Free Yourself From Your Business (ft. Brian Kaskavalciyan)

Logan Shinholser
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Contractor Growth Network. I’m Logan Shinholser, and today I have a fantastic guest. It is Brian Kaskavalciyan. Brian’s actually another marketing expert. He’s the co founder of gFour Marketing Group, and they focus really heavily on the repeat customer side of things. And he’s the host of the Wealthy Contractor podcast, focusing on the home services industry. He’s also the author of a fantastic book called the seven Secrets to becoming a Wealthy Contractor, which provides insights and strategies for business growth specific to the contracting industry. Brian specializes in relationship building and customer retention, emphasizing the importance of strong client relationships for sustainable business growth, which we all know we need to do. His expertise includes developing effective referral programs and personalized marketing tactics. Brian will be speaking at our new era of contracting virtual summit on January 24 and 25th.

Logan Shinholser
This is probably the fourth time Brian has been on our podcast because he’s always an awesome guest. So without further ado, let’s jump into it. So the first question I asked Brian was, at what point do you actually have a functional business compared to just a high paying job?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Okay, so, wow, we could talk about this for a day. But, you know, I’ll tell you the simplest thing. From my experience, from my experience, my personal experience and in working with clients, when you have people in place that are accountable for creating leads every day, somebody is accountable for creating leads every day. Somebody is accountable for making sales every day. Somebody is accountable for making sure that jobs are getting installed and customers are happy, and you’ve got your finances in order, somebody’s there got their finances in order, and there is a buffer between you, the owner, and everybody else. Meaning, like, we use eos here, the entrepreneurial operating system. And so most entrepreneurs, most business owners are what’s called a visionary. A visionary has additive. They’re all over the place.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
They create messes and, you know, and so, left to our own devices, without somebody that helps us to implement all of our ideas and keep us on track and focused. In eos, this person’s called an integrator. It. You’re, you’re a slave to your business. And the more of those jobs that you, the owner, are responsible for, again, the more of a slave you are to your business. But when you’ve got good people in each of those seats and they have accountability, then you’ve got a business that works for you. And you could leave for a month or two months and come back and there’s more customers, more money, and people see you and they say, oh, hey, you know, good to see you. And, you know, there was no real fires that needed to be put out.

Logan Shinholser
So in your mind, do you have to have people in place handling the, you know, account or being accountable to those individual metrics and aspects of the business? Or do you actually have to have an integrator or an Ops manager or a Coo?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Ideally, yes. Ideally, that’s what we are working towards. You know, just in my, you know, in my career, if you will, I guess that’s the right way to say it. Or on my entrepreneurial journey. Until we implemented that system, it was, you know, we, everybody did everything. You know, meetings were few and far between. They weren’t productive. We weren’t as effective as we could be, and we definitely weren’t as profitable as we could be. And I see that with my clients as well. You know, I just did a podcast episode with one of my clients that has, in a relatively short amount of time, really gotten this and really started to push, put the pieces together. So he’s on his way there to that entrepreneurial freedom that we all dream of. And he’s probably just a few months away, but he’s just filling seats.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Fill in seats, fill in seats. That’s the job of the entrepreneur, really, is have the vision, where are we going? Sell the vision and then put the people in place to execute on the vision.

Logan Shinholser
If you own a business, you know how tough it can be. So I asked Brian, how does personal development impact the evolution of the business?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Well, the evolution of the business owner and what they think and what they believe and how they act is the precursor to business success. I think business success is 90% mindset, 10% skill set. Because you could buy skill set, you can rent skill set. I can hire you to go and do Internet marketing for me. Right. I don’t have to learn how to do it. I hire you to go and do it. But what I have to have is I have to have the mindset of a leader, the mindset of somebody that’s okay with. How do I determine if this is the right person in the right seat and then delegate that responsibility to that person and then hold that person accountable to the results.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
And it is, yes, it’s much easier said than done, but that’s the only way you’re going to build a great company that works for you.

Logan Shinholser
Talk to me more about the ability to hold your team accountable. What does it take from the owner and the entrepreneur to really have an effective accountability system in place?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Well, most well let’s look at what most of us currently have. You know, I say us because, you know, I’m just going to throw everybody into the same bucket. If you look at the majority of business owners every day, it’s like you walk in to your office as an owner and you’re almost like this. It’s like, okay, what have you got for me today? It’s reactive. It’s, you know, we have a skill set. Entrepreneurs have a couple of skill sets that are very unique. One of them is the ability to solve problems. And what happens is we create organizations that rely on us to solve the problem. And so that’s why when you walk into your office, everybody’s shooting you with arrows. Hey, I need you for this, Logan, come here. I need this. Or, oh my God, we’ve got this client that’s upset.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
What do we do? And everything goes through the owner. And so you’ve got to create a system or surround yourself with a team of people that have the ability and that are, hey, I want to be held accountable to results so that I know how to win. So we talk about a players. We all want to hire a players. Well, a players want to win. You have to show them this is what winning looks like. And winning is, let’s just say, let’s use sales, for example. So if our goal is to sell ten jobs this week, so how many leads need to be issued this week in order to make that happen? So the marketing person, hey, did you deliver 20 issued leads this week?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Or 30 or 40, whatever the number is, so that we could hit the sales number and then talk to the salesperson and say, okay, marketing delivered the number of issued leads you need. How did you perform? Because our number was ten. So if you were at nine, what happened? Or if you were at seven, what happened? What do we need to do to fix this so it doesn’t continue next week? And it’s, so it’s, you got to be very clear about. And this time of year, I do a lot of planning with our clients and a lot of thinking about next year. And we always start with profitability. So how much money do you want to make next year? Once we know that now we could figure out how many jobs you need to sell.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
When we know how many jobs you need to sell, we know how many salespeople you need. When we know how many sales people and how many jobs we need to sell, then we can figure out how many leads we need to issue. And so each of those is a metric. Each of those is a metric, a KPI, if you will, that needs to be achieved week in, week out to successfully complete the quarter. And the core, you know, you successfully create or complete one quarter, then we’re going to move and do the exact same thing to the next quarter. We live in little mini years. My friend Mark Curry calls it many years, 13 weeks. So every 13 weeks is a. Yeah, is a sprint to the finish line.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
And in order for us to successfully finish this sprint, here’s all of the numbers we need to hit. And so it’s just a matter of having that system in place where every single week we are going through our list of KPI’s and we’re saying, hey, are we on track or are we off track? Because if we’re off track, see, here’s what happened. And this was me 20 years ago when I was, you know, fairly new in business. We would find out month later that, hey, we didn’t hit our goal. Or a quarter later, we didn’t hit our goal. Well, when do we want to know that we’re not hitting our goal? We want to know today. We don’t want to wait a month. We don’t wanna wait three months. We don’t wanna wait.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Some people wait till the end of the year and then turn in all their crap to the accountant and say, hey, did we make any money this year? No. I wanna know this week if we’re making money or not. Cause if we didn’t make money this week, what do I have to do to fix it? Because I’m not working another week for free.

Logan Shinholser
You don’t go from working in the business to on the business overnight. So I asked Brian, what are some of the common roadblocks to actually getting to the point where you are working on the business?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
So it goes back to what you asked me previously about and us talking about mindset. It’s, what do you believe? I’ll give you an example. Okay. So contracting companies, our clients, contractors, they get to a certain point in business, and it’s generally between about $1 million and where they come up against this ceiling, where it’s because they’re selling everything themselves. And so they have two full time jobs. They’ve got the full time job as salesperson, chief salesperson, but then they also have the full time job of everything else, running the whole business for that person. It’s a very simple breakthrough that needs to happen in order for them to get to the next level. And that is they need to stop selling.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
And what that means now is I have to bring in a selling system which today is a lot easier than it was five years ago, much easier than it was ten years ago and a thousand percent easier than it was 20 years ago. So, but what is required of them is to be okay with, I’m not going to be the salesperson anymore. I’m going to bring on other people that are going to now represent my company. I’m going to now have to become a sales leader. I am going to have to charge more for my services. All of this stuff is mindset. It’s all in what you believe. So if you believe that, oh my God, we all, we charge too much already. People are saying no already. You’ll never get out of the gate.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Because in order to bring on salespeople, in order to hire more people, you got to charge more. And more than likely you’re not charging anywhere near as close to what the highest priced person in your market is charging. So there’s so much room there. But if in your head you don’t believe it, you’ll never get out of the gate. The hardest job, the hardest job is convincing a business owner, you know, and look, we can’t, you and me, we can’t convince anybody of anything. So convincing is not exactly the right word, but I’m going to go with it for a minute. Our job is to show them the path, the model and proof that other people just like them have done it. That’s part of the convincing. But the decision to do it is entirely up to them.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
And people will go for years and years and nothing, make that decision. Or what they’ll do is they’ll make a kind of decision, but they won’t be fully committed. So they’ll hire a salesperson, they’ll try and teach them how to sell the way they do. You can’t teach me how to sell like you. I can shadow you for a month and try and pick up on how you logan sell. And guess what? It ain’t going to transfer to me. Just like if you did it with me, it’s not going to transfer. There’s a secret sauce that we have that is unteachable to somebody else. What we can teach somebody is a step by step, choreographed, scripted selling system.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
And so if your head’s not right and you bring on a salesperson and your hope is that, hey, I’ll just give them a lead, I’ll show them how I do it for a couple of days and here, have at it. It’s not going to work, and then you’re going to, and then that person’s not going to work out. You’re going to burn leads and you’re going to be like, oh, man, this doesn’t work. You’re going to panic and you’re going to go right back into selling again. This is like the easiest example because for most contractors, this is the thing that is in their way, is that they are stuck as salespeople. And you can’t do both. You can’t have two full time jobs.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
If you want freedom, if you want to create an organization, a business that works for you, that’s going to make you rich, whatever that means for you, that’s going to give you the freedom to go off and vacation for a month or take a few days off just because you’re not going to be able to do it. You’ll be a slave to the business. So all starts with developing your belief systems around the business.

Logan Shinholser
One of the things you brought up was it’s easier to implement that sales system now compared to 510 20 years ago. What makes you say that?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Well, because you can go to my buddy John Anglis, and I don’t care if you sell roofing, windows, siding, one day, bath, landscaping, closets, painting, whatever, there is a step by step system that sells home improvements. And you can go to John, somebody like John. I mean, there’s others, but you can go to somebody like John and he immediately turn it on, and you go start watching videos and get the scripting and understand the psychology of how the selling system works, and then put the parts and pieces together. And within, literally within two or three weeks, you have a selling system, you have a training platform to make it happen, and you’re off to the races. This didn’t exist, you know, ten years ago, you had to pay consultants to come in, pay tens of thousands of dollars for them to develop a system.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Or you, if you had worked for somebody else and you quote unquote, I hate to use the word, stole their system, let’s say they, you modeled their system. That’s the new word we’re using now around here. You modeled their system word for word, slide by slide, step by step. That was one way that people did it back then. But today, oh, my God, it’s so much easier to get your hands on this stuff. You just have to go to some industry events and listen to podcasts and go to YouTube and you’ll see, you know, the resources are all there for you.

Logan Shinholser
So is this in your mind? Is it simply just access to more, quote unquote, contextualized information. Because Carnegie Sandler, all these sales programs, I mean, I’ve been through them. They’ve been around for, I mean, since before I was born. So is it now that they’re taking these systems and now really applying it more specifically to each individual business, or is it more so that now people have more access to these systems? Because, you know, all Carnegie, Sandler, they cost thousands of dollars where you got to have some money to fork out for it. And now with YouTube and the Internet, it’s easier. Or am I off on all that?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Well, it’s a little bit of both, Logan. So yes, you know, Sandler and all of that, those systems are great, but they’re not, they’re more generalized. They’re not specific to business. Like your business, your agency has a specific step by step way. It should be sold. Home improvements face to face at the kitchen table. There is a process and a way that it should be sold. And so what people have done is they’ve taken these systems and they’ve, because of the Internet, because of the technology today, it’s become so much easier to be able to teach, to sell these systems to people, more so than it was before. I mean, look, up until before the, I went, did the iPad come out?

Logan Shinholser
20, 10, 28, something like that?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Okay, so before that, let’s say ten years ago, right, with that? No, 1515 years ago. Okay, 15 years ago. I mean, when I was in business 15 years ago, we would use laptops to do presentations or be few years before that we would use pitch books. Now people still use these things today. And it’s clunky. I mean, nobody wants, I mean, if you’re walking in to somebody’s house today with a pitch book, I mean, people are looking at your customers, looking at that thing, which is like a phone book, and saying, wait a minute, we’re gonna have to go through all of that. And immediately you’ve derailed the whole deal. Well, but when you walk in with an iPad, they have no idea what you’re doing. So it’s a much more elegant way of presenting.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
But it’s things like that, I’m just using those as examples. But it’s things like that have made this just, it’s so much easier today. The hard part though, and it goes back again to what were talking about before, is mindset is like, I have clients right now, but just staying on the selling thing because the selling is the easiest one I think the core of our business, the home improvement business, regardless, is the selling system that is the core of the business. Because if you get that right, you could spend as much money as you possibly can have on marketing to feed that beast. And then the more you sell and them, and the better you are at installing it and putting those people together and creating happy customers and getting reviews and referrals and all of that.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Now, when you get that piece in right now, you start making money, and now you start making serious money to where now you can start filling the seats that we talked about, but you, in your head, have to be good with it. And then there’s the whole conversation of, well, how much money do you want to make? So this is, you know, people come to me and they want to plan for next year, or they have questions about marketing or they have questions about selling. My number one question is always, how much money do you want to make? Because if I start to throw out all marketing, just using marketing as an example, I had a couple here with me a month ago. That’s in our wealthy contractor success society. These are clients of ours that are in our group, husband and wife.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
They came and they sat here. They came here to meet with me to review marketing. You know what? I found out within ten minutes that if we fed any more marketing into the system, into their quote unquote system, number one, it would all be wasted money. Number two, for them, marketing is a complete distraction over what they really needed to work on, which was their selling system, because they didn’t have enough salespeople to deal with the leads they were getting. But they thought, well, if we just get more leads, that’ll solve our problem. Well, no. So I went back to, well, how much money do you want to make? And then we laid out the whole year. You want to make whatever, half a million dollars. Great. We need a $3 million business. What’s the average cost of your product that you sell?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Keep the math easy. Okay, so we need 200 of these. Now let’s break it down by quarter. How many do we need per quarter? How many do we need per week? But it’s like we. You got to start with the end in mind. And if you are, and this is a hard thing for people, so if you say to me, I want to make $500,000, my question back to you is, well, what’s the most money you’ve ever made of 200,000? Again, the numbers don’t matter. It could be 2 million and 5 million numbers. Don’t matter. It could be 50,200. Numbers don’t matter. But in this example, what’s the most money you’ve ever made? Okay, great. So now you want to make $500,000. That’s a huge difference. Huge. It’s two and a half times what you are used to.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
And if you don’t prepare yourself mentally to make half a million dollars, you might sell more next year and have more revenue, but you won’t necessarily have more profit, because in order for you to make more money, you have to make the money in your head first. You have to believe it’s possible for you. And this is the stuff nobody wants to talk about, because it’s like airy fairy stuff. It’s like. It’s the secret. It’s the law of attraction. It’s all of this stuff. Well, guess what? I’m sorry to break it to you, but that’s how this world works. You can call it whatever you want, but this is how it works for most of us. Me included. Me included. I didn’t become a millionaire until I was 50. My goal was to be a millionaire by 30. I was broke at 40.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
And I finally, and look, I was 95, 97% of the way there because I studied for years and years. But what I finally. What finally clicked for me, what finally clicked for me was I made the money in my head first, and I got used to the number and in my head and on paper, I spent the money. And that was the. For me, that was the real work. And I see it now with my clients is I’d rather them spend a day, a week just reading, think, and grow rich listening to Jim Rohn, whatever different things they like, you know, whatever appeals to them, but really work on themselves, that will catapult their business faster than anything else.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
And this is just, again, from my personal experience and now working with literally hundreds and hundreds of home improvement entrepreneurs and working closely with dozens of from scratch multimillionaires, Brian talked a lot about.

Logan Shinholser
Getting your mindset to a place that you’re able to actually grow. So I asked Brian, great, now that you got your mindset dialed in, what are the next steps to actually implement systems into the business?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Well, I think, again, I think it all starts with selling. And as an owner, you have to look at what takes up most of my time. And this is a hard thing to do, because every day, if you’re going, going, doing. And you are in a habit. A habit. So we are all driven by habit, we wake up at a particular time. When we wake up, we do a certain thing. Then we do something next, and next, and next. And our lives, our days blend into each other. It’s the same day over and over again, generally. And so what we need to do is we need to recognize that’s happening. We have to break that pattern. And the way to break the pattern is to understand how am I spending my time. Now, there are two ways to look at your time.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
One is, am I working from Gerber Emeth? Am I working in my business or am I working on my business? Now, there’s a lot of confusion around that about what is in and what is on. Here’s my definition. Okay? In your BusiNeSS is an activity that has zero leverage. So again, I’ll use sales as an example. If I am running a lead, okay, and it’s going to take me half an hour to drive there, it’s going to take me 2 hours to measure, go through my presentation, and half an hour to drive back. That’s 3 hours of my time. Now, I may have made a sale, but there was zero leverage in it. That 3 hours is gone.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Now, if I take that same 3 hours and I work on my Sales People or my selling system, and I’m managing my SaleSPeople, that’s a Leverage AcTivity. That’s working on the business. And so you’ve really got to look at where are you spending your time as an owner. And if you are doing things like answering the phone, running to job sites, scheduling jobs, this is all stuff that can be done by somebody else at 25 an hour, 40 an hour, $100 an hour, you should not be doing those activities. The only activities you should be doing as an owner are activities that give you leverage. And believe it or not, the one thing that people have the most difficulty with is thinking time.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Just stopping, doing nothing, putting your phone away, turning off the Internet, turning off social media, telling the outside world, hey, I need quiet time. And you just go and you think and you work on. Okay, what are the parts of my business that need my attention?

Logan Shinholser
Running the business by yourself compared to having a team help you run the business are totally different. So I asked Brian, how does leadership impact your ability to have your team help you grow the business?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Well, look, we have to become leaders first. We have to be, we have to lead ourselves to where we want to go. We have to be very clear about what we want. Why are we doing this? Why am I willing to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week, not get a paycheck just so I can avoid working 40 hours a week for somebody else. We’re weird. I mean, this is like, to most people, that is such a foreign concept. And that’s why so few people are successful entrepreneurs, because it’s hard. And so the first thing is, you got to understand, why are you in this? Why am I. Why am I doing this? And for most people, if you dig deep enough, it’s going to come down to time, money, and freedom. Time, money, and freedom. And so what does time mean to you?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Like, how do you want to spend your time? What does money mean to you? How much money do you want to make? What does freedom mean to you? Like, I want to go and I want to take a vacation for a month, or if my kids have a soccer game at 02:00 Friday afternoon, I want to be there and I want to be present. And so leadership starts with leading ourselves to where we want to go. Then it’s about selling your vision to the people around you. And that could be one person. And look, I just. This is one of the best ways I’ve heard it said.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
I just did an interview with a guy that built up a great business, had a great exit a couple years ago, and he said at the beginning, you start with B and C players, and you got to do the best you can with BNC players. But the better you get, the more, the better people you attract. So now you start to let go of the c players. You work a little bit more with the b players. You bring on another b player. One of them has potential that buys into your vision, and you may be able to develop them into an a player. And now you’ve got an a player on your team, and now you want to go out. And as a leader of this business, you got to go out and sell your vision to your inner circle.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Those now, three people you have in your business, or ten people you have in your business. And then now you have to start selling your vision outside of your business. And you have to start to attract people that want to work for a company that is got great, a great reputation, that has a written plan and a goal that everybody can get behind that is exciting to them, where they can win. They know clearly this is what it looks like to win here. And a players, like I said earlier, they love to win. And so how do you create an organization that’s attractive to a players? It takes leadership of self and it’s going to take leadership of that team, of people around you, and then it’s going to take leadership of, you know, being able to sell that vision to other people.

Logan Shinholser
So one of the challenges that I find with entrepreneurs, including myself, is we usually hesitate to let our team know what our vision is because we don’t really have that much clarity around a vision. So how does an entrepreneur in the contracting space go about actually figuring out and determining what their vision for the company is?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
So I have an exercise. I always start with money. I always start with money because when you fix the money, you can fix everything else. Because with money, I can go buy the skill set that I need. I can go buy the people that I need in order to grow my business. So I start with, and this is what changed for me when I told you I became a millionaire at 50, my income, I had a goal for my income, which was four times what my top number was, four times. And it eluded me for years and years. What I finally did two or three years before I became a millionaire was, I said, okay, enough is enough. This is my number. And I went to work on myself and making the money in my head first.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
And as that started to happen, now things started to happen in the business. And look, if we want to, if our goal is to create, let’s say, for ourselves, we have to look at ourselves and our families first. You know, I always say, when you’re on an airplane, what do they tell you in the event of a loss of cabin pressure, the oxygen masks are going to come down. And what do they always tell us to do? You have to put the mask on yourself first, because if you’re trying to put it on your child, but you pass out. But you pass out, you just killed both of you. But if you put the mask on yourself first, now you’re breathing, and now you have the ability to put it on somebody else, it’s exactly the same thing with business.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
It’s, it’s shocking to me how people have these goals of, well, I want to create a great place for people to work. I want people to come here and make a whole bunch of money so that they can go and buy the new homes and they can do this and they can do that. My question to them always is, well, how’s that going for your family? Does your family live where you want to live, in the neighborhood that you want to live in, the house that you live in? Do you drive the cars that you want to drive? Do you have, do your kids go to the schools you want them to go to and on and on. I would start with the money. So my exercise, which changed my life, I call it the four numbers exercise. Here’s four categories of money.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Lifestyle, future, wealth, giving and taxes and liabilities. Come up with a number in each of those four boxes. Add them all together, and now there’s your number, and that’s the number we work towards. Now, how does this help sell a vision of the company? Well, in order for the business to get to that place, we need to do x amount of revenue. Now, people don’t get excited about revenue goals and about how much money you are going to make. What they get excited about is how are we going to deliver on, how are we going to get there. So you may be a customer centric business, which I always recommend everybody, because you’re not going to survive otherwise. You’re not going to, I shouldn’t say that you’re not going to thrive otherwise you can survive not being customer centric.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
But in order for you to thrive, you got to be customer centric. So you got. I was just talking with somebody yesterday or the day before, and when he started his new business, he wanted to control all of the labor. Why did he want to control all of the labor? Because he wanted to make sure that when they sold a job, that they were delivering an unbeatable experience, a five star beyond five star experience. And so that’s a vision people can get excited about. We do things different here. We take care of the customer, by the way. We do well in the process. The better we take care of the customer, the more value we provide to the customer. And value is not in product, by the way. In home improvement, it’s in peace of mind. It’s in your guarantees.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
It’s how much confidence you can instill in the person with the work that you’re going to do. Hey, we’re going to come in and tear your kitchen apart, but hey, we’re going to be as the least disruptive as we can possibly be. And we’re going to do it in a way that gives you peace of mind and confidence that we’re going to do the job on time and on budget. That is something that people can get around. That is a place where a players want to work. And so it starts with, hey, what does our dream business look like? How much money does it make? And make no mistake, the money is not only for you. The money is so that because we teach people to make a 15% to 20% net profit. Profit. Okay, ideally, 20%, but at a minimum, 15%.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Now, the average in our industry is a fraction of that. In fact, half of the. Almost half the industry makes 3% profit or less. That’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. These people work way too hard for pennies, and so you got to get out of survival more. So the business has to make money and be successful in order for it to successfully deliver on its promises and on its mission. And the mission is make you, the owner, rich, whatever that means for you, give you freedom, and then you start to do it for the people in your organization as well. So, with us, we always want to know. We always ask our people, what do you want? What is your vision for yourself and for your family, and how do we help you get there?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
And now you’re building a real team of people that are going to get behind the mission of the business.

Logan Shinholser
Brian is speaking at our new era of contracting virtual summit. So, naturally, I ask Brian, what does the new era of business freedom mean to him?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
It’s. It’s really about. There’s. There’s almost no excuse anymore, because everything is out there and nothing is new. You know, you and me, we. We. We take our experiences and other people’s experiences, and we share a. From our perspective, on what, for us, it’s what a success look like. What does wealth look like? What does freedom look like? Those are our big three core tenets here at the wealthy contractor. Success, wealth, and freedom. How do we help you achieve more of that? And today, there’s really no excuse anymore for not having a business that works for you. And I’ll say, and I say it all the time. In fact, my book’s dedication is not to my wife, it’s not to my kids, it’s not to a friend, it’s not to any mentors.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
It’s to the reader, it’s to the contractor, because they are the hardest working people I have ever met. I was in home improvement for 20 something years. It is the hardest business, I think, out there. There’s so many moving parts, it’s so disruptive to people’s most important and sacred space. And so, one, you got to make money, stop, you know, accepting low profits. You got to charge the right price and not be afraid of it anymore. And you’ve got to surround yourself with good people so that the entire business doesn’t run around you. These are not new ideas. But now, in 2024, coming into 2024, we have no excuses anymore. Everything’s out there, you know? And it’s just a matter of you making a decision and saying, okay, I’m going for it, and you don’t have to do it alone.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
You know, there’s organizations out there as groups like ours, you know, our wealthy contractor success society. There’s your organization, where you provide amazing, great content through your podcasts and webinars. And then there’s the people that work with you and the value that you provide to them in the Internet marketing space, which is not, you know, an easy place to be. And look, I. Do you know the name Perry Marshall? Oh, my God. How do you not know Perry Marshall? This is this guy. Okay, so Perry Marshall, look him up. The king of Google Adwords. So, way back when Google Adwords first came out, I was in a mastermind group with Perry Marshall and Dan Kennedy. That’s how I met him. And I, you know, what do they call it?

Brian Kaskavalciyan
Is it the dumb tax on Google when you spend a whole bunch of money on Adwords? Okay, so before Perry Marshall, you had to go and figure out Google AdWords yourself. Now, when I sat down with him in that mastermind, I had already wasted thousands and thousands of dollars on Google Adwords. We’re talking 25 years ago, okay? And 2025 years, something like that. And I had already wasted all this money on Google Adwords, but he had figured it out and he said, oh, no, this is how it works. You go in there and boom, boom, boom. In five minutes, he showed me how this thing really works. Now you can go and buy his books now on how to do Internet marketing so you don’t have to go and figure everything out yourself.

Brian Kaskavalciyan
I can go now and hire you, and now I don’t have to go figure out how to run my Google Adwords, how to do Facebook advertising, what works in SEO. I don’t have to build my own website. I could just hire you to do it. You’re going to do it cheaper, better, faster than I ever could do it on my own.

Logan Shinholser
If you want to learn more about working on your business versus in your business and hear from industry experts like Brian and others, make sure that you attend the new era of contracting virtual Summit on January 24 and 25th. Go ahead and click the link in the description below. Check out the event and we’ll see you there.