That is not a lead problem.

That is an owner doing six jobs at once with no process underneath any of them.

The move that gets you from 40k to 100k is the opposite of the move that got you from 0 to 40k.

Making more money than I ever have and I've never been more miserable.

Most of you have no idea how your marketing, how your sales and how your operations are supposed to work together.

Stage two is where the dream of owning a business starts to feel more like a prison sentence.

The Talking Pain Podcast is brought to you by Detailing growth.

That's detailing growth.com detailing growth is the industry's only US based full stack agency that provides you with full custom web design, ongoing SEO, local SEO via Google Business profile, ad management for Google and Meta, and an entire business suite of automations with our Grit suite CRM.

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There's a problem in the auto detailing, ceramic coating, PPF and window 10 industry and it touches shops at 30k a month the same way it touches shops at 80k a month.

The problem is is that most of you have no idea how your marketing, how your sales and how your operations are supposed to work together.

There are three machines that run inside your business and you'll likely be surprised to find out that they aren't connected.

It probably has your business feeling a little like chaos and I want to break down why and I want to break that down so that you can start seeing your business, your marketing and your operations for what they are and what they should be.

Because there are multiple stages of how a shop grows, how it gets stuck, and how you stop being stuck.

But it all depends on what's true for your business.

Right now most of you are stuck in that 30k to 50k a month range and you're stuck in a very specific way.

And you can only understand how stuck you are once I explain how this engine should run.

So if you're doing under 15k a month and still trying to figure out how to get your first steady stream of customers, I have content for that stage.

But this episode would be a waste of your time because the problems I'm about to talk about do not exist in your business yet.

My name is Gabe Fletcher.

I'm the founder of Detailing Growth and Detailer os.

Detailing Growth is the only full Stack growth agency built for this industry.

Custom website design, ongoing local and technical SEO, Ad management on both Google and Meta we have a business CRM and a backend marketing team that runs alongside your shop every single day, every single month.

We're not another agency offering bare minimum agency marketing services.

We built this from the ground up from inside a shop from based on my shop because I couldn't find anyone who understood what the industry needed.

I built a detailing business from nothing, grew it to 1.5 million a year.

I also figuratively burned it down over and over again and brought it back up and I ended up exiting that business for close to seven figures itself.

Detailer OS is where I work one on one with business owners to put together a business that makes sense, connect the missing pieces and help you build build the understanding and the structure to handle everything that comes with growth.

Now we work with shops across the country and I have a Data set of 1400 shop owners that tells me exactly where and why people get stuck.

And I'm going to reference that data today because what it shows is wild.

But before any of that matters, you need to understand where you are.

Because the advice that you need at 40k a month is different from the advice you need at 15k a month.

The move that gets you from 40k to 100k is the opposite of the move that gets you from 0 to 40K.

Everything I'm about to tell you came from the hardest lessons I learned building my own shop and from what I've seen dozens of shops we work with.

Stay with me now.

Quick common sense FTC warning.

Just because you watch one of our videos does not mean that you will make a shitload of money.

This is for educational purposes only and it is in no way a claim that you will have the same outcome.

It requires a shitload of work and watching one of our videos or podcasts does not mean that you will be a bajillionaire detail shop owner.

In our data, we have 147 shop owners in that 30 to 50k a month bracket.

63% Of them say their biggest problem is not enough leads.

45% Say nobody knows who they are.

31% Say they're not closing the leads that they already have.

I want you to sit with those numbers for a second because when I talk to these owners on the phone and I talk to a lot of them, the real picture is so much bigger than what those survey answers show.

They don't have a defined sales process.

There's no documented path that leads walk through from the first phone call to the closed job.

Every lead is handled differently depending on the owner's.

Mood, their schedule and their energy that day.

They don't understand what the customer journey is like, what it is or why it matters.

They don't know what a customer needs to see, hear or feel before they say yes to a three to $5,000 job.

So they throw shit at the wall and hope it sticks and then blame the lead when the deal doesn't close.

They have no source tracking.

They cannot tell you which lead comes from Google, which lead comes from meta, which lead came from referral, which and which one's closed.

They are spending money on marketing and have no idea what is working.

They have no follow up system.

A lead comes in, they call once, maybe twice.

If the person doesn't pick up or book, the lead is gone dead.

They never hear from you again.

The customer who got a coding two years ago and is now ready for PPF has no reason to come back to you because you've not talked to them since the day that they picked up their car.

They don't have a shop foreman or anybody with the authority to run the floor so the owner can step away for a day.

They don't have anything in place to protect their time or their ad spend.

They're afraid to hire because the last hire didn't work out.

They keep the wrong people around for way too long because firing somebody feels worse than carrying somebody who isn't producing.

These owners are overwhelmed and under educated on the business side of what they do.

They hear people talk about systems and marketing and leads and content and CRMs and funnels and most you just not along.

But they do not have any real understanding of how those things connect or where to start fixing them.

That is the 30 to 50k a month shop.

That's the stage where most of these businesses die.

Every detail shop that crosses seven figures in revenue goes through three stages and I've watched it happen over and over and it happens the same way every time.

Stage one is owner dependent selling.

That's when you're the sales department.

Every lead flows to your phone.

Every estimate flows requires you to be present either in person or on a call.

You walk the customer through pricing process and timeline.

You handle every objection.

You close the deal, you send the follow up and the close rate is a direct reflection of your personal ability to have uncomfortable conversations about money.

This stage works and that's the entire problem.

It works because you're good at selling, you know the product you you care about the customer.

You follow up five or six times because you need the job and every dollar that comes in reinforces a belief that feels true.

My personal involvement is the reason that this business makes money.

Revenue at this stage caps at whatever you can handle on your own.

For most shops, that ceiling sits between 300 and 600k a year, depending on your ticket size, your market, how many hours you're willing to burn through in a week.

Stage two is where the wheels come off.

You hire a rep, maybe two, and I understand why it feels like that makes sense.

At this point.

I need somebody to handle the phone so I can focus on production and growth.

And within 30 days you realize that the new person can't close at your close rate.

They don't follow up with your urgency.

They don't handle objections with your nuance.

So you start managing every deal they touch.

You review every estimate before it goes out.

You listen to their calls and jump in when the conversation goes sideways.

You stay late to redo the estimates they get wrong.

You handle the big leads yourself and hand them the scraps.

Revenue might push towards 70 or 80k a month because there are now multiple people touching the pipeline.

But your quality of life gets worse as the revenue goes up.

You added the weight of managing people on top of the weight you were already carrying.

Now you're selling and managing those people at the same time, which is honestly worse than just selling alone.

At this point, the management work is new and is unfamiliar and you usually find out it drains you in ways that selling never did before.

And what I've seen is that most owners reach a conclusion at this point.

Hiring salespeople do not work in this industry.

Again, I understand why it feels that way, but the actions that led up to that are wrong.

The reps you hired did not perform at your level because you never built the structure that would allow a rep to perform at that level.

You had no written sales process, no CRM tracking in the pipeline, no way for the rep to know which leads were hot, which were cold, and which needed a specific type of follow up.

You handed them a phone and told them to sell.

And that feels like you build a house without any real structural plans.

Stage two is where most growth minded shop owners get stuck.

And it's where their ambition dies.

They retreat to stage one, convinced they have to do it all themselves.

And they stay at 40k a month for years.

Now this is a true story.

I worked with a shop owner who was doing 47k a month.

They had four bays, 3,000 square feet, two techs and someone to handle the front desk.

Actually, I think it was closer to four techs.

But regardless, the shop was doing all kinds of high end work on Porsches, Audis, Range Rovers, Mercedes.

They had supercars all the time.

The shop was beautiful.

They had a mountain of beautiful cars in the shop all the time.

The shop owner calls me on a Tuesday night at 9:30 and I'll never forget this.

His voice was flat, almost like a mouse.

He said to me, I'm making more money than I ever have and I've never been more miserable.

He'd not taken off a day in three months.

He was quoting every job himself, closing every deal, following up with every lead, inspecting every car, answering his phone until midnight because he was terrified if he stopped, the whole thing would collapse.

And he was right to be terrified because without him it would collapse.

His team was fine, but he never built the structure that would allow them to operate without him standing over their shoulder.

And he was stuck in stage two.

And stage two is where the dream of owning a business starts to feel more like a prison sentence.

Stage three is the managed sales operation.

The sales team reports to a manager who has the authority over day to day decisions on the sales floor.

The process is written down and repeatable enough that a new hire can start producing within their first week.

Close rate is tracked by rep and by lead source.

The pipeline has stage based visibility so the managers can see who where the deals are stalling.

The owner's involvement at stage three is limited to reviewing weekly performance data, making decisions about pricing, service mix, staffing, pipeline allocation.

The owner is no longer the person who closes deals.

The owner is the person who decides where the business is going and puts the resources in place to get there.

Stage three is the threshold that opens the door to seven figures.

The business produces revenue independent of any single person, including the owner.

A rep leaves the business and the business absorbs it.

A new rep starts and begins producing within days because the process, the tools, the pipeline are already there.

People get stuck between stage two and stage three and the reason is not a knowledge gap.

Every stage two owner can describe what they need to build.

They can explain the logic of delegation.

They understand they need a manager, written processes and a CRM.

The knowledge is sitting there, but they're stuck because of an identity problem.

The stage two identity sounds like this.

I'm the person who closes deals, saves difficult customers and guarantees quality through my personal involvement.

That identity built the business.

It's the reason the shop exists at all.

Your hands, your hustle, your willingness to grind through 14 hour days, that is what's got you Here, the stage three identity sounds different.

I am the person who builds and manages the operation that produces revenue and quality without me being in the room.

Those are different behaviors, different priorities, and a different relationship with the business.

Building stage three requires you to release the identity that made stage two work.

Every hour you spend on the sales floor is an hour you're not spending building the structure that would make the sales floor run without you.

Your greatest strength then becomes your greatest constraint.

I get on calls with these owners every week and the conversation goes the same way almost every single time.

They tell me they need more leads.

I ask them what their close rate is.

They don't know.

Not a rough number, not a guess.

They never have it tracked.

I asked them what happens when a lead doesn't book on the first call.

They say, I try to follow up when I can.

That means they follow up once, maybe leave a voicemail, and then that lead disappears from their life forever.

I asked them how many estimates they sent out last month that never got a response.

I have to ask.

Hey, you there?

That's how quiet the call gets.

I usually have to ask if they're still on the phone.

I ask them where their leads are coming from.

Google meta referral.

They can't tell me.

They're spending three to five thousand dollars a month on ads and an agency and they have no tracking in place to know what that money is producing.

I asked them what happens after a customer picks up their car.

Is there a follow up email?

Is there a check in at 90 days?

Is there a text when it's time to come in for their annual coding maintenance?

Nothing.

The relationship ends at the cash register.

I asked them about their team.

Who answers the phone when you're in the bay?

Who follows up on the quote you sent yesterday?

Who owns the schedule?

And the answer is almost always the same.

Me.

I do all of that.

Do you understand what I'm saying here?

Are you hearing me?

That is not a lead problem.

That is an owner doing six jobs at once with no process underneath any of them.

And the reason it stays that way is the piece I just talked about.

They believe their involvement is what holds the quality together.

So they keep holding it.

And the business stays exactly where it is.

If you look underneath that identity gap, there are specific fears they're staring right at you, right in the face.

The fear that reps will underquote jobs and destroy margins.

The fear that the customer experience will suffer without your personal touch.

The fear that building management layers will make your shop feel too corporate for an industry that values being small and scrappy.

The fear that if you step back, things fall apart.

Each one of those fears is based on on something real that you've seen or has happened.

Reps do under quote when processes are absent, the customer experience does suffer.

When nobody owns it, bureaucracy can slow a small business down.

The only way to get past each fear is to build the system that prevents the feared outcome.

That's right.

You need to wade in it to fix it.

Reps will not under quote if you give them a pricing structure they can follow without guessing.

Customer experience will not suffer if you assign somebody to own it with defined standards.

Management will not slow you down if you build it lean.

Building all of that requires an identity change and most of you are avoiding it.

And that is the trap.

You know what to do.

You hear me?

Pound it into your head in every post, every email, every call and every podcast.

But it's the doing part that requires becoming someone different.

And the person you have been.

The closer, the grinder, the one who never drops the ball, that person never wants to let go, has to die.

Most shop owners at this stage know they need to build something bigger than themselves.

The question that stops them cold is what does this look like in real life?

What do I build first?

How does it work day to day?

I'm going to lay that out piece by piece.

First, the sales process has to be documented.

A rep reading this document should know what to do at every point in the sales cycle without asking the owner or the manager.

It defines every stage a deal moves through, from first contacted to closed one or closed lost.

Each stage has an entry criteria and an exit criteria.

Lead intake has qualifying questions.

The estimate stage has a defined format, a pricing structure and a timeline for when the estimate goes out.

Follow up has a defined cadence, not left to the rep's judgment.

The process also defines what disqualifies a lead.

Now, most shop owners skip this part.

They're conditioned to chase every opportunity.

And you'll hear me tell you to chase every opportunity as well too.

But a sales process without disqualification criteria wastes time on leads that you'll never close and corrupts your data so you cannot evaluate performance accurately.

Second, the management layer.

Part coach, part accountability, part data analyst.

The manager reviews pipeline reports, identified stall deals, coaches, reps and owns the team.

Close rate as their primary number.

Reps report to the manager on deal level activity.

The manager reports to you on totals, pipeline value, close rate by rep and by lead source.

Average deal size, revenue forecast for 30 and 60 days.

You don't look at individual deals unless the manager flags something that requires a strategic decision.

Third, compensation.

Compensation drives behavior.

A manager paid on total revenue pushes reps to close everything, including low margin work that fills the calendar but kills any profit.

A manager paid on margin and close rate pushes reps to qualify leads harder and protect the pricing match the incentives to the outcome you want.

Fourth, the CRM holds everything together.

All leads, all deals, all follow ups, all estimates.

One place.

So if a rep quits tomorrow, you don't lose their pipeline.

A lead calls back after six months.

Any rep can pull up the history and continue the conversation.

The CRM gives you that visibility.

Invisibility gives you control without your personal involvement.

Fifth, hire for constraints, not convenience.

Before you post a job listing, define four things.

The role, their contribution, the daily responsibilities, and the required skills and the output numbers you will evaluate them on.

If you cannot define all four, do not hire for that role.

Yet when you do hire, every new sales rep shadows the owner top closer for a minimum of two weeks before touching a live lead.

A new rep who fumbles a 5K lead because they're not trained costs you more than two weeks of shadowing ever would.

This playbook is not complicated.

What it requires is the willingness to spend hours now building something that gives you hours back later.

The shop owner who builds this does not need to be on the sales floor every day.

A shop owner who refuses to build this will be on the sales floor every day until they burn out or sell at a fraction of what the business could be worth.

One more thing before you build anything new.

Delete what does not need to exist.

Most shops at the 30-50k level are drowning in inherited complexity, processes, tasks and habits you learned from earlier stages that no longer serve you.

You're carrying weight that was useful when you were doing 10k a month and is now slowing you down at 40k a month.

Step 1 Question Every requirement in your operation.

Who added this step?

Why does it exist if you can't trace it to a reason that still applies?

Kill it.

Step 2 Delete the unnecessary parts.

Stop doing things that do not produce results.

Stop offering services that kill your margins.

Stop entertaining leads that will never close.

3.

Simplify what remains.

Fewer products, fewer steps, fewer decisions to make in a day.

Step 4 Accelerate the cycle time.

How fast can you move a lead from contact to close?

Deal speed gives you an edge that no amount of ad spend can replace.

5.

Automate last ad automation Only after you've deleted, simplified and accelerated.

Most shop owners automate processes that should not exist in the first place.

Run your current operation through these five steps before building Stage three infrastructure.

You'll find that half of what you thought needed to be built out can just be removed because a smaller, cleaner operation is easier to write down, easier to teach, and easier to manage.

Do the subtraction before you do the addition Everything I just told you is inside of this seven Figure Sales playbook that I have.

The three stages.

The identity gap, the structural build, the deletion of process.

All of it.

I gave you the what and the why.

All of that is yours.

You can build this yourself.

I need you to hear that.

You can take what I laid out today and start building it this week.

But here's what I know from working with dozens of shops at this exact stage.

You are doing 30, 40, 50k a month.

Quoting jobs, closing deals, managing texts, answering the phone, posting on Instagram at midnight, and somewhere in the margins of all that, you're supposed to also build a written sales process, a management layer, a CRM, a compensation model and a hiring structure.

And that is a full time job on top of the job you're already drowning in.

That's what we do.

Detailing Growth Builds the marketing engine, website, SEO, ads, CRM, strategic advisement.

It fills the pipeline with qualified leads on a predictable basis.

Detailer OS builds the operational side sales process, training program, management layer, the hiring structure, the compensation model.

It converts those leads into revenue without the owner being the only one doing the selling.

Everything from this episode and more is free in this playbook.

You can grab it down in the link in our show notes and YouTube video.

Description the seven figure shop sales Team Playbook the full Field Manual Not a teaser, not a PDF with three pages of fluff and a link to Book a call.

The actual structural playbook for building a sales operation that can run without you.

It covers all three stages.

The identity gap, anchoring fears, the sales process, the management layer, the CRM setup, compensation structure, the reporting cadence and the hiring process.

Download it now.

The link is in the description.

Read it this week, mark it up.

Share it with your business partner or your spouse so they understand why things are about to change and how you run the shop.

When you're ready to have someone build it with you instead of figuring it out alone, book a call with our team at Detailing Growth because the business outgrows the owner's self concept long before it outgrows their technical skill.

And that is your core problem at this stage.

The owner who feels that gap going back and forth between selling and managing, between control and delegation, between who they were and who the business needs them to become.

You're already working 50 to 60 hours a week.

The Playbook shows you how to make the move.

Go fucking get it at Detailing Growth we don't just build websites, we create conversion engines.

And we've done it hundreds of times for some of the biggest, baddest shops in the entire country.

Choose and go with Detailing Growth.

I highly recommend Detailing Growth if you want to grow, if you really want to excel in your area, and if you want to dominate your competition.

You guys are the most professional looking shop top to bot.

They are amazing.

They know what they're talking about, they know how everything works.

So if you're looking for marketing for any type of detailing company, vinyl wrap, pps, random coating, window tint, I recommend them 105 stars all the way around.

They turn to Detailing Growth to get them and their websites dialed in and we can do the same for you.

Hit the link below and let's get started.