482 | 6 Ways I Grew My Remodeling Company from $0 to $1.7 Million in 12 Months

Oct 21

Chaz Wolfe started Kings Collective, a Kansas City remodeling company, in 2023 with no construction background. It hit $1 million in seven months and closed the year at $1.73 million. In this episode, GTK integrator Jake Isaacs walks Chaz through the six steps behind that first year.

Step 1: Build the team before the work

Chaz put paid leaders in place on day one. One partner, a people person and a doer, ran sales and learned construction on the fly. The other, patient and creative, took over marketing and lead generation. An integrator with no remodeling experience ran the team. Chaz matched each role to a Predictive Index profile. He tells his project managers, who have 20 to 40 years in the trade, "You don't want me on the job site."

Step 2: Pick a narrow offer and the right clients

They started with bathrooms, basements, additions and multi-room renovations. The team had already done that work on 10 to 15 house flips. Kitchens waited until the crew was ready. Kings Collective goes after large projects for clients who want an expert, and Chaz will turn down a $160,000 job when the client is a bad fit.

Steps 3 and 4: Get leads, then work them fast

The company has tried Angi, Thumbtack, Facebook ads, Google Ads, SEO and social media. When a contractor tells Chaz that Angi leads don't work, his answer is that the sales process is broken. Their integrator calls new Angi leads within seconds. One of those calls turned into a basement remodel worth about $200,000. Every prospect then goes through the same four steps: open, discovery, presentation and close. Discovery covers what the client wants and what it costs them to wait. The presentation is a professional deck with 3D renderings of their space.

Steps 5 and 6: Deliver on time and on budget, then keep the relationship

Operations is judged on two numbers, time and budget. When an estimate misses, the lesson goes back to sales. Chaz's main rule is that a client should never have to ask where the project stands. The client journey starts the first time someone sees your truck and lasts as long as the relationship, not just until the job is done.

In year two, Kings Collective plans to hold revenue about flat while it writes SOPs and fixes operations. The next targets are $5 million, then $10 million.

00:00
Jake Isaacs
How are you finding $1.73 million worth of leads?
00:04
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, that's a great question. Because you're right. We can. We can have all the people. We can have all the process. But if you ain't got anybody to talk to, then there's no flow. There's no business from a sales guy. I need you to hear this loud and clear listener, is that you need leads, and it has to become an obsession. And so I just knew that from the beginning that we needed leads. We just know that you can't sell projects if you don't have leads. And so we've just been willing to fight and pay for leads, knowing that as soon as we get that lead, we're going to work it.
00:29
Chaz Wolfe
A lot of people know that they need leads or desire leads, but because then the next step, the sales process, because they don't have one of those, they pay for leads, or they get leads from their website or whatever, and then they. They suck at talking to the customer or don't even talk to them at all. And then they think that third party lead sources or Facebook ads or whatever don't work, which most of the time, it's really just the sales process. Welcome to Driven to win, the show that helps entrepreneurs who want to win in all areas and aren't afraid to do the work to get there. I'm your host, Chaz Wolfe, and I'm a serial entrepreneur in different industries. And my mission on this show is to help entrepreneurs who want to win in business, family, faith, health and lifestyle.
01:14
Chaz Wolfe
And on today's episode, I've got our own integrator, our COO, Jake Isaacs, and we discussed the six steps that I took to grow my remodeling company from zero to 1.7 million in the first twelve months and how I plan to scale that business to 5 million and beyond. So if you want to learn the exact steps to grow your business to 2 million and beyond, this episode is for you.
01:39
Jake Isaacs
Welcome to the Driven to win podcast, Mister Wolf. I am excited to talk to you today. Dude, I thought we would chat about Kings collective. Hey.
01:48
Chaz Wolfe
Oh, Kings Collective. Just another. Another one of the businesses in the portfolio, right?
01:54
Jake Isaacs
That's right. And one of the newest businesses in your portfolio, if I'm not mistaken. Chaz. Today I would love to talk about the six ways that you grew your remodeling company from zero to $1.7 million in the first twelve months of existence.
02:10
Chaz Wolfe
Let's do it.
02:11
Jake Isaacs
And then maybe as we're having some of that conversation, we can talk about what your plan is to scale that business to $5 million and beyond over the course of the next couple of years.
02:19
Chaz Wolfe
Jake, do you mean to say that growing and scaling are different?
02:25
Jake Isaacs
Yes, man, they sure are. And I appreciate you breaking up that difference because I think that, you know, in our business influencer world, people use growing and scaling synonymously with each other. And they are not the same thing.
02:37
Chaz Wolfe
Not, not at all, in fact. Well, the audience may not know this, but even with inside of gathering, the kings are different memberships. One for growth, one for scale.
02:47
Jake Isaacs
Exactly. And the reason that we have that is because it requires two very different things.
02:52
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, that's right.
02:53
Jake Isaacs
So when someone is growing a business, that usually means that they're increasing their revenue inside of the business. But with the process of increasing their revenue, they're probably providing resources to increase that revenue. So I want to grow. So I'm going to go buy three more dump trucks. And now my capacity has increased so I can grow my business. Yeah, makes sense on the other side of that. Like scaling really doesn't mean that you're adding extra resources, but you are increasing revenue. And so you're doing things at a cheaper cost that are allowing you to have that revenue growth that you can then dump into real business growth.
03:36
Jake Isaacs
So the example I like to use there is if were to set up an email campaign for ten people, growing that email campaign to 1000 people doesn't necessarily cost that much more or need that much more effort, but it has exponential ability to increase revenue.
03:53
Chaz Wolfe
No, I agree with you 100%, Jake. I think that doing two times ten times more with little to more effort, like you said, and then growth is just a one to one, maybe a one to two ratio.
04:08
Jake Isaacs
Yeah, I think that sometimes a business can get into a position where it's scaling and it doesn't necessarily know what levers it pulled to scale. But growth, I think, doesn't happen without very strategic decisions on how you're going to make the business grow.
04:25
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah. And I don't know how much we're going to get into the scale part on this podcast, but one other distinction that I make, typically with folks that are considering joining, gathering the Kings, is that when you've had enough growth, when you've got enough revenue to have a budget to play with, you start typically making decisions more around people or the assets inside the business that can continually build the thing without, again, that one to one, really, the owner's one to one time input, output and scale begins to happen regardless of even the owner's time and input because they're focused on different levers, to your point.
05:07
Jake Isaacs
Yeah, no, I think that's really good. I know we joked about it. Kings Collective, it's the remodeling company that you have inside of your portfolio. It's the newest business inside of your portfolio of businesses. You started it back in 2023, and you grew that business from zero to a million dollars in seven months, and then you finished 2023 with 1.7 or $1.73 million inside of that business. All that sound right to you?
05:38
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, yeah. We had done, you know, for a few months before that, we had flipped, I don't know, ten or 15 houses as a little bit of a warm up and. But, but, yeah. As far as the remodeling side, in fact, we won't talk about it here, but that was a huge pivot. That was the fall of 22, when the rates changed dramatically and we knew we wanted to have a remodeling company at some point. But we skirt went left when the market was going right and decided to fast forward our plan by about a year and a half, two years, and went all in on the remodeling side a little quicker than we had anticipated, but we jumped right in.
06:11
Jake Isaacs
That's awesome. And I think I. We'll talk a little bit about that nuance pivot or the decision that you made there when we talk about these six steps that you kind of put together for growth and so high level, so the listener knows where we're about to go. Step one for this growth was finding the right people, finding the right talent to put around you. Step two was creating clarity around the product, offering clientele that you were going to go after in the service area that you were going to serve. Step three was creating a lead magnet or a lead engine for the business. Step four was creating a sales process. Step five was creating a fulfillment process. And step six was creating some type of client experience or client journey for your clients inside of your business.
06:57
Jake Isaacs
Does that sound right to you, Chazz?
06:59
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot in each one of those. So excited to get into it.
07:03
Jake Isaacs
Yeah. Perfect. You know, we are just a huge believer in personality assessments. We use a tool called the predictive index. You've probably heard us if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, mention it or talk about it. We make this joke. Chaz and I do. My parents, they love to collect things. My mom collects dishes. My dad collects guns. And when I evaluate what Chaz collects, he collects personality profiles on everyone around him. So if you're anyone to Chaz Wolf, if you've been inside of his ecosphere for about six weeks, he definitely has you do a personality assessment. So he knows who he's dealing with.
07:43
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah. Well, I think that to your point, just anybody in the sphere, like, I want to know who they are at this point. I'm pretty good at knowing who people are without the survey. But, man, what power does that give us, you know, as entrepreneurs, as professionals, to be able to do what we do well when we know how the other person receives information, how they interact with our personality, there's a lot, just a lot of adjustments and leadership that can happen if that information is known.
08:11
Jake Isaacs
Exactly. I don't want to overlook this. So will you maybe take a couple of minutes and talk about how you partnered with your two business partners and how not only your business partners, but how you develop the leadership team inside of Kings collective for you guys to get started?
08:27
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, for sure. I like how you put this as number one. It truly was number one. The audience, depending upon where they are in their business, or maybe they're early on or maybe they're thinking back to when they first got started. And I think that starting with a full blown team at zero may have felt not doable or maybe a little bit scary. I mean, every one of the folks I'm about to mention from day one had a salary or an income. I'm really the only one from a visionary advisory perspective, just because I'm not in the business, I don't have a salary that's on the books as of right now, only being two years in. And so, yeah, the folks that are involved, two partners, one of which is a social profile and a doer, really, it's a little bit of excited personality.
09:23
Chaz Wolfe
Everybody loves this guy and super kind and nice, but a doer. And I knew that he's kind of fulfilled two roles. He one fulfilled the getting to know construction. Even though I've done real estate for several years, I've never concerned myself with knowing the nitty gritty of a remodel or any sort of construction. That might sound odd that I own this remodeling company, that I don't know anything about remodeling, but I know business and I know customer journeys. I know sales process. I know all the other widgets that go into, really any business. And so we needed one of us to become that expert. And since then, obviously, we have several people on our team that are those experts.
10:05
Chaz Wolfe
But originally, that was the one partner he was doing sales as well as kind of learning the construction process so we could talk with different vendors and subs and even team members along the way. The other partner has more of a patient profile, a little bit more introverted, but super creative. He writes poems and fun stuff like that where inside of the business, really marketing and legion is his main hat. He also wears the leadership hat for finance, but that's not even really truly his forte, but his just ability to be creative and be methodical. Slower than me, slower than really anybody else on the team, but that was a benefit. When you're thinking about marketing and you're thinking about being creative and crafting a message and figuring out different strategies to generate leads, you kind of need a little bit of patience.
11:07
Chaz Wolfe
It's not going to just happen overnight, typically. And so when I'm kind of master forming this group of owners, this is what I'm thinking. You know, I've got a perspective of vision and leadership. I've got a sales and construction guy, and I've got a back end marketing guy. And really what I needed was a leader. If you're familiar with the EOS system at all, as a listener, then, you know, visionary integrator. And so what I needed was an integrator. And so we have an integrator in place from the beginning. Again, I had a profile on this person as well. She didn't know anything about remodeling either. But I knew that she could manage people, she could manage expectations. She knew sales and has amazing follow through. And so I knew I could cast a vision.
11:56
Chaz Wolfe
I knew that the team itself would believe and take action because we're all doers, and each one of those kind of leadership roles would then begin to function at a high level. Even at the beginning, where it was just fairly clunky and Hodgepodge, I would say that we knew what we wanted it to look like, but it was the personalities that allowed me to go, okay, here's your strong suit here. Here's your strong suit here. Here's your strong suit here. Here's my strong suit. And here's how we're going to work together. And they believed me, not only because they knew me and trusted me, but I could paint the picture for them as far as all the different personality profiles and how they were going to work together. So everyone just kind of settled into their lane and we took off.
12:38
Jake Isaacs
That's awesome. I don't want to overlook it. So did partner a and partner C know each other prior to you connecting them?
12:49
Chaz Wolfe
No. Actually, in fact, we've talked about this a couple of times. The fact that they just didn't, they normally just wouldn't, you know, neither one of them had partnered with anybody outside of their spouses on anything and weren't really types to go just, like, beating down the door looking for a partner. Both in that circumstance, I could see the pieces, and I approached each of them individually. They each respected me based on a previous history that I had with them and kind of took my word for it. And so, not to say that I sold them a dream, but I did. That's what visionaries do, is we paint the picture and we make it clear, hopefully so clear, that you buy in and we can all do this thing together. And that's, in essence, what I did.
13:44
Chaz Wolfe
I knew each one of them very well individually. They had never met, so of course they've become super close. This is how it works in business, right?
13:55
Jake Isaacs
And you knew that you weren't going to be inside of the day to day for this company, and so it was important for you to have an integrator and place from day one. There's this misconception, Chaz, that you have to know everything in order to go be in business. And this story that you're telling is the counter to that. Talk about your confidence in starting a company in a field where you had little to no experience.
14:23
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, I mean, I guess my experience is what you wouldn't think of naturally when you think of a construction company. But there's two words there, construction company. And I know how the moving pieces of a company work. You know, I built teams and sales process and marketing and all the elements of a business. And so I knew that I could put it all together. The actual client fulfillment of that, I was going to have to a, have one of the partners really spend some time educating, and then also finding partners, strategic partners, and then also now our own employees that have decades of experience. And when we have our quarterly meetings and I meet up with the team, I don't even try to pretend.
15:13
Chaz Wolfe
I look at our project managers who have each 20, 30, 40 years of experience, and I look at them and go, hey, guys, you don't even want me on the job site. It's not that I don't want to be there with you. You don't want me there. You don't want me swinging a hammer. You don't want me doing any of that because, one, I'm not good at it. Two is that then I wouldn't be able to do the function that I'm supposed to do, which is thinking ahead and casting vision and planning for the future and moving pieces on the puzzle or on the chessboard. And so because I do my role, you're able to do your role and not have to worry about x, y, and z.
15:50
Chaz Wolfe
And so all that to say, I'm not sure if I'm even answering your question anymore, but I knew the personalities ahead of time. I knew how to build a team. I knew that there would be components that would be challenging because we didn't have the, quote, unquote, knowledge of the industry, but we put things in place for that to happen. Of course, I put one of the partners in motion to learning and really pushed him off the edge, and he started drowning immediately. And that was fantastic because that's how he learns, and I know that about him. And so he just needed to be shoved off the boat and into the water, and he started swimming, figured it out. And as well as our integrator, like I had mentioned, she doesn't have any idea.
16:33
Chaz Wolfe
I mean, she could tell you right now the intricate details of a construction project now. But when we started, it was not like that at all. But what I did know that she knew Washington, again, how to build a team, how to take a vision and execute, how to follow through, how to build up people. When I say build a team, some people just think hiring, yes, that's part of it. But then you have to manage a team. You have to infuse energy and infuse expectation, as well as then follow through and making sure that they're being held accountable, and projects are actually getting done on time and on budget and all the things that you think are going to happen. And so, yeah, I think those are the things that I knew.
17:11
Chaz Wolfe
And so I was confident that we'd figure out the pieces that we did.
17:15
Jake Isaacs
That's awesome. So, you know, architected the chess pieces on the board, you know, exactly who you want, doing what, where. Now it's time for you to decide, what are we doing? What are we selling? I mean, remodeling, construction, those are some very broad terms. You can do a lot of different things inside of that.
17:36
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah.
17:36
Jake Isaacs
So how did you decide what the product was going to be or what the offer was going to be for Kim collective and then what clientele you were going to go after?
17:44
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, that's a great. You're right, because we could, and we still today, could do a lot of different things. And I think that my business experience and then, as well as running now, the GTK podcast, and now known as driven to win that we're on right now. After interviewing 500 or so different entrepreneurs successful in different industries, I know that niching down or picking a very hyper focused, especially at the beginning, is uber necessary. And I've done the opposite and struggled in those moments of not having that super clear. And so our experience, I kind of hinted at it before, but we had done a handful of flips, and so we knew the project management perspective of a large remodel bathroom. You know, kitchens are kind of like their own thing. We haven't done a. We've done some.
18:39
Chaz Wolfe
We didn't start out doing those because they're really where, I don't know, people take a lot of, like, they spend a lot of time. You spend a lot of time in your kitchen. And I didn't want to disappoint anybody. And so, not that I was planning on disappointing anybody, we felt like we could do bathrooms, basements, additions, like the back of our hand, because we had already done so many of them. And like I said, we've done some kitchens, too, but people are particular about their kitchen space because I spent a lot of time there, and I just wanted our team to be a ten out of ten before we started doing kitchen remodels.
19:13
Chaz Wolfe
And so, anyway, long story short, we started with those bathrooms, basements, additions, multiple room renovations, partly because we had some resources already in place, but also partly because we felt confident that, okay, we've done these for our own properties, we can definitely do these for other people. And like I said, even at that time, it was still much of a learning process, even though this podcast has kind of illuminated. Maybe we'll get to this a little bit. Maybe it's another show altogether. But, yeah, we did 1.7 in the first year. But holy. Holy moly, man. That year. Washington. Like the most. The most learning I've probably ever done in a business because, you know, this goes back to the remodeling specifically, is that it's just so complex. There's just so many pieces.
20:05
Chaz Wolfe
I don't think most people that run a business, you know, the software businesses, the retail businesses, the real estate businesses that I've either owned or interviewed, I don't think those guys and me prior to this have any clue how complex building things is. And so, anyway, that was just kind of another element were trying to mitigate based on what our experience was to niche down into those three types of projects.
20:32
Jake Isaacs
Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so you've decided what type offering that you're going to have. But how did you decide the clientele that you were going to go target?
20:42
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, well, I mean, you could do a bathroom remodel for, you know, $10,000 or you can do a bathroom remodel for 70, $80,000. And there's a big difference between those two projects. One is size, but even inside of that, the preferences of such, we just knew that we wanted to deal with large projects. We wanted to deal with clients that wanted a valuable client experience. And so I'm kind of jumping to your number six here for just a half second. Knowing that my background and our integrators background and our sales guys background was this client experience, we really, from the beginning, began crafting, although it wasn't perfect and we're still maybe perfecting it, we feel really good about it now.
21:31
Chaz Wolfe
But in those early days, it was us kind of fumbling a little bit, but wanting to know, or wanting our clients to know that we had them. We can carry the weight of this heavy remodel. Most people are a little reluctant to remodel and to let people in their space and even trust contractors today, which is kind of crazy, but I totally get it. We've had contractors take us for money, and so deciding who we wanted to work with was someone who valued that experience, aka they were willing to pay for, not just the nuts and bolts. They weren't going to ask me, could we find that product cheaper somewhere else? And that might sound a little bit like I'm only willing to work with certain people. Well, it should, because I was and I am.
22:17
Chaz Wolfe
I'm only willing to work with folks that are easy to work with and who want us to come in as the expert. And they're pleasant and kind and we can really transform their space into something that they really desire that I know our team can execute on. There's just a lot of moving pieces in that. And the value that my team brings is not something that some people are willing to pay for. And I totally understand. They're just not our clients. Hopefully that makes sense.
22:46
Jake Isaacs
It makes a ton of sense. And, you know, I've said this, and all of the businesses that I've ever been placed inside of, not all money is good money. And if you, if you chase all money, you're going to come with just a bag of headaches, not only for yourself, but for your staff. And so, yeah, having a very clear picture, I think is important.
23:06
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, I'm going to give you an example because I think that it'd be helpful for the listener. We had a client or a prospect who had mentioned in not even the proposal stage, but in just us measuring and understanding what they were looking to have done with the space. They had mentioned that their spouse was either an attorney or the attorney general or something like that, which, I mean, we've worked with some pretty successful individuals, and so that part of it doesn't shy us away. It was the way that this individual basically said, like, if you don't get it right, we're going to come hard at you. And it was like, oh, wow. So we're already being criticized. We haven't even given you a proposal yet. And that's the type of client that is difficult for the sake of just being difficult.
24:02
Chaz Wolfe
And I'm a difficult client. Like, I built a home. I feel sorry for that home builder. I kind of regret some of the things that I did to that guy. But I guess what I'm saying is, in general, you know, this, being my partner is, I am difficult. I'm difficult to please, I'm difficult to work with, and I think most entrepreneurs are especially highly detailed ones like myself. And so I have to remember that. But I was talking to my wife julie about this just a couple of days ago. There's a difference between somebody who is highly hard to please and then just nasty, and then there is a highly difficult person who, like, you, enjoy being around.
24:41
Chaz Wolfe
And that's what I strive to be, is obviously, I strive to be someone who wants, like, I want you to be able to want to hang out with me. I want our members to be like, man, I can't wait to get some time with chaz. But at the same time, probably during that time, I'm going to raise the standard. That is not what I'm talking about, though. So I'm trying to clarify for the listener that some of those difficult clients, and you could define that however you choose. For me, the difficult client is somebody who's nitpicky for no reason or negative. You know? I'm. I am good with a highly detailed, client, a remodeling, or a member of gathering the kings or even, you know, some clients that order edible arrangements. You know, I've had.
25:20
Chaz Wolfe
I've had clients order tens of thousands of baskets, and I need it to be perfect. I mean, I need them all to be perfect. But this particular one, you know, and the team knows, and we execute on that stuff. I'm not. I'm not afraid of executing at a high detail rate. But I guess what I'm trying to give to you is it's not just that makes them a difficult customer for me, it's the negative vibe that they put off. And so whatever that is for you should sit down as a business owner or with your leadership team and define.
25:51
Chaz Wolfe
You know, you probably have some examples of, man, when we worked with so and so and so, that was really hard and challenging, whether it was, a, out of your scope of really what you're good at, or b, they were just fill in the blank negative or just hard to work with. Whatever the situation was, don't go looking for any more of those and be willing to say no. That's really what it comes down to. So to your point, Jake, number two is define who you're looking for. But I guess what I'm also saying is you got to define who you're not looking for and also be okay with saying, I know that this is $160,000 project, but this is not going to be a good fit for us. And we've got a couple folks that we can refer to.
26:31
Jake Isaacs
Yeah, I think that's really important because so often getting started out of desperation to pay the bills, you take on a client for the cash flow purposes, and it just turns into be such a large headache on the backend that if you just had some defined standards in place and use that as your guiding, don't deviate. Yeah, it makes it so much easier. Okay, so, Chaz, you've architected the chessboard. You now have determined who you're going to sell and what you're going to sell. Now, we need some leads. Like, so how are you. How are you finding $1.73 million worth of leads?
27:10
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, that's a great question. Because you're right. We can. We can have all the people, we can have all the process. But if you ain't got anybody to talk to, then there's no flow, there's no business. And so, from a sales guy, I need you to hear this loud and clear listener, is that you need leads, especially if you're in this, like, sub $2 million. I mean, you need leads after that, too. But I think by that point you'll recognize the value of we need more leads. And it's almost like an obsession. It's not almost. It is an obsession. It has to become an obsession. I just knew that from the beginning that we needed leads. And so we. I mean, of course, all the third party sources you know, Angie. Angie leads Angie ads.
27:55
Chaz Wolfe
You know, thumbtack, you know, we've done, of course, all the organic stuff, social media. We've done a little bit of SEO. We've done Facebook ads. We've done, you know, Google Adwords. I mean, basically, we've tried everything. Some of it has worked really well, and some of it hasn't. Some of which we knew that other contractors were doing well. And so it was just something that were doing, and we needed to circle back on it at another date, maybe with a different attitude or maybe an expert to help us or whatever it was. And so. But the element that you're looking for is that we've just demanded leads. We just know that you can't sell projects if you don't have leads.
28:35
Chaz Wolfe
And so we've just been willing to fight and pay for leads, knowing that as soon as we get that lead, we're going to work it, which I know is your next point. So I don't want to jump too soon, but a lot of people know that they need leads or desire leads, but. Because then the next step that you're going to help us with, Jake, is the sales process, because they don't have one of those. They pay for leads, or they get leads from their website or whatever, and then they suck at talking to the customer or don't even talk to them at all. And then they think that third party lead sources or Facebook ads or whatever don't work, which most of the time, it's really just the sales process.
29:17
Chaz Wolfe
And so anytime I come across as a contractor, especially when the hot topic of Angie Homeadvisor is the previous name before that service, magic. And so if you've tried that service at all, anywhere in your career and you're thinking it's your sales process, it's broken, guarantee it.
29:40
Jake Isaacs
Yeah. We've done a couple of client calls inside of gathering the kings around this particular topic, and it doesn't seem like there's any one topic that ruffles feathers more than telling someone they're not appropriately or accurately using the leads from these lead sources.
29:58
Chaz Wolfe
Right. Yeah. It's just easier to blame, right. It's easier to say they're crap leads or they're sold to 17 people at the same time or whatever. And I just know, you know, I just know that we can stand out. I know that when we call the lead quickly, and I don't mean like that day. I mean, we're making the phone call within seconds the other day, and we have an appointment setter on our team now, but the Angie leads specifically still come to our integrator, and she stops everything that she's doing in that moment, unless she's in something, that she has to forward it or pause the leads or something like that. But we're very precise about those. We're sitting in our quarterly planning. Just last week, last Thursday, she gets a lead, she clicks over, she calls them, and she's on the phone.
30:47
Chaz Wolfe
The customer is like, oh, my gosh. Da da. That was, you know, like he didn't even know he's gonna get a phone call. He's actually a little bit frustrated by the process that he was taking through. But after 15 minutes, he's all warmed up and nice and fuzzy and wants to do a basement remodel, probably looking at about a $200,000 project, and he can't wait to meet us. And so it's like, don't. You can't tell me that lead sources don't work. Your sales process is probably the thing that doesn't work.
31:16
Jake Isaacs
So it doesn't matter if you're paying for leads or you're building your own lead magnet and securing leads through a funnel or through organic campaign that you're trying to do on social media. You need leads. And the reason that we need leads gets us to step number four. It's because we've got to sell a product. And this is something that you and I joke about all the time. As the operational minded person that I am and the sales minded person that you are, the answer to your question or the answer to every question you're given is more sales.
31:47
Chaz Wolfe
More sales.
31:47
Jake Isaacs
And the answer to the question every time for me, is a better process. So talk about the sales process.
31:55
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, well, I think that, I mean, first off, I'm right. Sales solves everything, right? But there has to be a process. And so, you know, the sales process that we follow in our remodeling company might be a slight bit different than what you have in your company. Depending upon what type of business that you have. Generally, every business follows the same process, the same four steps. And I've taught this for a long time. I trained thousands of sales reps before owning my own businesses, and then I've taught hundreds, maybe if not thousands of entrepreneurs this as well. But open discovery, presentation close are the four steps that you're going to take any one of your prospects through. In the opener, you're going to basically introduce yourself and create authority, start to build trust inside the discovery.
32:49
Chaz Wolfe
So that, for us, that's the initial call, that call that I just described. The lead came in, and we built trust immediately identified, qualified, built some authority with them. And then our next step is to go out and meet the homeowner and walk through their space and really get a good understanding of what their dream is, what the space should look like if every dream of theirs came true. And we call that the discovery. And so we're asking a ton of questions, and we're asking them not just what do they want, but how would life be if they never got it? What's the pain not having this bathroom.
33:28
Chaz Wolfe
If, you know, the mother in law is supposed to move in 45 days, if the bathrooms not done, that's going to cause a lot of problems, because then mother in law is going to have to use the master with you and your spouse or whatever the situation is. Right? And so we're trying to find not only just their hopes and dreams, their desires, but we're also trying to find the pain of not having it. And then the effects of, you can have the pain, but then, you know, how long does that pain last if mother in law is using the same bathroom for months on end? Now we're talking about maybe a crumbling marriage. There's a lot of effects that could happen in that regard.
34:05
Chaz Wolfe
So we're trying to find all that in the discovery to build trust and also figure out what the pain points are so we can solve the problem for them. And then if we feel like it's a good fit, we'll come back and we give a proposal, which is the presentation for us, it's a. It's a professional deck. We're dress. We're sharp dressed, you know, mint in the mouth and clean shaven or bearded and, you know, still clean. But the presentation, I guess, of even the person, the pitch deck is professionally done. It's. It's. There's renderings to their specific space. We've really tried to, like, make their. Make their dream that they just shared with us, like, come to life in three D, a little bit of. And then we ask for the business.
34:48
Chaz Wolfe
We ask for the close, which is the fourth step to turn the corner, ask for the business, make an agreement that what they want is what we can do for them. And so once you have that process down, whether it's a multiple steps in each one of those, but once you know it and you can just, in your mind, know exactly where you are, or your sales folks can know where they are, then you're not fumbling around is really the key factor there. I want to lead the prospect through that exact order. Open discovery, presentation, close, because a confused mind doesn't buy. And I want them to be not confused at the end, but I want them to be excited and have full clarity of like, wow, these folks can actually make this space look like I want it to.
35:35
Chaz Wolfe
I mean, as you can imagine, the opposite of what they get is no pitch deck. Sometimes don't even get a call back weeks on end to get an estimate. It's not detailed, it's not line item like, it is not hard in this business to separate yourself. And so in that sales process, everything I just described is one of the main ways that we separate ourselves. Every single person we sit down with is always going to say, even if they think we're way too expensive to say, wow, nobody else did it like this. And like I mentioned earlier, every once in a while there are folks that while no one else did it like this, they're willing to pay for that experience.
36:11
Jake Isaacs
That's incredible. Yeah. So having a process in place so you know how to take the customer through it to get your desired outcome.
36:20
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah.
36:20
Jake Isaacs
Right.
36:21
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah. And there.
36:22
Jake Isaacs
So we've moved the pieces on the chessboard. We've defined what it is that we're going to do. We've defined how those are going to come to us. We now know that we're going to sell them and how we're going to sell them. How are you fulfilling the product? Well, that's step five. Like, how are you fulfilling the sales contracts? How are you doing the things that you're doing to meet those revenue numbers that you guys reached?
36:46
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, well, I think the fulfillment is going to look a little different for every type of business. The fulfillment in an edible arrangements franchise is going to look like cutting and putting fruit in chocolate and making it look beautiful in a basket or whatever. So over here, obviously, we're constructing, we're remodeling, we're demoing, we're painting or making things new and different that requires experts. And so we've got a lot of strategic partners on our team. We've got employees on our team that have a lot of experience. And so really we try to sit down at the beginning of the project, of course, create a layout for timeline and also a budget, and then the operations team follows along those two things. Those are the two main indicators of whether the operations team is doing their job and doing it well.
37:34
Chaz Wolfe
Is are we on time and are we on budget? And did we estimate properly and so that's a feedback loop sometimes that we have to close or not close, but circle back to quickly and give feedback to our sales folks around. You know, maybe estimating a little differently, maybe we underestimated something and that caused some problems on the operation. But generally speaking, we're trying to take them through a design process if the project requires it, and we're trying to launch or break ground, and we're going through all the different trades, we got a demo, we got to install all the mechanicals, we got to do all the finishing touches. And there's steps along the way, really the process that I want to identify, which is what we use in gathering the kings as well, it's a communication process.
38:23
Chaz Wolfe
And so at every step along the way, it doesn't really matter what step we're at. It just matters whether the customer knows where we are. Because if they don't know where we are and they don't know where we're going, then they have questions. If they have questions, then they might have concerns, or they don't have the level of trust that I need them to have. They should never have a question. I should always be informing them along the way ahead of time. So that way they just can take a deep breath and know that we got it and we can carry the weight of this heavy remodel project like we talked about before, even inside of gathering the kings or edible arrangements or whatever other business.
38:58
Chaz Wolfe
If I'm wondering when the delivery is going to be made, if I'm wondering when the next event is or the event that's coming up, if I don't have all the details and I'm like wondering what those are, then it's a level of uncertainty, is what I've now created for my customer. And so I would say the number one thing I could give to the listener is that of course there's a process, and you got to create sops and follow along. And Jake could probably do a much better podcast on this than me. But the number one takeaway is if you can create those things, but then communicate those things to your customer so that they never have to ask that they're never ever uncertain of what is coming next, then you have ultimate trust.
39:39
Chaz Wolfe
And trust is what not only sold the deal, but is what's going to help carry them through sometimes the up and downs of a construction project or just life, and then also get you a five star review and referrals at the end. It's like the basis of everything. So I want to press hard on that trust in every way I possibly can.
39:59
Jake Isaacs
Yeah, that's good. Okay, so were talking about fulfilling the sales, right? And you very eloquently talked about this journey that you also want customers to be on. And so step six for our growth model was a customer experience journey. Take a second and break down the difference between fulfilling product and the customer service journey that you just talked about.
40:27
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah. Well, the fulfillment process, the sales process is simply just are pieces of the client journey. And the client journey is going to be from when they interact with your brand. At the very beginning, that could have been seeing one of your trucks, it could have been hearing a radio ad, it could have been seeing you on Facebook, could have been a friend referring them like whatever their first interaction was, all the way until the end, the relationship ends. And I didn't notice how, I didn't say the project ends, I said until the relationship ends for us, obviously people remodel or, and, or refer their friends or they move and then they want to remodel their next product, their next house. And so for us, the relationship never quite ends.
41:11
Chaz Wolfe
It just continues and we just continue to try to build value inside of that. So the client journey is really just every single step along the way. The more detailed I can be in that, you know, every single step, you know, of course, of the multiple steps of marketing, the multiple steps of sales, the multiple steps of operations and fulfillment and finance and, you know, continuing the relationship after the quote unquote sale is done, then the more detailed I can be around hiring, the more precise I can be about job descriptions and what that person is going to do inside of this particular role because I can give them, say on the client journey, like these three things are your role. And then they now know that the three things up to them aren't going to happen.
41:58
Chaz Wolfe
Or it's important that they do what they do so that the other folks can do what they do on each side of the client journey, I guess is what I'm trying to say. I probably said that backwards, but I can just be really intentional about how I'm building the team and who's on the team and what they're doing. If I know where I'm taking my client all the way through, because I'm going to need different help along the way. I can't do it all myself, of course, but I need any different personality types. I need different experience, I need different ambition levels for every different kind of spot along the client journey. The feeling, the emotion of the client journey is probably by far the most important thing, though. I just gave you all the tactical pieces of why it's important to have one.
42:38
Chaz Wolfe
But the emotion that the client goes through, whether they're building a $160,000 basement remodel or, you know, you're fulfilling, you know, an edible arrangement basket, I guess I want at the end for the it, for it just to be like, my goodness, like, I'm just so, like, well done. I'm so glad I chose you. No regrets. I see that you gave it all you had and you gave a way more than I paid for. You gave me way more than you contracted for. And if that's the experience, that's the emotion that they have, then the five star review and the referrals and the client for life perspective is just a natural consequence.
43:30
Jake Isaacs
Yeah. A great resource for this particular topic, this customer experience, client journey. Experience. A couple of months ago, you interviewed an author by the name of Joey Coleman who wrote a book, never lose a customer again. If the listener is looking for a resource about client journey, go back and watch our episode from a couple of months ago with Joey Coleman. It was really good.
43:53
Chaz Wolfe
That's a big one.
43:54
Jake Isaacs
All right, Chaz, you grew this business in twelve months. Where are you taking it from here? Year two, year three?
44:02
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, good question. And so, believe it or not, in year two we'll do about the same revenue. And that might sound a little bit odd, but there were a lot of pieces of that process, specifically the operations process that we wanted to really spend time on in order to evoke the emotion that I just described. And so really for the last twelve months we've been hiring different experts, changing out team members, really honing in, creating sops for every little step of the way because you have an experience and you go, oh, man, this didn't feel good for whatever reason, whatever the situation was. And then I can either just let that go and it'll happen again and again or we can, as a team go, okay, what didn't we like about that? Why did it happen?
44:56
Chaz Wolfe
And then let's create process so that it doesn't happen again. In the last year two, we'll probably end right around 1718, maybe two. We kind of just did our quarterly planning and talked about that. But the growth for us in this last year has really been behind the scenes and operationally and systems wise, I've never felt more confident about the team and the process and the five star reviews that we're getting every single time now we've created a machine. And so we'll go back to adding fuel to the fire here this quarter and start the process. Where are we going? I mean, 5 million is the next stop, 10 million after that. And really depending upon whether we get in much into commercial. We've done several commercial projects, but it's mostly residential at the time.
45:47
Chaz Wolfe
But depending upon if we go that route, that'll really determine, you know, long term revenue goals. Just because in commercial, you know, doing 30, 40, 50 million really isn't. It's not that. It's like, it's like doing five or ten in the home side. So, so, yeah, all that to say that we're going to keep getting bigger, but not until some just random number, it's unto creating spaces for meaningful moments. That's our mission statement. And we want to do that all across Kansas City, whether those are homeowners or businesses. We want to create meaningful spaces. And Kansas City has amazing people. This is the only home service type company that I've got in the portfolio. And it's super interesting to be in people's space, literally their home. The most close knit thing you can get to a person.
46:43
Chaz Wolfe
We just get the privilege of transforming those spaces and making them amazing for our clients. So we're going to do it, and we're going to do it for many others as long as they're a good fit for us and we're a good fit for them.
46:57
Jake Isaacs
That's awesome. That's great. Chaz. Like always, you are just a total wealth of knowledge, my man. Appreciate you spending a little time with us today, kind of sharing about your experience. If someone wants to find out more information about Kings Collective, they live in the Kansas City area. They want more information about what it is that you're doing or you've mentioned a couple of times, gathering the Kings here. If they're a business owner and they want more information about the community, where can they go and get more from you?
47:24
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, our website for Kings Collective is remodelwithkings.com dot. They can go there and take a look at some of our work and just our website there. And then if you're a business owner listening right now and you're interested in being around other business owners that speak like this, talk like this, because, yeah, I've been successful, Jake's been successful, but we're not the only ones. And in fact, we've done a really great job of gathering the Kings. If you will some other successful men and women entrepreneurs around the table. And if you need to be around other folks that can challenge the way that you think you should, go to gatheringthekings.com and you can apply and book a time to speak with our team about what that might look like for you. Clients, entrepreneurs that are inside of gathering the kings.
48:16
Chaz Wolfe
They want to triple their business. They want to make more money. They want to work less and spend time with their families or doing the things that they love. And it doesn't take very long. If you're intentional about using the power of the mastermind. I get those texts all the time. I've doubled my business. I'm making the most money I've ever made. I work the least amount of hours I've ever worked. I'm spending the more time with my wife and kids than I ever have. And if that's what you want, you should go to gathering the kings.com.
48:43
Jake Isaacs
Perfect. Chaz, as always, I appreciate it. And until we get to do another one.
48:47
Chaz Wolfe
Yeah, buddy. I appreciate you, dude. Talk soon.

If you’re starting a business or already deep in the grind, you might be feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure of your next move — let’s fix that. In this episode, I break down the six strategies I used to grow my remodeling company from $0 to $1.7 million in just 12 months. Jake Isaacs and I dig deep into how I achieved this explosive growth, from creating the right team to designing a killer sales process.

Chaz Wolfe:

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