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. 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. Today's episode, we're going to be talking about, you got too many leads? Do this instead. But before I get started, I want to let you guys know about this partnership I have with RPG Coffee. Definitely check them out. There should be a link in the show notes. This coffee is really, really good. I used to be an avid drinker of Black Rifle coffee. But once I started trying out the RPG coffee, it really just, I don't know. I like it a lot. Yeah, I'd take a drink there. And there's a, like I said, there's a, there's a link in the show notes that you can get access to that coffee. And one of the great things I love about RPG coffee, it stands for real people giving. And what they do is they give a percentage of their profits back to first responders, veteran communities, that type of stuff. So they really do give back. So check them out, guys. A really good coffee. have switched over everything to RPG. So now let's get started. You got too many leads. I've talked a lot about how to get leads because a lot of people struggle with trying to get leads. But after you've been in business for a while, after you've kind of figured out how to do some marketing, how to put some processes in there to help with SEO and all that stuff, once you've kind of got that all figured out, now you run into the problem of the phone's ringing too much, right? And how do you handle that? Now there's really two different problems here. There's a problem where you're getting too many leads and a majority of them are not good leads. And then you have the problem where you're getting too many leads and a majority of them are good leads. And that's a good problem to have. You want the problem where you have too many leads that are all good leads. Because if that's the case, that is a prime opportunity to raise your rates. If people are calling you and you're selling, you're getting 50%,60%,70% close rates and everybody that's calling in is hiring you, you raise your rates. That's a good thing to have. That's a good problem to have, I should say. And it's a good place to be. But what happens if you're getting too many leads that are not good leads? Well, you have to go through them all, right? So as we're transitioning our marketing, as we're getting laser focused on the type of customer avatar that we want to target, which is what you should be doing. If you haven't listened to any podcasts before, go back and search. Look for the ones I've talked about, How to Fish for Clients, episode 53. That's a good one. And there's a couple other ones I've talked about on marketing. I was trying to look here and see number 92,33 ways to market your business. Although that one really doesn't get specific on how to find the targeted market, targeted customer. But you want to be figuring out who your customer is, who your ideal, customer avatar is and then you do marketing specifically to those people. But what happens is, I don't care what you do in terms of marketing. If you start a business and you have good branding and your name gets out there, you're going to have people of all caliber that are calling you because they see that you're a professional business. They want you to do the work, but they just don't want to pay your rates because they don't have the money, they don't have the funds, or they're too cheap. And those people we want to weed through. It's not our responsibility to be affordable for everyone out there. It's our responsibility to make money, to make a profit for ourselves first, for our business and our family first, and then on to our employees as well. It's not our responsibility to be affordable for everyone, to be fair. I see all the time, just this morning, I was on Facebook. People, I want my prices to be fair and affordable. And I'm like, no, you don't. You don't want to be fair. You don't want to be affordable. You started a business to make money, not to give people jobs, not to help out the community. That's not the reason to start a business. You do that to start a nonprofit. If you want to help out your community and give back, start a nonprofit or donate money to charity. But don't become a charity yourself because you want to be fair and you want to be affordable. And you want to be a competitive and all these other words that people throw out there. I don't know how I always get fired up. I had no plans of talking about that on this podcast. I just get fired up. I need to stay off Facebook completely because that's where I get all these. I see all these contractors every day struggling, trying to figure stuff out. And guys, a lot of this stuff is super easy. But you want to spend the next three to five years banging your head against the wall. Because you're too cheap and you don't want to pay a professional to teach you how to do these things. Again, I wouldn't even plan on talking about that. I just get so frustrated because I talk to so many contractors on a regular basis that are struggling and they won't invest in themselves. You're only three to six months away from having a business that you want. You guys realize that? If you're listening or watching this, you're three to six months away from having the business you've always dreamed of. But you're two to three years away from getting over your ego and realizing that you need help to get there. Or you're turning down $100,000 to $500,000 worth of lost opportunity profits during that two to three years because you don't want to spend a few thousand dollars on coaching. It just blows my mind. Seriously, I don't get it. I don't understand it. I've spent almost $50,000 on coaching myself in the last two years. And I plan to spend another $50,000 to $100,000 on coaching because that's the shortest way to success. You guys listen to these podcasts and I appreciate the audience. I appreciate... I get people messaging me all the time and say, Hey, listen to your podcast. I took your advice and now my business is doing well. I'm making more money. That's awesome. Like that's what I want is these podcasts are to get people that take action to take the proper action and then have success with it. But the ones that listen to this podcast and then don't take action and then message me about they can't figure it out. It's because you don't you're not interested in getting better. You're simply interested in staying status quo. I don't know how I don't even know how we got here, guys. I apologize. Let me take another drink of my coffee. I don't even know how we got on this tangent. This was not even on the topics. It wasn't even on my mind. I just get so fired up. I see so many good contractors going out of business, failing, struggling. It just blows my mind. I just don't understand it at all. I don't get it. Somebody please tell me. Message me. Let me know why you like being stuck in your business. Tell me the reasoning behind why you enjoy it. I want to find out. Back to leads. You can't see me if you're listening, but I'm like shaking my head. I'm just so... I can't even fathom it. Back to leads. You got too many bad leads. If you got too many bad leads, you need to get targeted in marketing. You need to figure out who your avatar is, get laser specific and go after those people. But here's what you can do. Especially if you're a smaller... Maybe you're still on the tools. Maybe you have two or three employees and you are the lead man. Maybe you're the project manager. Maybe you're off the tools. I don't know your situation. But not everybody has sales teams. It's easy for these so-called gurus out there that want to take you from six figures to 27 figures in six months. And what they do is they just hire sales teams and they subcontract everything. And they just want you to become this big general contractor, which there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with growing a business that way, but that is not realistic for most contractors. Most contractors are lifestyle contractors who are smaller, who just want to make a good living, want to make $100,000, $200,000 a year of take-home, have a business that they can create, build houses and make things and remodel and be proud of it. And they want to have a business that works, right? And that is most of the time they don't have salesmen. Some companies may have one salesman or whatever, that's fine. But most of my audience that I know are, they're doing their own sales. And so when you have too many leads coming in, it can be overwhelming because now you're trying to do everything else and handle the number of leads that are coming in. And I know this firsthand because we were averaging 600 plus leads a year. We were doing... between two and 300 jobs a year towards the end. And it's a lot. And I did that with four employees and one office person. So there's only six of us total. And I was doing all the sales as well as the project management. So I understand what busy is. And that's part of the reason why I came about this. Creating this program was based on my own experiences and what I had to do to be able to figure out how to quickly triage people and see if they're qualified or not. So regardless of which situation you're in, whether you're getting a lot of quality leads or a lot of bad leads, but you're getting too many leads, the simple answer is you put more friction in the sales process. So what does that mean exactly? Well, if you like say right now, you answer the phone. Like every time someone calls, you're answering the phone. Maybe you don't even have a form on your website. I don't know. You should absolutely have a form on your website. But what I did in my business was if I had to be out in the field, if I was meeting with a customer, if I was doing sales calls, whatever, I can't always answer the phone. So my voicemail message simply said, basically, it was like, thank you for calling. Fortunately, we're not able to help you. I don't remember exactly how I said it, but it might have been like, we may be helping another customer. Something to the effect of we're helping someone else. If you would like quicker service, you can visit us online and fill out a work request. So I'm selling it as a quicker way to get in touch is to go to the website because I want to filter people through my website. My website does all the selling for me. It does the filtering, the talking, all that for me. And so if somebody is calling me who's cheap, doesn't want to pay my rates, I still have to talk to that person. And it may only be a five-minute call, but it's still one more call I have to do every single day. But if I can filter them to my website and put them through my funnel there, it's going to self-eliminate. Because on my form, because I was getting too many leads, it was a very long form. It was like, I don't even remember, like 10. It was like 10 or 12 blanks you had to fill in, your name, your address, your phone number, your email. Do you get texts? How did you find out about us? What is your time frame for getting this work done? Give us a basic description of the work you want done. Upload pictures, like all of these things. And those were all required, except the pictures weren't required. But I had all of these more questions that I would ask. How did you find out about us? And they were all required. And so if someone wasn't willing to fill out that form, they've essentially pre-qualified themselves as a good lead because they're impatient. Now, will you lose good leads and good people because of that? Yes, you will. But again, remember, we're getting too many leads, right? So it's okay if we're losing a few good leads as long as we're keeping the pipeline full. The more friction you put between you and the customer, the more it's going to weed out these people. There's some other options that we'll get into here. But like with the form, the last year,2021, the last four years I was in business, we had over 600 and something people visited the landing page where my form is on my website because I can track this stuff. So I had over 600 people went to that website, meaning they went to the form. Whether they were going to fill it out or not, I don't know. But I only had about less than 300 people actually filled it out. And that's just going to my website. That doesn't include Facebook messaging and phone calls and all that. That's just people that went to the website. So if I look at that, it tells me that that process alone weeded out 50% of the leads. And again, remember, we have too many leads. This isn't a problem of filling a schedule or making money. It's a problem of having too many leads to deal with. And so when you put that friction there, then it removes some of these people. Now, if you don't have any leads coming in, your form on your website should be like, name, phone number, how did you find out about us? What do you want done? Make it as... Easy as possible because you want more leads to come in. You don't want to pre-qualify people. But again, we're talking about having too many. So the other thing you do on your website is you put a pricing guide. And I've talked about this before, but you put your pricing on your website and people start freaking out when I say this. You can put price in your website. You don't have to put exact pricing, guys. If you're a bathroom remodeler, you only need three pictures. You have a very basic bathroom. You know, standard like five by eight hall bathroom. It's just a simple update with a fiberglass tub, a new floor and vanity, like the basics, right? And you just put on there like what's included, put a picture of it, a single picture. You don't need to have before and afters. You just put a single picture and say, this is what's included. Okay. New floor, new vanity, new tub, blah, blah, blah, blah. Pricing starts at X, starts at $15,000. Whatever your pricing is, starts at $12,000 based on that package. And you can put some disclaimers in there. Pricing, depending on different applications may apply or whatever, whatever your typical disclaimer, pricing may vary based on your selections, blah, blah, blah. But you don't have to put on there, this exact bathroom costs $12,472.23. You can also do a range. You can do like a basic bathroom, you know, pricing, $12,000 to $18,000. If you want to get a little bit more dialed in on pricing, again, the more specific you are, the more qualification you will have through that process. If you don't really know your numbers 100%, maybe you're... a little bit new and you don't have all that experience, just put starting at. Basic bathroom package starts at $12,000. Then you have a medium one. Medium bathroom package starts at $20,000. And then the high end starts at $30,000. Whatever your pricing is, you could have a very simple three option. Three is the magic number. You don't need to have 15 different prices. You don't need to put every project that you've done on there and what those things cost. Just pick three things and throw them on there. It's a very simple way to price, do a pricing guide. The one thing I would recommend is two things I recommend on that actually. Don't word it in a way it's like the low one is the cheapo. Don't put on there, I wouldn't say basic package. Don't put on there, here's the price for the cheapskates. Don't put any language on there that makes it seem like if someone buys the lower package. they're less than human. You're shaming them. We don't want to do that. That could even be a gold. You can do packages. Gold, platinum, or whatever. Diamond. I don't care what you pick. But even though the lowest one can still be a high dollar sounding package, if that makes sense. Because you want those people that can't really afford a $30,000-$40,000 bathroom to still feel like they're getting high quality work. You don't say this is the basic. You get builder grade vanity, stick-on flooring, and the cheapest, crappiest faucet you can buy. You don't put that stuff in there. You still make it sound like they're getting higher quality stuff. I'm not saying lie, but you just don't put wording on there that makes it sound like it's cheap. Do a package, three package. Put that on your website, on your form, right above your form. Put a little thing on there. It says, have you checked out our pricing guide yet? Before you fill out this form, please check out our pricing guide. Why? Because you want people to pre-qualify themselves. You want them to go to your pricing guide and see the prices. And if they're like, they want a bathroom and they only got $5,000 a spin and your basic package starts at $15,000, they're going to be like, holy crap. Yeah, we're not, you know, we can't afford this. And they're not even going to bother reaching out to you. So that's how you put friction in there. You can also, let's say you're too scared to put your pricing on your website. Okay, I got another tip for you. If you don't want to put price on your website, just create a PDF with your pricing on there. And after they submit the form, you set up an automation. An email goes out and says, thank you so much. We'll be in touch in this timeframe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In the meantime, please check out our pricing guide. And then you email that link to that PDF to that customer. So you're not putting it out there for the whole world to see. You're only giving it to the customers who scheduled. And then you can also, because if they fill out the form, you send them the email, they go, holy crap, this is way more than what we thought. They may cancel the appointment. And again, they're going to pre-qualify themselves. Now you may be saying, oh, that scares me to death, Brad. And I don't want to do that. And I understand why you may be thinking that. Well, what if my competitors see what I charge? I'm telling you right now, if you guys are doing the things that I recommend and you dominate in your business with your branding, you don't have to worry about your competitors. Your competitors are worried about you. You want to be the one that everyone else is scared of, not the other way around. That's a scarcity mindset. Who gives a crap if you say $15,000 and they come in and undercut you by $2,000? It doesn't matter. You have too many leads coming in already. So it's not something that you should be worried about. But if you're so scared to death to do that, just send them an email in the PDF with the pricing guide. I know a lot of contractors who do this successfully, and they have more than three packages, which is fine. But starting out, you only need three. But they may have three to five different levels or that they have different product lines. Like if they're a landscaper, maybe they do hardscapes and they do ponds and they do like pondless water features, right? Like those are three different types of products. And so they may have three of each. In other words, they would have nine different pricing guides or nine different prices depending on each one. And but what they can do is they will sell from their website. So they may schedule a call and ask them through the sales process, ask the client to be on a computer during that call because they'll actually go onto their website and say, okay, go to our pricing guide page. Now, which one of these projects makes the most sense for you? And while they're on the call, like literally selling through their website, oh, we like the Excalibur. And you could put names on there. I told you it's like, you know. gold, silver, platinum. It can be Excalibur. It can be a street name. I don't care what you call it. You can just assign names to these things so that when you're talking to them and they go, oh, we really like the Excalibur. That's exactly what we want. And right there on the page, it says Excalibur package, $27,000 or starts at $30,000. And they go, yeah, that's what we want. If that's what they want, they've seen the price. That means they have the money. It means that they're okay with that price. They've pre-qualified themselves. So these are just ways you can use pricing on your website to actually, as a selling tool for one, but as a pre-qualification tool. Now back to being on the job side answering the phone. Don't answer the phone when you're working. You're sawing, you know, or hammering, whatever. Phone rings, you don't answer the phone. Put a voicemail on there. Simply says, hey, busy working. meeting with customers, blah, blah, blah. Go to our website for quicker service or you can leave a message and I return all my calls at these three times of the day. If someone won't leave a message, I posted a video on TikTok the other day about this and a person replied and said, if you don't answer the phone, I'm going on to the next contractor. My response was perfect. You just pre-qualified yourself. That's exactly what we want. If you are so impatient, That you can't leave a message. You are not an ideal client. And I'm okay with that. Again, keep in mind, this is if we're getting too many leads. If you don't have enough leads, you probably should be answering the phone every time. When you can get to the level of being able to hire a salesman or an office manager who can answer the phone, that's still going to be ideal. It's not the best level of service to not answer the phone, but it's the best option. If you're out in the field and you can't handle the volume coming in. So you want to work your way to the factor where you can actually have someone answering the phone. That is the best way because you still want to provide good service. But you want to try to eliminate some of this of the tire kickers during the process. If you have a really good website that's designed professionally, it will look really expensive. You want someone to go to your website. and look at it and be like, holy crap, this company is expensive. Just by looking at it. You got beautiful pictures of the projects you've done. It's very well done. That's the image you want. I've seen... The handyman industry is the worst at this. And I understand handymen aren't doing $100,000 projects usually. But you go to their website and it looks like a crackhead designed it. I mean, it looks like... You know, it's got a block and then a picture, a stock photo of a guy in a hard hat sawing something. And it's like, we do high quality work. Give us a call. No, your website screams, we don't do high quality work. Ergo, we're cheap. So give us a call if you're a cheap customer. So your marketing helps to eliminate people through the process. It's the prequalification process. You create more friction, right? But you have higher quality marketing so that everything screams, this company is expensive and I don't want to pay that much money. Because the people that are like, oh, this is high quality company. That's exactly who we want to do our job. We're tired of hiring these wannabes. They take our money and never show up. We're tired of hiring people that say they're good and they actually don't know what they're doing. They lie about their abilities. I see this company and everything on their website is beautiful. They're very professional. They got pricing. They, you know, a bunch of reviews, all that stuff. That's going to attract higher end clients. And then you just put more friction in there. Especially if you're doing larger projects. If you're doing $100,000 landscaping projects. that's not a one call, let's schedule an appointment and get it done type of thing. If someone's looking for a $100,000 landscaping project, they're not going through the phone book or Google listings and just calling one contractor after the other. They're doing a ton of research. They're getting recommendations. They're doing their due diligence before they even hire someone. Those people are willing to go through the process because the more... process you have, it actually shows more value. I know this is hard for a lot of people to understand, but the harder you make it to do business with you in that capacity, like putting friction, the more value that you provide. Think about it this way. If you were able to just call Donald Trump, his cell phone number was published, and you could just call and he would answer the phone and you could talk to him, would that seem normal to you? You would expect if someone of that stature of where they're at, it would be nearly impossible to talk to that person. But if you really, really, really wanted to talk to that person, you're going to jump through the hoops and figure out a way to get in front of them. That's the type of customer that you want. Someone who wants to work for you. They're practically begging you to work for them, to do work for them. That's the type of customer you want. And whenever you have a bunch of people calling you, you can easily weed out the ones that are not serious by doing that, by putting more friction in their way. And I think that's... I'm looking at my notes over here to make sure I didn't miss anything. So yeah, and that applies to if it's bad leads or good leads. If you notice that you start to have a drop-off, you put all these things in place and then you start to have a drop-off of leads, then you may want to... remove some of that friction. So that's the beauty of having it in a way to where you can, it's like a system, like the pricing guide. Some people will send out a video. If you fill out a form, you'll send them a video. I've done this. As soon as they submit the form, it's a video of me. Hey, this is Brad with my company. Thank you for reaching out. We're excited to talk to you about your project. In the meantime, please check out our pricing guide. And if you have any questions, bring them to our call on Thursday or whatever. I didn't say the day, but bring them to our call. If you have any questions, whenever we reach out, we'd be more than happy to answer them for you. So that's another step up of professionalism. Have a video that you send them. You can also do, if you really, really want to get a level of professionalism, you can send them a bonjour or send them a personalized message after they fill it out. Hey, Chris, this is Brad with... Hammer and grind. Just saw that you scheduled an appointment on Thursday. Looking forward to talking to you about your project. In the meantime, check out our pricing guide and looking forward to talking to you. Basically, like a little personalized message. And there's an app called Bonjuro that does that, makes it easy. It automates it, gets a notification. You open the app, record a 30-second video. It sends it to them. It's personalized. You see if they open it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you can put some levels of friction, levels of professionalism. going the extra step, adding more value to this process. So that's all I got on this podcast. I hope it was helpful. The key thing is you need to put more friction, create a more professional website, and create a pricing guide to help eliminate these people. And if you need any help with that, reach out to me. I'd be more than happy to share with you what that looks like. And guys, I know I went off on a tangent earlier. I truly want to help contractors. This is something I'm passionate about. It's why I quit my construction business. I get 10 times the amount of satisfaction seeing a contractor who is struggling and is now making three, four times more money in a short period of time than I ever got remodeling bathrooms and kitchens and all that stuff. Those things last for about an hour. Oh, Brad, you're so great. This is beautiful. Thank you so much. Our bathroom looks beautiful. That lasts about an hour for me. But whenever I take a contractor, change their business, which affects their family and their lineage, that is fulfilling for weeks and months. I love getting those messages. And so if I can help you in your business, please reach out to me and I can share with you what that looks like. More than happy to talk to you. Until next time, guys, remember, profit is not a dirty word.
