Episode 172 Frederick Dudek (Freddy D)

Hourly worker incentives are one of the most misunderstood—and most powerful—levers for improving productivity, quality, and accountability in service and trade businesses. In Episode 172 of Business Superfans®, Michael Fortinberry, Founder of Protiv, breaks down how the right performance pay system can fundamentally change behavior on hourly teams.

Most companies pay by the hour, unintentionally rewarding time instead of results. Michael explains why this model stalls productivity and how transparent, simple, and frequent hourly worker incentives realign teams around winning together. By turning the labor budget into a visible scoreboard, crews begin holding themselves—and management—accountable. The result is better output, stronger culture, and improved margins without adding headcount.

If you lead hourly employees in construction, trades, or field services, this episode delivers a practical playbook for building incentives that actually work.

Discover more with our detailed show notes and exclusive content by visiting: https://linkly.link/2Vv1v

Key Takeaways

• Hourly worker incentives must reward outcomes, not time — otherwise behavior will always drift toward inefficiency
• Performance pay works best when it’s simple, transparent, and frequent
• Turning labor budgets into “their money” changes how crews treat quality and rework
• The best incentive programs create peer accountability—not micromanagement
• Hourly teams need basic financial literacy for incentives to stick
• Behavior changes faster with a visible scoreboard than with verbal expectations
• Strong hourly worker incentives improve culture, not just productivity

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Guest Bio:

Michael Fortinberry is the Founder of Protiv, a platform helping service and trade businesses modernize performance pay for hourly workers through simple, transparent, and frequent incentive structures.

From growing up with construction roots to serving 10 years in the U.S. Army and leading in the multifamily/tech world, Michael now helps contractors unlock productivity, improve quality, and build culture by aligning labor budgets with team incentives.

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Freddy D’s Take

This episode is a championship film review for any owner running hourly crews. Michael’s core move is classic: put a scoreboard where everyone can see it—and pay out when the team wins.

In sports, you don’t tell the team, “Just play hard.” You track points, clock, and execution. Protiv’s ProPay turns the labor budget into a live game plan: budget vs. actual, progress tracking, and a clear bonus forecast.

The real power is ecosystem momentum: when your people win, they become internal Business Superfans®—promoting the company, recruiting talent, and defending the standard on the field. And that’s exactly the type of strategy I help clients implement through my SUPERFANS Framework™ in Prosperity Pathway coaching within the Entrepreneur Prosperity Hub.

FREE 30/Min Prosperity Pathway™ Business Growth Discover Call

The Action:

The Action: Launch a “Friday Scoreboard Bonus” pilot for one crew this month.

Who: Your crew lead + hourly field team

Why: Because behavior changes when the target is clear, the math is trusted, and the reward hits fast.

How:

• Pick 1 repeatable job type (or one project phase) with a clean labor budget.
• Define the win: “Beat budget + pass quality checks = bonus.”
• Show the crew the numbers weekly (simple + transparent).
• Celebrate winners publicly (badge, board, shout-out, big-check moment).

Mailbox Superfans

Guest Contact

Connect with Michael Fortinberry:

• Website: Protiv.com
• Email: michael@protiv.com
• LinkedIn: Michael Fortinberry (mentioned)

Ninja Prospecting

Resources & Tools

Protiv — Performance pay + incentive management platform for hourly teams

ProPay (inside Protiv) — Bonus structure tied to labor budgets + real-time tracking

Ninja Prospecting — Sponsor: human-first outreach that opens real sales conversations

This podcast is hosted by Captivate, try it yourself for free.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Protiv
• Ninja Prospecting
• Procore
• Aspire
• Service Titan

Copyright 2025 Prosperous Ventures, LLC

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Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy

Michael Fontinberry: 00:00:00

You got a bunch of hourly workers. I would challenge you to really think about how upset your team is when you don't do the right thing.

Intro/Outro: 00:00:12

But I am the world's biggest super fan. You're like a super fan. Welcome to the Business Superfans podcast.

We will discuss how establishing business superfans from customers, employees and business partners can elevate your success exponentially. Learn why these advocates are a key factor to achieving excellence in the world of commerce.

This is the Business Super Fans Podcast with your host, Freddy D.

Freddy D: 00:00:52

Hey, super fans superstar Freddy D. Here.

In this episode 172, we're joined by Michael Fortenberry, founder of Protiv, who takes on a challenge many construction and trade service businesses struggle with. How to motivate, engage, and fairly incentivize hourly crews while driving real productivity.

Too often, owners rely on outdated pay structures that fail to align effort with outcomes.

Michael's journey from growing up on a family farm to serving a decade in the US army, to leading at real page and a Fortune 500 company shaped his disciplined tech forward approach. Today, he applies the experience to help blue collar businesses modernize. Incentives, boost performance and build stronger, more engaging teams.

Freddy D: 00:01:47

Welcome, Michael, to the Business Superfans, the Service Providers Edge podcast. Great conversation we had before we started recording. You're from New York. It's been a long time since I've been there.

oned, last time I was here is: 2007

Michael Fontinberry: 00:02:08

A little change. Yeah. Thank you. Freddie. You got to come back out. You got to come to New York. When I out here, we'll show you around.

Try to keep tripping over the crazy people in the street. And it's New York. It is a kind of a wild place in that when you're there and you walk on the street, sometimes you get really close to to it.

It's a little messy.

Then what we do is sometimes you're out, maybe you're out on the water and you're looking at the skyline at night and it's all lit up and it's majestic. It's like, oh my gosh, look at this thing. This incredibly powerful view of opportunity and possibilities. I'm not so sure.

That's not like the perfect example of the reality of running a business. You get too close to it, it's awful hard. It's messy and dirty, and it's hard to keep all the pieces in line.

Boy, when you it's, look at what we built. You know what we built something that didn't exist before. We created something from scratch.

It's got all this possibility in it and I don't know, maybe that's a metaphor for the opportunity we have as founders and business owners. We go and create something good stuff.

Freddy D: 00:03:17

It's a thriving city, that's for sure. And it doesn't shut down, it just goes.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:03:21

That's true. If anybody's never been there, it is legit. You walk around Tuesday at 4am there's people everywhere.

I don't go out at Tuesday at 4am anymore but it's a thing like in the middle of the night there are people everywhere doing something. I don't know what they're doing. That time of night I sleep, but I get it. I'm a country boy wound up here accidentally just married in New Yorker.

Now I'm stuck here. But yeah.

Freddy D: 00:03:47

So let's go back to your story, Michael. You've guys got a software technology but as we talked before, that really wasn't your wheelhouse. You really are into the construction aspects.

How did you get into the construction? More importantly, how did you create the software platform?

Michael Fontinberry: 00:04:07

I guess how do you get into construction? That's dad's fault. I think a lot of contractors get that. Dad was a plumber, so I'm a plumber, whatever.

My dad was an electrician later part of his life. From that point on, I think you learn how to do stuff with your hands, how to fix things. I had other places, other things I did.

I was in the military for a long time and worked around multifamily for a long time. But in the end I'm very comfortable with construction. I speak the language, understand it.

So we built a two actually multifamily renovation companies in New York City. Obviously there's a lot of that kind of work did pretty well with those. But like a lot of business owners, we run into problems we face.

I've got this challenge or that challenge. And so you try and go find a system or a tool or a best practice to help you solve that problem.

We just ran into one where the Doherty built a solution for it and that was we have a bunch of hourly workers. Half the United States is paid by the hour. And how do I get them to be motivated to care, to focus on the same things I focus on as the owner. Right.

If I want them to pay attention to detail, if I want them to do good quality work, if I want them teamwork and communication, productivity, how do I get them to want that? Because they're Paid by the hour. So what do you think they care about? Hours.

Freddy D: 00:05:24

Paycheck.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:05:25

Yeah, hours. They care about hours. That's how they make more money. And so. Oh, how do I make more money? By getting overtime.

The fundamental equation on which I pay the people who do the work is disjointed from the way that I actually make money. Almost contrary in some ways. So how do you bridge that? And people historically used to have this piece rate model.

It goes back to the factory, the industrial revolution and worked in the factory. Got paid to be a widget or whatever. Can't really do that very well legally anymore. Hourly pay is a structure in which we have to work.

But we wanted to better connect the output of our team to their compensation. In our case it was the variable compensation out limit. So they could make more if they helped us make more.

And we essentially enabled them to see those numbers. They could visualize it, understand it. They knew if they hit certain targets, here's exactly how much money they got on their check. Bang.

All of a sudden something happened like their brain came to work with them. You get a free brain with every employee. Freddie, I don't know if you knew this not, but they all come with one.

You hire them for their back, but you get a brain too. What do you do with it? Do you unlock it? Do you? Some of them are better than others, but what do you do? What do they do with it?

Do they bring it to work and try and do better? Solve problems, be creative, try and do better. If you can get them to do that, you're winning. You're winning that day.

Freddy D: 00:06:50

You remind me of my drafting days back in the late 70s.

weld guns that Spot welded a: 1982

And that's when he really killed it.

And I was usually picked one of the top guys to get the double time because they only picked the guys that were actually going to reduce for that kind of money.

But what the company did, and that's what you reminded me of, they ended up creating an incentive for the workers us that says, okay, you're guaranteed your hourly rate. But here's a chunk of cash. If you do it faster than this time, you'll make your hourly rate plus X per hour.

And if you don't and you go beyond, we guarantee you your hourly rate because that's what we've got to do. And that changed the whole dynamics, which is clearly what you just talked about.

Because all of a sudden people show up and they're going, man, I ain't got time for the coffee machine. I got to get down here. I want to get this thing done. Because can make and I can go from $12 an hour, I can be making $16 an hour.

That's a whole game changer right there.

Freddy D: 00:08:29

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Michael Fontinberry: 00:09:46

The way to look at it is it's not their money. Right now, your cost of that task is a dollar. That's not their money. It's your money. So if they can make that cost $1.20, it doesn't really matter.

If they can make it cost 80 cents, it makes no difference to them. It's not theirs. The minute you get them to view the labor budget as their own money, that's when they treat it different, right?

I don't really care about your money. I just don't. So they care about their own money.

And so if they perceive that the labor budget's theirs, they treat them and they want to do the job because they don't want to come back and fix it because it costs them money. I actually have a carpenter on video saying the quiet part out loud. And his name's Frank.

And he said, so this whole pro pay things, what we call our bonus program, change the way that I look at quality because it cost me too much money to come back. And I'm like, hallelujah, Frank, welcome to our world. That's how we see the world, right?

My quality problems cost me more than my production problems do. So I need you guys to do the job right, care about the quality of what you do, and beat my budget. They're not mutually exclusive. You can do both.

And so how do we get them to want to do that? And we try and create incentive structure that gets them to want it.

And I've learned a few things now about incentives, about what moves hourly workers, right? It's different if you're an executive level, white collar job, whatever. Maybe you think about quarterly bonuses or annual bonuses.

If you're a blue collar guy out there or girl, you're making your $27 an hour, you care about what you make on Friday.

So you need to create a bonus program that is somewhat frequent because if you're waiting at the end of the year to pay it, it doesn't change behavior if it is overly complex, if it is not simple, it will not change behavior because they're not understanding how the number is going to get calculated.

And they don't trust you if it's not transparent, if they can't see the calculation almost in real time, they won't change behavior because they don't trust you. So you have to make a program simple, transparent and frequent. And then all of a sudden you get buy in.

That's what allows them, because they see you're willing to invest in them, and once they see that happening, they're willing to invest back in you. It's a trade. It's an equation that says, I value you more because you're giving me more and I'm going to automatically pay it to you.

You don't have to come ask.

Freddy D: 00:12:12

That's because you bring up a really important point because even it's applicable to multiple industries. Because I'm going to go back to my drafting days. We would design the fixture, or in my case, the spot wall guns.

Someone had to go check the work that we had. They were called a checker.

And they would check to make sure that the way you designed it and more importantly, the way the dimensions were laid out, somebody could actually make the thingamajig and all of a sudden you come back and instead of all yellows, you got a third of it is all marked up in red.

That means you had to go back and fix it because it was wrong, the checker didn't approve it, and then they back and recheck it to make sure you did it correct.

So you're absolutely right because then you'd be going like, oh, man, I just knocked myself two, three hours back because I went a little too fast and. And so totally get it.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:13:10

We see it play out with teams too. We see the teams will hold each other more accountable because your guys will say stuff to each other you're not allowed to say to them.

So if they're a little lazy because he's carrying one 2x4 from the truck or he wants to go spend 45 minutes at Sherwin Williams store because he free coffee at the paint shop, his teammates, they recognize pretty quickly that's my money and my time. If you're not doing something right, if you're not doing that task the correct way, you are costing me money. It's not the company's money anymore.

It's mine. So we're going. We're going to.

Freddy D: 00:13:47

Dynamics is different.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:13:48

The whole team dynamic shifts and you've got 50 people in the field.

You're going to have four people quit because they don't like getting yelled at by their teammates all the time for being lazy or whatever, not paying attention. Detail, it creates a different energy inside the organization. We think it's a good thing. It exposes opportunities for performance improvement.

But it is real and you got to be ready for those kind of things. Big culture shift. When you move to performance based compensation.

Freddy D: 00:14:18

You got emotional buy in. Really? That's really the thing you're talking about is these people are emotionally completely locked in. So that changes the whole mindset.

Because now, as you mentioned, I'm just going to reemphasize it is that's my money and I have an opportunity to make some nice cash here. John, get your butt over here because you're affecting my cash. And that changes the whole dynamics.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:14:45

If you're a business owner out there listening, you're an executive manager, you got a bunch of hourly workers. I would challenge you to really think about how upset your team is when you don't do the right thing.

If your team doesn't care if the materials aren't there on time, if the store's not unlocked on time, if none of that matters to them, you're missing an opportunity. You should have Everybody in your organization caring that management does their part. I need my materials. Materials, right.

I need my tools that I need to do the job. Well, you got to estimate it. You've got to create the right kind of markings. I get their customers in that I need in order to be successful.

They should be storming the management's office.

If management lets them down because they make money based on everybody doing their part, it's almost like a litmus test for how aligned you are across the organization. So does your field team, your hourly worker care? If you fail at the management level.

Freddy D: 00:15:49

That affects your company's perception because at the end of the day, that's the front line.

If they're working with the gc and if that GC all of a sudden sees this crew and they're comboulated because they're short of their supplies, their attitude is they're frustrated. They're going to go, geez, I'm not sure if I really want to use this crew and this company again.

Versus they come in and a lot of times they're contractors, I know this. And they're treated unfortunately as contractors by a lot of people. And that's the number two mistake that they make. Because that's your front line.

You want that team to go in there and says, hey, good morning, Michael. We're with such and such a company. We're super excited. We're all wearing the shirts and we're branded. We're coming in, good morning.

Hey, we're leaving a job site, making sure it's clean. Completely different perception. You're going to go as a gc. You know what? I like these guys. I like this company.

They're always on time, they're friendly, they get the stuff done. Versus the combobulated guy that says, you should be grateful I'm giving you work.

Go bust your butt over there and then, oh, I'm going to shortchange you and doc you because you screwed this little thingamajig up, that doesn't work.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:17:12

I think there's a whole other level of building company culture inside of any kind of company contracting otherwise, where you have predominantly hourly paid workers, entry level workers, or just blue collar side. Because a lot of times we don't think about company culture in those kinds of organizations and we certainly don't think about it deeply enough.

I actually argue all the time that there are only about two and a half things that make a contracting company successful. One is mastery of your numbers. If you're not a master of your numbers, you're toast. As a contractor, eventually we'll bite you at some point.

Two, you need to build a company culture where your team cares about what you're doing and they know you care about them as people, which is spent a lot of time talked about. Coming the other one, you'll appreciate this. You need to answer your phone. So that's the two and a half day.

If you don't answer your phone as a contractor, you're just. You're at some point doomed. I know it's annoying because it's probably a vendor calling or a customer calling to complain about something.

It doesn't matter. Answer your phone and you're going to win because your peers don't. So your peers don't know their numbers enough.

They don't build good culture and they don't answer their phone and just do those things. You're going to build a big trade contracting company if you want to.

Freddy D: 00:18:35

One of the things in my book, Creating Business Superfans, one of my quotes is people will crawl through broken glass for appreciation and recognition. And unfortunately we don't do enough of it.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:18:46

A lot of people, if you don't tell someone something positive within one business week, one week at work, if they haven't heard something positive, their view of working at your organization begins to degrade. You only have how often we give them praise once a year. It takes five days, five days of work, Monday to Friday.

They haven't heard something that makes them feel good about being there, about what they do, their view of the role begins to degrade.

How much degradation can you afford before that person not only is not delivering for you what you need, but then begins to look to work somewhere else where they will appreciate them.

Freddy D: 00:19:24

And it also poisons the rest of the team.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:19:27

It's a. It's just a circle. Like, it's just. You're spiraling down. You're spiraling down.

Freddy D: 00:19:32

At this point, just a matter of.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:19:33

Watching the clock and thinking, just caring about your people. And one thing, no matter what kind of company you're building, you're listening out there.

This idea of building culture, a lot of people like, I don't know what that means. Company culture is just your company's personality, if you will, and it is, it should be designed intentionally.

It should be designed based on who you are. So, Freddie, if you're building your company and you are, I'm a disciplinarian and I believe in getting the job done at all costs.

And you know all that, then don't advertise that. No, we're warm and fuzzy and people first and just everybody. We all collaborate on every decision.

And it's okay to leave work early if you got to get your kids soccer game because it's okay. We'll get job done tomorrow. You don't really believe that it's not sustainable. You have to have an authentic culture to who you are.

I'm not even judging the culture that says no, we're disciplined and we're going to finish the job on time no matter what. That's fine. You can build that. But be authentic about that's who you are because that's sustainable.

You can keep that culture up and repeat it over a long period of time and as necessary for company, for growth in an organization, repeatable processes. So don't fake your culture. It won't work. Be legit who you are and care about your people.

And caring about them means caring about their whole self, means their families, what's important to them, where they want to go in life. Right? You have a goal for your company, where you're trying to go. Where do they want to go? Maybe they want to go open a barbecue restaurant.

They don't want to be a plumber. Okay, how can I help him get what he wants? Is that Zig Ziglar quote, help enough people get what he wants?

Freddy D: 00:21:13

That is what it is. What you're doing by doing that is you're creating internal superfans of the company. That's where it starts. You got to get your team.

I look at it as you got to become the swan of a racing rowing team. Okay. Can become. And you got to get everybody that has a single or right. It's not two ores, one or eight people.

You got to get them in synchronization, going in the right direction. And they got to be blindly trusting you because they can't see where they're going because they're rowing. So you're doing person in charge.

But they have full faith in you. And once that happens, it's a beautiful thing because that boat just flies. That's what you're talking about.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:21:58

You start winning. They're winning because you're sharing with them now. Like they win, you win, everybody wins together.

Now we've got something that people are buying into. I trust here and I give my all, I get return for that. So you can't just take from them. You have to give to them. Give more, get.

The more you give, the more they'll give you back. That's the craziest.

Freddy D: 00:22:18

Because then what they do now is they start telling all their friends what a great company they're working at. When you're looking for another contractor or an employee to come on board, they probably know somebody.

And now they're going to say, hey, you know what? You got to come check this place out. I love this place. I've been here for five years. These guys are great. That's a super fan that's promoting.

You can't buy buy that kind of pr.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:22:42

There's this idea where if you have a say, an organization out there today listening, and you have written somewhere or say out loud, we, our customers come first. I would suggest you erase that and say my people come first. Because your job, take care of your people.

Your people will take care of the product or service you deliver. And the service and product you deliver takes care of your customer. Your customers will.

Freddy D: 00:23:08

If you help enough other people accomplish what they want to accomplish in life, you don't have to worry about yourself. They'll take care of you.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:23:15

This one comes from someone else too. And I'll think who it is. But the idea is your job take care of your people. They're the ones who take care of your customer.

You're not taking care of them. Why should they care about whether they do a good job painting Mrs. Smith's kitchen? Right. Because you don't care about them.

Why do they care about your customers? You care deeply about them. Put them first. Be authentic as a leader and you have an opportunity to build to your point.

A super fan within your organization that carries that brand with them everywhere they go.

Freddy D: 00:23:45

So let's talk a little bit about.

Freddy D: 00:23:47

The protiv product that you guys created. How did that come about?

Michael Fontinberry: 00:23:52

It was something we faced as a company. The original origin story was actually we renovate apartments. That's what we do. We do them at scale for big honors.

You're doing the same thing over and over again, renovating these apartments, same kitchen, over and over. Add the schedule. When you're doing multi family, it's a unique thing.

There's someone with a moving truck showing up on Saturday, so you better be done on Friday. So that's number one. Schedule is really important.

If you are still there on Saturday, so many bad things happen, you're not long for that contract, so you gotta be done on time. The other thing is, if you have a quality problem, the minute that there's something wrong, the microwave doesn't work.

That person who just moved in is now going through everything, see what else doesn't work. If you leave that apartment not perfectly Clean right. You don't clean it right.

The minute they think something's dirty, their perception of that property is going down. The phone calls into management. All bad, right? So I need these jobs done right. And I need them job. I need them done on time.

How do I get my team to care about that same thing? Because I've got 130 people out there in the field.

Carpenters and cleaners and tile guys and floor guys and painters and all these people doing all this work. How do I get them to care about it? We were doing these cabinets and we had 10 hours on our schedule. 40 bucks an hour or so for my carpenter.

And I've got this 400 labor budget for these cabinets. But really what I really need, Freddy, is I really need those cabinets done in one day.

It's a schedule problem if you just be done at the end of the eight hour day instead of bleeding into the next day. The way I can stack my trades just work better. The team and you say, guys, get 10 hours in here, I'll give you the whole 10 hours of money.

I just need it done in one day. Turns out they can do it in six and a half hours. I guess I'm a bad manager. I don't know. Maybe I don't know what I'm doing with a hammer and a level.

But there is, there's opportunity in this, right? And so you start peeling this onion back. And we discovered that what I shared earlier were some of the keys to getting an incentive program to work.

So we were growing a lot. So we couldn't do this in Excel. We needed a system to manage it. Tried to find something on the market to buy. I don't want to build.

Somebody must have built an incentive management tool for hourly workers. It's half the US Population, for God's sake. The workforce paid by the hour. Nobody built this for it. Didn't exist. Doesn't still.

We're still the only one with an incentive platform for hourly workers. So we outside of like rewards and tickets and points kind of things, we built it and it was a mess and barely worked. And we built it again.

It worked better. Finally we were like, we're really onto something. It moved the needle for us.

We had peers that wanted to use it, people we knew gave it away for a while, see if we could get other people who had the same success. So we actually built a version for the market and spun the whole thing out into its own company. What a journey that's been.

Freddy D: 00:26:47

So tell us a little bit about how does it work? What does it do?

Michael Fontinberry: 00:26:49

Our fundamental construct starts with your labor budget, because that's how much I thought I was going to spend when I bid the job. You could maybe look at it as, how much does it cost me to produce a unit?

Whatever it is I'm doing after my budget, that's how much value I have in the labor associated with that work. Pull all that into our software.

From their operating systems integrations that we have, then we are tracking how much time you actually use to do that, to produce that unit or to finish that project or that part of the job or whatever it is.

What we do on our app is we show the crew in the field that budget, and we show them how much time they've used, and we let them use a little calculator to forecast what they'll make if. And so all of a sudden, now you get a conversation going with the crew lead and the supervisor, and the crew says, wait a second.

We've got: 2000

Instead, with our crew, big team we got here, we share the savings, and they can see personally what it's worth for them. We have gamified that labor budget to be their money.

And they learn, they're going to learn the hard way if they're not careful that if you don't do the job, that money bonus money is going away. Okay? So we got to do the job right, quality, and we got to finish ahead of budget. But we think we can. The truth is, we know they have another gear.

Everybody out there listening as I'm telling you right now, your crew has another gear. They are capable of more. They just have to want to. Now, how much more? I don't know. You tell me.

Look at your very best employees and compare them to your average. Tell me what the difference is, and that's how much more they're capable of. In fact, probably even a percent or two better than that.

So what we did is we unlocked that gap. We brought this whole middle universe of workers up because it now mattered.

They became extrinsically motivated by the money, frankly, where their best crews were intrinsically motivated. Good luck. If you can find enough of them in the world, you can. You don't need my program.

But if you have this bunch of extrinsically motivated people who like to make more money, they come in your office, right? Freddie, man, I need to get raised, okay? If I give you raise, the only thing that happens is my Costs go up. So how do I get you to do more? Right.

If I give you a raise, you don't do anything different the next day except tell your wife you get a raise. So how do I get you to do more for that raise? The concept of raises have gone away in our company. You want to make more money, just get more done.

And they'll find a way. Some creative SOBs out there, they will find a way to get it done better.

They have come up with ideas that I would have never come up with on how to be more productive.

Freddy D: 00:29:33

You've empowered them to think differently.

It's one of the things that I've learned over the years in managing teams is sometimes if you just empower them, they will surprise you with the ways they come up with ideas to handle stuff probably 10 times better than you would because they're in the trenches and they've been dying to be able to say, this approach is horrible. This is a better way of doing it. And so you get yourself out of your own way as the leader.

Once you empower a team, it's a game changer because now they feel good about themselves emotionally and it just transcends to everybody.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:30:13

Yeah, it's exactly as you described it. It can roll through an organization. It becomes empowering. There is a moment where they take that ownership and they run with it again.

I think I said earlier, you get this free brain. Now look, sometimes they're going to come into your office and be like, oh, boss, I got an idea.

You just give me a rocket ship, I'll get this earlier. Not every idea they come in with is the best idea. Good lord. They're thinking, they're trying and you're already winning.

The minute that they are thinking they're going to solve a problem, you're going to never even know that you had. Something's going to happen at that job site and they're going to fix it without you ever being aware. It just build, build.

And those materials aren't there on time. One, they're on the phone immediately letting someone know, hey, we need our stuff. Two, they're finding something productive to do. They just will.

I had this client, I thought it was a great example. He's a landscaping company and it's a little his office block or so away from the shop and guys are to get to the shop at 7.

They're supposed to be out of the shop by 7:30.

And he used to roll down there about 8 and kick the rest of them out because they'd still be Hanging around the coffee machine and get him out there and start mowing lawns or whatever. But he pivoted over. He told me this true story. He said about two weeks later, he gets down there to the shop at 8 o', clock, there's nobody there.

Next day he comes in at 7:45, there's nobody there. One day he goes down there, it's 7:30. He told me it's 7:33. I just remember the number. He said, there's nobody there. He said they're just.

He said it's their money, man. They're out. They do not waste time in the shop anymore. That was amazing. It happened fast because it sunk in. He dove into it culturally.

He made it a big deal. This is how you guys are going to make more money. Quit asking me for a raise. You want to raise? Let's get more done. We all make more money.

Freddy D: 00:32:07

It's a complete win. Win. Nobody loses on that approach. I'm going to go back to what I was saying is you've really recognizing people. You're empowering people.

And you'll be surprised as we just talk of what they'll do.

And more importantly, when they go out to the job site, their mindset's completely different and their attitude's completely different because now they feel good.

And that transcends to the people that they're engaging, whether it's a general contractor, a complimentary business, whatever it is, that whole engagement is different.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:32:47

An important piece for everybody to recognize is that when you start down a road like this, it is a cultural transformation. It is not a software thing. It's not even the money that's a piece of the equation. It is how you dive into it culturally.

You have to build financial literacy, especially among your crew leads. Right.

They need to be able to understand how to talk about budgets and talk about the translation of the number of hours and days we're on this job or the number of units we produce on the line. They got to be able to translate that to money. And they will do that on the fly with guys who are asking questions.

They've got to be able to understand the linkage between quality issues and cost and how important attention and detail is in the execution of delivery of the service or product. So those things, you've got to raise your financial literacy bar. I know a lot of people rolling their eyes thinking, yeah, you haven't met my guys.

If they could count, they wouldn't be working here. You're going to have to lean into that man, I hate to break it to you.

But that is a price of admission to a culture where everybody cares about the numbers is to get them to understand the numbers. So bite the bullet and educate them, teach them, spend some time with them on what our budgets look like. How do we actually make money as a company?

I'm going to show you guys how we make money.

Freddy D: 00:34:02

Sure.

Freddy D: 00:34:02

Share a story. How you implemented this into your organization and how transformative was it and what was the outcome?

Michael Fontinberry: 00:34:12

We have a client. He's an industrial painting company. They do they paint like chemical plants, technical painting.

And I like this example because it was a very nothing else changed kind of thing. He's got a pretty talented team of people. This is not Bob's painting.

This is a company that's used to applying technical materials on sophisticated environments. You know, safety things. A lot of his stuff moving around here without changing anything else in his business.

He was able to drive 7% to his bottom line. 7. That's a big number. Like that is a game changing number for.

And it was almost a direct translation out of his increase in productivity allowed him to sell more with the team he had. And his overall profitability went up because labor costs came down a little because of the way he set up his bonus pool.

And the translation of that fell straight to the bottom line because there was nothing else in the way from a COGS or GNA standpoint to get that money into profitability. I thought that was good because it was a very specific thing where he just leaned into the culture side, got his guys wired in.

These are projects the last couple of months kind of thing. It's with a decent sized crew of people. Got them really buying into the objectives of the project.

Dove into the financial literacy, made it his culture. We're not going back. This is our future. If you're not on board with this, work somewhere else. And got his crew leaders involved in it.

So it was a really well executed implementation from his side that translation into financial performance. Very impressive. So I don't know that everybody's going to pull seven points of net in EBITDA out of it. We know there's another gear. Yeah.

Freddy D: 00:36:07

And so he's a super fan of your platform because you guys helped transform that company completely.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:36:15

Never stop. Completely changed the trajectory of their growth and the opportunity we have for companies that are struggling.

Especially if you've got shortage of skilled labor, which is about 8% shortage of skilled labor in the US right now. I don't think that's going to get any better. So you're looking to how do I get more from the team I have.

If I can give you a 10% lift in productivity, then you don't worry anymore about the 8% of people you don't have. This solved. The US shortage of skilled labor.

Freddy D: 00:36:45

How does it work? Let's get into real quickly, how does the software actually work?

See that there's a couple things you can create your own incentives and company culture and multitude of other things. Talk a little bit about the platform in itself.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:36:58

The integrations are important. So we integrate into the software systems that companies are already using. So we're integrating into your estimating tools.

If you've got using like a Procore or Aspire Service Titan, these different systems are being used by trade contractors.

So integrating into those platforms so that we have your budgets and then also into wherever you're tracking time, which is sometimes the same system, sometimes something different. So we're going to pull your time tracking data. And so two sides of the equation have budget and have actual now within prodiv.

And then what is created from that is what we call a pro pay. The pro pay is simply the goal for the team and that is shown to the crew on our app.

So the crew has on their app the job information and all the details about the job, the budget, the actual.

Once they start spending money on it and they can see and set a goal, it's got a little calculator in there where they can say, we think we can do this job in 10% faster or 100 hours faster, 10 minutes faster, whatever they want to put in. And what that does is then tracks how they're doing against that and keeps them updated in real time.

Creates a statement for the crew to be able to see exactly what their bonus is that they are making. If they get behind on the job, it's showing them what they need to do to get back up. It does production tracking.

So I can see at the end of the day, the crew leader is saying, we finished 50% of this and 100% of that and 10% of this. So we know what percentage of work is actually completed, which is usually new information.

For a lot of contractors, they often know at the end of the week maybe how far along they are, but we get daily production tracking because I want to be able to tell the crew every day in the app exactly how they're doing against the bonus goals that they set. They want to keep their mind engaged on the budget, keep their mind engaged on and on the objectives.

Now at the end of the project you can have policies wrapped around how bonuses are distributed, prorated to who worked on the job based on wage rates. You can create different pools based.

If we save a dollar, how are we splitting up the dollar between the company, the crew, management, whatever you want to set aside some money for the annual holiday party, create a pool for that. Whatever you want to do. So this little. The engine essentially a set of settings.

And the crew sees a statement on their phone where they know exactly how they performed on every job for that week or month or whenever you want to pay bonuses. And they can say, now I understand exactly why I made $75 a bonus or 500 bonus because I can review the calculations for every job that I was on.

It's very transparent. That is. It's really not much more complicated than that budget. Actual, what did we save? Share it with the crew in the field.

Track how we're doing along the way.

Freddy D: 00:39:45

Mentioned you also had gamification in there. So I'll talk about a little bit about that.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:39:50

So when you gamify something, some people think that means I'm going to pop. You hit the little buttons and it's a fun. It's a bubble popping thing.

Now gamification is a term that makes me want to come back to something to see how it's going and am I winning? And so what we've done is we've gamified the labor budget. And so what I've done is I've made it.

I want to come back to the app and see if I am winning against the labor budget because we make it fun. It's got the bright screens and it's got gold coins stacked up on there. Good job. You're making money. It's like kind of fun. It's engaging.

I want to know I'm making money. It's shareable. You can share with your team.

I tell people all the time, if your crew is making money, you need to tell all the other crews you're making money in case they're not. Because then you can tell me back to the shop, sorry, you guys ain't making money. We are. Be proud of that. We put it up on TV screens.

Here are the biggest bonuses being paid. Make one of those big checks. Big checks and hand it out. Good job, Bob. You guys made a big bonus check this week.

Our software ranks everybody on everything. Efficiency, productivity, revenue created per hour, bonuses paid. We rank your crews.

We have all these dashboards that show who's winning in your company. I want to know what worker creates the most Revenue per hour.

Freddy D: 00:41:12

For me, what you're mentioning there is, it's one things I've talked about in the past, and I'll bring it up again, is it's one thing to say, hey Michael, great project, great work on that project. Super excited, you knocked it out of the ballpark. Yeah, you feel good.

Freddy D: 00:41:29

It's another thing to say, hey team.

Freddy D: 00:41:31

I want to take a moment to recognize Michael on the fact that he really killed it on this particular project and because of him, blah blah, blah, happen. Changes the whole dynamics. And that's exactly what you're doing with the gamification because they can see that.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:41:44

On their phone, they can share it with their teammates, they're ranked right. They get a first place badge when they're top of whatever list. You want to know where you're at. You want to see how's my score?

We are actually going to build something called, we call it the pro score. And we're working through what that's going to look like right now. But effectively it's going to be your score relative to the industry.

So imagine if you are a plumber or a commercial electrician or whatever your trade is, or you work at a line, you're a CNC operator, whatever your, your ability to score yourself and be able to go to the market when you're looking for a job and say, this is my score, this is how good I am at my job. And it's. And here's the list of all the kinds of work that I've done. And here's the job that brought in under budget the kind of work it was like a.

Think of it as like a resume for a blue collar guy.

Freddy D: 00:42:41

Imagine he's going to have attitude, they're going to have attitude.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:42:45

I'm a winner, man. I take pride in what I do, my trade, my craft.

Freddy D: 00:42:49

That changes everything.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:42:50

I'm gonna own this because I hate to break it to you, you just went to law school, man, you just burned a bunch of money. You should have been a plumber because lawyers are going away and plumbers are going to own the world.

It is just a future that we're going to deal with is we're going to have people who don't have a path forward because they spent too much time in college. And look, I went to college burning. Everybody went to college.

But the reality is if you want a job in a new AI world, I hope you could work with your hands. There's something to it. And so I want these guys to take some pride in that. You can do stuff, you can fix things and most people can't.

I meet people all the time. Like how do you fix that? I don't know. Take it apart and see what's wrong with it.

Freddy D: 00:43:30

I've remodeled my own apartment buildings, I've remodeled houses and all that stuff. So I understand exactly what you're talking about fixed up.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:43:40

And so the people who can fix things and build things are going to be more and more in demand. The path from 18 years old to multimillionaire status today runs faster through the trades than almost any other space.

Unless you happen to be a super gifted AI developer or you get lucky enough to get picked up by Goldman Sachs. And even that I think is suspect changing.

So I think your path to being a multi millionaire, starting a plumbing company or a landscaping company or a trade contracting business of any kind. Be smart, learn your numbers, get a good business coach, get out there, get a good coach and win.

Freddy D: 00:44:21

You want to create superfans all the way. That's your marketing engine. So as we come to the end here, Michael, great conversation. How can people find you and how can people find the platform?

Michael Fontinberry: 00:44:31

Protiv.com Pro T I V Pretty simple. That's our website. You can learn about us there. My email, michaelrotive.com you can get me on LinkedIn. Happy to talk to you.

People used building a contract company. We just want to understand company culture, anything like that. I'll talk to you about that if you want.

You want to talk about performance, pay whether you use our system or not. Happy to talk to you about it. We're a pretty low pressure sales organization. I want people to win.

I know if they win, we're, you know, good chance to be part of that journey for them. So how can I help people to win and whatever stage they're in? We've got clients who have thousands of employees. We got clients.

I literally had a guy today. He's got one guy and one guy and he wants to grow and he wants to buy my system because he thinks that's the way to grow.

All right, help him get there.

Freddy D: 00:45:21

Great conversation, great insight for our listeners about really leveraging and leveling up your our lead team because at the end of the day they're what makes it all happen. And thanks so much for your time, Michael and definitely would love to have you on the show down the road again.

Michael Fontinberry: 00:45:39

We'll keep you updated on our journey. Very grateful for you and what you're building. I love the whole construct the superfan model, how we win. Fanatical customers, fanatical employees.

I love it.

Freddy D: 00:45:49

Thank you.

Freddy D: 00:45:52

All right. What a practical conversation with Michael Fortenberry. The big takeaway Hourly teams don't need more pep talks. They need alignment.

When your pay structure rewards time instead of outcomes, you get exactly what you incentivize.

But when you make incentives simple, transparent and frequent, people start thinking like owners, protecting quality, pushing productivity, and even holding each other accountable. That's how you build a culture where the field cares when management drops the ball because everyone's winning or losing together.

And that's why I keep preaching it. Your people are your first superfans. Build them and customers will feel it. If this episode brought you value, leave a quick 5 star review.

It helps other service based business owners discover the show. And if you're ready to stop listening and start activating, join the Entrepreneur Prosperity Hub on Skool. Completely free.

The moment you join, you'll be surrounded by other service based entrepreneurs who are leveling up their people, processes and profitability so they can finally step into true prosperity. Join us here at school s k o o l.come Prosperity Hub.

Inside, you'll get access to conversations, tools and weekly growth plays to help you shift from doing everything yourself to leading a business that works smoothly, predictably and profitably. I appreciate you spending time with us. You're not just listening, you're investing in your business, your team and your future.

That's what being on a Business Superfans mission is all about.

Intro/Outro: 00:47:43

We hope you took away some useful knowledge from today's episode of the Business Superfans Podcast. Join us on the next episode as we continue guiding you on your journey to achieve flourishing success in business.