A letter from Jim Johnson

Our contracting company did $5 million its first year, $20 million the second, and better than $25 million every year after that, with a high of $31 million before we sold it. Roofing, siding, gutters, painting, whatever a homeowner needed done. I’m proud of that. I’m also going to tell you that for a good stretch in there, we ran that company on whiteboards, legal pads, and a filing cabinet that exactly one person on our team understood.

Everything that worked fine at forty jobs a year came apart at four hundred. Leads got written on the back of an envelope and never got called back. Two of my reps showed up at the same house on the same afternoon. A customer would call to ask when we were starting her job and somebody had to go dig through that cabinet and find the folder.

Now, those were not people problems. I had great people. Every question in that company came to me and I always had the answer, so I never felt a bit of it. My team felt it. My customers felt it. In other words, I wasn’t leading that company, I was the search engine for that company. If the answer to every question in your business lives in one man’s head, you don’t have a business, you have a bottleneck with a truck.

So we went out and bought software. You know what happened? Almost nothing. We paid for it, loaded some customers into it, half the team used it and half didn’t, and six months later my whiteboard was still the real system and that software was an expensive address book.

What finally worked was boring. We sat down and wrote our process out first. Every milestone, every task, every role, every handoff, written down so plainly that nobody had to come ask me about any of it. Then my team built us a CRM on a Microsoft Access database, back before anybody in this trade was saying those three letters.

I didn’t build it. I couldn’t have. What I could do was tell my guys exactly how it needed to work and what it needed to do and where it fit in what we’d already written down, and they went and built it. That’s been my whole career. I’m not the one who builds it. I’m the one who can see the finished thing and describe it clearly enough that the people who are good at building can go build it. It wasn’t pretty. But it knew our process, which is more than I could say for anything I could go buy.

Then we went after the next bottleneck, and that was estimating. Our reps were measuring the job, driving back to the office, and putting an estimate together by hand. An hour, easy, and by then that homeowner had three other guys scheduled. So we built an onsite estimating tool and called it SilverLining. A rep standing in the driveway could measure the job, spit out the order for material and labor, and hand the homeowner a real estimate in about five minutes.

AccuLynx bought SilverLining. Now, did they buy an estimating tool? Yes. That’s exactly what it was. But that isn’t all they got. They got me and what I’d learned about how this industry actually works, and they already had a building full of people who were far better at software than I will ever be. They had the back end, the customer management side of the house. We had the front end that estimated the job. We sat down with their developers and worked at it until those two things were one thing, and what came out of it was the first cloud CRM this industry ever had. I did not do that. We did that, and there were a lot of us.

Then we took it to market, and the market did not want it.

There was no such thing as a cloud CRM in our business. Contractors had everything they owned sitting on a server in a back room, and they had no intention of handing it off to somewhere they couldn’t put their hands on it. I don’t blame them. It was their livelihood. So we showed them, one at a time, that this was simply how the work was going to get done from here on out. It took years and there were plenty of days it didn’t look like it was going to happen at all.

It’s how the work gets done now.

Before contracting I spent five years helping build one of the largest health and fitness franchises in the country, from fitness instructor to salesperson to manager to VP. We took five chaotic licensees and created better than fifty ordered franchisees. I owned two of those clubs myself and eventually sold them. And while I was there I went through every sales program and certification you could imagine, because they invested in me.

When I left, I came into this industry as a carpenter, building new construction homes.

Then I took a job selling for a contractor, and I brought that sales methodology with me. I already had a proven methodology and a mastery level of skill that I knew worked, because I’d watched it work somewhere else. I sold 108 jobs in my first three months. The rest of that company, twenty other sales guys, sold 370 jobs in the entire year. So they made me the sales manager, and we went to work putting those same tools and strategies underneath the whole team. The next year that company sold 4,137 jobs.

Then I went and started our own, and that’s the company I told you about at the top of this letter. This time we applied all of it. The ways we made the phone ring, and how we knocked on doors when we canvassed, were health club strategies carried into the home service contractor industry, and nobody in our business was doing a single one of them. Then we did the same thing again with a commercial company, same thinking.

And it was the same set of questions every single time. There is an industry here that does a thing. How do we do that thing as orderly as we possibly can, and deliver a wow experience to every client? What do we do that’s different? How do we stand out? How are we one percent better than every other company out there, and how are we twenty, thirty, forty, fifty percent better, so that people are willing to pay a premium for what we do?

The reality is, I am not saying we sold more jobs than anybody, although we were definitely up there, others sold a lot too. What was different was how, and the amount of chaos we dealt with by creating order. I knew what it was like to live in chaos like they were.

In other words, it’s the same move every time and there is nothing magic about it. See what’s coming. Take what you already know works somewhere else and apply it to the way things are being done right now. Then build the systems and the processes that create velocity, so you can do more jobs in less time and repeat it over and over, no matter where you are.

And every single time, I sold it and went looking for the next one.

Now, I don’t want that to sound like a sad story, because it isn’t one. I owned those two clubs and I sold them. We owned our contracting companies and we sold them. When SilverLining sold, I got a check. Somebody else owns it today and that worked out just fine for me. The cloud CRM is the one where I was not an owner. I worked for them, and I helped somebody else do very well, and I’m at peace with that too.

What I handed off every time wasn’t the money. It was the compounding. I never once stayed long enough to see a thing all the way through.

ContractorCoachPRO is the exception, and it’s a different animal entirely. That one started with me seeing a hole. Nobody was coaching this industry. I knew somebody was going to figure that out and start teaching people how to do it, and I wanted to be the one who started it. So I did, and at the beginning it was just me. I built every piece of it myself, and I could do that because I’d already built those pieces before, in the health clubs, in our contracting companies, at the software company. I had the information, and I can sit down and do the work and build the things. Fourteen years later that’s my IP, and I don’t take it lightly. I’m proud of it.

But here is what I’ve learned about what actually makes a business great. It starts with me. I set the groundwork. Then it gets great when you bring in people who have real talent in a seat. Somebody who writes code makes the technology come to life. Somebody who sees systems and processes refines them. Somebody orderly and organized administrates. Somebody detail oriented runs production. I can see those things and I can put those people in place, and I can do most of those jobs myself. That right there is the trap. Doing them all myself is exactly what made me the ceiling.

I’m not doing that here. This is the one I stay on.

A good part of that is who I’m doing it with.

I played a real part in every one of those things and I’m proud of the part I played. But not one of them was ever built by me alone. My guys built that Access database. A building full of people at AccuLynx built the cloud CRM with me. Our team and our clients built ContractorCoachPRO right alongside me. It takes a lot of people to do something special, and anybody who tells you different is selling you something.

Bench is no different, except in one way that matters to me. Bench has Cory in it, and there is a long list of things he does better than I do, and there’s a team around us doing work none of us could do alone. This isn’t my company that they work at. It’s ours. For the first time in my life, what we’re building doesn’t stop where I stop. And I love the team I’m doing it with.

Now, about AI. You’ve already been sold it, probably twice this month. Somebody promised you a robot that answers your phone and a dashboard that reads your mind, and what showed up was one more subscription and one more login your team won’t open. I’ve watched contractors automate their own chaos and get chaos right back, faster, at a monthly price. The tools got a whole lot better. The order of operations hasn’t moved an inch.

You’ve read the same stories I have about companies that cut their staff because somebody sat through a good demo, and then went quietly back to hiring for those same jobs a year later. That isn’t foresight. That’s a company that never understood its own process well enough to know what its people did all day.

But here is what has changed, and I want you to hear it from a man who has been telling contractors the opposite for twenty years.

My whole career I’ve told every client the same thing. Technology serves your process, it does not replace it, and if your process isn’t written down, no software on earth is going to save you. That was true, and I built a career on it. It also meant I had to walk into a business and spend months digging out what their process actually was before I could apply one thing I knew to make it faster.

AI can do that part now. It can look across all your tools, all your data, and every half finished SOP sitting in a folder somebody started two years ago, and reason out what your process actually is, based on the way you already do business. It puts the whole thing in one place. It takes your chaos and hands you back order, and you don’t have to shut the company down for three months to get it.

Then the AI runs the operation and your people run the relationships.

Here’s what that means, because I don’t want to sell you something I have to walk back later. You will run leaner. You’ll do it with fewer people than you would have needed before, and I’m not going to dress that up for you. But the people you do have are going to have superpowers, and you’ll scale up and back down with your season without carrying that overhead through the winter. Your humans get more important, not less. The relationships were always the part that mattered, and now that’s what they get to spend their day on.

This is the way businesses are going to run. I know that already. The only question left is who does it best, and that’s going to come down to who walks into this with real experience in systems, process, and velocity, in a world that mostly doesn’t have any. That’s why I told you about the filing cabinet, and the five minutes in the driveway, and the servers nobody wanted to give up.

What we’re after is velocity and a wow experience. Not just for your customers. For your people too.

What Bench does is simple enough to say in one sentence. It puts your strategy, your execution, and your performance in one place, run by agents that already know this trade, so you can stop paying for the ten or fifteen disconnected pieces of tech you’re carrying right now that don’t talk to each other, and stop being the only person in your company who knows how the whole thing works.

And you should hold us to the same rule I’ve given every client when it comes to investing in tech, for the last 14 years, and still use personally. If it doesn’t save you time or make you money, you don’t need it. Not because it’s the future. Not because your competitors are getting one. Time or money, measurable, or we haven’t earned the subscription. That rule has talked more people out of buying from me than into it, and we’re not changing it now that we’re the ones selling.

So why is this the one I don’t sell and walk away from?

About fourteen years ago, in a moment of prayer, I resigned as the Director of Sales at that software company. I couldn’t have told you why. One word just kept repeating in my head. Resign, resign, resign… and when that happens to me there’s no other option than to listen. I flew to headquarters, handed our CEO my letter, and told him I had no idea what I was going to do next. Talk about faith.

I flew home the following day and found out my grandfather was on his way to the hospital.

That’s why I resigned. I needed some final coaching from the most important mentor of my life. Over the next three months, Pappy asked me the two most powerful questions anybody has ever asked me. When I told him what I really wanted was to be a college basketball coach, and once the laughing died down, he asked whether it was the basketball or the coaching that gave me energy. Then he asked me what I was great at. I told him I knew this home services contractor thing better than most, and he asked whether it was being a contractor, or was it leading a team to win.

He knew who I was better than I did. He knew because he listened.

Coaching a team to win is what I’m here to do, and there are only so many hours on my calendar. Bench is how I coach past the end of it.

ContractorCoachPRO will keep right on doing what it does for the contractors we coach. But my full effort and everything I’ve got goes behind Bench, because I see what’s coming here the same way I saw it in that driveway with an estimate in five minutes, and the same way I saw it when nobody wanted their business living in the cloud.

I’ve spent my whole career watching good people get owned by the business they built, working themselves half to death for something they were supposed to enjoy. I don’t believe your work and your life are meant to be at war with each other. And no matter your spiritual persuasion or your beliefs, if you’re a contractor, I’d like to help you build a business where they aren’t.

I knew we were on the right track the first time we ever showed Bench to a contractor. He looked at it for a while and said, “Oh, you built the one.”

That’s his word for it, not ours, and it’s the right one. The one that takes those ten or fifteen things you’re carrying and makes them one thing. The one that helps you live a happier, better, less chaotic life, because you finally have order and velocity working for you instead of against you, serving your people and handing you back the time for the relationships that were always the whole point.

Come see if we’re telling you the truth. Then let us build the one for you.