TRANSCRIPT

Pip Meecham:

Dane, thank you so much for agreeing to come in and have a chat to me about Gold Coast Plumbing Company and everything that we’ve been working on together. I really appreciate your time today.

Dane Beazley:

No, honestly, that’s our pleasure and that’s the least we can do, considering that the monumental I’ll say improvement that you’ve made to our business. So, thank you.

Pip Meecham:

Well, first of all, do you want to just tell me a little bit more about Gold Coast Plumbing Company, so anyone who’s watching this can get a better feel for what you do? And then we can start diving down into a little bit more about why you went down the systemizing path.

Dane Beazley:

I’d love to and that’s a shameless opportunity for a plug with Gold Coast Plumbing Company, of course. I’d like to think that we are probably one of the premier plumbing companies on the Gold Coast. We are customer centric in our focus, so we really look after our customers as best as we can. We provide plumbing solutions to the domestic homeowner, so if you’re a mum and dad, if you’ve got a leaking tap, or a blocked toilet, or a hot water system that’s failed, we’re your go-to company for basically anything in your home.

We’ve been operating for five years primarily here on the Gold Coast. I’ve got a team of four wonderful tradespeople out there on the road who are just awesome, knowledgeable, technically gifted, but also very personal people; and a team of a couple people in the office as well that as, I suppose, the first point of contact with the company, just wonderful people to reach out to when you’re having probably a pretty bad day. Because normally, if you’re calling us, something’s not going too well.

Pip Meecham:

TSo what all lead you down the systemising path to start with? What made you reach out?

Dane Beazley:

Scalability, Pip. I got to a point where I was on the tools, but I also wanted to grow the business. I didn’t want to be middle-aged and out there in the heat on a shovel, solving those problems as much as I was. So, I knew from the onset through a little bit of business improvement knowledge that systems were the only way that that would happen.

It’s an interesting thing. I was listening to a great podcast the other day and somebody summarized it really well, was that you can have a brilliant team, but without the systems to use, you just haven’t got a chance. So, you don’t need to build a great business with a brilliant team every time if you’ve got brilliant systems, then I’m not going to say anybody can do it. But if you prop the right person in with a bit of training, systemising will get you there. So, that’s why we chose the systems.

Pip Meecham:

So something that has struck me as quite different when I first meet you was all of the documented processes that you already had using the flow charts. Can you tell me a little bit about what the change is between what you had then and what we’ve done now, and how that’s really working for you?

Dane Beazley:

I’m smiling because they were magnificent. You know?

Pip Meecham:

They were.

Dane Beazley:

And you might remember when you walked in here, I proudly pulled out this door-stopping the folder full of these books that I had spent hours, and days, and weekends after work after knocking off, and building all of these systems flow charts, putting them together. I’d proudly putting them into this great binder and sending them out with the team and then nobody used them, which was… It was terrible. You’d talk to somebody that we’ve onboarded about, “How’s the experience? What do you think about the systems and have you seen the books?” Because I’d ask, “Has our senior trainer taking you through some of these flow charts?” And, “The what now?” And you just hear crickets and, Oh okay, righto.” So, obviously we’ve got something that’s good here, but it’s not in a workable format. And that, I think is where we’ve made this massive difference, is that we’ve taken the content that we had there and we’ve made it now current, relevant, and accessible, and I think that really has made a massive difference.

If I may, I’ll just say that we’ve sanity-checked this because when we onboarded a new team member recently, they would go to these new systems in the new format, search for the problem that they were trying to solve, or the task they were trying to complete, and easily navigate their way through something that takes a little bit of knowledge and expertise and could easily do that.

Pip Meecham:

Yeah. So, what made you reach out to somebody to help you go from what you had? Why did you think about engaging somebody external to doing everything yourself?

Dane Beazley:

Pip, I think that there’s a certain point that you get to in business, and it can be when you are a sole operator working on your own, or it can also be when you’ve got a team of six or seven like we do at the moment, but you get to a point where either you’re not able to do it; you’re perhaps not passionate about it; it’s not your expertise and you’re not going to progress as well as you could if you don’t involve somebody who’s knowledgeable.

So, for me, we needed somebody who could come in and solve a problem for us. I will say that by doing it, we are far further ahead of where we would have been had we taken on that challenge ourselves. We would still be working on those systems now, had we not engaged you to help with this. That would be the honest truth and we would were chasing a tail. It would never get there.

Pip Meecham:

Cool. So what made you decide to proceed with using myself and ProjectBox?

Dane Beazley:

Pip, over the years, what I’ve found is that it’s referrals from other people who have solved the same sort of problems that I’m trying to solve; it’s through those referrals where I’ve had the best results. I’ve tried to hire people through Upwork or other platforms where you might find freelancers or people that you meet in the street, for example, but it just does not work as well. When you’ve got somebody who you’ve met through referral or even through the knowledge of what somebody else has done, e.g. visit your website, see the work that you’ve already done. You can see that it’s got synergy with what we’re trying to achieve. So, it was an easy decision. After our first meeting, it was a good fit. I was confident in the fit straightaway that you had the knowledge, and the ability, and the output, and that desire to help us to reach that next level, so it was a no-brainer.

Pip Meecham:

I want to know what things are like now for you, both from your perspective with having all this stuff in place, but also from the teams? I know we briefly touched on why the flowcharts have gone, but more how it’s actually happened on a day to day basis?

Dane Beazley:

There’s two scenarios that I can tell you about here, which is just fantastic. We went from a position where I was heavily involved day to day in the operation assisting our other team member in the office. It was quite hands-on because we didn’t have a great schedule for what our day should look like. We didn’t have the right systems to be consistent in our results and the outcomes.

Once we implemented not only the systems, but also those other opportunities around it. This is where I believe you’ve got a unique skill for seeing not only the system itself or the way, the process, I suppose, but also the opportunity that broadly surrounds it to make it more efficient or even cull things that are just not necessary. Because I remember one day when we were working on one of the projects, you said to me, “Why are you doing this?” “Well, I don’t know, we’ve always just done it.” “Do you need to?” “Well, probably not actually.”

So, a great example there. We managed to streamline things and make things more consistent, so we went from a state of probably a little bit of random chaos throughout the course of the day, although we broadly knew what we needed to do, to a far more structured day where people walk in in the morning; they know what needs to be achieved; there’s a format of the day that we follow and when that’s done, we know that the day is completed. So from that perspective, that then freed me up to have a little bit of time off to get out of the office, to go back to some of those other pursuits and opportunities in those windows of times throughout the day when you can go away and do things. So, it’s given me a little more freedom.

For our team out in the field, which is a little different… the team operating in the office operates differently from the team of the field… it’s given the field team more autonomy as well. So now, things that they probably would have called me for for approval or for more information about, we’ve moved past that. Now they’ve got the autonomy, the authority, they know what the outcome needs to be, and they’ve got the means of achieving it. So, for them, it’s improved their day as well too.

It’s really brilliant in the way that everything ties together, especially having someone like you who has come in and with your knowledge and experience you could see the bigger picture for us. Because we were so close to what we were doing, it was a little hard to step back where you were able to see that and then help us to establish a number of platforms, tools, methods of doing things. We’ve moved forward from having those original systems processes in books that were no longer read to bringing those online, and moving away from the old way of doing things, and being very step by step with a snapshot about everything that needs to do, to more providing information about what the outcome needed to be, and then broadly, steps about how to get there; not so much about what every step looks like because we should trust in our people to be able to make good decisions and get to that outcome, if they’ve got a sense of what that is.

So we implemented a lot of that, great tech throughout, to using Google Drive, so that way it was accessible across everybody on all of our platforms, moving into some cool automation and using Zapier to automate things and saving half a day per month in work time in our office. That’s the reality with some of these automations that we achieved, which is massive, especially for a two-person team. To save about half a week per month is massive and it frees us up to do other things that we do better.

Pip Meecham:

So, obviously there is an investment into doing something like this, both from a financial perspective and outsourcing to myself for ProjectBox to do it for you, but there’s also time on your part as well because you were very heavily involved in the whole process too. Do you believe that it is a worthwhile investment?

Dane Beazley:

Absolutely, hands down. You would not be able to scale any business without having the correct systems in place.

Look, a prime example is with a new team member who started with us, Kirsty, could just come in and search for what she needed to do and get on with it and do her job if we weren’t around, our other senior person was around, to ask those questions. So, that investment, initially, yeah, there’s time that will come out of your day and there’s some cash that it costs, but the bigger picture at the end is where you get so many things back, exponentially moreso because you get freedom; you get better cashflow; you get consistency in your results. When you’re talking to your accountant and I see this month in month out, this same pattern of achievement, being consistent in that, it’s great.

If you need to go to the bank to get a business loan, you’ve got this… It’s consistent. You can show these systems and when you want to sell your business down the track, a private equity company or something like that, is not going to come in and buy the people with the knowledge. They want to buy the systems that you’ve got in place, so your business is worthless without it. So that investment at the start will continue to grow so long as you keep it current, which is not that difficult to do. The end result is going to be worth multiples, multiples.

Again, without it, at the end of the day, if you don’t have systems, you’ve just bought your business, you’ve just bought yourself a job if you don’t have systems in place. Because right now, I’ve got that ability where I could jump on a plane tomorrow… And we’re in the middle of COVID here, it is January 2021, but if international travel was available, I could be on a plane tomorrow and run my business from anywhere in the world with the knowledge that my team have got the systems right now to do that work, and do it safely, and do it productively, and do it profitably as well.

Pip Meecham:

Do you find that the system impact your customer’s experience with you?

Dane Beazley:

Absolutely. Absolutely. The system shouldn’t be seen as just an administration fix as well, systems fall into sales, so the process when you walk in the door to see a problem, making recommendations on what the best repair might be to offering a price on that, then doing the work, it’s not just the administration of your business, it’s the sales part.

It’s the marketing part too because I could pretty much walk away tomorrow, anybody could jump into my seat and run the business within a certain set of metrics based on the systems that we’ve got; not just administration, but who to reach out to to switch Google Ads on, for example, and how much budget to apply to that. Or how to generate blog articles and who to contact to get those written, or how to get that knowledge out of your head onto a piece of paper so somebody else can expand on that.

So, it’s not just from an administration point of view, to delivery out in the field, customer experience, and even how we build our systems, and broadly, our processes, our way of doing business. Because that’s what you help fix as well, is the way of doing business. Right away, that whole customer journey from that very first point when they pick up the phone or visit our website, you’ve had input along that entire customer journey right to the very last piece, that last email that we sent to them to say, “Thanks very much.”

Pip Meecham:

So what was the best thing that you took away from your time with working with me?

Dane Beazley:

Pip, I think I’ve said this once already, but I’ll say it again. It’s the ability for you to, with fresh eyes, see how it is that we’re working. From getting to know you, I can see from your experience and the journey that’s led you to where you are now, that information is invaluable for anybody who’s growing a business. Because although technically I might be quite a good trades person and have some business acumen, it’s people like yourself who come into our businesses who can see bigger things, but also see things that are used across other industries as well, what works well.

What works well, say, for example, with real estate, that might work well with plumbing and whether that be from an administration and marketing, or a sales perspective too, there’s a whole range of things. And because you’ve got that varied experience, you’ve got that depth of knowledge now where you can cut to the things that work really well, really efficiently, and then implement.

This is the other bit because you can have some fantastic systems in place, but it’s not until the implementation part is done that you actually see the results. So, it’s the implementation too. I think it’s knowledge and implementation. Tony Robbins says this, he talks about the saying that “knowledge is power” and he usually pulls people up at that point and he says, “No, knowledge with massive action.” That’s where the value is.

Pip Meecham:

Yeah. And finally, is there anything else you’d like to share, either about your love of new systems now or from your time with working with us?

Dane Beazley:

Again, the systemizing of the business all the way through from administration, sales, marketing, all of those perspectives, how we onboard employees. We didn’t touch on that in our chat at all. Unfortunately, that’s something else that we’ve got too. It makes you very hands-off. It gives you freedom. It gives you then the freedom to go out and play golf if that’s your thing, although I don’t own a set of golf bats. Or you can improve on your knowledge, it’s a wonderful time to be alive because knowledge is so accessible. You can download something on your iPad or your phone and be reading it in five minutes time, and it’s just a great opportunity. So, to systemize your business, get that freedom, learn, go out and play sport, do that thing, life becomes good; business becomes great. And then, with the knowledge that you’ve built something that’s got these fantastic structures within it and great foundations, and then these other pillars of systems and things sitting on top of it, you’ve got this saleable thing. So one day, if you just do it, play that long game, build your business, set the systems, grab people, you’ve got something that’s going to be worth a lot of money one day as well, which is the cherry on top. You’ve got a lifestyle and, as you go, you’re building an asset that’s going to be worth something to someone… well, some day; So massive.

Pip Meecham:

I can’t wait to see where you take yours.

Dane Beazley:

Exactly right. And I can’t wait till our next project