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4k - Logger Onboarding Video
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4k - Logger Onboarding Video
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Transcript
Introduction to the Better Contractor Podcast
00:00:14
Speaker
Alright, welcome to the inaugural edition of the Better Contractor podcast. To my left, I've got John, aka the Bean King. What's up, John? Not much. How are you? Not too bad. He works for Landicorp, by the way. Yes, I do. I'm a project manager. I'm Brent Oberlink. I own Landicorp. Started it in 2007. Right now we're at 80 employees. So several years in, we're basically a right of way tree clearing company that
00:00:43
Speaker
performs work in 10 states. So technically kind of a mix of all three of those industries, laundry, tree and landscape. So I think it makes us pretty suited to do a podcast. To my right, we've got Travis, he does not yet have a nickname. We're going to get him one though. I'll heavily influence that nickname. We'll call it a call sign. What do you do Travis?
The Gap in Contracting Training and Solutions
00:01:06
Speaker
Strategy and operation for the better contractor.
00:01:08
Speaker
So the better contractor. So what do we do? So we are an online training platform, uh, coaching. And basically in a nutshell, we are here to, to help you guys. Uh, we basically, we saw a need, we saw a need in the contracting space. There's not really anybody out there doing engaging training. There's a whole bunch of, you know, we talked about this earlier. It's a whole bunch of training out there that's 12 hours long. But as you guys know, in our business, nobody wants to watch a 12 hour video about stuff they may or may not even be doing. So.
00:01:38
Speaker
I mean, it's the balance of there is engaging training, but it's not scalable, or it's really tough to scale that the engaging training is hands on immersive, you're out there, they're hands on the equipment or in learning what the experience is just as dangerous, potentially expensive, and really tough to do in route to scale and get exposure to it. So
00:02:02
Speaker
even though that's the best and across all industries that they know that that's the best if I can pick you up and go put you in an environment where you're surrounded by it and you can experience it that's the best way to train it's just really really difficult to scale the time limitations cost money you can't get everybody to the trainers or the trainers out to everybody
00:02:21
Speaker
So most industries have pivoted to digital. So whether it's e-learning or something, it's just a lot of that when you start to go to that 2D format, you're always going to lose things that would be available for you being immersed in it. But the trade-off is you can scale it. That's the least effective way to transfer information. And then when you start getting those long 440 minutes or whatever,
00:02:46
Speaker
Yeah, especially in this day and age, you're gonna lose people almost immediately. And there's no way that you're going to convey. So you're basically a lot of organizations, they're just checking a box, like we provided it. And that's one of the other challenges with a lot of learning and training organizations is they don't have a great metric strategy or being able to judge and determine ROI and like
00:03:07
Speaker
we provided this and what impact did it have. And so that's another fault within the training industry, but ultimately organizations trying to find that happy marriage, like how do we scale training and learning for one, but then two, how do we actually make an impact?
Importance of Engaging Training and Real Experience
00:03:24
Speaker
Part of that is content, delivery, but across almost every industry, that's an important component that's needed and people are trying to solve for it.
00:03:34
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of companies that do I like what you said about checking the box. That's what we run into all the time. There's so many companies out there. That's actually all they're doing is checking the box. They know their employee is not actually watching that 10 hour video there. It's on play and they're doing something else watching another video or whatever. They're not actually actually sitting there watching that video. So it's one thing we tried to do was you know, the word engaging.
00:03:58
Speaker
create content that's short enough to actually go past your attention span, obviously. But we've also tried to create stuff that's actually by a contractor who's actually out there in the field doing this stuff.
00:04:10
Speaker
We know what we're doing. We're not going to as a group of safety guys sitting here. They've never been on that side of the desk. So I think that's important too. And you founded and run successful companies in this industry and other one, so that you obviously can construct lessons learned and apply the universal principles, but you having created a company that operates in this space, a successful one for multiple years, very successful one.
00:04:39
Speaker
And being able to extract, and that helps too from the practitioner side, it's not hypothetical, it's the better contractor was derived from lessons learned and challenges experienced in the real world, and then being able to test some of these principles against what does it actually have an impact.
Scalable Processes and Onboarding Importance
00:04:58
Speaker
the real world with your other company and then extract the best components out of that to help guide, shape, influence other companies and individuals in the space so that they can be successful, more successful, faster.
00:05:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's good. You know, and we'll talk about this in future episodes. But one of the items we'll talk about a lot is scalability and being able to repeat a process. You know, and that's kind of where this comes into play. You know, everyone knows like when you hire a new employee, you know, there's a certain cost of retaining. But when you hire a new one, do you really want your safety guy to go out there and onboard every single employee and I say onboard him talking
00:05:41
Speaker
the very basic of things, the very, very basic training. If you're a tree climber, that needs to be in person. But do I need to be in person for every single simple item? Not really. So it also kind of goes back to this. This is a system for you to scale your business. And we're making it super easy to do so. In that way, your safety guy then has the ability to spend more time in the field because he's doing less of this basic stuff. So I think that goes a lot to your repeatability and engaging in the scalability of the system.
00:06:11
Speaker
Yeah, and consistency is very important when you are onboarding new employees. You wanna make sure what they're taught from day one is the same for every single employee. So you don't have one guy getting one message and then the next hire getting a totally different message and then they're out in the field on a job and they're not on the same page.
00:06:37
Speaker
Yeah and I've run into that with people doing some services at my house even is that right there where crew one comes and that's who I hire this contractor for because they're awesome and then crew two comes in the summer and all of a sudden I'm like I don't want these people back here again there's no uniformity in most of the crews and that's kind of the issue when you do not have training or do not have any onboarding process
00:07:01
Speaker
basically each foreman individually is who's actually leading your company's culture and your company's morale.
Impact of Training on Safety and Culture
00:07:06
Speaker
It's up to them because you're not out there and you're not actually setting up this onboarding system. Duplicatability, repeatable, get the standard down and then scaling that.
00:07:26
Speaker
in a digital format. So some of the challenges is we attended a few conferences and had a lot of conversations with individual business owners across multiple industries, but then also across the United States. And some of those challenges is labor, being able to address all of the potential clients they have, do all the work. And so a lot of times the training component gets sidelined
00:07:54
Speaker
Even if they wanted to they have the staff to have the personnel that that are interested in it and and see the value in it but you've only got X amount of employees and they need to be out there generating revenue and So that even sucks any time out that you did have
00:08:10
Speaker
So there's consequences for not having those standards and having a repeatable process and having it digital with nature, something that you can scale. Right. Even if you had an in-person training program, and a lot of them did, or at least to some degree, and as soon as they have people call out sick or
00:08:26
Speaker
something happens where they set training and setting that standard that baseline suffers and ultimately that's going to manifest down the road. You're not setting that standard. You're not setting expectations, having that shared consciousness or ideas exposed to the staff and it'll manifest in safety incidents or just having a bad culture. Yeah. One of my quote unquote mentors, one of the things he always says, you can't scale chaos.
00:08:55
Speaker
That's very true here as well because if you, and we ran into that with Lanarkorp several years ago when we had to kind of exponential growth was not having that structure in place. And then we grew a whole bunch and then all of a sudden now you have to take a year and fix all of that stuff. But by that time you've made a few customers matter whatever so.
00:09:16
Speaker
This kind of stuff is key, like you said, to that, you know, having that uniformity amongst the crews where no matter who shows up, you can expect quality. You can expect safety. Um, you know, there's, you know, there's some other brands we go to where you've never really had a bad experience. You know, I look at like, you know, everybody talks about like Chick
Standardization and Franchise Mindset in Growth
00:09:35
Speaker
-fil-A for example, but it's kind of similar. I've personally never had a bad experience. It's always fast. The food's always warm and the people are always friendly. You know, it's the same thing in that, in that industry as well.
00:09:46
Speaker
duplicatability. Yeah, you almost want to look at like a, what comes like a franchise model, you know, where the reason franchises are successful is because you basically have a bulletproof business model that you've worked on and made perfect. And that business model could then be purchased and replicated. That's basically what a franchise is. But it's not just for franchises, you should be doing that with your business too, if you seek to go past, you know, if you're at five employees now and your goal is to be at 100, you've got to kind of have that same mindset there too.
00:10:16
Speaker
And with what you were saying earlier, it's much easier to set those standards of this process up earlier. Yeah, you're gonna scale something. It's gonna be chaos or it's gonna be a duplicatable, repeatable, high quality, thought out, whatever training program, safety program, cultural leadership.
00:10:36
Speaker
But I love your your insight on that in that so I think when we'd have a conversation a few weeks back you're like fit and the court could have been 50% bigger or More successful had we had those processes and and I get it a startup company running lean first goal is to go out there and and create revenue if you don't create revenue and
00:11:00
Speaker
It doesn't really matter. At some point very soon you have to have some sort of standards and process. It's going to create the culture from the beginning and what gets passed on from the rest of your team members. They're going to reinforce that culture, whether it's chaos or whether it's standards.
00:11:19
Speaker
the cultural things that you wanted implemented. So if something's going to scale and yeah, yeah, something will scale. It may not be what you want. Yeah. Same thing with leadership. You know, if you're kind of a quiet leader and kind of in the shadows, and you have a more boisterous leader, but they're not actually a leader that values the same values you have. That's who ends up leading your company. Yeah. So
00:11:41
Speaker
And it starts going in a different direction. Yeah. It'll go in a different direction that you don't want it to go. And we do keep, I just want to say, we do keep kind of loosely using their current term contractor. You know, a lot of times people refer to contractors, they think like home construction or dirt work. We're kind of broadly saying it is all of those, but for us, for this podcast right now, anyways, long tree, uh, and landscape companies and.
00:12:04
Speaker
We're starting there because that's kind of what we know the best, best of, you know, that's, so to give you a little bit of insight on Lanarkorp, it's basically a right of way clearing company, which is most closely related to the tree care industry.
00:12:18
Speaker
There's some mowing involved, there's some grounds maintenance at refineries. So we're kind of in a little bit of all these a little. But right now we have approximately 80 employees, probably very active in what, at least nine, 10 states, probably. Started the company in 2007. My wife and I.
00:12:38
Speaker
It grew quickly. I think by year 2012, I think we were right at, gosh, I think 30 or 40 employees. So you can see the exponential growth in the beginning. And are we experts? We're not experts. But you know, the thing is, you look at like mentorship, or you look at, you know, these type of podcasts that are kind of helping others. You don't have to be the expert. Nobody's technically all the way the expert, there's usually always a bigger fish in the sea. But if we can help those of you who are
00:13:07
Speaker
one to 20 to 30 employees become the companies at 50 to 100 to 200 employees.
00:13:13
Speaker
then that's kind of our goal here is to help you guys out. We want to see an improvement in the contracting space as a whole. One of the reasons I started Lander Corp was just seeing kind of a need for what I was kind of at the time calling it kind of a concierge contractor. So a contractor that was actually, you mentioned checking boxes earlier. That's always a pet peeve of mine and I see our competition doing a lot now even. So in our industry, we have to work inside of, it's called IS in that world but it's a safety.
00:13:42
Speaker
verification site. And it's good. It's good intention. It works well. There's a whole lot of competition. I know that this is sitting there just checking boxes, right? They're not actually doing the safety stuff in the field. And I hate that, you know, it's unfair to those who are doing things the right way. And you sit back and you see that you're just, you know, it's just wrong. So anyway, so when we started land record, that was kind of the goal.
00:14:07
Speaker
was to actually do that and actually create a safety culture, not just checking the box. That was kind of our lingo in the beginning was we're a culture, not a not a box checking company. But, you know, that goes beyond just safety. It goes into how you conduct business, the quality of your work, your core values, it goes into everything. So
00:14:26
Speaker
Our kind of goal here is to basically change the industry in a way to think more like that. It can actually be better. And if we all do better, then we all do better. You know what I mean?
Challenges of Low Bid Practices and Quality Emphasis
00:14:37
Speaker
So if we all kind of elevate the space, we all make a little bit more money. The business is a little bit more sustainable in long term. It's a win-win for everybody. And it will push out some of the cheap ones, which is that kind of goal.
00:14:51
Speaker
And we've talked a lot about better value versus low bid and just having conversations too. But you can see that so that it kind of comes from a couple different areas. Procurement teams potentially who are bidding out contracts, especially for larger ones. So sometimes the manifestation of low bid. So low bid or low cost bidding and the mentality associated with that is you do the very bare minimum as far as
00:15:18
Speaker
Culture safety all the maybe auxiliary things that make a strong sustainable for short company for short term profits. So it's all about profitability not necessarily about creating a stable and sustained business that you care about your people and careers or things. It's all about the bottom line.
00:15:38
Speaker
Very, very short term thinking you potentially can win upfront bids, but the company that you're supporting is going to end up paying and you're going to end up paying for it in brand reputation and constant rebidding and safety and potentially lawsuits.
00:15:54
Speaker
it manifests in different ways. And it's typically you're paying for it long term. So the low bidding is kind of, I was talking to somebody earlier, it's a race to the bottom for the entire industry, it's a race to the bottom for you, it's a race to the bottom for everybody in that procurement teams. And I get how sometimes that manifests
00:16:14
Speaker
I see manifest comes about for procurement teams. You got somebody who's literally about we're in a company in charge of being out contracts. That's maybe not their expertise. They've got one of maybe 50 that they have to do. This is a part time thing that is on their plate. They're being hounded about and they got deadlines. So they need an easy way to assess who they're going to procure for those. And probably the easiest way is
00:16:44
Speaker
Lowest bid or maybe maybe there's an assumption that lowest bid maybe they really are undercutting things so I'll take the next one up or somewhere in the middle and it's not actually What's more sustainable? What's the best practices because the other side is? You implement things that take care of your people you do things that are right you implement training programs you implement safety because you care about them too and
00:17:08
Speaker
you want to foster a culture where they can grow and succeed and advance their careers. And you want to be in the industry long term that costs money, that costs time, which you're going to have to build into your bids. And so a lot of the times those low costs, low bids, in order for them to achieve that is they cut out a lot of that, which there's consequences for. You're going to have incidents you're going to miss.
00:17:35
Speaker
deadlines. And so you can help one of the procurement teams or those in charge of procuring contractors or companies to come do your work. If you can help them understand, one, you're going to pay for it one way or the other. You're just kind of rolling the dice or gambling that maybe this season or this job, I was able to get by with the low cost or low bid.
00:18:02
Speaker
it will come about in a different way where you're going to pay for your reputation. And so helping them understand that when they do that, it does create the kind of race to the bottom for everybody and that now those low bid, low cost contractors
00:18:21
Speaker
Keep winning the bids over those that are trying to do things right and so in order for them to sustain their business and actually have a business It forces even the ones that are trying to do things right to start looking for ways to cut And this is the death spiral
00:18:38
Speaker
And so helping one company to understand that, to unify around doing things right so that we can create. In conversations, I don't mean to be taking over, but in a lot of the conversations, labor was a challenge. So can't find high quality people, can't find
00:18:56
Speaker
Well, if it's a company that's low cost, low bid, and there's no real hope, you're viewed as kind of a cog in the machine. I don't have safety training. I actually don't really don't care. I just don't want lawsuits. I have no growth opportunities for you. I'm going to pay you minimum because I have to. I'm doing low bid. Why would anybody want to come work for them? And that's what beauty is now is you're seeing that post COVID is those companies can't find people to work for them.
00:19:26
Speaker
You know, we ran into that before in a few contracts where, so I know somebody wanted a little bit, but now they're not able to perform the work. So I can't find it by the work form because they're paying so cheap, but now, and this will definitely be a full, full length episode. I think in the future is this very topic right here. So.
00:19:41
Speaker
I think that that's kind of the essence of what the better contractor as a whole beyond just a training platform, but the podcast series and the culture that has been established is that's driving it is unifying the industry and helping the organizations do things right and find find the things and the people and the principles that are leading success in the industry and help
00:20:04
Speaker
amplify those voices and those ideas and those strategies so that everybody can win and make this more sustainable. Yeah, it's kind of calling out, you know, and we've done that a little bit at work, we're calling out some of the procurement policies.
00:20:18
Speaker
that simply are dealing just low bid, you know, because I cannot think of a time, and I mean, I've been in this business for, what is it, 16 years, in a similar line of work for another two prior to that. I cannot think of one instance where low bid was ever the best choice for the company that was procuring the work, or a customer, if it's just a customer, not a company. It always ends up costing more in the end. They always end up usually in litigation,
00:20:45
Speaker
safety issues, scope of work not being performed exactly. And sometimes they don't even know what to offer the contractor has left, you know, they the contractor leaves. And five months later, they realize, oh, they didn't do this, or they skipped this, or they broke this, you know, didn't own up to it. So it's really so it's partly the contractors
00:21:05
Speaker
marketing themselves better, instead of constantly marking yourself as we are the lowest, we're the cheapest, use us because of that, you should be building up your product or your service, you know, and then telling the story of what is it, what makes it better, and then marketing it that way and stop talking about low bid or low cost all the time.
00:21:23
Speaker
And then it's also calling out some of the procurement or the homeowners that always want to just use low bid. And it's okay to not want every customer out there. You know, not every customer is your customer, nor do you want them because usually the ones that are low bid are also the ones that are going to complain about everything too. So it's a little bit calling out that as well and being fine not doing business with them. Because if they want to do cheap, let them do cheap.
Podcast's Role in Industry Improvement and Contractor Support
00:21:46
Speaker
Focus on the ones that actually want to spend money so you can actually make money, pay your people, have the new equipment.
00:21:52
Speaker
Do it safely. Yeah. Yeah. So what is the podcast for? What do you think Travis? What's the purpose of this podcast? We're sitting here talking about training, which is what better contractor is. And it's also coaching. Um, and it's going to continue to evolve. Like I said earlier, our goal is to, to help contractors. So as we find other avenues, like, Hey, this will help. We're going to add it to this, but what do you think the podcast is for the goal?
00:22:18
Speaker
I think it falls more on the cultural side. One, it allows us to get a wider distribution of content ideas, bringing guests, best idea wins type philosophy, but allows us to be pivotal or pivot to whatever is important without having to be fixed in maybe just training videos. But it allows us to build maybe the culture a little bit better, asymmetric in a sense that
00:22:44
Speaker
allows us to get the, like I'm excited about a lot of the guests and the different things that we can bring in. Other viewpoints, you know, this guest may be awesome at marketing. Social proof a bit in the industry, find people who are winning in the industry.
00:23:04
Speaker
and bring them in and help extract some of the things that are making and I guarantee even after talking with several people that will potentially have on the podcast, there's definitely they don't maybe use the same terminology, but you can see the same through lines. There's definitely principles that lead to success that they're implementing and
00:23:22
Speaker
sometimes you just need to hear it from a different perspective, a different point of view. You maybe resonate with their company, their industry, that person, and being able to amplify those voices, I think can be pretty powerful. And then the podcast allows us to be nimble, we can pivot and bring in a bunch of different ideas, topics, things, then just maybe a fixed recording. Things we all struggle with. And the chances are, like when we bring on guests, or even just talking about ourselves, like,
00:23:52
Speaker
guarantee whatever topic or issue or whatever we're talking about, it's going to be something that you've dealt with at your job, your business as well. So it's kind of one of those things like if we all help each other, which is kind of the goal of the better contractors to help contractors. Same thing with the podcast is to help, you know, so if we can help you solve one problem, if you listening for the to this podcast for
00:24:12
Speaker
10 minutes if you get a 10 second little sound bite out of it and that 10 second sound bite causes you to change two little things inside your company. And those two little things equate to $200,000 a year in increased savings. Guess what? That was a really valuable 10 seconds that we just gave you. So that's kind of how I look at it anyway. Well, I think, like you said, time is money and
00:24:39
Speaker
We want to take what we've learned in our industry as a contractor and share our experiences, our shortcomings, and allow others to avoid those. So we make a mistake here on this project. We can help somebody else down the road avoid that mistake and save them money, save them time. Yeah. And I know I've listened to several podcasts that aren't industry related.
00:25:09
Speaker
But just knowing that they're a business and most likely some of these, some of these things are universal. All businesses have the same issues in the first part. But if we can have a podcast that actually deals with stuff specific to our industry, because it is different. Like to me, that'd be amazing, which is one of the reasons we decided to do this. You know, where there's a need, you know, create the solution. So.
00:25:30
Speaker
And hopefully we're able to do that. Hopefully we're able to help you guys grow your businesses and take it to the next level. Like I said, there's fish bigger than us in the sea, and we hope to have some of them on. But we're bigger than most of the fish. So that's the thing. If we can help you grow it, my passion and goal is always to see people succeed in life. So guys, we've been talking for, gosh, 18, 19 minutes for the first edition of the podcast. I think we're going to call it a wrap.
00:25:56
Speaker
Hope you guys found some value there. Please tune in some more. Other than that, I think we're good. Yeah. See you on the next episode. Thanks everyone. Thanks.