to build any relationship with anyone. They show up to the problem and have instant credibility because they put themselves in so much danger. You see that uniform and you think they are going to save you. You give them your total trust. I had to put myself into maximum danger to earn trust. The culture can change very quickly when the employer makes themselves as vulnerable as the employees. There are books and books about ways to build relationship with your employees. This is the fastest way to do it. As soon as you can show them on paper that you’re the most exposed, they are on your side. Once they saw that I was the most vulnerable, I gave them two choices. They could choose a conservative mix of higher salary and lower commission, or a riskier mix of lower salary with higher commission. The conservative option has a larger guaranteed income while the riskier option had a lot more potential income. I let each employee decide how much control they wanted over their fate. I pulled up their income from the previous quarter and showed how much they would have earned with each package. They were able to make a decision from real data. When you give people concrete data it’s much easier for them to choose. Each employee was able to make an informed decision. I had a different set of options for each level of employee. It’s not fair to try to give the laborer who is on the bottom, that doesn't have a lot of control of his day, the same level of risk as someone who has the ability to bring in more clients.
The worker who doesn’t do anything customer facing. It's not fair to give him a huge amount of exposure for commission because he really does have a lot of control over our sales numbers. They are able to earn raises and bonuses by improving their certifications and the quality of their performance. They can leverage their training and skillset to make more money. They can learn new skills. But they aren’t in a position where commission makes sense because they don’t affect the overall numbers. The person who is a level higher has a little more control, so their bonuses were partially based off of their own performance, but also the performance of their entire division. It’s really easy to incentivize the wrong thing. People are very good at figuring out how to beat the system. If you incentivize speed, quality will start to drop so they can finish faster. If you incentivize quality, speed will drop because they want to finish each task perfectly. A lot of my ideas had failed so I knew I had to modify the system multiple times until I found the right incentives to maximize the performance of my entire team.
I would love to say I got it right on the first try but that’s not what happened. People will game the system if you don’t set it up right and it took my multiple tries to get it right. I was transparent about the process. I made sure that everyone knew that I was committed to the outcome and that the process might need to be adjusted so that we could make it happen. Surprisingly they seemed more engaged and willing to communicate their perspectives and ideas. They started doing all the things that we had “trained” (nagged, pleaded, and threatened) on for years. My process provided more income for the team and they become more invested in the success of the company. We were all sharing the risks and rewards together. I was always finding new books for my team to read to continue their education and improvement. While I love providing my workers with an income it also felt amazing to have an impact on their lives. It’s possible to find leadership fulfilling. I found that having an impact was the most important part of my day. That's when I discovered my passion for coaching. I had always enjoyed helping others, and I realized that coaching was a way for me to make a real difference in people's lives. I decided to start my own coaching business, and I have been doing it ever since.
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