How To Buy Back Your Time & Make More Money

Contractor Freedom - Break out of Contractor Prison

Jason Phillips: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Contractor Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Phillips. This show exists to help small business owners like you escape the tyranny of contractor prison and enter the bliss of contractor freedom so you can have the time, money, and freedom to live your life with purpose beyond your business.

As a certified human behavior consultant in DISC personality styles and motivators, I'll be sharing with you skills for life and business. I'll also be connecting you with experts that can help you scale your business and your life. So if you want to build the business and life of your dreams, then you are in the right place.

Let's go! All right, welcome back, everybody. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce a special guest who is truly a beacon of innovation and leadership in the home service industry. Billy Kline, the owner of YourNewDoor. com is here with us. Billy runs a family business. Metro area and Billy and I have been online friends for quite a while now, but we recently got to spend some time talking in [00:01:00] person when he, uh, generally offered to take me to the airport in Austin, rather than me hailing an Uber.

So I really appreciate that, Billy. And Billy made a choice to a few years ago to eject the status quo in his business and to, and to change the game. And since then, he's made some impress impressive strides in his business. And I'm sure that you are going to be inspired by his story. One of the things that I really.

Appreciate about Billy is how humble and hungry he is. And plus he's got a heart to give back and to help others. So Billy, welcome to the Contractor Freedom Podcast. It's fantastic to have you here with us today.

Billy Cline: Hey Jason, I appreciate you having me on. It's an honor. There's one thing in this world I like to talk about is business, right?

I'm very awkward a lot of times when we get into social events or settings, right? Like, I don't want to talk about much. I don't like talking about baseball or sports much, but I want to talk about business. So if I can corner someone at a party or something like that, it wants to talk business, you know, they can't shut me up.

But otherwise, a lot of times I sit around and don't say much. So I enjoy these,

We

know

Jason Phillips: if we revisit that. That little [00:02:00] talk we had on the way to the airport, you know, you told me where the way your business used to be. Can you just give me a, give us a, give the listeners a glimpse of, of how did things used to be with, with your company and you?

Billy Cline: Well, you know, we spoke a little bit and I referenced that, you know, the path that you're on and what you do and what you speak about, contractor prison and breaking out of that. I was the epitome of that, right? Like my, my business owned me. I didn't have a, I didn't have a business. I had a job really.

Right. And my number one goal every week was to sell enough jobs to make payroll. Right? And it was really one of those scenarios where I couldn't afford to take a day off. I couldn't miss a day. If something went wrong on a job where we didn't get paid for that job, we were going to miss payroll. And you know, it was always something, right?

Like it was literally what you hear and what you think when someone talks about being a firefighter in their business. If, you know, you know, Honestly, it's probably was a good exercise for me to go through because now when something's on fire around here, I just sit around and, you know, it doesn't, I don't get excited about it because I've been through way worse.

Right. [00:03:00] So, but it was literally, you know, five alarms every day, just trying to keep the wheels on the bus. Somebody doesn't show up, you know, somebody messed up a project, something was missold or whatever. Right. So it was always something and I just got tired of it one day. Honestly, almost quit. My wife and I went to church.

And we stopped at, I'll never forget it, we stopped at Burger Street on the way back from church and had a conversation that we were going to quit offering a certain aspect of our business just because it was just so burdensome. And I was ready to quit. And I'm glad that I didn't because in three or four instances in my life, I've been right at that edge to where things were, you know, ready to quit.

And it's like, it was literally like, just, that was the edge that we broke over and things started to break open for us and change. Mostly my mindset and my attitude. But it really, after we, after I, uh, got over not quitting and getting over that, it was like the skies opened up and, you know, God was ready for us to do, you know, what, uh, we were supposed to do.

Jason Phillips: Billy, has there been a time [00:04:00] when, can you take us back to a time and maybe that was it, when you felt completely, you know, overwhelmed by your business and it was, it brought you to maybe even a breaking point? How long, uh, are we

Billy Cline: recording today? Right? Yeah. It was, you know, the interesting thing for me is, I feel like, you know, not to pat myself on the back or anything, I feel like I have come out of that place relatively quickly, right?

Like, it's one of those things, like a reform story, someone's in prison and they get out and totally change their life and become, you know, millionaires or whatever. I was literally felt like I was stuck in prison. You know, I was, a lot of times, I was wearing all the hats still. I was doing all the sales.

I had people for things, but I was too dumb and too stubborn to turn loose and let them do their job, right, without micromanaging. It was just always. You know, buyers and always I had to felt like I needed to be in a part of everything. And then one day I, what really broke it open for me was I realized that I had a broken mind, right?

Like I was raised by people who were raised by people who went through the great [00:05:00] depression, right? And generationally that carries over. And my parents, it wasn't something they did wrong or, you know, were necessarily trying to do to me, but. Growing up, I always heard that cost too much, that won't work, can't do that, right?

There was never enough money for anything, but, but, you know, the thing, you know, cigarettes and things like that, right? Like they always had money for that. Gas is always too expensive. The rent was always too expensive. And what I realized was I had that in me and I went to buy a van, right? Like I had bought one at the beginning of COVID before things went crazy, just before COVID.

It was like 35, 000 bucks, right? Very reasonable. You know, 18 months after that, during COVID, I went and bought two more and they were almost 60, 000. And I was like, there's no way they're worth that. But what I got to thinking about a couple days later was like, I'm an idiot. Because if I don't want to spend 60, 000 for the van, it's not that.

It's a 1, 000 a month payment, right? So by not wanting to pay a 1, 000 a month payment, it's costing me 000 in revenue that I'm not going to be able to get. So right then I realized that I had a broken mindset and I was going to do [00:06:00] anything in my power to fix that. And it started by taking it, becoming curious, right?

Reading books, going to events, seeking out mentors, listening to people smarter than me and podcasts. Really, podcasts really opened my whole mind to, you know, successful people. And it is as simple as that sound. It really does starts to, uh, grease the wheels in your mind and change your mindset. And all these gurus that are out here and all the things that will, number one thing that, that they may disguise or you may not realize they're selling you is a mindset.

They can help you fix your minds that take credit for, they charge you for it, but you really don't need a guru to help you fix your mind. You just have to make your mind up and decide that day is the day that I am changing. I don't know the answers. I don't have the answers. I will seek the answers out and like in the Bible, ask and ye shall read.

Receive, see, and we shall find. When you start looking for the answer, they mysteriously show up. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And that's literally all about mindset. That's the problem, you

Jason Phillips: know, Billy, with mindsets is they [00:07:00] cloak themselves in logic, broken mindsets. That's too expensive, but we're asking the wrong question.

It's not how much does it cost? It's in that case, it's what am I missing out on by not spending this money with your van question, right? And switching to an investment. Absolutely. And some people will say it's an unlimited mindset. Surplus mindset or whatever it is, but man, that's a key. And what's crazy is we can see limited mindsets in others, but we can't see them in ourselves.

You know, I literally, maybe you've been through the same thing. I've literally went through a time and I still pray this prayer from time to time, but I literally went through a time where I prayed every day, God, I want you to open up my thinking, help me think bigger, help me to see my own limitations.

Man, that's a great, that's a great, that's a great story. So, you know, so before that, back in the day, I guess you were striving to meet payroll, right? And then you recognized you had a limited mindset, which kudos to you, man, for doing that. So along, along this change, what, what personal sacrifices have you, you know, had to make along the way?

Billy Cline: All of them, right? You [00:08:00] know, it didn't. It really kind of got bad there for a while financially. And when you mentioned personal sacrifices, the ultimate personal sacrifice to me would be divorce, right? Or losing my spouse over these types of things. And, you know, in a marriage finances are very important, right?

And I was taking money out of our personal account to make payroll sometimes and all the things, and I wasn't communicating that with my spouse. And. I was ashamed, right, of the fact that number one, I had maybe stuck my head neck out too far or that I was a failure. I wasn't doing enough to, you know, um, to do whatever it would take to make payroll.

So I would write the checks to payroll and I would slowly pull it back in. And my wife was trusting me to do the finances and all things. And that really led to some tough conversations and some tough moments. In my marriage, right? And, you know, shined a light into who I was, who I wanted to be. And that wasn't, you know, if that was who I had to be a successful business person to hide things from my wife, not worth the sacrifice there.

It's not worth [00:09:00] that. And, you know, that probably was a big catalyst. Into, you know, me setting in a quiet place and wondering to myself, you know, what I should do, what's next, how do I overcome this? And a lot of times when you have these realizations, if you haven't already met someone or have a mentor or someone to speak to, kind of on an island by yourself, because you don't know what you don't know, right?

And you don't know that you can be successful in what you're doing. You know, the biggest, one of the biggest reasons we weren't successful for so long is because I didn't know I was a price strike, right? Like it's the age old thing. Why does it for this much? I'll do it for a little bit less. Right. And when you're a solo guy, you know, working out of your truck or out of your own garage or whatever, you can get away with that for a while.

You can, you know, you can make a bit of a living doing that because you don't have any overhead or any other expenses. But at a certain point, you know, when you got, you look up, Oh, now I've got eight people and I'm still doing it the same way. We say you can build a busyness

Jason Phillips: with low GP, but you're not [00:10:00] going to build an organization and get out of, you know, and get out of contractor prison that way.

You know, the story, one of the things, Billy, that's passionate for me is, you know, I don't want to help people scale their business. Well, I do, but really what I want to do is elevate. Because there's plenty of people that have scaled their business and burned their home life, burned their health. And you're, you know, you're smart enough to that.

You've realized that, you know, at before it was too late or early on or whatever. But you know, my business caused a lot of stress in my marriage and my wife is, thank God, she's a champ and very patient and, but there, it has been the ruin of many relationships and it's sad. And I hate to see that. Ought not to be that way.

Right.

Billy Cline: So it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to be, and the biggest issue is if you have a spouse that loves you and believes in you, right, like my wife has always had my back, but what happened, especially in that time I was mentioning earlier is it erodes that trust, right? Like that's a good way just to, to lose all the trust, but all these little things, you know, they [00:11:00] believe in you so much, and then it's just negativity.

It's just problems. It's just financial issues. So it erodes that trust and eventually, you know, it gets to a point where you can't ever get it back. Luckily, I never totally lost that. And, you know, we turned things around and, you know, now my wife's my biggest cheerleader and supporter and fan and, you know, blindly follows me, you know, through whatever.

But my wife is also my biggest secret weapon, right? And all this, because her gut feelings have made me and lost me more money than anything else in my life. It made me more money when I listened to it. And it lost me more money when I went against it, right? That's usually when something bad happens.

Words intuition is a very powerful tool if you happen to have that in your life. So

Jason Phillips: you could have stayed with the status quo of how you had been doing everything and it had been working. Maybe it wasn't like sustainable. It was obviously sustainable for a number of years. But, and you went through this moment of, wow, I've got a limiting mindset and you all of a sudden get real hungry for [00:12:00] learning, right?

Along the way, have there been any significant, you know, setbacks or obstacles that made you feel like, you know, Man, I don't know if I'm good enough. I don't know if I can overcome this.

Billy Cline: Yeah, for sure. And it was the awakening for me started to happen with my mindset and opening up my eyes to the fact that the culture wasn't where we needed to be.

You know, just all the things that go along with bad days, right? Like someone couldn't cash their check or whatever, right? It was always, you know, something. And it was, you know, along that time when I decided that I couldn't do everything, right? Like, you reach the limit of what you can manage as one person, right?

And at that point in time, I needed to start working and worrying about leadership and how to do this. And I kind of marked time, right? Like, in history, we talk about B. C. and A. D., right? Like, before Christ and Whatever. And in my business, I have a mark in the stand and that's when I hired Dan, right? Like I hired Dan.

Dan [00:13:00] was my, he is my, he's still here. He's my operations manager. And Dan started to take on, he took on a lot more than he needed to, but he started to take on anything in the business that was not a revenue, revenue, revenue. Generating product or project, right? Like whatever it was, there's hundreds of things every day.

And when I was able to get that off my plate and put it on Dan, you know, looking up insurance and just setting things up and all the things, it freed me up to start focusing on the thing. And one of the, I don't know where I came up with the. This revelation in my life, but one of the things that we started doing was working off of a framework, right?

So I knew that I wasn't priced right. And I knew that, you know, I was going to be stuck wherever I was at until we started generating more revenue, but not just necessarily revenue, but profit. And I went to an event Tommy Mello put on. I think it was his second or third big event that he had ever put on.

And I heard this woman speak. Her name was Megan Lyke. She was an accountant and whatever. And also Ellen Rohr. I don't know if the listeners are familiar with Ellen Rohr, but she's the legend in the home service space as [00:14:00] an accountant, right? Like, that's a thing. But they were all talking about gross profit and all things.

Your P& L's all kind of new to me, right? Like all these things that I'm starting to learn about. So I started learning about that. So I wouldn't recommend anybody do this blindly, but I went home and I raised my prices 40%. I just went into my price book, adjust the prices, bulk edit, 40 percent apply to all.

And I closed my eyes and grabbed my tea and suddenly things started to get a little better. And what was interesting, I've always been afraid of raising our, we're all afraid to raise our prices because we think that, you know, the, the customers aren't going to buy, but. Customers don't buy or not buy because of your price.

They buy or not buy because they either see or don't see the value in what you're trying to do for them, right? And when I, it was just all these things, all culmination of learning how to sell better, learning how to price better, learning how to be helpful instead of salesy, right? All these things just all started to come together.

Profit really does cure all, you know, when you start having a little bit of money left over, you know, you can start to pay things. Frameworks I was talking [00:15:00] about were helpful in us kind of coming out of the wilderness, so to speak. I still use that term around here because we would, a framework for me is basically an outline, right?

Like. So the framework for payroll or the framework for sales, right? And at the top of the outline, you have the subject sales, and you have Roman numeral one, two, three, and four. What is the bare minimum thing that I can put in there to work with, right? So we, growing a business on your cashflow is incredibly difficult because there's always something that needs financial attention without, you know, investing, don't want injecting money in your business or a loan or whatever.

Doing it on your cashflow is really hard. But we would do orbits around the business with the leftover cash flow. And we would spend a little bit on everything. It took us a long time. We would spend just a little bit on everything, every orbit around. If we spent too much on marketing, we didn't have enough sales guys to back it up.

If we spent too much on sales, we didn't have enough marketing to keep all the sales guys busy, all the things. So we would just continue to orbit the business with our money and pay a little bit here, pay off a little something that was nagging us or [00:16:00] whatever, and just keep paying things off as we went.

And, you know, making 1 percent improvements a day. And over time, now things are much bigger and much better. We still have that philosophy of trying to make things 1 percent better per day. But today that 1 percent is a much larger piece, uh, at 1 percent than it was then because the whole thing is much larger,...