Every business owner we talk to shares a common regret: wishing they had established solid systems and procedures earlier. When you’re starting out, it’s easy to get caught up in branding, attracting new clients, and building your team, often overlooking the importance of systems in business.
That’s why we’re thrilled to delve into the critical role of systems in driving business growth with Justin Sturgill, co-owner of Incline Landscaping. Justin’s meticulous approach to creating effective systems has catapulted his landscaping business to record-breaking success. If you want to learn how implementing systems can help you scale your service-based business, this episode is tailor-made for you!
In this episode, we’ll explore:
- The impact of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) on scaling efficiently
- How well-designed systems and processes can minimize errors and boost employee retention
- The value of hands-on and video-based learning for field employees
- Strategies for overcoming the fear of delegation and successfully hiring your first team members
- Building a business that not only grants you more family time but also allows you to give back to your community
Don’t miss out on these invaluable insights that could redefine your approach to business growth!
Building a Construction Business
Madeleine: Okay. Welcome to the podcast, Justin. I’m so excited that you’re here today.
Justin: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I’m really excited as well.
Madeleine: Yes. So, for our listeners, can you just introduce your company and kind of your story? What’s your journey getting to this place?
Justin: Yeah, so my name is Justin. I own Incline Landscaping. I own half of it. My cousin, who lives here locally, owns the other half as well. And so we’re going on our fourth year in business now. Prior to that, I was in the clothing industry, so a totally different industry, but I’ve been an entrepreneur now for going on about 12, 13 years. And, uh, I always say the first eight to nine years I had a lot of failing and a lot of learning what not to do. This time around, I feel like I finally got it right. And so, um, yeah, we here in Colorado Springs locally, we specialize in design and construction installs for residential and commercial properties here in Colorado Springs.
Madeleine: Nice. That’s awesome. Um, funny enough, my first business was in the clothing industry. I started a clothing boutique, so I built my little website at 16 and set up at trade shows and craft fairs selling women’s clothes. So, yeah, I remember those days.
Justin: Yes. The hustle of being in the clothing industry.
Madeleine: Yeah, it’s a tough industry.
Madeleine: Well, congratulations on all that you’ve been able to achieve. And I’m really excited to be able to talk to you. I’m very intentional about who I bring onto this podcast, um, to specifically have guests who have gone through scaling and have gone through those failures and those processes of learning, because that makes you now somebody’s goal to work towards. Being able to take and learn from you and what you’ve done and be able to implement it in their business today.
Why SOPs are Important?
Madeleine: So, talk to me about that kind of growth span. What have you learned in those 12, 13 years to be able to get you to a place where you are functioning as a company, you’re successfully scaling? You told me the other day you’re having a record year. So, what have all of those experiences taught you today?
Justin: Yeah. So, I think one of the biggest things, and I always focus on it a lot when I talk with people, is the systems and processes. When I was first running my clothing businesses, we had no systems and processes; we were just kind of all over the place. What I learned this time around is building out SOPs that not only can run the company for myself but also, as we started to grow and have employees, that they can have a system they can look at without needing to call me a hundred times a day to get answers or ask, “Hey, how do I do this again?”
It’s anything that’s at their fingertips. With Incline, we built out a system. I would like to say it’s like the Google for Incline. Anything related to Incline, they can look it up at the source of their fingertips, basically on their phone. It’s an app. They look it up and can have the question and the answer to anything literally within seconds, without needing to call me and ask, “Hey, how do I do this again?” or “What was this process again?” That has dramatically allowed us to scale and grow and be able to bring on employees.
Madeleine: Yeah, absolutely. Where did you first learn that? Because it takes businesses a while to even know what SOPs mean, much less how to actually create them.
Justin: Yeah. So, actually, I learned it from a friend out here locally. It first started with my wife, who works for a company out here in the salon industry. Her and her boss partnered together, and they originally were going to franchise their business. What they started doing was spending 40,000 to 50,000 dollars on franchising classes. Within that process, they realized, “Hey, why don’t we license the business and kind of build what’s called a business in a box?”
Instead of Jimmy’s Landscaping having to buy or Jimmy himself buying Incline Landscaping and running that franchise, he could still run Jimmy’s Landscaping but buy all the systems and processes to successfully run that business. So, we kind of switched to a licensing program and built out all those systems and processes.
The goal is to have everything function within Incline so that, one day, somebody could buy it. That’s the end goal: to sell the program to other landscapers around the country so they can buy it. But we’re trying to get everything perfect before we do that. That’s where I got the idea—from a local salon owner.
Madeleine: That is so cool.
Madeleine: That is such a high-level skill that I wish every business, when they’re starting, could learn and get that value. They do what they do day in and day out, the same things over and over again. The minute they hire that first person, it becomes like, “Oh my gosh, how do I get what is inside my brain, which has been so natural to me and ingrained in me, out into somebody else’s hands?” That then ties you to your business even more than when you were just functioning as a solopreneur.
Justin: Yeah, I totally agree. I think one thing I learned as we were scaling and bringing on employees was you don’t really realize how much you, in my case, how much Justin does day-to-day on these little tasks. Even as we grew with our managers, it became clear how much they do to teach the employees. So, being able to take everything in our brain and put it onto a piece of paper, so somebody can then look at that and learn from it, has been crucial. Once they learn it and train on it, you don’t need to be there every day with them.
Madeleine: Yeah.
How to Create SOP for Business
Madeleine: So, as you were building this Google-like ultimate source, what is your process for creating those SOPs, and how do you teach other people to do the same?
Justin: Yeah. So, basically, what I do is I’ll replay the moments and go back through my head as if I am the employee. I’ll literally do the training myself. I’ll say, “Okay, let’s say we need to onboard a customer.” What is, and I’ll physically write down first, every step that we need to do?
Then, I’ll go through and practice as if somebody is training me. I’ll read back through that, whether it’s a script or a step-by-step guide, and I’ll execute them to see if there are steps missing. Once it feels pretty perfected, I usually do a couple of tests with people outside my company.
So, I’ll grab a few outside people and have them test it because I want to see if someone who has never landscaped a day in their life can read these processes and understand them. Or, if someone who has never run my CRM system can, within an hour, read it and then perform the task I’m asking them to do. I usually test it on those people first before testing it within the company.
Madeleine: Nice. I love that. Yeah. I have interns at my company. We partner with universities and run an internship program. And so that’s always my test: create the SOP as if you’re giving it to an intern because college interns need their hands held for a lot of things. So, if you’re able to write it at that very basic level for someone who doesn’t have that information, it is protecting you instead of building it with company jargon and assuming knowledge. Because you might hire that entry-level person or intern, or you might be on vacation and need somebody to interpret it. You can’t rely on people having that assumption of knowledge to get the job done.
Justin: No, I totally agree. I totally agree. And I think one thing for me is that I’m definitely a student of the game. Whether I’m watching a movie or a show, I’m always super interested in business. Even in a non-business show or movie, I’ll try to pull out the data.
One of the things that helped me implement a lot of this was watching the movie The Founder about McDonald’s. It showed me that any corporation can pull anybody off the street. You don’t need years of experience because you can go through their systems and processes, and within two to four weeks, you’re pretty much fully trained on how that company wants you to do something. I took a lot of those ideas and built them into Incline as well.
Madeleine: I love that. Yes. So, I am curious. We’re both service-based businesses, and our audience is service-based businesses. How do SOPs differ when you have people actually on the field carrying out their job duties? My people are behind a computer, so it’s a very different work style. How do you train your employees to depend on your SOPs and be able to access them? How do you get people to actually utilize the systems you’ve built?
Justin: Yeah. So, we have a couple of ways. We do monthly meetings with all of our employees. That’s where we do our check-in statuses with them and go over any questions they have. It’s part of their job as well to write down questions that come up throughout the month. If they’re not urgent or emergencies that need to be handled right away, they can save them for our September meeting, for example, and then we would meet in October to go over those basic, non-emergency questions.
For all of our management staff and upper leaders, their SOPs are built into the app on their phones. They can read and click on links that open new tabs. As for our field workers, they’re a little bit separate. Most of the people who work with their hands and do construction are more hands-on learners or prefer video over reading.
So, we create video SOPs for them, showing them step-by-step with video editing. This is how to build a retaining wall—step one, step two, and so on. At the end of these videos, they take a test and must pass it with an 80 percent rate to be in the field.
Madeleine: That is so awesome. I love that. What kind of software do you use to deliver the test, or is that something you guys have created?
Justin: It’s something we created, actually. Everything is custom within Incline. The test is created as part of their orientation. When you first get hired with Incline, one of the biggest things we heard from the construction industry was that new hires often get thrown to the wolves. They might have some rough experience but no specific training on how a particular company operates.
With us, when you get hired, you go through a full orientation. At the end of that orientation, you also get quizzed on how well you were paying attention and if you can pick up on information. To take it a step further, we give all our employees a hard copy manual showing them how to install things in case they’re not video learners. If we ask you to dig a French drain and you forget how, you can run back to the company truck, pull out the manual, and review the steps. Then you can go back into the field and follow the instructions instead of calling me or the foreman to ask, “How do I do this again?”
Madeleine: Yeah, that’s awesome. Have you noticed an improvement in employee satisfaction and job quality? What have been some of the benefits you can point to that wouldn’t have happened without these systems in place?
Justin: Yeah, absolutely. One thing I noticed right off the bat is that prior to having these systems and processes, my phone would ring at least 20 times a day from multiple employees asking a ton of questions, as well as from customers calling in. One of the biggest things we noticed right away was a decrease in phone calls. Then, you start getting nervous because you’re not used to not getting calls. When you call to check up, things are running smoothly, and they know what to do.
As well as improved employee retention. Our foreman has been with us for four years now. He was one of our first hires. His family has even commented that it’s crazy he’s stayed with us so long because he’s never been at a job more than a year and a half. He’s in his mid-40s and has had multiple jobs, but he says this is everything he’s ever wanted in a company: growth, a place where he knows what to do at all times, no yelling, and structured processes. We hear that from all our employees—how much they appreciate the structure.
Even the KPIs and monthly one-on-ones we do are a big satisfaction for many employees. At first, I was nervous that employees might be frustrated with another monthly meeting. It actually had the opposite effect—sometimes, if we’re running a little behind, employees will reach out asking, “When are we doing our one-on-ones?” That’s been really exciting for us.
Madeleine: That’s so exciting. I love that. Yeah, we do something called monthly alignment meetings. We have regular check-ins, sometimes moving them to quarterly for people who have been here for a while, and then we do an annual performance review. We have all these touchpoints, but it’s so helpful to give people that space where it’s okay to ask questions and give and receive feedback in a reciprocal process.
Justin: Yeah, totally. It’s been a game changer for us.
How to Measure Success in the Workplace
Madeleine: Nice. So, talk to me about the implementation of systems as it relates to your growth strategy. How do you go about setting those goals, and how do the systems reinforce what you’re going to do and allow you to grow and scale as your goals align with them?
Justin: Yeah. One of the things for us is that we’re growing as we onboard more sales reps and project managers. Part of their systems and processes includes a resource page that shows them a breakdown of their KPIs. This way, they know what they’re being measured on. It’s not something where we just go over it with them and say, “Hey, this is what we’re looking at to determine if you’re doing a good job or not.” They have a source they can always refer back to and check how they are being measured this month.
For example, our sales reps have specific percentages they need to meet for their closing rate, lead intake, and other metrics. They can refer back to their resource tab for the estimator role and look up the KPIs for the current month. They can also check if there have been any updates specifically for that month, like September. This has been a huge factor for their role and growth because they know what to focus on each month and what the emphasis is. It’s really allowed us to grow and provide them with some structure.
Madeleine: Nice. Yeah. Being able to have those benchmarks means they know what they’re aiming for, and on the other side, you’re able to hold them accountable for what they need to accomplish.
Justin: Yeah, exactly.
How to Learn Business Without College
Madeleine: Yeah. Just out of curiosity, how do you like to learn? How did you get your business know-how? Do you have any particular books or pieces of knowledge that you’ve been able to consume and would recommend to other people?
Justin: Yeah. As we talked about earlier, I love being a student of the game and will forever be a student of business. I never had any formal business background from college or school. I did a ton of reading. I always say I earned my master’s degree from YouTube University. I watched a lot of videos and looked up to business leaders like Tom Bilyeu, Eric Thomas, and Gary Vaynerchuk.
There are also specific resources in the landscaping industry, but as far as books, one of the most impactful for me was Think and Grow Rich. It honestly has very little to do with business but more with mindset. You always hear the cliché that it’s about mindset, and that book really changed a lot about my mindset and how I see the world.
Another significant book for me was The E-Myth Revisited. It helped me understand the difference between being an entrepreneur and being a technician within the business—working on your business as opposed to in your business. Books like these, focusing on mindset and specific business principles, were really helpful in my journey.
Benefits of Taking Risks in Business
Madeleine: Hmm. Nice. Yeah. So, speaking of that E-Myth transition, a lot of our audience is in that stage. They’re starting to scale, and they really want to get out of the business but are trying really hard. What advice do you give to people in that stage to truly put on that CEO hat, to be able to trust their team, and develop the systems to pass on? What is your advice for those people?
Justin: Yeah, I would say, honestly, taking the leap of faith was the biggest thing for me. It was the trust factor and, honestly, being scared. You hear the stigma with entrepreneurs that they’re super risk-takers and crazy. In my case, I’m not necessarily a huge risk-taker; I like to evaluate the data before I make a decision. Of course, there’s some level of risk-taking involved, but what I found was that I was always afraid to take the jump to hire people.
I’d say take the leap and know that you can always go back to doing the work yourself. It’s not the end of the world. I know it feels like your business is everything and everyone knows you and your business, but ultimately, if you make a mistake, most customers are pretty forgiving if you maintain open communication.
As for the trust factor, this goes back to building out the systems and processes. If you believe in yourself and build these out, train somebody up, you typically won’t make a lot of mistakes because it will come directly from you in the beginning. You go from being the owner to the next person in line, and it’s not seven people down the line training someone and you being so far removed.
So, I would say let go of the trust factor, knowing that most people want to do good and make you proud as their boss. Take the leap of faith, jump headfirst into hiring people, and remove yourself.
Madeleine: Yes. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Being able to trust in your systems and train that person effectively means you can have faith that they should be able to carry it out.
Onboarding Process for New Employees
Justin: And also know that, like, that onboarding process and people learning your systems will involve mistakes. People are human and they are new. So, how do you create that kind of onboarding training experience? What kind of parameters do you put in place? How do you allow them to safely experiment or dive right in? What is your process in that?
So, we always give them a grace period, like 60 to 90 days. You’re not necessarily allowed to make mistakes, but we’re very vague on mistake-making. We almost encourage you to make mistakes because we really want to lead from a place of empathy and not fear. That’s very different from the construction world, where everyone’s tough, and it’s common to get yelled at or cussed out by your boss. It’s just the norm in the industry.
Everybody’s human, so they’re going to make mistakes. We lead by encouraging mistakes because we’re never really putting you in a position where the mistake you make will be massive.
For example, if you’ve never driven a skid loader before, on your first day, you won’t be on a skid loader on a 45-degree steep hill where you could potentially roll it over. Instead, you’re put into minor areas where any mistakes you make are supervised and manageable.
From a management perspective, you put your people in roles understanding that they’re going to make mistakes. Can you deal with the mistakes they’re going to make? We kind of pretend that mistakes will happen and encourage them, but ensure that they won’t be drastic to the company. We also lead with empathy when mistakes occur.
We talk to all of our employees, especially during the interview process, about how they want us to handle mistakes. Would they prefer immediate feedback in front of the whole crew, or would they like us to pull them aside? So, it’s not overwhelming. We adapt our approach to each person, rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all style.
How to Accommodate Different Learning Styles in the Workplace
Madeleine: That’s powerful. Being able to understand people and seeing what drives them and motivates them, and asking them directly how they like to be treated, is a really big next-level move in your relationship with your people and your ability to communicate with them.
I like, in your SOP documentation process, how you have multiple formats as well. You’ve got the video, you’ve got the hard copy, you’ve got the manual—being able to really hit all of those different learning styles. That’s something that we’ve been able to think a lot about too, as everybody learns differently.
Some people need to get their hands on it, some people are auditory learners, and some people need to be able to read it in front of them or feel it. So, being able to hit all of those different styles with your SOPs is like a fail-safe.
There’s no way that you can miss this.
Justin: And it honestly kind of reminds me of marketing, where I got the idea for this, because the same principle applies to marketing. You’re not going to just put out a video. You can put out that video, then you can put out the written blog of it, and you can put out the audio version of it. So it’s a lot of things.
I think people overcomplicate things when they get into business because they start to think differently. They might get starstruck or set in their ways. We try to apply normal life actions to our business as well and keep it simple.
Importance of Systems in Business
Madeleine: So, speaking of marketing and being able to prepare for scale, and being able to create those systems that allow you to handle an influx of customers and onboard an influx of employees—talk to me about how you go about that thought process. What are some experiences in your business where you’ve seen those systems benefit growth, especially rapid growth?
Justin: Yeah. So, as we’ve ramped up our marketing and are able to take on more business, one of the things that really shocked me was how much we needed to create systems and processes for our management staff. We didn’t just need systems for “Hey, this is how to do your job,” but also “Here’s what it looks like to onboard somebody.”
The first thing we do is print out all their W-2s, W-4s, get their shirt sizes, and then there are links to where we order our shirts from. Even down to those minor details has really changed things because we started realizing that when we were hiring people—or even our management staff were hiring people—they were back to square one. They’d call us asking, “What paperwork do I need?” or “Where do I order the shirts from?”
So, building out those systems and processes on the internal employee side was crucial. More importantly, we found that we needed new CRMs to help us manage all these new leads and keep them systematically organized.
We created systems and processes for what we call our lead specialists, outlining how to manage these leads—whether they’ve been called, left a voicemail, or sent a text. It’s not as linear as it seems on the surface. For example, someone might not answer, only send an email, or not fill out a form correctly. So, creating systems to handle these nonlinear situations has been a big part of our growth strategy.
Tech Stack for Small Business
Madeleine: Yes, I think it’s really exciting when you realize that you can actually systematize anything. What tech stack would you recommend to other service-based businesses? You mentioned CRMs being particularly helpful, so do you have any specific recommendations for others?
Justin: Yeah. HubSpot has been really helpful for us. Even in the beginning, when we were smaller, Jobber was specifically useful for the contractor world. Landscape Management Network, which is specific to landscaping, has also been really powerful for us. Those are kind of the three that we really utilize a lot.
Madeleine: Nice. Awesome. Thank you. Can you talk about the amount of time you devoted to creating these documents and SOPs yourself? How did your role in working on the business, rather than in it, change over time? What was your time commitment then, and what is it now in the role you have today?
Justin: Yeah, I hear a lot from entrepreneurs about working seven days a week, 12-hour days. That was definitely me back in the day when I was running companies that weren’t successful. I was working seven days a week, 10-12 hour days.
What’s been interesting is that the more successful I’ve become, thanks to these systems and processes, I don’t have to work as much, even though the business is a hundred times bigger than anything I’d run before.
Coming from a sports background, especially with a big wrestling family, I think of our off-season as the winter. We do a data dump at the end of every summer, at the end of every fall, and review what went well that year, what we can improve on, and where our opportunities are.
During the winter, I stay in the office and write SOPs pretty much all season. I usually keep a schedule of Monday through Friday, with weekends off for everyone, including myself. I maintain a pretty old-school nine-to-five Monday through Friday schedule.
The winter is when I really crank out a lot of SOPs. In the summer, with our business in trades, it’s go, go, go—a hundred miles an hour. I think of it like a sports season. The winter is our off-season, where we debrief, clean everything up, and prepare for the next season by creating new systems and processes.
Madeleine: Nice. I like that. Using your natural seasonality to handle preparation and rest allows you to reflect and build, which makes your productive season that much better. You’re not scrambling to onboard new employees or fix systems on the fly. Instead, you’ve prepared ahead of time so that when it’s time to execute, your systems are solid and ready to support growth.
Justin: Exactly. I think of it like a game, and framing it that way has really helped me. I look forward to the upcoming year and running into those problems because it’s intriguing to see, “What didn’t I think of this winter?” and then address it the next winter.
What Makes a Small Business Successful
Madeleine: Definitely. So, for my last question, it’s a bit untraditional, but could you paint a picture of success? What does that end goal look like after you’ve put in all the hard work, built those systems, and enjoyed successful seasons? What does success mean to you? How does it feel, and what is waiting for you at the end of all this effort?
Justin: For me, success isn’t really about monetary gain. It’s more about time. I want to build a company that’s successful so I can spend more time with my family. As I’m growing my family and starting to have kids, success ultimately means creating a sustainable company where I don’t have to be involved every hour of every day.
It’s about having the freedom to spend time with my family and giving back. Those are really my two primary motivations for running and growing the company. I want to buy my time back and contribute to those in need.
I didn’t come from a lot; I didn’t have a great start as a kid, and breaking that poverty cycle is a significant goal for me. Giving back to the community, especially where I was born and raised, is important. For instance, over the last couple of years, we’ve given out turkeys during Thanksgiving to families in need. It’s things like that—being able to contribute to the community and spend quality time with my family—that define success for me.
Importance of Systems in Business for Scaling Entrepreneurs
Madeleine: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for spending time with me, Justin. This has been my favorite guest episode. I love diving into the business side of things and exploring how your business can serve you in so many greater ways than just entrepreneurship or making money. It can give you time, freedom, and provide your employees with fulfilling careers, while also positively impacting your community. Thank you for painting that big picture of success. It’s what we’re all striving for, and knowing it’s possible is encouraging. I believe that systems and processes are the first step in getting people on that path.
Justin: It really is. Even what we were talking about earlier with BNI—it’s allowed me to free up my time, and it’s why I can now keep this scheduled BNI meeting.
Madeleine: Nice. Yeah, I love that. Being able to invest in something that continues to grow your business and yourself.
Justin: Definitely.
Madeleine: I love that.
Awesome. Justin, well, thank you so much for being a part of the Succeeding Small podcast.
Justin: Of course. Yeah, thanks for having me. This was a blast.
