A contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. And welcome to the Hammer and Grind podcast, the podcast built for contractors to help maximize profits and get you off the tools before burnout or bankruptcy happens. I'm your host, Brad Hebner, and I'm here to help you on your journey to self-mastery. Make sure you check us out on our social media platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast and you'll be able to find me there. Consider joining my free Facebook group called the Contract Your Profit Blueprint. I created this free group to give you as much information as possible to help you in your business. I go live in there once a week, tons of content to help you in your business. Now, if you want to accelerate the success, consider joining my paid coaching group called The Profit Club. In there is a great community of contractors all willing to share information and help each other succeed, as well as hundreds of hours of training, coaching calls, everything you need to accelerate your business. If you want to learn more about that, you can find out more information on hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club, or just send me a message and I'll be happy to share that with you. Now, let's get on to the show. All right, welcome back to the Hammer and Grind podcast. This is episode 101. It's hard to believe we are over 100 episodes in, coming up on two years in the podcasting world. I've only missed two weeks in the past two years. I've only missed two episodes. In other words, two weeks of podcasting. It's a pretty good record. I ain't gonna lie, it's a lot of work to put these podcasts on. But I get a lot of feedback from you guys, and I appreciate all of that. And if you could do me a favor at the end, just go to your favorite podcasting platform, whatever you're listening on right now. Just go and leave a review, an honest review. I'm not trying to persuade you into leaving me a five-star review. Just leave an honest review. That's all I ask for. I think that's a very low favor to ask of you for the value that I put in these podcasts. So do me a solid if you would, and leave me a review on your favorite. podcasting platform. Now, this is going to be a good episode. So I hope you stick through the end because there's going to be a lot of content in here. This is actually training that I have in my programs. This is training, sales training that I have in my programs. So you're getting access to stuff that people pay for. So this is good, solid, helpful advice. And I want you to listen very clearly. And I want you to listen and apply this in your business. Because if you do this, this This one thing could potentially change the outcome of your sales. So what do we do? How do we win more jobs? How do we increase our sales closing rates? Well, here's the thing that you need to understand about sales. Most of us believe that as long as we handle the three main objections, two really, two top ones, and there's kind of a third one there. But the two top objections are going to be price and time, right? Price, meaning what's it going to cost. Time is like, how far booked out are you? Is it going to be six months from now? I need it done in two weeks. Okay, we can't help you. Those are the two main objections that almost every single person who's ever had a sales call with a customer knows that those are the most common objections, right? And so we know that we can't really help the time. objection too much. I mean, there's a few things you might be able to do to try to work it into their schedule, but if they need it done right away and you're booked out, it's just not going to happen, right? That is a deal killer for sure. The price one is one that most of us get wrong. I mean, we just totally get the price one wrong. But before I get into that, I want to go to the third one that we hear a lot of, which is the spouse. They have a spouse or a partner that you have to basically convince. One of them wants the work done. They like your price time. The other one doesn't. And so we have this spouse that we have to try and convince. And so those are like the three main objections that we come across with customers, right? I think most of you would agree with that. You're probably nodding your head or saying yes to yourself right now. The problem is, is that that is not even like remotely close to how many objections that clients have. Those are just the three that we identify with. Your clients have way more objections than that, but they don't call objections. A lot of times they call them concerns. They have concerns about things of their project. They have concerns about you as the contractor. They have concerns about your ability to do the work. Okay. And so this is why it's important to understand. that what you're trying to solve the problem for, which is price, time, and spouse, is that that is not really the full scope. You're only solving maybe 25% of their total concerns. Now, don't get me wrong. Price is one of the biggest ones. It's not the biggest one, but it is one of the biggest one, and time is also one of the biggest ones. But for most people, price usually is about third on their list. And time is usually about two on their list. But we know a lot of contractors, we believe it's price. It's all about price. Price, price, price, price, price. I got to be competitive. Everybody else out there is doing it for half price. I can't raise my prices, Brad, because everyone else is cheaper than me. That's all BS. It's all head trash. It's a limiting belief that you have. It's fixed beliefs that you have around something that is absolutely not true. And I know this. because I've experienced it in my own business and I teach contractors how to do this every single day and they do it with success. But you've never had official sales training. You've never done anything to improve yourself, but you know, I mean, you are the expert and know that that is what's most important. Bullcrap. Bullcrap. That's your pride and ego right there. All right, I digress. Let me do some deep breaths here to try to calm myself down. I promised I wasn't going to get fired up on this one. I can't help it. I can't help it. I get fired up because I'm passionate about this and I get the most pushback about this. And it's stupid. Like it's probably the most stupid thing to argue about. And yet it's the one thing that keeps contractors broke. All right. Re-center. Okay, I'm back. So here's some beliefs that we also have about sales. We believe because, you know, we got to go in front of him. I posted a TikTok the other day, last week, and it was about going out and doing free estimates and all this. And somebody wanted to argue with me about how, you know, he's got to get in front of him. Man, if I get in front of him, I'll close them. They love me. My close rate's 90%. If I get in front of him, I'm like, yeah, one, you're probably too cheap. If you're closing 90% of the jobs that you get, even if you are the best in your town, you're too cheap. Like right off the bat, you're too cheap. You should not be closing 90% of your jobs. That's one thing. The second thing is it's all, it's just bullcrap. It's bullcrap. It's bullcrap. It's BS. It really is. And so they want to argue with me about this all the freaking time. Yet they've never tried anything else. They've never tried to do anything else. But they know for a fact that this is the only way that works. So the saying that they like to hang their hat on is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, I like the Japanese version of it, which is, if it ain't broke, it's outdated. So just because it's worked for the last 20 years,50 years,100 years, doesn't mean that going forward with new technology, new ways, new demands on people, that that's always going to work. If that's the case, then we would still be riding horses everywhere. We wouldn't have vehicles and airplanes. We would just ride horses because why fix it? Horses work, right? So it's this limited belief that we put on ourselves as to, oh, I can't try something new. No, I can't do that because this has worked for so long. Why would I want to save 10 to 20 more hours a week of my time, Brad? Why would I want to be able to save 20 hours a week when I can just go out and get in front of them and close people? I mean, why would I want to save 20 hours? I love wasting all my free time. I love it. It's just the cost of doing business. You know, you just put that in your overhead and you penalize the ones that do hire you. You just make them pay for the ones that don't hire you. That's how you do it. That's the way you run a business. Bull crap. That's the way you stay broke. That's the way you stay small. And that's the way you don't grow. It's the way you just stay in your broke mindset. By the way, if you're listening to this right now and you're broke, you're a broke contractor. The reason why you're broke is because your mindset is broke. You have a broke mindset, which equals broke pocketbook. That's a direct correlation,100%. So if you're tired of being broke, then you have to change your mindset. It's not a hiring issue, I promise you. It's not an economy issue. It's none of that. It's you. It's a you issue. It is a broke mindset issue. Man, we've gone way off the path here. We've gone way, way off the path. I'm going to bring it back. I promise. One more deep breath. Okay. I'm done with that. All right. So what do most contractors believe when they talk to people? They believe that the longer they talk to them, the more time they spend with them, the higher the probability that they're going to get the sale. So if I go to their house and I spend an hour or two hours talking to them and we build all this rapport and they really love me and we find out that our kids go to the same school and they're on the same t-ball team and everybody's all jamming together and they love each other, then that is an indicator that I'm going to get this job. The more time that we spend, the more connection we have, the higher probability that I'm going to get this job. And that's not true. The more time you spend with someone does not indicate that you're going to be closer to closing the job. It's simply not true. So what I'm talking about today, and finally getting into it, is what I call the yes staircase. Now, I did not come up with this principle, but I did come up with this name and this analogy of how to apply it. So the yes staircase is simply the way you connect with your clients. through a series of yeses. And you build a staircase to the next floor. So for those of you that are listening, I want you to picture a staircase in a house. You have a first floor and a second floor. And the object is to get to the second floor, right? I want to go upstairs. So for me, I want to get to the second floor. For you as a salesman, Your object is to get the client to the second floor. That's winning. That's winning the sale when they get to the second floor. So you have a staircase to get you there. But you have to build the staircase. When they call you, they're standing on the first floor and all they see is a wall straight up to the second floor and they don't know how to get up there. They have no way to get to the second floor, which is ultimately winning or selling the job. Now, some of these things can be answered through your website. and through marketing efforts. And by the way, the stronger your marketing and branding is, the easier it is to sell. Because if you answer all of these concerns ahead of time through your marketing efforts, then when you get on the phone with them, you're only connecting the last few steps. And it'll make sense here in a minute as I explain this. Okay. So we talked earlier about objections. Right. We have we identify two to three main objections. There may be some other ones like, you know, skill. Are you skilled enough to do this job? Do they like and trust you? Like, do you have reviews and people other people have hired you and recommend you like those can also be some objections. But the three main ones are price, time and spouse with the two being price and time. But those are objections that we identify. Your clients may have a whole slew of other concerns that they have. Now, we'll use the term concerns and expectations. Okay. So we call them objections, but to them, they're concerns and expectations. They may have expectations about how you're going to do something based on their experience with other contractors or based on their experience or your experience with one of their friends. So you do a job for their friend. And they, you know, they go to him and say, hey, Brad did this job for you. How was it? And the friend says, it was great. They did X, Y, and Z, and we loved it. And so if you don't produce that same expectation, that's where disappointment happens. This is also why I've talked about your brand promise. If you listen to episode 97, go back and listen to it if you didn't. But when you're talking about your brand promise, you have to make sure that you have consistency with your brand. Because if my client's neighbor recommended us because we did a job for their neighbor, and we don't live up to that same expectation, that is a disappointment. It doesn't matter how good of a job you do. If the neighbor says, we got X, Y, and Z, and you only deliver X and Y, they are disappointed. There's a certain level of disappointment there because you didn't meet that expectation. That's your brand promise. But when it comes to selling, your customers have expectations or concerns. All of them do. Every single person that ever calls you has expectations and concerns. Now, going forward on this podcast, I'm just going to call them all concerns. I'm not going to separate them as an expectation or a concern. I'm just going to label them as concerns. Your clients have concerns about certain things to them. And they're probably things that you've never in your entire life thought of unless you've experienced this with other clients. Now, what are some of those concerns that they may have? Well, they're unlimited. I mean, there can be hundreds of concerns that they have. But you won't know that unless you learn how to ask the right questions. You won't know that unless you learn how to use calibrated questions, how to employ tactical empathy, how to use labeling and mirroring to get more information out of them. If you don't know those things, if you don't even know what those things are, then you're already behind the power curve. You're already behind in your sales process. So what are concerns that they may have? And this is not an exhaustive list. This may only be 5% of them. Concerns. And these are not rated like one concern is going to be 80% of what's important to them and the other one's only 10%. You won't know what's what. There's no rating on these of one has more weight than the other unless you find out. So some of those concerns are going to be price and time and skill. They're going to have those for sure. Those are going to be concerns. But they may be concerned if you're licensed. Are you licensed, bonded, and insured or whatever your state requires? They've heard horror stories about contractors that came in and did work and they weren't licensed and then their house burnt down and then they lost everything because they couldn't sue the contractor and his insurance didn't cover it and blah, blah, blah, blah. They've heard horror stories. So they have lots of concerns around being licensed, bonded, insured. They have concerns around pulling permits. Now, I've done jobs where I didn't pull permits and I've done jobs where I did pull permits. And there's times where I should have pulled permits, but simply didn't. And there's times where I pulled permits for the dumbest thing that really there shouldn't even be a permit for. Right. So this is not necessarily like you always have to pull permits 100 percent of the time. That's not what I'm saying to you. What I'm saying is that they may have concerns around whether or not it's a permit is required. Maybe it's not required in your state. city or county, but they may have concerns about that. If they believe, if they talk to a neighbor about their project, maybe they, I'm trying to think of a scenario. Let's say they want to build a deck. And I always see this on Facebook groups. It cracks me up because somebody will like, somebody in New York City will ask a question about, do I need permits? And somebody in rural Louisiana will say, no, you don't need permits. Oh, okay. Great. Thanks. Dude, it's completely dependent upon your county and your city and your state. Every single one of them are different. Where I live, the major city, you have to have permits for everything. I call them permit Nazis because they're like, they want your money. They want permits for everything. One county over where I live, which is not even 10 miles away, like 10 miles and you're into the city. They don't give a crap. As long as you have insurance and you have an actual legitimate business, they don't give a crap what you pull permits on or whether you're licensed. It just depends. It completely depends. But if their neighbor says, hey, do I need a permit for my deck? And he says, yeah, you do. And maybe you don't. Maybe your county or whatever you live doesn't require a permit for a deck. But they're convinced that they need to pull a permit. And you come in and say, no, you don't need to pull permits. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe you say you do need to pull permits and the neighbor said you don't. You're going to have a clash there of like, they might believe you're lying to them. Right? But if you've never addressed that and they don't bring it up. And then after you like get ready to sign the contract and they go, oh, by the way, are you pulling permits on this job? And you say, no, it's not required. Wait a minute. That's not what I heard. It's a red flag. Right? That's just a... basic example they may have concerns of you making dirt in their house making their house dirty i remember one time i had my ducts cleaned when my wife and i bought this house we bought it on a short sale and i remodeled the whole house over several years but once we got the majority of the remodel done we had our ducts cleaned out because we knew you know there was just dust and stuff we weren't living there the house was vacant so i wasn't worried about protecting the you know protecting everything So we knew we had dust in the vents. We hired a company to come out and clean the ducts. And when they got there, I was like taking them around the rooms. I said, here's the vents, here's the vents, here's the vents, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, I didn't tell them. I didn't specifically tell them that there was a return air vent in the kitchen up high on the wall. I assumed that they would know that they're supposed to go and check. Apparently, they just relied on me to tell them where every single vent was in the house. So when I got home that day from them cleaning, there was like an eighth inch thick layer of dust in our entire kitchen was covered because they didn't block off the return air vent when they were blowing the air through the vent. That was a concern. Like I'll never hire that company again. And we haven't because of that one little thing. That was an experience I had, which was a bad experience. And so it was a concern of mine. So when we had our ducks cleaned last year again, I asked the company specifically, do you go around and check all the vents? Like I can show you where the majority of them are, but will you go in and check it? And they go, oh yeah, for sure. We'll definitely go in and check everything in the room. Why would I say that? Because I had a bad experience in the past and now it's a concern of mine. I don't want to have that same experience. It can be just plain old dirt. If you're going in a remodel in a bathroom and you're doing demo and you don't set up plastic everywhere. You don't set up dust containment. They're going to get dust in their house. Some of you don't do that. Why? I don't know. You should be. That's a value add. But that could be a concern of theirs. Are you going to make dust? How are you going to control the dust? They may have concerns about animals. We did a job one time and our fault for not making sure, but they had a cat and they were just like, you know, the cat's fine. If it gets outside, no big deal. but try to keep it in the house if you can. We're like, okay, cool. We try our best to keep it in the house, but sometimes when you're going in and out of the front door a hundred times, the door doesn't close all the way. The wind blows it open. You're out of the trailer for five minutes looking for something. Something similar that happened. The door was open and we saw the cat run out into the yard. We're like, okay, crap. We spent like 20 minutes trying to get this stupid cat back in the house. Couldn't get it in the house. We're getting ready to leave because it's at the end of the day. And I finally called the customers like, hey, the cat got out. And they're like, okay, no problem. I'll have our neighbor down the street come down and let them in. They know what to do. It wasn't like a major problem. But if that cat got out and got hit by a car or something, that would have been a big deal. So they may have had experiences with animals getting out, getting outside and getting ran over. When I was a little kid, I had a puppy. got a puppy. It was like, you know, eight weeks old. And then two weeks after we got it, it got ran over. I still traumatize about that. So like, I'm very, I get very stressed out about our dogs getting outside and running off. They don't want to get hit by a car because it was a traumatic experience for me as a kid. They may have concerns about that. They may have concerns about theft. Did a job one time when I was working for a company. I wasn't, I didn't, wasn't my company. I was working for a company. We hired a drywall finisher to come in to hang and finish drywall. And he had a kid working for him who had a history. And sure enough, while they were working there, the customer's phone disappeared. But of course he didn't take it. You know what I mean? Like he didn't do anything. It just happened to disappear the two hours they were there that day. So theft. They may have concerns of theft. They may be concerned about employees or subcontractors that you have. Are you doing the work yourself or do you use employees or do you have subcontractors? Do you trust them? I don't want somebody that's not going to be there. If you have a subcontractor, I want you to be there while they're there. Those may be concerns you have to address. Who has access to the house? Are you going to go, if I give you a key, are you going to go make 100 keys and give everybody access that can come back at any time and break in? That may be a concern. Do they have special needs kids? I did a job one time where they had two adult male special needs kids and we had to take extra precaution to handle that. But the concerns can go on forever, like nonstop. It could be the dumbest thing that you think is dumb, but to them is very critical and important. And the thing is, is that sometimes they might be embarrassed or they may think it's not that big a deal. So they don't ask you or they don't bring it up. But if you're not able to identify these things, it's going to hurt you in the sales process. And so how does this all play into the yes staircase? Well, we're back to the original scenario where you and the customer are standing on the first floor and you got to build the staircase to the second floor. So through calibrated questions, through labeling, through mirroring, through asking for permission, through all the techniques that we teach in the Sales Accelerator program, you're going to find out what's important to them, what concerns they have, what expectations they have. And every time that you're able to give them a solid yes, in other words, the concern is, are you licensed and insured? And you say, yes, we are. Boom, that's a check. They're checking it off of their list of concerns as meets the concern, meets the expectation. So you're giving them a yes. And every time you say yes, you build one step. So you've built the first riser and tread, the first step. Okay. The next time you're able to answer yes or check a concern off, we have animals. How do you guys, you know, how do you handle animals? Well, this is what we do. We do X, Y, and Z, and we ask you to do this so that your animals don't get scared or get lost. And they say, cool, that makes me feel better. Check. That's a yes. You just built another stair. Okay. And so every time that you're marking off or checking off these concerns, every time they're getting a yes, you're building this staircase. And the more yeses that you can check off, the higher the stairs go. And if you are able to check off every one of their yeses, you've effectively built a staircase to the second floor. They now have a path, a very clear and visible path to get from the first floor to the second floor without any objections or any concerns or any problems that they see. And so all they have to do now is walk up the staircase and then step on the second floor and hire you. This is the yes staircase. And if you understand this principle, you will be able to increase your sales drastically, like by tens and twenties of percentages. Okay. This is kind of a secret formula, if you will, secret principle. But most people never think about this. They think about the price and the time. And that may be all they care about. They may only care about price and time. And if you can match both of those, then you've built that staircase. But what happens when you don't check off all of their concerns? Well, you're not building a complete staircase. So maybe they have three concerns that you didn't check off. Whether you didn't know about them or you can't effectively check it, yes. Maybe they say, are you licensed? And you say no. Well, then you can't check that off as a yes. You can't build that staircase. You can't build that next step. So maybe you miss three or four concerns they have through the sales process. And so now there's a gap. Now the stairs is not built all the way to the second floor. You're four steps short of the second floor, which, you know, if you have a 10 to 12 inch tread. That's going to be like three to four feet away. If you know anything about stairs, which I hope you do because you're a contractor, but if you're three to four feet away because you're three to four yeses away, now you have a gap. You have a height gap and you have a width gap. You walk up the steps and now there's a gap. And so the only way you can get to the second floor is you have to jump. And that's what your customers have to do. When you put them in the situation where you're not able or don't understand or don't effectively check off all of their yeses, you force them to make the jump to the second floor. And the fewer yeses that you get, the longer the gap is. If you only build two steps and it's a 12-foot jump, they physically can't even make that, so they wouldn't even try. Those are the ones that just ghost you and never call you back. because you never even got close for them to be able to make that jump. Sometimes you get one step away and that's an easy like, oh, I can just step over that. Yeah, it would be great if they could do all of these, but man, we're so close and I really like them. So I'm okay to let this one concern go because it wasn't that big a deal and they've checked off everything else. Is this making sense? I want to know if it's making sense. Because this principle, if you understand this, is eye-opening. It can totally change the entire process. I want to take a quick break here and I want to talk about my coaching programs that I have currently. The Profit Club and the Sales Accelerator, those are my two flagship programs. The Profit Club is a complete foundational program where we are going to make sure that you're maxing out your profit. The reason why it's called the Profit Club... is because profit is the number one most important thing for your business to thrive and for you to have the kind of lifestyle that you want. So in the Profit Club, we teach you four main things. We fix your mindset, that broke mindset, the limiting beliefs, we get rid of it. The second thing is the profit blueprint. And that's where we make sure that your finances are aligned and you're getting the profit margins that you need. Make sure you're charging enough. Make sure you're... Labor burden is correct. Everything has to do with the finances. We make sure that's aligned. The third step is the profit sales system itself. And that's where we teach you all of the sales parts that you need in order to be an effective communicator. And then the last pillar is we make sure that we can scale your business. We help you with your systems. We help you with team building, leadership, all those things that are going to allow you to take your business and scale it once you have the other three things. in place. So that's what the Profit Club does. And my Sales Accelerator program is just sales only. Maybe you already have a solid business, but you just want to improve your sales process. You can even put your sales teams into the Sales Accelerator. It works for teams, employees, whoever. And that is a standalone program just for sales. You can find out information about both of those in the show notes or hit me up, go to the website. hammerandgrind. com, find out information. The Sales Accelerator, you can get information on that at contractorsalesaccelerator. com. The Profit Club, you can get information at hammerandgrind. com forward slash the Profit Club. Now back to the yes staircase. When you can build a staircase out, it becomes almost impossible for them to say no because you've given them a clear path to the end. You've shown them that you are a conscious contractor, that you're conscious about their concerns, that you understand what their concerns are. And you do this through effective communication. It's not an interrogation. When we're talking to people, when we're talking to clients, it's not an interrogation. We're not saying, okay, what every concern do you have? List out every concern that you have right now. List them out. I want to make sure I have every one of them. This Brad guy on the internet said, I got to say yes to every one of your concerns. So let me have them. Let me get all your concerns. It doesn't work like that, guys. People are naturally recluse. They don't want to tell you every single thing. It's just the nature of it. They're skeptical. People are skeptical, especially with so many scam artists, contractors that do crappy work. They're skeptical. And the way that you can get into this is through calibrated questions, which I've given out before. There's eight questions. Those are the eight main calibrated questions that we use, but there's lots of others that you can ask. But the real secret in that is how you use labeling and mirroring to follow up and get more in-depth information from them. You know, we may ask the question of like, you know, who else is excited about this project? And they may say, well, my spouse is really excited, but also my daughter. Oh, okay. What's got them excited about it? Well, my spouse, we've both wanted it for a long time. And my daughter, who's now seven, has dreamed about having a, let's say it's a pond, has always wanted to have a pond. And she's kind of gotten into fish a lot. She has fish in her room. She's got some goldfish and stuff. And she thinks she wants to go down to be a marine biologist. She's always, we got fish wallpaper and fish and fish and fish and fish and fish and all this. You find out that their daughter is handicapped. She's a wheelchair. How do you think that might affect the way you build out this pond for that family? Do you think it's going to be important that you have access for a wheelchair to get out to the pond? And maybe they wouldn't say that initially in the process. Maybe they wouldn't tell you that it's important that they have access for their... Maybe they don't even think to know to ask you, is there things that we need to do to make it accessible? They may not know that. But do you think that that's going to be important to them? That you think it's an important concern they may have about their daughter and their ability to have access, for her to have access in her wheelchair? 100%. 1,000% really. But if you didn't ask the question, a simple question of like, who else is excited about this project? They may have never told you. that their daughter was excited and that she was in a wheelchair. That may have never came up. But if all you care about is price and time, you are missing a huge portion of their concerns and expectations. And I want to say a word of caution to those of you whose phone's ringing off the hook right now. It's easy in a bull market when the phone's ringing off the hook to simply say, This is our price. This is our schedule. If you don't like it, take it and leave it. You know, leave it or whatever. Take it or leave it. It's easy to do that when you're winning. But at some point, you're not going to be winning. And you're going to burn all those bridges. So it takes very little effort to actually show compassion and empathy towards people that you can't even help. It takes very little effort. In my business, when my phone was ringing off the hook, I was getting 600 plus leads a year and it was hard to even get back to everybody because we were working hard. We were doing a lot of work and it was hard to keep up. I still made it a point, even if it was two weeks later, if someone called me up the message and said, hey, we need somebody to do X and we don't, let's say we don't do that service. It's just not one that we do. I wouldn't just blow them off. I wouldn't say, oh, that's a bad lead and I'm not going to call them back. I made it a point. Even if it was two weeks later to at least send them a message, a text, or call them and say, hey, I'm sorry it's taken so long. Just wanted to get back with you and let you know that we don't offer that service. But here's some people that might be able to help you. That one single thing plants seeds for them and everyone they know to get business in the future. You don't have to be a dick to people. I mean, you don't. You can be respectful to people. If that was your great grandmother or your grandma or your daughter and some contractor blew them off, you would be pissed. Yet for some reason, when we're busy, we just can't get to them all. It's not a good lead. I only care about the ones that want to pay us tons of money. That's it. I only want the ones that have a gazillion dollars and they say, yeah, come out and charge me whatever you want. Just get it done. That's the only clients that I want. If that's you, then I mean, I feel sorry for you, man. or female, whoever, male, woman. How do you say that? Man, woman. I feel sorry for you if that's you. There's fortune in the follow-up. I followed up with people from three months ago, three months prior, and they ended up hiring us. There's calling people, being normal, connecting with them, showing empathy, being compassionate. and understanding what their real concerns and expectations are, if you do that and you build that yes staircase, you will get the job nine out of 10 times over anyone else who's cheaper. Because I guarantee you, if they're cheaper, they're not even doing anything in that yes staircase. The people that actually care about building the yes staircase are the top contractors already because they invest in themselves. And they understand the value in being better at what they do. The people that are cheaper, that are affordable, they don't give a crap about getting better. They truly don't. The ones that come into my program who exceed and excel beyond my wildest dreams are the ones who are on a mission of self-mastery, which is where I started this podcast was about self-mastery. The very first podcast that we recorded, technically the second one is about self-mastery. And that's where we're at right now. So if you want self-mastery of your sales process, then use the yes staircase in your sales process and you will see a significant difference in your sales. That's all I got for today, guys. I appreciate you hanging out with me. Hopefully you use this in your business and get results. And if you do this, if you implement this and get results, I want you to come back and tell me. I want you to go and leave a review. I want you to shoot me a message. I want to hear back from you about your experiences with this. It's important for me to understand that it's working for you. I want you to win. I want you to have success in your business. This is not just me saying it, hoping that I can somehow make money. I genuinely want you to win in your business. And that's what a lot of other coaches can't say. There's a lot of other coaches out there who want to sell you a program, but they don't give a crap if you win or not. If you ask any of my clients, they will tell you, I truly want them to win. And I want you to win too. And I want you to tell me when you do win. You know where to find me on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, search for the Hammer and Grind podcast. Check out my free Facebook group, the Contractor Profit Blueprint. I'm going to be dropping a lot more training in that group over the next several weeks. So you're going to want to come in there and get that free training, get access to that, the Contractor Profit Blueprint. And remember, until next time, guys, profit is not a dirty word.
