Focus + Plan x Action = Profit. The ultimate plan for business success! Guest starring Lifestyle Tradie Member, Ashley Woolf, owner of Woolf Plumbing & Gas

Andy
Hell yeah. Welcome back to another episode of The Tradie Show, together in trade business.

Ange
So glad to be back in the studio, and we’ve got a special guest today too. We’re joined by Lifestyle Tradie member Ashley Woolf from Woolf Plumbing and Gas in WA.

Andy
Yes. He joined Lifestyle Tradie as a member three years ago. And you know what? He’s an absolute superstar in my book, so it’s really good to have a chat with him today. Ash, welcome to the show.

Ashley
Hey guys, how are you? It’s great to be here and speaking to you this morning.

Ange
Yes, absolutely. Stoked to have you with us. So I’m gonna ask a really basic question for you to start, which is what made you decide to start your own trade business?

Ashley
Uh, as always, I think there’s a few reasons why we start our own trade business. Usually it’s all about the money, isn’t it? I was working for someone else and I was sitting there doing a job. I went into the office for a little while and I thought, Hey, look, I can do this myself as we all do as tradies, can’t we? So that was probably the main reason, the money and thinking I knew better than the boss. But the other reason was, I just met someone new and I’d moved here from England and I still hadn’t decided whether I was gonna go back or not and met my new person and I was like, no, this is it. I’m standing here. I need to make something of myself. So that was it. I, uh, started up on my own.

Ange
Love caught you in Australia?

Ashley
It did. Indeed, it did.

Andy
Yeah. Nice. Incredible place. Incredible over there in WA. No doubt. You love it. Now the thing, I also heard that at one stage you are actually weighing up. Should I be a plumber or an electrician? Now, you know, in my books, why the hell would you ever want to be an electrician?

Ashley
Yeah, I know. Tell me about it. . Um, I certainly, certainly made the right decision, didn’t I?

Andy
Ah, a hundred percent .

Ange
Is that actually true? Did you do that?

Ashley
Yeah, it was like, my dad’s an electrician, so Ah-huh. I used to work with him when I was 12, 14. I was rewiring houses with him on the weekend, so I was, I was quiet, I was quite good already. But in school, knowing that I wanted to be an electrician. I, we, it comes to year 10 and we had our work experience and they had the old-fashioned big box of companies and yeah, you sifted through the papers, decided who you wanted to do your work experience with, and we had to pick four and, uh, two were electrical companies. One was the local airport for aircraft engineering and the Full Falls, a plumbing company. And yeah, they were the only ones that got back to me. So that was it. Oh, rest is history. Two weeks of work experience and they offered me a job.

Andy
Awesome.

Ange
Awesome. That’s awesome. So Ash, one of the things we love the most about you out of all of our members, is the fact that you are such an action taker.

Andy
Oh, a hundred percent. You know, we say do this and this and this, and you just go out and do it. And to be honest, this is why your business is absolutely killing it. Now, I know everyone out there listening would go to themselves. How the hell when I’m doing a full-time job, can I fit in making my business so much better? So I wanna ask you this, mate, because I know a lot of our members say the same. Wow, Ashley Woolf, what an absolute superstar. He gets so much done. So I wanna ask you, what is the secret, you know, and how do you do it?

Ashley
Like as I’ve gone through business, I think, I think I’ve learned a lot of things about myself. Probably the first thing that helped me the most was doing the right things at the beginning. So, the time maximizer and that exercise at the beginning really helped. God, I was wasting so much time on tasks that I didn’t need to do. So like that, that was a massive part of it. But as I’ve gone through running my business, I’ve learned that I try, try not to let fear take me back and I’ve, I’ve been doing the desk profiling things, and I’ve realized that I don’t like to overthink things. I’d rather just do it, see if it works, and if it does, it does. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I just scrap it and move on to the next thing.

Andy
Let me ask you that. Okay, so what you are saying is, you know, you are a bit of a procrastinator and most of us tradies are, but you just make a decision that I am gonna do it. And you just don’t let anything get in the way.

Ashley
Yeah. Yeah. I’ll do it. Uh, look at it and look, it’s bit me. Previously I’ve made mistakes, but look, now I know I’ve learned from them. I’ve done it, I’ve tried it, and I’ve moved on to the next thing. And I think that’s the way to go. You just have to do better business.

Andy
That’s business. You’ve, you’ve gotta make mistakes. We’re all gonna make mistakes, but the trick is you’ve gotta fall forward and not fall backwards. Yeah. And you’ve gotta lean in on a community like ours to make sure you’re working on the right things in the first place.

Ashley
Yeah, I think the fear or, or the fear of making a decision or that procrastination evolves, what if and, and even not making a decision at all is worse than making the wrong decision sometimes.

Andy
A hundred percent.

Ange
I think also to touch on what you’ve said is this subject of self-awareness. So over the course of time, as you’ve grown in your business, it’s quite clear that you’ve taken some reflection on yourself. You’re talking about this profiling and understanding what makes you tick and therefore how you can be better as a person. And what I love about that is we often talk about this subject about self-awareness, which is actually a really critically important subject as a leader in business because you constantly need to be aware about what you say, what you do, and how it affects everyone around you, and in this instance about you actually just taking action and getting stuff done. What I love the most about this is you have taken this so literally about how do I do this better? How do I be a better self?

Ashley
Yeah, that’s right. I think that’s one of the best things about the community and Lifestyle Tradie as well. Without everyone, you can’t see those things in yourself because when we all get together and you have those conversations where you’ve had a problem and someone else has had a similar problem, you can see how they’ve dealt with it and maybe how you could deal with it differently or, or because you’ve lived your life in a certain way, you, you only have your own perspective and then all of a sudden someone’s dealt with that situation in a completely different way, and all of a sudden you’re like, oh, oh yeah, why didn’t I do that?

Andy
Yeah, mate. As you know, we’ve just, I have a job. I’ve done seven dinners in eight nights, traveling around Australia, seeing just over a hundred tradies. And after doing that and hanging out with all these tradies, the one thing I really noticed is Lifestyle Tradie has everything you need to be a successful business. But our community is the thing that really holds us all together and we’re all like best mates. And the thing is, sometimes people hear it from Ange and they hear it from me, and they may hear it a hundred times, but when they go and they sit down at a bar and have a chat with a guy and he goes, mate, you know what to do, Andy’s told you a hundred times. Just do it. This is what changed in my business when I did, just do it. It’s amazing how many people are just like, okay, and then they do it and they go, it works .

Ashley
That’s right.

Ange
I actually often hear when new members come on board and they say, oh, but Ange, that just won’t work inside my business. Mm-hmm. . And I go, okay, why do you think that is? And they say, because my business is different. That is often the sentence and yes. You know, no one knows your business better than you do. I, a hundred percent agree with that. However, to Andy’s point, when you are around these people, when you’re around other trade business owners who go through the same problems, just like you do the same challenges, how eye-opening is it to go, oh my God, I’ve only ever seen life through my own perspective, and all of a sudden I’ve now been given 20 different ways to see and find a solution to actually take action. So yeah, it’s overarchingly. Massive kudos to you. You are seriously the pinup boy for action taking. It is clearly the reason why your business is literally going so well.

Ashley
Awesome. Thank you.

Ange
One of the things that I know you have integrated well is systems inside your business, and we all know systems is one of Andy’s favorite words.

Andy
Systems, systems, systems, systems.

Ange
So Ash, in your opinion, what’s been the biggest benefit of implementing systems into your trade business?

Ashley
Well, like I said before, me being lucky or choosing the right things to work on at the beginning, that was one of them. Getting the systems down path even just the simple ones freed up the time. So when I got more time doing the time maximizing everything like that, I was able to work on my systems and being able to do those, it gave me more time to work on more systems and that’s, that’s what I wanted as a business owner. Um, and that’s been the biggest benefit of, is giving me back the time. And as soon as I got those systems in place, my phone stopped ringing so much. So like initially, that was the biggest benefit of getting those in place. Now as I’m growing the business, I now see that having those systems is what’s gonna be able to allow me to scale. So that’s where I’m at now.

Andy
And most tradies listening now, you know, and most tradies I talk to, they come to me and they say, I need structure in my business and I need systems. But as I say to everyone, that’s all well and good building systems, but don’t just build systems when your business model or your business isn’t run correctly. Yeah. So you’ve gotta fix your business first, and then when you put these systems and structures in place, oh my God, you’ll start getting your time back cuz, mate, you’ve got a little boy and you’ve got another baby girl on the way. So congratulations.

Ange
Congratulations.

Ashley
Thank you.

Andy
Like most business owners, we don’t feel like we do spend enough time with our family. I mean, hell, I really struggle. That’s probably the time that I struggled the most when my kids were young and they were tugging on my legs or pulling my hair outta my legs saying, daddy, daddy, daddy. And I’m on the phone. I’m trying to juggle everything. It’s actually tough. So how do you feel like you struck the right balance with how you do family and business these days?

Ashley
Um, I kind of, I was disciplined. I decided I’m gonna start this time and I’m gonna finish it this time, and, and that was it. Look, when you start your business, you, you, you wanna be there for all your customers all the time answering the phone, but the more you do that, the more they expect it. So one of the first things I did was organize an admin. And I, I stopped answering my phone. Every time I had a phone number that called that I didn’t recognize, I let it go through and they dealt with it. And, and very quickly my customers realized they couldn’t just get hold of me anymore. So it made me feel not as bad that come five o’clock, that was it, can’t get hold of me. And that’s what I had to do. I had to cut myself off and, and decide finish time is finished time.

Andy
I just love the word discipline, because that’s the challenge that most of us have, is we don’t have the right discipline. And something that might take 15 minutes if we get in and knock it over, takes us over an hour because we’re stuffing around looking at our phone, looking at socials, whatever it may be.

Ashley
Yeah, that’s right.

Andy
And that’s the thing that you, you know, I’ve heard you say phone off, get stuck in, bang, not having those phone calls, so yeah, huge.

Ange
Yeah, I think it’s also about time of day too. I can only imagine that you really understand yourself with regards to when your energy levels are high. So, you know, when you talk about discipline, I’m sure you know, you hit five o’clock at night or whatever that is, and you literally go, I’m exhausted and I wanna be with my family right now. I’m not gonna go to my office and write a quote when I actually need to give it my hundred percent attention. So I see discipline even come out there where you’ve gotta lean on, you know, when you know your energy is hive and if you know that you’re a morning person, then get up and do all your quotes first before you actually go out on the tools or, you know, start doing other work. So, huge benefit.

Ashley
Yes, exactly right. That’s one of the things that we do in our business. All the hard stuff, the plan in the strategy, the process is I have eight till 12 blocked out every day. That’s when that stuff gets done. And the easy stuff, the quoting, the site visits and things like that, that’s, that’s 12 till four and the structured day like that just is gold.

Andy
Mate, I’m gonna just say one thing. I don’t know if you can remember this, but it was super funny. So we used Voxer to do a lot of our communications between Lifestyle Tradie, I dunno if you know where this is going, and we are looking at your face right now. But one morning you got must, your alarm went off and you went to hit the stop button on your alarm and you hit the Voxer um button that actually went to me, right? And I heard you get up, get outta bed, a big yawn , walk to the toilet. I heard the toilet seat lift and then away went. And I’m this and I’ve probably still got that on my boxer. I’m gonna actually send that to you, mate. But, um, it’s amazing. Can you remember those days?

Ashley
No, I’m in denial. I, I don’t, have no idea what you’re talking about.

Andy
Yeah. Yeah. I know, you know.

Ange
I remember in the early days, Ash, you actually saying that, um, when you first started with Lifestyle Tradie, you were in this bit of a rhythm that you’d kind of know what you wanted to do that day and you’d start, never finish, and you’d try something else the next day and you’d never finish. And I remember you saying it wasn’t until you actually sat down and actually worked out a strategy and a plan with us so that you had absolute clarity on what to actually get done. That all of a sudden life became very different inside your business. Do you remember those days?

Ashley
I do remember those days. They were frustrating.

Ange
So Ash, speaking of looking back, can you tell us a bit about what your business was like before you joined Lifestyle Tradie?

Ashley
Yeah, so before I joined Lifestyle Tradie, I was a sole trader, as we all were, and we would go to site every day and do the work, and then it got to the point where it was getting busier and busier. So we took on employees and that’s where the struggles began, as I think that’s, that’s where most, um, businesses struggle when they start taking on employees. And it got to a stage where every week, every month was looking at the bank account and thinking, oh, we’re only just gonna make payroll this, this week or this month. And that’s the struggle. And there was no structure, no, no knowledge, no way to grow. Um, and yeah, kind of at loss, just making ends meet week on week.

Andy
It’s amazing hearing that, considering how far you’ve come in the last four years and how you’re absolutely smoking it now. So, mate, it brings a tear to the eye. I’m so happy things are going so well. So mate, I just wanna ask you this, knowing that every trade business owner will experience a similar journey just like you, what would your top three tips to a struggling trade business owner be?

Ashley
Uh, the, the first one I think would be to know your worth. Um, as, as trade is, I think, We become a tradesman sometimes because we can’t get into uni or something like that. And it puts a damper on maybe knowing that you are worth, you’re worth something so much more. Yeah. So look, we do all this training, we have all this knowledge and, and knowing your worth is, is so important because we are the professionals. And then after that, I would say that, Because you know you are worth and how much you’re worth per hour is to delegate everything. If we are here and we are building a business, why do something that you could pay someone 20, $30 an hour for when you’re charging out 100, 200, $300 an hour? Um, yeah, it’s not worth it. And then the third is enjoy the journey. Um, and I love being a business owner. I’m grateful every single day that, yeah, I get to be at home in the afternoon with my family. And yeah, the job, I love working with my team and, and building these processes and building a business, and that’s a blessing for me. So, enjoying the journey is important.

Andy
Perfect. Now, how much are you worth an hour?

Ashley
How much am I worth an hour?

Andy
Yeah.

Ashley
How much do I charge? Well, I’m,

Andy
No, not How much do you charge. How much do you believe you are worth an hour?

Ashley
I, I don’t think you could put a number on that. If I spent an hour networking and I met a client, I could possibly get a new client that could make me 50, a hundred million dollars that year. So yeah, it’s invaluable.

Andy
Mate, that’s perfectly answered. And I think the big thing is most tradies, as you said, you do not value your worth. You know, if it’s $300, $500 an hour, $10,000 an hour, whatever it is. But why can everyone else out there charge megabucks? And we get stuck in this little hole where customers think we’re only worth 80 a hundred dollars an hour. We’ve spent four years, six years, just like going to uni. We’re doing our hands, we’re breaking our bodies, we’re climbing on roofs, around the floors, we’re doing the hard work. We are worth so much more than people out there perceive. And that’s something that we’ve all gotta change as tradies. You’ve gotta charge what you’re worth and get out there and make that money.

Ange
So Ash, I’m gonna change tack just a little bit and ask you a different question. In your business journey, what’s been the thing that you’ve battled with or struggled with the most?

Ashley
There’s been. There’s probably been two major ones that have been the hardest for me. One has been my marketing probably, because I’m trying to grow my business and I like to delegate that stuff. I’m not a marketer. I don’t get that stuff as well as I do plumbing. Picking the right team to work with has been a struggle for me. Um, and look, that’s, that’s been one of my mistakes. Look, I’ve been out there, I’ve made a decision. Turns out to be the wrong one. I’m, I’m sure that’s been the case for lots of people, biggie marketers and like we found a great one now and we, we are going gungho, so that’s great. Um, and then just the climb at the moment, staff, staff has been a hard one as well. Uh, we’ve got a pretty good tactic now to get in front of some new staff members and find some great talent and he’s working really well, so I’m pleased with that. But a hundred percent marketing and staff has been, or should say, finding new staff should say, has been probably the biggest struggles in my business.

Andy
And that’s like a lot of people out there. Staff is an absolute killer. So Ash, with every guest, we like to play this rapid fire question game. Are you ready?

Ashley
Ready. Go on. Go for it.

Andy
Mate, if you didn’t become a tradie, what job do you think you would’ve ended up in?

Ashley
I would probably be in the army.

Andy
In the army?

Ashley
Yeah.

Andy
Why is that?

Ashley
Well, when I was in school before all the work experience that came, uh, came through, uh, we had the royal engineers coming to our school and yeah, I was gonna be an electrician and the royal engineers.

Andy
Wow. Very cool. Very cool. The next question, what is the biggest mistake you’ve made in business?

Ashley
Uh, a hundred percent, picking the wrong marketing company.

Andy
The wrong marketing company. You definitely touched on that as well. And what do you love most about being a Lifestyle Tradie member?

Ashley
Hands down, the community.

Andy
Yes. What an awesome community.

Ange
Absolutely.

Andy
We have.

Ange
There’s nothing better than having like-minded tradies and their partners all trying to aim for the same thing, have a better life and have choice.

Ashley
Exactly right.

Ange
So that was awesome, Ash. You really are an absolute gun and we’re so stoked you’ve been able to join us here today.

Andy
Yeah. We absolutely love you being on the show, mate. You’re uh, an absolute superstar. And yeah mate, we just want to thank you for joining us on the show today.

Ashley
Thank you mate. No, it was great. It was great to be here and great to be on the show. I really appreciate it.

Ange
All right, Andy. I think that’s us done for today. Should we wrap things up?

Andy
Sounds good to me. Catch you next time, tradies.