PART II — THE SYSTEM
I told you in Chapter 1 about Dale, the consultant who gave me you don't know what you don't know. I only knew the man a few years. And before I hand you the second thing I picked up in that stretch, I owe you an honest accounting of why a consultant who passed through for a season left lessons that stuck for the rest of my career.
Here it is: in forty years, I never once ran short of sales wisdom. The best sales minds in the country came through my shop — trained my floor, pumped up my closers, ate dinner at my table. Production wisdom? Numbers wisdom? Almost never. Rick Grosso — the man, the myth — used to stop at my shop on his runs between New York and Florida, and one afternoon at the tail end of a two-day sales pump-up, all of us sitting in the production office of all places, I asked him, half laughing: "Rick, what production advice do you have?" He looked at me with a perfectly straight face and gave me the complete inventory: "Sell more, install more."
That was the industry I grew up in. An entire brain trust aimed at the kitchen table, and the back half of the building on its own. So when one consultant finally sat down with my own job costs and started asking about the side of the business nobody else would touch, his lessons had no competition. I want you to know that going in — not because the lessons are any less true, but because this whole book runs on the difference between what a thing is and what it looked like from the owner's chair. From my chair, the rare commodity looked ten feet tall. It wasn't the man. It was the scarcity.
The first line was the diagnosis. The second was the table manners for delivering it.
Dale would sit down across from an owner — a man with his name on the trucks, twenty years of his life in the building, his kids' college paid for out of the margin — and before he asked a single question, he'd say it:
Save your feelings for your wife. I need your numbers.
The first time I heard him say it I about fell out of my chair. You don't talk to an owner like that. Owners are proud men. They built something out of a pickup truck and a phone, and every question about their company lands on them like a question about their children. I'd spent my whole career learning how to handle that pride — how to ask around it, flatter through it, ease into the hard subjects sideways. Dale just walked in the front door and told the man to leave his feelings at home.
And here's what I watched happen, over and over, in the few years I got to watch him work: the owner would laugh. Some of them laughed like they'd been waiting years for somebody to say it. Because underneath the pride, every owner knows the polite conversations haven't helped him. He's had a thousand polite conversations. The banker is polite. The accountant is polite. The marketing rep is extremely polite, especially in the month before renewal. Twenty years of polite, and the same problems are still in the building.
Dale's line worked because it wasn't an insult. It was a promise. It said: I'm not here to make you feel good or feel bad. I'm here for the numbers, which means for the next two hours you don't have to perform for me at all. You have no idea what a relief that is to a man who's been performing — for his customers, his crew, his wife, his banker — for two decades. The rudest sentence in the room was the kindest thing anybody had said to him all year.
I borrowed the line the way everybody in this business borrows anything worth borrowing: I used it, it worked, and I've said it so many times I can't remember when it wasn't part of me.
Now let me unpack what the line actually does, because there's more machinery in it than you'd think, and this whole chapter is really about the posture you need before you ask a company a single hard question.
The numbers are the past. That's the first thing. Every number I'm going to ask you for in the next six chapters already happened. The job is built. The check cleared or it didn't. The crew took nine days or eleven. Nothing we find can be changed, which means — and I want you to sit with this — nothing we find can hurt you. There is perfect safety in a number that's already on the books. It's the only thing in your company that can't get worse by being looked at.
Compare that to a belief. A belief you've never checked is live ammunition. It's making decisions today — pricing decisions, hiring decisions, which line to push and which crew to trust — and if it's wrong, it's wrong at full speed, in the present tense, compounding. The owner who won't open his books because he's afraid of what's in there has it exactly backwards. The past can't hurt him. The unchecked belief driving next month is what's doing the damage.
Nobody is in trouble. That's the second thing, and if you're the owner, you have to mean it, out loud, in front of your people, before the first question gets asked. Because here's what I know from forty years of sitting in these rooms: the numbers you need live in your people's heads, and your people have spent years learning exactly which numbers you don't want to hear. Your production manager knows the real callback rate. Your bookkeeper knows which line bleeds. They've been protecting you from that knowledge — not out of malice, out of self-preservation, because the last guy who brought bad news about your favorite product got the big-picture speech.
I told you in Chapter 1 that I gave that speech more than once and I'd like those minutes back. This is where you buy them back. You say, in front of everybody: these numbers already happened, nobody in this room is in trouble for a single one of them, and the only way anybody gets in trouble today is by dressing one up. Then — and this is the hard part — you have to behave that way when the first ugly number hits the table. The room is watching your face, not your words. Flinch once and the rest of the day is fiction.
A doctor doesn't prescribe before he diagnoses. That's the third thing, and it's the one that separates this process from every sales call you've ever sat through. When I sit down with a contractor to run the questions you're about to read, I make one promise before we start: I will not give you one piece of advice today. Not one. Today is discovery. If I walk in with a solution in my pocket, then I'm not diagnosing you, I'm qualifying you — checking whether your symptoms match what I happen to sell. You've been on the other end of that exam your whole career. The chiropractor finds a back problem. The SEO guy finds an SEO problem. The lead company finds, miracle of miracles, a lead problem.
The doctor who prescribes before he diagnoses isn't a doctor. He's a pharmaceutical rep with a stethoscope. And the reason no marketer has ever asked you the questions in this book is that the questions might produce an answer their product doesn't fix. Discovery is only safe for people with nothing to sell you yet.
There's a third Dale line, and I might as well give it to you now, because it's hiding inside the name of my own company and most people never notice.
Know your numbers.
That's it. That's the whole sermon. I named the company EASy — the Economic Accountability System — and people assume the pun is the promise, that the system makes the business easy. It doesn't. No system makes this business easy. What Dale taught me is that it's all easy when you know your numbers. The knowing is what's easy to live with. Pricing gets easy when you know your real margin by line. Firing a lead source gets easy when you know its real cost per acquisition. Saying no to the wrong job gets easy when you know what the wrong job actually costs you. Every hard decision in your company is only hard because it's being made in the dark, by feel, against a belief nobody's checked.
Three lines. You don't know what you don't know — why the exam exists. Save your feelings for your wife, I need your numbers — how to sit for it. Know your numbers — what you get to keep afterward. One consultant, a few years, and I've been living off the inventory ever since. I've come to believe that's how it works in this business: the lessons that stick aren't always from the mentor you had for decades. Sometimes they're from the guy who passed through for a season carrying the one commodity nobody else was selling.
I want to show you what this posture looks like when a man lives it full-time, because I got to watch one up close, and watching him is how I learned the difference between an excuse and a decision.
Bob Aitken was the CFO at Four Seasons Sunrooms in the years after they took over my shop. A Scot, with eyes that would cut right through you, and he counted every penny of that company's money like it was his own. My production manager in those years was Jason Rose — the best collection man Four Seasons ever had. Understand who Jason was: a Marine. A black belt. And no stranger to the sermon in this chapter — he'd worked for Dale himself for six years before he ever worked for me. Jason was bringing in over seven hundred thousand dollars a month, for a couple of years running. He knew how to collect. Nothing at a job site rattled him, nothing at a kitchen table rattled him. There may not have been a physically braver man in the company. The only time I ever saw Jason Rose squirm was missing Bob's numbers.
Because Bob didn't ask how the month went. Bob asked:
"Jason — who is going to get me my other $64,973?"
Sit with that number a second. Not "about sixty-five grand." Not "the shortfall." Sixty-four thousand, nine hundred and seventy-three dollars. Bob knew his numbers to the dollar, which meant nobody in the room could negotiate with him in round figures. And when Jason started in on the month — it had rained thirteen days, you can't pour concrete in the rain — Bob cut him off with the question I've been quoting for twenty years:
"I don't care that it rained thirteen days. Did you rent tents so you could pour the concrete?"
That's the whole chapter in one sentence. The rain was a feeling — a good one, as excuses go, the kind twelve out of twelve owners would accept. The tents were a decision. Bob had no interest in the first and total interest in the second, and the man on the other side of the desk — a man who collected seven hundred grand a month without breaking a sweat — squirmed, because there is nowhere to hide from a question like that. You either rented the tents or you didn't.
Incidentally: we never rented tents to pour concrete. Not once. That was never the point and Bob knew it. The point was that Bob was certainly going to ask "and why not?" — in that bloody Scottish accent — and you were going to have to answer him with a reason instead of a weather report. The question wasn't about tents. It was about whether anybody in the building had treated his $64,973 like it was worth working a problem for.
A CFO like Bob Aitken, if you could afford one, would make you rich. Most contractors can't afford one, and most will never meet one. That's what the rest of this book is for — the questions Bob would ask, sitting in the columns, waiting for you to run them yourself.
So here's how the exam works, mechanically, before we get into the questions themselves.
You put the right people in the room. Not just the owner — the owner alone can't answer half of what's coming, and the half he can answer, he'll answer with the front-office beliefs this whole book exists to audit. You want the owner, the GM, whoever runs marketing, and whoever runs production. The bench. The people whose hands are on the parts of the watch you never see.
Then the questions come in two flavors, and everything depends on keeping them straight.
Some questions ask for a number. What's your typical ticket on windows. What's your monthly nut. How many crews. Those go in one column. Some of the numbers will arrive soft — "our margin on sunrooms is about forty percent" — and we write them down anyway and flag them stated, to verify, because one of the most reliable finds in this whole process is the distance between the margin a man states and the margin his books show. That gap alone has paid for the exam more times than I can count.
And some questions ask for a belief. Which line do you think makes you the most money. Who do you think is your best salesman. Which lead source would you swear by. Those go in the other column, and here is the rule that makes the whole thing work: we do not argue with a single belief. Not one. We don't raise an eyebrow. We write it down with a straight face like a court reporter, because the beliefs aren't obstacles to the diagnosis — the beliefs are the diagnosis. Half of it, anyway. The books are the other half. The gap between the columns, sorted biggest miss first, is the report.
That's why the feelings have to stay home. Not because feelings don't matter — I've built my whole life on reading them at kitchen tables — but because in this one room, on this one day, a feeling defended is a belief that never makes it into the column, and a belief that never makes it into the column can never be checked, and a belief that never gets checked goes right back to running your company in the dark.
Save your feelings for your wife. She's earned them. Your books need something else from you entirely.
The next six chapters are the questions. We'll take them the way I take them in the room — one block at a time, starting with the easiest thing in the world for an owner to talk about and the hardest thing for him to actually know: the lay of his own land.
From The 48 Questions No Marketer Ever Had the Guts to Ask You. Read Chapter One free →