6 Ideas From Inside Remodelers Community

Kyle Hunt: if you want more structure and accountability in your remodeling business, you need to check out the Remodelers on the Rise Peer Groups. The foundation of the program is when you meet with your group of nine other remodelers from around the country for a spring and a fall two and a half day in-person retreat. These retreats give you the space to slow down, gain perspective, regroup, and come out of it with a clear game plan for the months that follow. Then to keep momentum strong between retreats, groups meet monthly via Zoom, and each member receives a quarterly one-on-one call with their peer group coach. We're all about setting clear commitments and going out there and achieving those commitments so you can make more and more progress and be a remodeler on the rise. If you're tired of doing this alone and you want a coach-led group, that helps you grow with structure and attention. Learn more at RemodelersOnTheRise.com. Check out our peer groups. They're great.

Kyle: Greetings, everybody. Welcome to the Remodelers on the Rise podcast. Thank you for listening. a lot of you might be listening to this on a Thursday morning. We generally drop these new episodes every Thursday morning. If you are a regular listener, could you leave a little review on whatever podcast app or platform that you tune in from? It will help get the word out and help the podcast be found by other remodelers across America. Thank you very much. Today Little solo show with yours truly. title in it from inside the remodelers on the rise Facebook community. If you go to remodelerscommunity.com, it will take you to our Facebook community. There are a ton of generous, thoughtful, smart, willing to share remodelers in there. Post your comments, you know, post your topics, chime in, good stuff in there. And what was gonna do is I have six count them, one, two, three, four, five, six items that I was going to go through. And then I was also going to end the podcast by telling you a little bit about Remodelers on the Rise coaching and services. We try to just give, give, give, give, give, give, give, share ideas, share examples, but occasionally you might even want to hear about what we do to help you even further. So we'll do that at the end. number one, number one, let me do a little. Bam. I hope that sound effect works because it's gonna be awkward if I have to have Cassie edit all of those. But that was a little drum roll for the first one. The first one is a little story. I'm not gonna use their name. We don't need to, we don't need to share and spill the beans on on the name of the person, but one of my clients had a mistake in their process. Somebody on their team who was supposed to, after the project was signed, go through the checklist and take care of ordering and processing the permit on the project. Here we are a week before this project is set to start. Here we are a week before foundation, like a pretty big project. Foundation is all lined up and that side of things. And as we were going through the details, there was an crap moment. crap, we didn't get the permit filed. And there was a little bit of one finger pointing this way, another finger pointing that way, a little bit of ambiguity on who was responsible for that permit. It ended up causing a little heartburn with the team, with the client, with the schedule. you've been there. Everybody listening to this has been there. Probably the biggest thing though, that is a little bit of the blessing in disguise is that the heartburn that this caused. Also caused a review of their overall process. Client basically told me we need to get clearer with who does what and create a more solid and foolproof checklist that we can follow. And they did that. And I saw an updated version of that checklist, and it was a huge step forward in them being more clear and more organized. Mistakes are going to happen. Things are going to get mixed, missed. The real question is. How do you respond to that? Do you slow down enough to say, this isn't going to happen again? Let's use this as fuel to work on our process and make it better. And that's exactly what they did. I have a hard time believing that this is going to happen again because the process is getting locked down. The to-do lists are getting locked down. Remember, if two people are responsible for something, nobody is responsible for it. One person is responsible for For each key thing in the process. That way we have some accountability. We know who is doing what, and that's how we are able to grow and run our remodeling business with less chaos and less mistakes. What I just shared there is not rocket science, but it isn't easy either. Let what I just shared in this example be a reminder to you. Continue to refine the process, continue to refine who does what, and that's gonna be the key. To helping you be even a stronger than you are right now, remodeler on the rise. So that was the first one. another little drum roll. Bam. The second one. It's a little hot take. A little hot take that I like to share with you. You should not read the newest book that just got published. but Kyle, this book came out this week, this month, and people are talking about it being the the greatest business book of all time, and it's gonna be the business book that cha transforms my entire life and business. Maybe, maybe. But here's what you should do instead. Dust off a book that was impactful to you, could be years ago, could be two years ago, could be ten years ago, but dust off a book that was impactful to you, that's already on your shelf or that's already on your Kindle and read it again. that sounds like an interesting idea, Kyle. The reason this came up is I was using the restroom facilities at my office, and I walked back in my office, and behind me are a series of books, and right on the top of one of the stacks I saw this book, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. What year was this originally published, I wonder? Deep bee bee deep deep deep deep. Nineteen thirty-six. Woo! Coming up on 90 years or in 90 years of this originally going on. The first and still the best book of its kind, and the only book you need to lead you to success. And it just reminded me, I remember reading this. is it American Airlines even still in business? I'm a Delta guy, but there's a napkin from when I was on a plane, evidently an American Airlines flight. and I was reading this book. It made me think, you know what? We need to just take books that we've already read, read them again. We're going to read them. Something's gonna pop off the pages that are fresh to us. It's gonna be a reminder to us. It's gonna give us some energy and encouragement to implement some of the best practices. Also, when you get a book like this that's been around and been a bestseller for decades and decades, there's a reason for that. There's good wisdom and good knowledge in there. So grab a book that you already own, spend a little time reading it this evening instead of scrolling. I did take a screenshot of one of the pages from said book and it says six six ways to make people like you principle one become genuinely interested in other people key word genuinely genuinely if you are a little bit more curious if you are a little bit more interested in other people if you're looking to see what makes this person tick, what do they love? What do they get excited about? One, it'll lead to more interesting conversation. You'll probably enter into a vein of topic or area that you might learn a thing or two. Genuinely is the key there. Six ways to make people like you. principle number two, smile. Hmm, interesting. Principle three, remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. I have two VIP club members. one is one his name is pronounced ILIR. And the other one is pronounced Kawacy. And I butchered both of their names a few different times, then I said, enough of that, Kyle. Remember, a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. And I phonetically spelled it out and I emailed myself a reminder. I use a program called follow up then. And before the last four weeks, before the VIP club meeting, which happens at two o'clock PM Eastern on Wednesdays, I have practiced to make sure that if their name comes up and I they They ask a question or they're chiming in on something that I pronounce it properly. Mm. So take the time to do that. principle number four, be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. People love to talk about themselves. and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it's a little obnoxious and a little annoying. Sometimes we're the obnoxious and annoying person that won't shut up. Mm-mm. But be a good listener. Don't worry about what you're gonna say in response. Don't be waiting for them to stop so that you can share what you want to say. distinctly, Tim Brown is the Tim Brown's the first person that comes to my mind. Friend of mine, pastor of ours for years who moved out to Pennsylvania. he's a great listener. He is locked in. He is listening to every word coming out of your mouth and is not in a hurry necessarily to respond. He just is locked in and listening. So be a good listener. That takes practice for a lot of us, myself included. Principle number five, talk in terms of the other person's interests. Six ways to make people like you. And then number six, make the other person feel important and do it sincerely. Principle number one, genuine interest. Number six, do it sincerely as far as making them feel important. Those are two important words with those. people are liking this. Episode. Excellent. So we just hit two of the of the six that I was going to share. That's wonderful. All right, enough clapping. Turn it off. All right. All right. All right. third one. I recorded a podcast with Ryan Englan. you may have already heard it. It may be getting published after this one or a couple after this one. And he runs a business called Core Matters. And we were talking about leadership. We were talking about retaining team members. And the word accountability came up. Accountability. And Ryan said, hey Kyle, define accountability. How do you define it? And he defined it. And he came at it from this angle. He said, accountability equals agreed upon outcomes. Or set aside the word accountability and just focus on those three words. Agreed upon outcomes. If you get clear with your project manager on the agreed upon outcomes of success. For that project manager. For example, it could be projects coming in and being managed on schedule or on budget or client satisfaction or frequency of client communication. Agreed upon outcomes. Also another way of saying it, key performance indicators, KPIs. If your project manager and you both, not you telling the project manager, but also the project manager agreeing to it and Maybe coming up with some of the agreed upon outcomes themselves, we are setting ourselves up for easy leadership, easier leadership. We are setting ourselves up so that the project manager knows how to keep score and how to put points on the board, knows what's most important to deliver in their position, lots of benefits there. And once we have agreed upon outcomes, accountability to those outcomes becomes easier. So think about that. Get clear with your project manager or your designer or your estimator or your office manager on the agreed upon outcomes for their position. And accountability is simply checking in and managing against those items. They know how to put points on the board, they know their KPIs, they know how they're being measured, and you both already have agreed upon outcomes. I like the clarity of that. So consider that as you are managing your team. What's so funny about that? What's why there was nothing funny about that? Boy, I hope the sound effects are working. all right, the fourth one. The fourth one. I actually, this was a post that I made. I posted a picture of me. my friend Phil took photos at the Rise conference. There's a cool, there's a cool photo of me kind of taking notes and organizing some things, sitting in the back. And, you know, anytime you're kind of sitting, sitting, you know, with your stomach and you're you're kind of Bent over at the midsection. You know, I don't have like an eight-pack. So I was like, man, it'd be nice if there was a little bit less in the midsection and a little more on the arm. And I had Cassie on my team. I said, could you do a little AI on this? So it's a picture of me absolutely jacked. Like, this guy obviously uses steroids and this and that, so my arm is giant. But I did it for it was interesting. It was one of the most viewed posts in Romology's community in a long time. It had 47 kind of likes and a good number of comments. And I did it to kind of just catch people's attention. But also it's because I saw a post the other day. It was in the Job Tread group and Elijah McDonald commented on it and I kind of paraphrased it. Elijah said, you know, as great as AI can be, I'm finding that my rock solid kitchen estimating template is quicker. And more solid than trying to get everything AI automated in my estimating process. AI can be helpful, and maybe in the months and years ahead, we'll be able to take an audio recording of our on-site meeting with the client, put it through some prompts, have some AI magic added in, some AI pixie dust sprinkled on it, and out will pop an exceptional and detailed estimate. And maybe some of you are already cracking the code and doing that. But as we sit here in September of 2026, you might be well suited to lock in an amazing and detailed template for your estimating as an example and use your experience and your noggin to put together your estimate for that kitchen project. AI has hype, as it should. There's a lot of things we can do with it. But use your brain, use your hard-earned experience and skills, use AI to save you some time. But don't worry or panic if you're still kicking it a little bit old school. That might be the best thing for you right now. So kind of keep that in mind as you evaluate AI. Use it to your advantage. Use it to save you some time. Use it for some research. Use it for some clarity of ideas. And perhaps use it to automate some of your processes. But you are not failing if you are still doing it with a really solid template or you're doing your estimating as an example. a little bit more human like, let's say. So that's that's that one. That was the drum. That was the drum joke. Let me see what this one does. This one's got a ooh, that's a good one. That's a little transition from the fourth one to the fifth one. The fifth one is a picture of Alex Kaufman. He's up there asking a question at the Rise conference. And Alex and I are doing some one-on-one coaching. And the post that I made said this: Step one, go to the Rise Conference. Step two, come back and make a full list of all the ideas you heard and loved. Step three, load those into your to-do list. And I include an image. Step four, meet as a team and prioritize that list of awesome ideas. And select one or maybe two for each of your team members to work on. The rest of it, all those ideas that you have, are off to the side. They can be kind of in the parking lot. Great idea, not going to do anything with it right now. And then step five, set up a 30-minute meeting to check on the progress every two weeks to make sure we're executing and doing and implementing. Alex had written out in his to-do list. here's a bunch of things, some marketing-related things. We need to do a Google review push. We need to create some marketing KPIs. we need a social media plan. We need to do some strategic partner outreach. In the PM set of goals, things that he heard at the RISE conference. we need to have more consistent job costing meetings. We need to process for a little bit more organized PM daily logs. We need to consider how we're doing site inspections. And then he has a list of sales related ones. He has a list of team related ones, some of the team related ones, biannual organizational event, all staff. What do we want to do for birthdays as a team? What about bonus structure? We need to create our core values. So again, he went to a two-day conference, which you should do in August of twenty twenty-seven. And was flooded with a bunch of good ideas. But again, what did he do? He created a list of all those ideas. He loaded them in his system so that he's not losing any of them. And he's not going to work on all of them at once because he's wise, because he's a busy business owner who can't do everything all at once. And each team member picked one, maybe two, and no more, that they're going to work on. Either that quarter if it's a bigger one, or even that month. And then they're going to have a little 30-minute meeting every two weeks to check on the progress of some of these on-the-business projects that they're working on. That is a simple, clear recipe for success. You cannot play whack-a-mole. that sounds like a good idea. this sounds like a good idea. Yes, Kyle, you do this. Bailey, you do that, Cassie, you do that. And then you don't even meet for two months. That's that's stup Pardon my French. That's stupid management. We are better business owners than that. You want to be a remodeler on the rise. You do what is said in that Alex is doing. You don't try to take on everything at once. You stay focused and prioritized on the things that matter. You see things through to get them actually done and implemented. None of these 80% done projects, 70% done this, 60% done that. One item 100% done and implemented and decided. And dog on it, fight for the time to set up follow-up meetings and hold yourself and your team members to getting things done. You do that and you keep stacking those wins and you keep stacking those pro that progress week after week, month after month. That is how you grow as a remodeler. That is how you have momentum in your business. That is how you become a remodeler on the rise. Come on. Anyone? Yeah, that's what I thought. Some good cheering there. All right. Sorry, I got a little passionate there. But that's that's the nuts and bolts of it. Business is infinitely complex and it's also quite simple as well. That doesn't make any sense, Kyle. You're just talking out of two ends of your mouth. Look, there's no magic bullet in business. It's a combination of consistent, positive, prioritized actions. I look at my business and I think. about 10 years ago and how I was trying to do it all my own and I was implementing this and I was encouraged by that. I was looking at the list of things I wanted to do that I can't didn't have time to get to, dreaming about having this implemented or that implemented. And I look at my business today, it's dramatically different than it was back then. And it wasn't some magic bullet. It wasn't some one thing I did. It was a combination of little thing after little thing after little thing. Do I have regrets and wished I would have done fill in the blank six years ago? Sure. should I have been more focused, you know, eight years ago? yeah, but also I had good work-life balance. I was putting up some boundaries. I didn't work in the evening. Here I am these years later, I have knock knock on wood, a pretty good marriage. Although that's fli that can be tricky, right? All of a sudden now I just said we have a pretty good marriage. So that means next week we'll probably be at each other's driving each other bonkers. That's how that works. But like We we b we balance out we're doing we're all doing the best we can. As you sit here listening to this today, simplify things, remind yourself that progress in business is executing fundamentals, it's having some accountability, it's prioritizing, it's putting it's doing more focus on fewer things. You can do this. You can absolutely do this. Believe that and make steady progress. You don't have to move mountains overnight, steady progress. And then number six. Number six, I told you I was going to go through six things that came from posts in the remodelers community. If you're not in the remodelers community, remodelers community.com, and you're hearing all these good posts, you're like, I'm missing out. I should be dialing into that and seeing how people are commenting and what they're sharing. this last one was an exercise that I did in the VIP club. That is our Wednesday at two o'clock group. And I had them do a kind of a three-year outlook. Let's pretend it's December 31st, 2029. I would like you to describe your business and where you're going there. We did an exercise where I just wanted them to dream about it. And what I what I kind of wanted them to look at is what does total revenue look like then? What is the primary type of project that you're doing in the average job size? what is you what would you say your gross profit margin is going to be then versus what it is now? What is your total owner compensation goals? What about number of new team members? What are the new positions you're looking to create? Any other items to note? Three years is a decent amount of time out to dream, but it's also not crazy out there. So you can really kind of think through where you are now and where you're trying to go. and then I had them work on, all right, when you make this happen, how is your life different? How do you feel? And then we got into the strategy of all right, how do we go from where we are? To where you want to go. Reminder for all of us: if you don't know where you're going, it's harder to get there. Slow down, step back. Where do you want to take your business? Why do you want to take it there? And then let's figure out the strategies, the things you need to do to get there. Your business should should support the life that you want to live, not control your life. And if you believe, you have to believe that you can absolutely positively create the business of your dreams. It's possible, it's hard, but you can absolutely do it. come on. There we go. All right. I gotta step up. I gotta step up my sound effect game a little bit. All right. Okay, so those were the six things. and I also mentioned that I was gonna mention some remoulers on the rise items. You're listening to a free podcast that we do. We've been doing it very, very consistently for a good number of years. Thank you to our sponsors for helping support it. Thank you to our listeners for listening to it. Thank you for leaving a review and for engaging in it. We've got videos on YouTube. That are free of charge as well. We've got our Remodelers Community, Remodelers Community.com. It is a free Facebook group. we have a weekly email that we send out to our email list trying to give, give, give ideas and help you. So we do a lot to to just put good information, good help out there. And I love nothing more than people reaching out saying. Hey, Kyle, I've been listening to the podcast. I've been in community. I actually connected with somebody in the community and had a great conversation because they were willing to share some ideas. I implemented that thing that you posted related to this. I love when remodelers reach out to me who have never paid remodelers on the rise a dime and they have been helped. I believe wholeheartedly that marketing is getting someone who has a need, getting a remodeler who wants to improve their business to know, like, and trust you. That's what marketing is. And I love to do that through all of the Content that we put out there. I also run a business. So we do have some paid services that are even better than the free side of things. We offer one-on-one coaching where we are on Zoom, we are looking at each other square in the eyeballs, and we set up over the course of a quarter, we do a generally speaking, quarter of one-on-one coaching, we get really clear with what you want to achieve in that quarter of coaching. Do a lot of coaching around financials, pricing, Understanding our PL job costing. We do a lot around the sales process and charging for design and development, make sure we're differentiating ourselves in the sales process. We do a lot around crafting an organized professional producing marketing plan. And we do a lot around leadership. So if you're interested, you need that you know, push to really move things from where they are to where you need to go, one on one coaching can be a huge help with that. That's one thing. Another thing we offer is just a nice little nice little service called Remodelers Autopilot. Every month there is a couple email newsletters for you to choose from. You select the one, you can add your picture to it, you can tweak it, you can fill out the form, submit it, and my team goes ahead and schedules that and sends that out to your email list of past clients and prospects. There's also eight social media posts that you can choose from. You can add your own image in there. You select the ones you want, you click submit. And we go ahead and schedule those out for you on social media. It's just a nice way to make sure you're staying in touch with your previous clients and keeping really solid content out there on your social media platforms. Do I want you to still also be creating some more custom content on your social media? Yes, but this is a great way to be consistent. It's $147 a month. It's a great program. It's called Remodelers Autopilot. Another thing that we offer is called the VIP Club. This is great if you're a remodeler. going from 400, 500, 600, 700,000 up to you know a little over a million, 1.2, somewhere in there. There's a lot of foundational systems and processes and learning and implementation that you need to get in place in order to move into that 2 million, 3 million, 4 million and up range in your remodeling business. The VIP Club gives you access to all of our pre-recorded courses on financials, marketing, sales, leadership, et cetera. And every Wednesday at two o'clock, we do a live coaching call where we go through different areas of the business. what did we do yesterday? Yesterday was actually on cash flow. How do we predict and forecast our cash flow? How do we get out of this crunch of crap, I'm robbing Peter to pay Paul, worst case, or crap, I just collected that progress payment and I'm actually using it to pay for payments over here, or crap, I just need to. get some more progress payments in because we've got payroll coming up and I need to pay for those cabinets, et cetera. How do we graduate out of that so that we no longer have much of a cash flow issue? And how do we kind of predict that and forecast that? That's what we did yesterday as an example. As an example. I also shared two weeks ago we did that three year business plan. So it's a great group. It's $497 a month. It's a month-to-month kind of agreement. Join it if you're looking to get some push, encouragement, accountability, clarity. Get your business unstuck, get your business continuing to grow. And then we also offer our remodelers peer groups. We have five peer groups with 10, 11 companies in each of them. I lead two of them. We have three wonderful coaches who are also running their own remodeling business and coaching their peer groups and Brian Sebring, Curtis Lawson, and Peter Rainey. And we meet in person. for an in-person retreat in the spring and the fall. We're pretty excited because all of our fall in-person two and a half day retreats are coming up, even starting next week. all five of our groups are meeting here in September and October around the country. And it is a wonderful way to get in a room of remodelers who are generous, who are smart, who are all working to improve, and who are very willing to share their guidance. their ideas, their templates, their tools, their strategy, and frankly their friendship with a group of other remodelers going through very similar things. There's a quarterly one-on-one call with the coach. There's a monthly call we do as a group. So just a really good area for companies that are more than that 1.5 up to up to 10 million plus. Each group has different kind of sizes in them. it's just a wonderful way to continue to be encouraged, to have kind of a almost a built-in board of directors, to have a group of people that you can once you get in there and once you meet everybody, you sit there and go, I could call any one of these people and pick their brain about this, or have this person show me how they set this up and they're estimating, or hey, you've got job tread dialed in. Can we do an hour zoom to go? Just a lot of good things happen in our peer groups. So that's one of the main things that we offer. And then we have Kind of an annual live conference. We just did that back in August called the Rise Conference. you put that, pencil that in for August 2027. great thing for you andor your team members to come to. And that's kind of our little list of services. Reach out. a lot of people, if you just go to Remollers on the Rise dot com, click on the contact us, you'll see a little video of me going, Hey everybody, thank you so much for coming to the contact us page. If could fill this out, here's what's gonna happen next. And and then we set up a time to chit chat. Don't be shy about doing that. I love doing those introductory calls and getting to know you and your business. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.

Kyle Hunt: Thanks for tuning into the Remodelers on the Rise show. Whether you're listening or watching, I appreciate you being here. If this was helpful, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next one. We're putting out new episodes every single week focused on helping you build a better remodeling business with real stories, practical ideas, and things you can actually take and use. If you're on YouTube, hit that like button and turn on notifications so you know when new episodes drop. If you're listening on a podcast app, a five-star review goes a long way and helps more remodelers find the show. We've got great links below or in the show notes where you can connect with us, check out our remodelers community and learn more about our coaching and resources. Appreciate you very much. See you on the next episode.