Top Contractor Reveals 4th Quarter Sales Secrets

Ever wonder why your business starts strong but slows down mid-year? In this video, Jim Johnson reveals the 'Fourth Quarter Rush' strategy that helped his team outperform expectations. By turning the end of the year into a competitive game with incentives, Jim's team stayed motivated, crushed their targets, and had fun doing it.

In this video, learn how to:

• Keep your team engaged during slow periods
• Use competition to boost performance
• Finish the year stronger than you started

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Transcript

Jim Johnson: 0:00

As, as business owners and sales leaders and things like that, we are always looking for ways to kind of move the needle a little bit. And one of the things I noticed, um, that was happening in my business is we had a really good start to our years. Like we would crush it. We'd come out of the winter, we had a great kickoff party. Everybody's all excited. They're all broke. And so they go hard at things and they're out there doing what they're supposed to do. We're staying with our vision, helping them. Achieve what it was that they were about and we would far surpass our goals. And I think that goes for a lot of us that if we're pretty intense, we're competitive, but we're also putting others first. Um, it's surprising what can get accomplished. And so we have these targets we're trying to hit and they're each trying to hit their targets because they want to change their lives and help the company achieve what they're after as well as the. outcome of helping them get where they want to be. But we noticed a problem. There was this problem that was happening that as the summer would come in, uh, we would still maintain pretty good action through the end of June, but about the time July 4th would hit, um, things would slow down. And you may have experienced this as well as a contractor that there's a 4th of July time that people kind of go on vacation mode and then our customers are in their back to school phase or vacation phase and things kind of slow down. And then we kind of pick up a little bit after that going into September, October, November, that type of thing. But it's almost, it's like we have this real high arc and then it kind of dips a little bit and then we kind of come back up a little and just tail out towards the end of the year. And I was looking at my numbers and going, why is this happening? It's the same thing every year. We kill it and then kind of take a dip and then come back a little bit. And I always wondered, why in the world could the end of our year not be like the beginning of our year? And so we sat down as a group, uh, the owners and some of our key leaders, and we started talking about it, like, why is this happening? And it could be one of two things. One is what we call Fat Wallet Syndrome. We helped everybody get to where they wanted to be, and now they are where they need to be, and there's no more push, no more challenge, no more thing getting us to do and go. And so that could be one problem. The other problem could be that we didn't get to where we want to, and everybody's kind of down a little bit. And because they're down, they're not putting in the effort that we want, and they're kind of almost chalking it up to a lost season. Think of it kind of a little bit like football. You know, if you start off 0 and 4, like Do the players play as hard or if you start off, um, eight, no, Hey man, we're way up and you kind of get complacent and all of a sudden the bottom dueler comes up and takes it out from underneath you. And I always love this football analogy because it's almost like quarters in a football game. We got our first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter. And if we take off in the fourth quarter, how many times have you seen the other team come back and win? Like this idea of like, Hey man, we're up 14 going into the fourth quarter and we start playing prevent defense and just kind of tailing out trying to make it through to the end so that we win in the end and all of a sudden do kicks the last second field going you lose. Well, we looked at it the very much the same way we're like, what can we do to get as much out of the back end of the year as we did in the front end of the year, knowing that summer was going to be summer between Memorial Day and Labor Day. There were certain things we could do to move the needle a little. But after everybody went back to school. What could we do to change the game? So we started to think about, well, what are the pinch points? What are the pain points? What are the things that make people start to make decisions? Well, winter's coming was one of those things. You're starting to get into some different weather. You're trying to get things done. People put off things. So they want to get those things done before the end of the year. We started to tailor what we were doing around that. And we actually put a name to what it was that we were doing. We call it the fourth quarter rush. This put the nail in the coffin, this idea of never letting somebody come back and defeat us because at the end we wanted to have the championship. We wanted the super bowl. And if we start to think about our businesses that way, we can do some things that allow us to achieve even bigger and better numbers at the end of the year, which is actually the better time of the year than the beginning of the year. You think about the beginning of the year, people are excited about getting their projects done and stuff like that, but there's no real pressure on them. They're kind of like, Hey, I don't have to do it right now. I can do it later and later and later. But at the end of the year, there's pressure. There's like, Hey, winter's coming and all that other good stuff. I need to get this project done. And you can start to apply a little bit of that, but you also have to apply some incentive to your team, especially if they have fat wallet syndrome, if they've got the money, their incentive is now gone. So their effort doesn't quite meet what it is that we're looking for. So, um, I'll never forget this, uh, time. We're all sitting there together and we're like, Hey, what can we do to kind of spark things a little bit? And we all know that the only reason anybody does anything is because of incentive. And so what kind of incentive can we do at the end of the year to get the same or better results that we did at the beginning of the year? Well, we took into consideration what was going on at that time. Everybody likes this time of year. We're here right now. It's kind of the beginning of football season. Every single, every single team is going to win the Super Bowl right now, unless you've got had the first week and your quarterback got hurt. Now you're like, Hey, maybe we're not. So we, how can we kind of tailor this around the football idea? We've trained everybody. We've gone through our practices. We've gone through our gameplay plan. Like we know all that stuff. We're good at what we do. How do we get a little bit more out of all this and make it fun? And so what we ended up doing is we created the fantasy roofing league. And what we did is we took each of our guys and we said, Hey guys, You are your own individual teams. Now we add about a hundred people in our company, but we section them up into divisions and stuff like that. You could do it with a small team. Usually you have to have four or more to do this, but they can have their own team and so they can name it whatever they want. Depending on your culture, you can get some pretty fun names and things. And so they are going to play a game. But against another individual or team for that week, and we set up a whole schedule 14 week schedule that was after the end of summer going into winter and now they were playing for points. They weren't playing for money. They weren't playing for, now there was bonuses and all that fun stuff, but they weren't playing, they were playing for winning. They were playing for achievement. They are playing for competition. And so each week they got a point for the number of inspections. They got, they got three points for the agreements. They got, they got five points for a contract. They got, uh, another three points for a build that week that went without a problem. And so we put this point system. To their results for the week, and they could do them any way they wanted to. They could play the game any way they wanted. If they wanted to run some numbers up, they could go out and get a whole bunch of inspections. But they were only worth one point. I mean, if they wanted to get some big points, they could go after getting some of their deals closed. And so each week they would play, there'd be a winner and a loser. And then next week, hey, new winner and loser. So it always had incentive every single week. Nobody ever. Took a day off or a week off. They went hard at it, trying to get to the playoffs. And so at the end of the year, we would tally up all the wins. We had a quarterfinals, semifinals, and then a super bowl where it came down to the last two guys playing each of the guys that were out at that point were rooting for the other ones and we had the best. End of the year we've ever had. We actually outperformed the beginning of our year. The beginning of our year, we did about 7 million from January 1st to June, um, to June 30th from August. The end of August or September 1st to the end of November, we did 10 million. So imagine in four months, we did what we did in six months and it was totally because they were playing a game. Their purpose had changed. Their mind had shifted from this is about me making money to get this thing. I want to, Hey, I want to win. So they had new incentive. And so you need to really think about in your own business, As a business owner, how do you get the most out of your team without making it a burden and always feeling like you're pushing on somebody because people burn out that way. That's not fun. That's not enjoyable. We want to do something that's incentive. That's enjoyable. It was an absolute blast. Whoever finished last always had to do something silly. We played it just like you would play a fantasy football league. Now, that's just one example. There's a million different ways that you could do something similar, but you are going to have to shift your mind from the cracking the whip on people thinking that more money is going to solve their problem and looking at what is it that they really want or need depending upon your culture that you can create competition or purpose over so that they finish the year strong. You come out on top and you're the Super Bowl winner in your market. This is the way that you make a shift in your mind to make it more about what it is that somebody else wants based on incentive. Cause it's the only reason that we do anything. And once we understand that, what can I put in place that fits my company's culture to give the people that work for me, The incentive to do something that isn't always about the money. I get asked an awful lot, like, and this was one of the reasons I actually became a coach. Like this is maybe the number one reason I became a coach. Um, I used to sell software for a company called Acculinks. You may have heard of it. I was the director of sales and part of my job was to make Acculinks a thing. But once we had was to go in and meet contractors and talk with them about their business. And, uh, it'd take about an hour to sell Immaculinks, but then there was all these questions, there were questions on like, how did you grow your team the way you did? Uh, what was your culture like? How did you be as profitable as you were? How did you have multiple locations? How did you pay people? How did you, like all these questions. And I started to realize that people are out there doing what it is that they think is best instead of doing what they know is best. And it shifted the way I looked at this industry going, Hey, everybody's still kind of doing it that way of achievement, this hitting a dollar figure, this, all that stuff. That everybody gets wrapped up in which causes them to make mistakes They make these mistakes To do the right thing at the wrong time because they think they're trying to hit their achievement Instead of trying to serve their people and whenever we do that, we mess up our priorities. We start to make it about money We start to make it about this number this profit this stuff instead of making it about our people Well, these five mind shifts that I just shared with you were radical changes from about me and myself and my numbers and my achievements and all of that stuff to about my people. When I started to make it about my people and focused on them achieving their goals, them having fun doing what they were doing, them putting the client first because I had put them first. These mind shifts were the sole biggest difference between me being a 5 million company and me being a 25 million company. Which could have been even bigger if I wanted it to be. The only reason it wasn't bigger Because I had already done that, 41 million with the other company. I knew that I wanted to live a certain type of lifestyle. I knew what sacrifice meant in money and time. And was I willing to give up the time with those I love and care for to just be a bigger company making more money? Not necessarily for me. Now, that was something that I had to have a really good talk with, with my wife and those that I love, about where do we actually want to be. And once I figured out what that was, it allowed those mind shifts to actually come to play to say, Hey, I want to help people achieve amazing things, but I also want to live a lifestyle that's enjoyable. Those five mindsets allow me to live a lifestyle that allows me to be prosperous and enjoy what it is that I do and feel fulfilled every day. I hope they help you as well.