Austin Gray: What's going on, OWNERS AND OPERATORS? It is Austin Gray. Welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm going to do a solo episode here, just answering some questions. I'm going to start doing some more of these because I feel like I'm answering a lot of the same questions week in and week out.

Let's see—need help developing strategies and systems. As I'll leave the name private, someone is feeling pulled in too many different directions but doesn't have a lot of consistent cash flow. They're hesitant to hire, especially with the slow season coming up. How to juggle bidding, looking at jobs, operating maintenance as an OWNER OPERATOR, and when to start hiring subs or employees.

So, let's start with this. One of my friends—now, someone who I respect—he's built multiple businesses. He currently owns a $15 million-a-year e-commerce business, but he's just a serial entrepreneur. He started his career by buying a sewer and water excavation business down in Denver.

One thing he told me very early on is that he pushed me to hire as fast as I possibly could because the reality is, whenever you're starting out as an OWNER OPERATOR, you have so many tasks to do. I mean, you are the one doing sales, you are the one doing the estimates, you are the one showing up to the job, you are the one mobilizing all your equipment, you are the one running the equipment, you are the one raking the final grade. All of this stuff just takes so much time.

The reality is that you're never going to be able to break free from just the hustle and bustle of running around like a chicken with your head cut off until you make a decision to invest in other people who can help you.

This is when it got really fun for me because I grew up playing sports and I love working on a team. The second that I felt like I had a team dynamic and a team atmosphere is when I really kicked it into gear personally.

What it also did was allow me to focus on the things that were going to drive the business at that point in time. The way I've thought about growing our business is, "Where is my time best spent?"

It's not necessarily that one thing is more important than the other or one person's role is more important than the other. It's more about who is available right now to help with what specific task.

In the beginning, I didn't have anybody who I knew or trusted to run my equipment. This is at the very beginning. Now, we do. We have a great team in place, and I'm so very thankful. I wake up every single day, and before I go to bed at night, I thank God for the people on our team. It's incredible where we are now.

I'm so unbelievably thankful that we pushed through those beginning phases because those are the hard times. Those are really, really hard as an OWNER OPERATOR. You are running around like a chicken with your head cut off, and you feel like you could be working for 48 hours in a day if there were 48 hours in a day.

That's the reality—you could be working 24 hours in one day, and if there were 48, you could be working 48 hours in one day. That's how much work it takes to get these businesses up and off the ground.

If you are in that situation, like the person who texted me last week, I have a ton of respect for you because I know how hard it is.

Two, I've seen my dad do it my whole life. The guy is an absolute workhorse. I've lived it as someone who has watched it as a kid growing up in a household with a dad who was an OWNER OPERATOR, and then I have personally lived it as well—whenever I started Bearclaw.

All I want to say is get really clear on what you want. I would challenge you to get really clear on what you want. For me, I didn't want to be running around working 24 hours a day doing all those things. I love working, and I love my job, but I wanted to be able to come home at 5:00 p.m. and spend 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. with my wife and daughter before my daughter goes to bed. That is the most important thing to me right now.

So, if the business did not allow me to do that, then it was just worthless anyway. I had to figure out a way to pursue my dream of creating a successful small business while still prioritizing my family.

Sacrifices have to be made. I think a lot of people think, "Oh, you know, you live in Colorado; you must be getting a mountain bike all the time." It's like I think I've mountain biked three times this year. I love archery hunting; this is the first year that I'll be able to even think about going archery hunting. The last several years have just been unbelievably busy.

So the sacrifices being made are that hobbies are going to go down the list in the early days of starting the business. For me, I had two priorities: family and business. That was all I did. It's still pretty much all I do, with the minor exception of now having a few more waking minutes to think about shooting my bow in the evening whenever my daughter goes to bed.

That's just part of starting a business.

So, to answer this question simply, in the early days, you're doing a lot, and there's no getting around that. You have to go through that phase of just doing it all.

But at a certain point, when you have enough lead volume coming in, whenever you are on a piece of equipment, digging with an excavator, or whenever you're grading out a driveway with a skid steer, and your phone rings three times before noon with people asking for jobs or asking for you to come look at their jobs, it's probably time to hire somebody.

I'm using three as a rough example, but I can specifically remember those times when you're trying to focus on delivering a great product in your skid steer or in your mini excavator, and your phone's just ringing. Now, your quality is going down because you're being pulled in a different direction. Your customers may have a decent experience if you answer your phone, but they're not having the absolute best experience they could possibly have.

So, what needs to happen at that point? Here’s the way I approached it: my friend encouraged me to think about what all could be done from someone sitting in a chair behind a computer that could help me be more efficient.

I just thought about that. What can be done from the back office? Let’s coin this person who we're going to focus on recruiting as a back office or office operations manager.

It's a very lightly used term because that person is going to be filling a bunch of different roles related to finance, bookkeeping, accounts receivable, and collecting checks.

Very simply put, that person ideally lives in your local town and is someone who wants to work about four hours a day, 20 hours a week.

The way we structured it was that I found someone who wanted to work 20 hours a week at $25 an hour, and I made a commitment to doing that. Then I delegated or wrote down all of these things that I felt like I could use help with.

We still have customers who want to write checks. A lot of our customer base is composed of 50, 60, and 70-year-old people. I can push Jobber—the software that we use—as much as I want for credit card payments, but the reality is that some people are just going to want to write checks.

The way I approach this, and the way I recommend approaching it, is: don't give people friction! If they want to pay you money, let them pay you money.

But the downside to that is, when you live in this rural area like we do, we have a post office. So there's a delay in the checks. You're thinking about a million things going on. You're on the excavator; you're trying to sell jobs. The person you talked to yesterday told you they were going to put the check in the mail, but in all reality, they're not putting the check in the mail until tomorrow.

So, that means it's going to get there three days from now. Oh, by the way, if that falls on a weekend, it’s here next Tuesday.

By next Tuesday, your head's already in a million different places, and I get that.

One thing I gave to this person was: just make a daily post office run. That’s all I ask of you because it is a pain in the butt to go pull off a job and go to the post office.

So that was like one very simple thing. What do you need to do whenever you grab that check? Well, you need to deposit that check into the bank. But all of that takes brain power and brain space, right? It’s time, and that time adds up.

I guarantee you, you're minimum wasting an hour if you pull off a job, go to the post office, and then go to deposit a check.

“Oh, but Austin can't we use mobile deposit?” Yes, you can, but it still takes brain space and time that you could be focusing on selling and fulfilling right now.

So in that first phase, the first hire I made was: who can help me with all of these back-office tasks? And they're not unimportant tasks; they're very important.

What a lot of these business gurus and business books talk about is that you, as an owner, need to focus on high-level tasks. Like you're the high...You know, it's like, "No!"

One, yeah, you may own equity in the business, but you still have a small business, and you still have a job. So put your ego aside and call yourself an OPERATOR. That's what you are in that phase, and shoot, in the phase that we're in right now, I still am. I just change hats daily: "What does the business need?" I fulfill that.

So many people right now are being brainwashed in this society of, “Oh, create this remote business, and you can be an owner, and you can sit back on a beach.” It’s such a bunch of bull crap! It really is. The 4-Hour Work Week mindset ruined everybody.

Okay, so back on track here—you got to focus on doing the things that you don't have other team members to currently do at that phase of business growth.

It's not that one task is more important than the other; it's that all of these tasks have to be done. How can I efficiently get this done by plugging myself into the equation and leveraging somebody else's time by paying them for their time? That's just what you're doing.

So that first hire was an office operations manager!

The problem is, you know from this person's text, “I need new strategies and systems as we're being pulled in many different directions but lack of consistent cash flow. We are hesitant to hire.”

You have two options here: you can, one, keep doing the same thing, which you’ve already admitted is not working for you.

So theoretically, if you were to make a decision to hire someone and if it didn't work, isn’t that the same outcome as keeping doing what you're doing? My point being that if you try something different and it doesn’t work for you, you're still going to end up in the same scenario as if you were to keep going as is, because right now, there’s no consistent cash flow.

If you keep doing it how you’re doing it, you’re going to end up having to quit because you don’t have consistent cash flow.

So, in my opinion, it was worth taking my friend's advice and saying, "You know what? I'm going to go take a risk and hire this person before I think I have enough cash flow to do so."

The reason being is because where I convinced myself is that I would be able to focus on the things I needed to focus on and allow that person to focus on the things that were dragging me back from creating consistent cash flow.

Right now, we have a team dynamic of two. Now this person can focus on collecting the checks, depositing the checks.

Oh, by the way, whenever an estimate needs to be sent, you have to sit down at the computer and really get detailed. If you're going to do estimates right, that person—if you spend the time on the front end to train them how you think about doing estimates—will be able to help you while you're on a skid steer, while you're on a mini excavator.

The amount of brain power that this hire freed up and the responsibilities I was able to delegate and get help with freed me up so much to be able to still continue to go sell jobs whenever people called my phone, meet with the customers, provide a great first-level experience, understand what the job that needed to be done was, and then go deliver five-star service on that job and then ask for the five-star reviews—all of these things you have to do as a salesperson and as a field operations manager because those are the two roles you're filling whenever you delegate the office operations manager.

So that was the first step, and for this person, that’s what I would recommend: go find somebody who can help you out with all those back-end things. The reality is, we haven’t even addressed bookkeeping yet, right?

You're probably going crazy because you're like, “Oh my gosh, I know I need to track receipts! I know I need a system for this!” But your receipt pile in your truck or in your dashboard is just piled up because you don’t have a good system for it. Trust me, I've been there, and it all takes time and effort.

But if you can delegate that to somebody else, then your brain space starts to free up.

So, you got it—the first hire is an office operations manager!

How do you find that hire, Austin?

All right, well, think old school—just post in local Facebook groups and find a retired mom who has kids out of the house, who is kind of just bored during the day, and wants about four hours worth of work per day.

If you think about it, people who work behind the bar at coffee shops are usually in a transitionary period. Meaning, they could have just graduated college or they’re either graduating high school and working behind a coffee shop for the summer—there are all these different scenarios as to why a person might be working at a coffee shop.

People behind the bar at coffee shops get to know people in the local community, and they usually have a good pulse on what's going on in town. The people who come into the coffee shop as customers talk to the person behind the bar, and that person gets to know these people.

My thought process was if I just put this word in front of the people behind the bar, they would be able to get the word out to other people who might be looking for this.

So, that’s what I did. I just went to all the local coffee shops and said, “Hey, I’m hiring for this role: 20 hours a week at $25 an hour.”

Very quickly, someone said, “Yeah, I’m interested.” I said, “Okay, you want to meet at our office? We’ll do a quick interview.” We did that, talked about roles and responsibilities, hired her, and she helped for the first two years.

She was incredible. She was way overqualified for this role; she had worked at Bloomberg in the finance department. She had a college degree and was just in a transitionary period of her life.

She was a very smart individual and driven, so she was going to be very successful. I was very sad to see her go whenever she did recently. For the first two years, she helped with all of those back-office tasks, and she also helped create recurring tasks and document those SOPs.

Now, we can give that to the next person we hire.

So right now, I’m acting as recruiting and exploring a remote role with this overseas and Latin America. The downside is they won’t be able to go pick up the checks, but the good thing is, where we’re at in the business is I have a field operations manager and sales estimator on the team. They are both rockstars. We have people in the field crew who are great operators.

So, I’m now able to refocus on making a post office run each day as part of my routine, but in the beginning, that wasn’t the case, which is why I encourage people to hire someone locally.

Especially if you're an OWNER OPERATOR, if you have a wife who is willing to help you in the business or a husband who is willing to help, then by all means, that is something they could help you with.

But as the OWNER OPERATOR of the business—the one who's operating the machinery—it’s unsafe! It really is! To be thinking about all that stuff, you got heavy equipment going! You need to be focused on that job!

Two, the customer deserves five-star quality, so you’re focusing your effort on delivering five-star quality while you're on the skid steer or while you're on the mini excavator—not thinking about the check that you have to go pick up here in 20 minutes.

That's delivering five-star service, and that is putting yourself in the safest operating procedure.

I hope all this makes sense. I'm sort of rambling at this point, but I do want to make the point of that first hire: an office operations manager.

Literally, as an OWNER OPERATOR, just think of everything that you should not be doing or don’t want to do, right?

You're likely starting this business because you enjoy operating equipment; you enjoy creating. You enjoy taking your customer's vision and being the bridge between their current reality and their vision, right? You like showing up and being like, “Okay, this customer thinks they want a boulder wall right here. I know I can build it, and I know I can do a great job of it.”

You probably get really excited about that! So you need to focus 100% on delivering that while somebody else focuses on the menial tasks: logging your receipts, picking up your checks, depositing your checks, even answering the first phone call!

If that person can be on call from 8:00 to noon while they're working, you can just direct your phone line to them, and they can answer. Just train them to say, “Hey, this is my name, Bearclaw Land Services. This is Austin, how may I help you?"

That’s all you have to do! When a customer calls, they expect someone to answer, and it’s two totally different scenarios. If somebody sitting in the office answers, it’s, “Bearclaw Land Services, this is Austin. How may I help you?” with no background noise. That’s a great experience for a customer!

On the other side of the equation, if they call you and you're in the middle of grading a driveway: “Phone rings, ring ring...hello? Hold on! Hold on! Uh, yeah, is this Bearclaw Land Services?” That’s a terrible experience for the customer!

They're trying to talk to you, you're trying to operate your equipment, you're holding it with your...you know, if you don’t have AirPods, you’re holding it with your shoulder, and you’re still running the joysticks: “Hold on just a second! Let me get out!”

You power down the machine, you jump out, the door cranks—it’s just a terrible experience for the customer.

My thought process is: how do we not let the customer feel that?

They immediately know who they're dealing with. If you answer your phone like that—and I’m not saying it’s not going to happen because it definitely happened in my scenario too—it’s inevitable when you start!

But the sooner you can get somebody answering your phone, sitting in a chair in an office, who’s very calm, who answers the phone, "Hey, this is Bearclaw Land Services!" This is Austin, how may I help you? That is so much better of an experience than the customer calling and just hearing all the background noise.

They immediately know they’re dealing with a scatterbrain contractor at that point. They’re immediately, psychologically, thinking that they are going to pay a mid-level price for an average product because they’ve had a terrible experience with contractors in the past.

Everybody has horror stories.

So that’s like the level of belief that the customer kind of expects. But if you deliver the calm, happy personality over the phone when you answer the call, you're stepping up a level to showcase that you are a business—a professional business.

And then psychologically, you’re embedding this in the customer’s mind. You are dealing with a business that takes care and takes pride in what they do, so therefore, you can demand a higher price because of that psychology that’s going on in your customer’s brain.

We’re covering a lot here, but I’m trying to get all the things I thought about early on that someone sitting in the office could do to help elevate our customer experience.

We are going to be dropping one interview episode at this point. People are reaching out from YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms in our newsletter, asking specific questions about this.

I’m trying to take myself back to those early days, answer the questions, and share little tidbits—like whenever my friend encouraged me to hire faster than I thought I could support.

It’s always going to be hard to make that hire—it’s always going to be hard to commit. Because here’s what you think as an OWNER OPERATOR, and trust me, I’ve fallen into this—“Oh, 25 bucks an hour, 20 hours a week, I could be putting that in my pocket or that could go to my family.”

Yes, you could. But you can also be working 24 hours a day!

So you've got to choose! My goal was always to be working. I don’t mind getting up early; it's when I do all this content stuff, and it’s also when I do my best admin work for whatever needs to happen in the business.

But I don’t want to be working after five. I want to be spending that time with my family.

So, if you don’t want to be working 14-hour days, you got to make choices to reinvest back in the business, which means hiring the right people.

Well, that’s one portion of reinvesting back in the business.

I hope this encourages you. I hope this answers some of the questions that you might be having if you're in that early-stage solo OWNER OPERATOR running around like a chicken with your head cut off.

By no means am I an expert at any of this, but I have taken advice from other people, and I have taken action on that.

What I’m trying to do here is share the areas where I have acted that have proved to be fruitful for our business, and I hope that it helps you in your business.

I really do! I want to see you guys succeed. I believe there is so much opportunity out there. We are one business here in one local economy, and there are hundreds of thousands of local communities throughout America that need OWNER OPERATORS who take business seriously and commit to delivering five-star service.

I’ve really gotten clear on the mission here. For me, it’s like I can’t be all over America servicing excavation clients or tree clients; I just want to help other people utilize some of the advice I’ve gotten from other smarter friends than I am.

I just want to use that and share that so that people can create thriving small businesses in their own local communities. Everyone wins!

You’re going to win; you’re going to make more money. Your family’s going to prosper, your kid’s going to have food on the table; your mortgage is going to be paid for; the customers in your community are going to be treated better.

The customers in your community get five-star service, and I think that’s the bigger picture mission for me. God has put so many people in my life who have helped me through those early stages, and I guess what I’m trying to do is just take those learnings and things that worked, and then share those with other people in hopes that it can help you.

Once again, thanks for the support! I really do appreciate it. I mentioned this in an update episode a couple of weeks ago—I never dreamed that, like I said, I didn’t even really look at the analytics in the beginning. But for whatever reason, people are listening, and yeah, I do appreciate the support!

If I can help in any way, I seriously mean it—just reach out. That was a specific question from my phone from somebody who reached out and asked for some help last week, and I’m happy to do it. This is fun for me!

I just encourage you guys to keep going. It’s not easy. Once again, I have respect for anybody who’s doing the whole OWNER OPERATOR thing; it’s not easy. It’s a lot of work. I have a ton of respect for you.

I just want to encourage you to keep going. Reach out if you need help. Don't forget: work hard, do your best, never settle for less, and good things are going to come.

We’ll see you guys in the next episode!

I wanted to introduce you to two of my growth partners. Strike Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bod and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land Services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you want to learn more, visit stryker-digital.com. That’s S-T-R-I-K-E-Digital.com.

Secondly, Local Service Marketers specializes in paid ads and unlimited content creation. I’ve been working with Josh since the beginning of Bearclaw, and all I’ve had to do is upload my content—photos and video—into a shared iCloud album or Google Drive album, and they handle everything else from there.

Thank you to YouTube, Instagram, Facebook—all that is taken off your plate. It saves you so much time as a local business owner. In doing so, you end up with a very professionally designed social media presence. After the presence is created, then a paid ad strategy can be implemented to help bring you more leads and win you more jobs!

If you're interested in learning more, you can visit localservicemarketers.com.