Cut Into It

I met with a good friend and spiritual mentor of mine recently for breakfast. I'll keep his name anonymous, but not his message. In fact, we'll call him Todd. Todd loves breakfast and knows everyone in the restaurant. He regularly takes his friends out to breakfast and won't even let us pay. As you know from this podcast, I like hanging out with friends like that. I love being around generous people as it rubs off on me.  Todd is a retired/semi-retired painter. He was excellent at his craft for over 35 years. He ran crews, teaching and mentoring many younger apprentices over the years. I was staring at the wall next to our table and noticed some trim work. "Would you tape this off?" In my mind, I assumed all painters had to use tape so you wouldn't get paint from one area onto another. Oh boy! I had no idea that this was the wrong question to ask a professional painter! Todd responded. "Painters don't use tape!" He did explain later that there are certain applications where special painters tape can be useful. For the most part, it's time consuming to use tape, adds expense, and lowers the quality of the job. Of course I had to dig into his response.Todd went through a thorough and detailed technical explanation of how he paints and how he teaches his guys to paint. Here's a few things I learned. He wears special painters pants and always keeps his putty knife, some clean cotton rags, and a screwdriver in his pants. If he's painting molding in a room and happens to get some paint on the wall, he can use his putty knife and a cloth and fix it. I asked him about the tape. He said. "When I get someone working with me, they don't use the tape. They learn with the tools. I teach him my method and I don't care if they mess up and need to use the putty knife nine times. Over time, they'll need the putty knife less and less until it's barely used."  Todd was training his guys in his best painting system, yielding best quality and best efficiency regardless of how bad or slow they are in the beginning. This explanation brought me to attention at the table as I recognized so many parallels between painting and cleaning. Todd went on. "Truth be told. The newer guys are not going to be bad. They're going to have excellence, but they'll be slow because they may have to get used to making the mistakes and using the tools 10 times on the first day." I connected that to training cleaners and how they always start out slow and get faster, but you never teach them shortcuts to get fast in the beginning. Why do I train this way? It's a simple concept. Train for excellence first, then speed. This guarantees a level of quality, which can be optimized. You don't lose clients this way. If you train for speed first, mistakes will happen. Things will break. Areas and details will get missed. This will cause you lose clients and tarnish your reputation. Todd finished with this. "Tape is a crutch for painters." They don't have to get excellent as it encourages sloppy work.Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website

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The Smart Cleaning School Podcast helps cleaning business owners from start-up to the struggling solo to the striving seven-figure get SMARTER in their businesses, reshape their mindset, increase productivity, clear the overwhelm, and get clarity through SMART goal-setting & personal accountability. Ken Carfagno is a lifetime learner and teacher. His mission is to help visionaries make the impact they were meant to make.