From Vision to Victory: Building Contractor Freedom with Integrity featuring Jason Humrichous

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Contractor Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Phillips. This show exists to help small business owners like you escape the tyranny of Contractor Freedom and enter the bliss of Contractor Freedom so you can have the Time, Money, and Freedom to Live Your Life With Purpose Beyond Your Business.As a certified human behavior consultant in DISC personality styles and motivators, I'll be sharing with you skills for life, love, leadership, and business. I'll also be connecting you with experts that can help you scale your business and your life. So if you want to build the business and life of your dreams, then you are in the right place.Let's go.Jason Phillips: Hello, contractors. I'm so glad you're with us today. I have someone very special here with me in my office studio today with you, and I can't wait for you to meet him. We've got some great stuff we're going to talk about. I want to introduce you to, right now, Jason Humrichous from the great [00:01:00] state of...Indiana.  Hey Jason, welcome. Jason Humrichous: Thanks. Thanks for inviting me to Dallas. Jason Phillips: I'm honored that you're here. I'm glad you made the trek. Jason Humrichous: Yeah, no, great flight and easy, Jason Phillips: man you guys, I love following you on social media and all the great stuff, all the great stuff that you're doing both at work and outside of work.Jason Humrichous: Yeah. Jason Phillips: Man tell everybody a little bit about, who's Jason. Okay. You're you're not me. And tell us a little about yourself. We'll make that confusing. Try not to. So yeah my wife and I, we have six kids. High school all the way through college. We just had two graduate from college this year, and so that's a pretty big deal.And one's going to continue to go on to school and then one's going to be starting her career as in the ministry in essence with Youth for Christ, so pretty excited about that. Started painting in middle school studied for the ministry. Actually worked at a couple different churches in the late 1990s, early 2000s.Didn't know what to do after I resigned as a children's [00:02:00] pastor at a church. Ended up starting, going back into painting. I'm like if I don't know, I don't know what to do, Lord. And I begin to pray, what do you want me to do? And ended up starting a painting company. Just pulling out signs that from the high school days and started getting business.And, did that for a while and then went to work for a contractor in the custom home business in Indianapolis area. In 2009, ended up leaving that company and starting Heritage Custom Painting. The mother company is Heritage Homes and Restorations, but Heritage Custom Painting is what we're doing business as.In 2009, just continued to just work through the economy the best I could. Was on the job site, but then grew through in 2012, pulled myself off the job site. And in 2018, I began to see that I... wasn't able to do what I wanted to do, and I was understanding that I was the bottleneck, I was the problem in our company, and I had to fix that bottleneck.And so in 2019 a [00:03:00] friend of mine, Jason Finney, another Jason, we'll just add that to the confusion Jason Finney and I, we connected at a local paint store and became good friends. And in May 1st of 2019, we sat down at a local pizza joint called Pizza King, and I have a joke that we say, All good decisions happen at Pizza King.Pizza Kings are all through Indianapolis or Indiana area, but anyhow, we sat down and we began to figure out, I like what you do, and he likes what I do, and how can we serve together. And in 2019, May 1st, we joined our forces and continued to just grow Heritage Custom Painting. So that's pretty awesome.I'm just thinking, imagine that the owner is the bottleneck in the company. And in reality, in every company, the owner is the bottleneck. Jason Humrichous: You're not lying. Jason Phillips: That's a hard pill to swallow. Jason Humrichous: It was. And one of our core values is humility. And I had to just come to the realization that my dreams were [00:04:00] super big.But I knew that I couldn't do that by myself, and I, there's a scripture reference that references that two are better than one, and I'd already experienced that in my relationship with my wife. She serves us as our CFO in our company but as my wife, she's also serving me by saying. Chase your dreams, go after it.She understands that I'm the gas, she's the brakes in our relationship. And so she's saying, whoa, slow down, you're scaring me as your entrepreneurial person, and I'm like, let's go. And take risk in that, but she also gives me freedom to just, she knows that I'm trusting the Lord.For Wisdom Daily, listening to his spirit to say, do that. Stop. Don't do that. Do this, whatever. And so it's just daily listening to the Lord, what do you want us to do? How do you want us to be responsible for the resources that you've given us to that you've given us? And so it's I think about that, okay, I still have my health today.How should I be responsible with that? And I can tell you you, you grow and you learn, [00:05:00] right? You get better. Jason Phillips: 100%. Wow. So give give us an idea. You don't have to go into any detail about maybe the size and makeup of your company and the type of staff structure you have, obviously you and Jason and your wife.Jason Humrichous: Yeah. Yep. I would currently I'm the CEO in essence, and I'm still running the day to day operations. I'd love to work out of that role. But I do love it. I genuinely love it. And Jason Finney has a full time role as a firefighter. And so he's in and out. With his schedule, which when he's at the firehouse, he's very active, still at times he has space to be able to be engaged in building processes and systems and stuff like that.He's been very active during that time and then when he's with us, and then we have Jennifer, who, my wife, who does the CFO stuff and payroll and all that jazz. Jason's wife, Kim, does our social media. She Does a phenomenal job with that. When I, when we merged, she took that over and she's made it consistent, right?Consistency is the, is really a huge win. And [00:06:00] 'cause and I love, I'm so thankful for that and she does a really good job with that. In admin, in our admin space, we have a content manager. Caleb Clark does an incredible job. He does SEO and just does a great job with that. We have him and our office admin.We have three people, Christy York and Emily King. Support on the call intakes. And do a great job with that. And then Emily's also our full time color consultant. I love color. You love color, as we can all see. And as we know, if Jason Phillips, Jason Phillips loves color. But and I listened to your, you and your wife talk the other day about how she's so colorful, and I think that's awesome.But I love to talk color. If somebody wants to just come in pink gray, that's fine. But I want to add color, right? And and I, the struggle, and I think Nick Slavik talks about this, the hardest thing for a client to do is pick color. And we've identified that years ago. And so for a long time I've been saying, Hey, we're going to do complimentary color consulting.And so [00:07:00] we do that. Now we have a full time in house person who does. They meet with every client if they need help. And in the field, in the room, whatever, in the outside. And then we also offer a virtual rendering. So Kim Finney helps do exterior virtual rendering of the house, which is phenomenal.service and just helps people see that. So that's a little bit about our admin staff. I think I got everybody there. And then we have a project consultant who's the salesperson. We like to use the word consultant because it's generally what we're doing. Yeah. We're helping people figure out the problem and then we have project man.So they do the sales process and then they hand that off to Emily who does the color process and then hand that to a project. Manager who manages our teams and currently we have a mix between W2 Painters and Subcontractors. So what people would know is a hybrid company and so we have about 19 to 20 crews in all.Jason Phillips: Nice, that's quite an operation you guys have [00:08:00] there. Yeah, God's blessed us. 100 percent. Yep. Wow. Your clients are... Homeowners? Jason Humrichous: So we do, probably 85% of our clients are residential repainting homeowners. And then we have about 15% commercial repainting. We do have a small percentage of the builders that we're still working with in a certain size of commercial project.So we don't want to engage all of our resources on just any commercial new construction project just because we just have found that. That's a market that is they're looking many times for the lowest bid and we're just not going to be the lowest bid, unfortunately, fortunately, unfortunately for whoever Rightso let's dive into this for a moment. Jason, I get I get a lot of contractors that ask me about partnership. And you've done it without, you've done it with. Yep. Could maybe share, how do you guys break down? Who does what and maybe what was life. You said a little about it, but what was [00:09:00] life like before versus what life is life in business then and now.As a person of faith I love the passage. It talks about two are better than one because that is a...