S02E05 – The Naked Truth (On Being Too Expensive)


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There are few things more painful in life than being dragged into a corporate workshop.  That is until you go to a Tim Byrne corporate workshop. Instead of the usual droning on about sales projections and team building you get a Tasmanian Devil whirlwind of foul-mouthed truth speak.  The good folks at Curb Signs Inc. made the fateful decision to invite our hero to their office in Aurora to deliver a lecture on all things sales.  

“Everything you do is too expensive.”  Every sales person hears that every day.  But that’s bullshit, according to Tim. Well, most of the time anyways.  33% of the time you’re not too expensive compared to your competitor. You’re too expensive for their budget.  It’s all about how they build their budgets.  Property managers will always move numbers around to make it look like they’re saving their clients money.  Often times they will take money out of the budget for your work and stick it somewhere else – leaving you with nothing. So when they tell you you’re too expensive it has nothing to do with your estimate.  The other 33% of the time you lost the job because they don’t like you. It’s only that last 33% where you will actually lose a job because you were undercut by a competitor.

Building relationships is by far the hardest job a sales person has to master.  Sales people

will do anything to avoid having to go to yet another social function where they awkwardly stand in the corner talking to people they already know.  Those events are about building new relationships!  The easiest thing about the job is writing the purchase order or bidding the job.  Shaking hands and meeting people is fucking awful. Cold calling is the worst of the worst.  But it’s the only way you’re going to be successful so you better get good at it and quick.The only thing your organization is going to need in the next few decades is people that know how to talk to people.  Most of the jobs in big companies are going to be automated. Building relationships is the only thing matters.    

S02E04 – Two Girls and a Dog of Facilities


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Tim is outnumbered in this week’s episode.  He’s invited two superstar young women to join him for a conversation about the business of facilities management.  Kat Byrne is a familiar voice to regular listeners of the podcast.  She’s the General Manager of Byrne on Demand and has the far more difficult job of being Tim’s daughter.  Kat is joined by Angelica Levesque, a former Byne employee and now a Senior Project Manager with Promain Exteriors.   

The conversation starts with Tim marvelling at the driving habits of both his guests.  Angelica now has a company car which surprises Tim. “Haven’t both of you nearly lost your licenses?” he asks.  They have and Tim starts to say that men are better drivers than women but then stops himself. “I got stopped in Quebec last weekend going 140 in an 80 zone,” he says.  So that answers that.

Angel has mostly worked for small companies like Byrne and Promain but she does have some limited corporate experience.  A short stint pouring coffee at Tim Horton’s convinced her that there is no creativity working for a big business. Promain works with mostly with Ontario customers who often do business in Western Canada.  Angelica thinks that there isn’t the same kind of urgency in the West as there is in Ontario. Managing customer expectations is a big part of her job. All three agree that working with Canadians is way better than dealing with Americans.  It’s not because they are worse people. They just don’t understand Canada and treat their Northern stores as an afterthought.

Tim quickly becomes bored of this conversation about business and shifts the conversation to a far more interesting topic.  “Did you know that 47% of employees masterbate in the office?” he asks. The girls are astonished by that figure. It disturbing to think about in an office like BOD with 27 employees.  It’s gets far more disturbing when thinking about Promain’s office which has just 3 employees. “I don’t want to think about this,” Angelica says.

 

 

S02E03 – Touch my junk!


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Tim has an absolutely phenomenal guest in the studio this week. Not only because he’s a great guy but because the company he works for is absolutely trouncing the marketplace these days. William Stefancic is the commercial sales manager with 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Will started with the company when he was a student working in the trucks. He worked his way through the ranks and took over commercial sales when he was barely in his 30’s. The company grew quickly by focussing on the residential waste removal. Will has been tasked with putting a new emphasis on commercial customers. That’s where Tim comes in.

Tim is pretty interested in all the weird stuff William has come across during his decade with the company. The list William provides definitely meets the definition of “weird”. You can only imagine the stuff you find crawling through basements, backyards and storage spaces. “You meet a pretty wide spectrum of humanity in this job,” Will says. “Hoarders, abandoned buildings and overgrown yards are a normal part of the job.”

The Toronto franchise of 1-800-GOT-JUNK is by far the largest in the country. It was started by Paul Guy who after meeting founder Brian Scudamore became the company’s first franchisee. Unfortunately, he was in Vancouver at the time and had to drive a waste removal truck all the way to Toronto to start the business. Will finds that story particularly inspiring. When he was first starting with the company, spending his days bouncing around in a hot garbage truck, he made the decision to do his absolute best at a job that other might have found beneath them. That hard work and dedication has paid off.

If you have an office filled with old office furniture or a project manager with storage lockers filled with people’s abandoned stuff Will is your man. He and 1-800-GOT-JUNK are aggressively courting commercial customers. Tim thinks commercial leasing guys are particularly desperate for dependable waste removal. “The property manager has a huge problem finding the right labour source for waste removal,” Tim says. For one price, William says, 1-800-GOT-JUNK will sort you out.

Contact

William Stefancic
416-572-0067

https://www.1800gotjunk.com/ca_en/locations/junk-removal-toronto
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/william-stefancic-a5132aba

S02E02 – An architect’s nightmare on my street


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The relationship between architects and tradespeople is sometimes less than congenial. Today Tim tries to fix that. He’s invited Stephen Pollock, a Toronto-based architect with more than 20 years experience, onto the show. Tim asks all the questions every tradesperson has wanted to know about they guy behind the drawings.

First up is a discussion about how an architect figures out what to charge their customers. The rule of thumb is that an architect can expect to be paid between 5 to 7% of the total project cost. “I’ve never seen a project go under budget,” Tim says. People always want more than what they can afford. Stephen says the art of architecture is reconciling those differences. An honest architect will tell the client when they are not a right fit for a particular project.

Architects are expected to wear a lot of hats on any job. They need to be able to make a drawing that is on-budget and up to code Then they need to be able to work with every imaginable trade and act as advisor and therapist to the client. It’s not an easy gig.

Stephen dreams of building his firm and being able to mentor the next generation of architects. He has had plenty of bad bosses in his past and he wants to make sure that he doesn’t repeat the past.

S02E01 – We finally get paid!


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Things are about to change in the building trades. The Ontario government has decided to radically overhaul the Construction Lien Act. The first set of changes came into effect July 1st. Tim decided he needed a crash course and asked lawyer Olga Morozova to join him for a chat. Olga has worked for all levels of the construction business and knows what’s about to change.

One of the biggest changes is that, for the first time, the government mandates time frames for payment. Owners must pay within 28 days of receiving an invoice. Olga says the old days of contractors blaming the owner for lack of payment are over. Getting paid your holdback is another big issue in the trades. Because you can lien the holdback Olga is telling all her owner clients to pay that money within 60 days.

Tim wants to know why screwing over subcontractors has become so common. Tim thinks the big contractors and owners have systems in place to stop or slow payment. He once had someone inside an accounting department tell him that it was policy to reject 10% of all invoices. A lot of subcontractors are barely hanging on because giant firms aren’t paying their invoices on time. Olga says she sees this all too often. She says your first call should be to your lawyer.

Tim has only placed about three liens in 30 years of work. He’s one of the lucky ones. For a lot of companies liens are a common part of the business. The changes to the law allow subcontractors more time to “preserve” and “perfect” the lien. Olga explains those definitions to Tim and reveals why they are so important.

The changes to the act are long overdue. The last time the law was updated was over 35 years ago. Making it easier for subs to actually get paid on time will be a huge boon to the industry. Only time will tell if the law will really make those changes.