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 Grind Podcast. This is episode number 107, How to Deal with Difficult Clients. Now, as always, or I shouldn't say always, as usual, a lot of my ideas for the podcast show come from TikTok and social media, Facebook posts. And so this one is no different. This came from a TikTok thread that was started. on another creator's post. And then I adopted it and started commenting on it. And I got lots of feedback. And I've kind of expanded it a little bit. But really, we're talking about how to deal with difficult customers. The initial contact or the initial post was about how contractors charge clients a PETA charge, a pain in the ass charge. and or they sometimes charge you an FU charge. I think you can figure out what that stands for. And it's basically like, I don't want to do your job. I'm going to throw out a ridiculously high dollar amount. And if you accept it, then I guess I'll do the job. In my mind, those are two different things. I'm not a huge fan of the FU charge. I think there's a little bit of borderline unethical activity in doing that. And I don't think it's professional. That's debatable. And I'd like to hear your feedback on that. But really what we're going to be talking about is a general consensus of how to deal with difficult clients. So there's really three areas that we're going to talk about. One is if you identify them through your pre-qualification process, which if you've listened to any of my podcasts, you should have a pretty good understanding of how to pre-qualify clients. And during that pre-qualification process, we will identify some of these red flags, if you will. It's at your leisure to decide if I'm willing to work for this client, I know they're going to be a pain in the butt. So therefore, I am going to assess the PETA charge, the pain in the ass charge, which is basically I'm going to charge you more simply because I have to put up with you. And that's just a reality, right? If we are dealing with someone that we know from the start is going to be a pain in the butt, we're going to charge them more to deal with them. So that's one thing is like charging them for dealing with them, right? The second thing we're going to talk about is sometimes people sneak by. Sometimes we don't catch any red flags or they do a good job of disguising it. And then their true colors come out in the middle of a project and now you have to deal with them. And we're going to talk about some ways to handle that. And then lastly, we're going to talk about sometimes things just happen. And so you have to deal with a specific issue. So they're not a bad client in that sense, but something bad happened and now you're dealing with a difficult situation. So we're going to cover these three areas on this podcast episode. And it's really going to be... The main theme here is how to communicate. That's what we're talking about, effective communication. But I'm going to share with you some ideas and some ways to handle and approach these to maybe help you deal with these if you've ever dealt with them. And if you've been in business for more than one day, you've probably dealt with one or all three of these situations. So this should be a valuable podcast to hang out with or hang out with me until the end. So my question here to start with, why do people get upset? Think of yourself. Why do you get upset at a situation, at a person? The reason why most of us get upset is because there was an expectation that was not met. So if I believe as a client that you, the contractor, are going to be at my house every morning at 7.30. to start working on my project and you're going to be there every day from 7.30 to 4 or whatever, Monday through Friday for three weeks straight until the project's done. If that's my expectation and come the first day you show up at 9 a. m., I'm already upset with you because you didn't meet the expectation that I set even if you're not aware of that expectation. So at no time, you may have not ever said, hey, we're going to be at your house at 7.30 on Monday, and then you show up at 9. That may have not even happened. You may have never said a specific time. You might have even said, we'll be there between 8.30 and 9, but I'm still expecting you there at 7.30. For whatever reason, the expectation has not been met. So that's just an example of like, most of the time, when you have difficult people and situations, it's because expectations are not being met. And it's your job as the contractor to set the expectation from the very beginning through the sales process and then through the handoff. Actually, from when you sell it until you actually start the project, the handoff. It's your job to set the expectations and meet them as well as understanding what expectations that your clients have. Because not everybody has the same expectations. Now, I talk about this in my training about the yes staircase. And the yes staircase is essentially when you're selling someone, when you're talking to a client that you're trying to sell a job, we try to figure out what concerns and or expectations they may have. So a concern can be like price, it can be timeframe, it can be, are you licensed, things like that. And as you're going through the sales process, if you're able to answer those concerns and or expectations, then you get more yeses in the sales process, which leads to the final sale. It's the same thing when you're delivering the actual fulfillment, doing the product, right? When you're doing the work. There's expectations there and there's still concerns. I may have a concern of my dog being let out. I have three dogs. I may have concern that you're going to leave the door open or the gate open and the dogs are going to get out and get hit by a car. That's a valid concern. We love our pets. And if I see that you're acting haphazardly during the project and leaving the door open or leaving the gate open and not paying attention to my dogs, I'm going to be upset about that because I have concerns. I have an expectation that you're going to take care of my pets. So those are all things that come up. Now, when you're talking to them in the sales process and we ask questions, one of the questions that we like to ask, which gives us insight into who they are and what expectations is, we like to ask something like this. Have you ever done a project like this before? And if the client says, yes, we have, you know, we had a, we did a kitchen remodel in our old house five years ago. Now we follow up and say, oh, how was that? How'd that go? How was that experience essentially? And that will start giving us insight because people will tell you whatever is important to them. They're not going to tell you things that weren't important to them. So they may say something like, well, It wasn't really that great of experience. And we'll follow it up and maybe do a mirror or label and say, not a good experience. And they'll say, no, they were really nice guys. It was two brothers that had a business. They were younger and kind of new in the business. And they had some good reviews. And we really liked them when they came and visited us. And everything seemed really good. But then after the project started, it just kind of went downhill from there. And we just keep prying and digging. Oh, what happened? If you don't mind me asking. Well, they just, you know, they said they'd be there Monday at 730 and they wouldn't show up till nine. You know, we're waiting around for them so that we can go to work. They didn't call or anything. That's kind of started. And then there were several times during the project when there was nobody working at the house for three or four days. You know, we're at war without a kitchen. So it's a big inconvenience. And they didn't say anything. Like they said, the plumber will be there on Thursday. Plumber didn't show up. At least we don't think so. Nothing was done and nothing came Friday. And then Monday or Tuesday, like nobody showed up. They didn't call us. And, you know, we're not ones to like call every single time that there's something wrong. So we like to, you know, respect them and their time. But there were four days where nothing happened. And then finally we called them and they didn't know. They thought the plumber was there the whole time. And so it was just little things like that where there's just miscommunication and some issues. There was one other little thing, which wasn't a huge problem, but they didn't really do a very good job of putting up plastic and stuff. So most of our house was covered in dust when they were done. And they did a good job. They tried to clean it up, but I mean, they had little dusters and it wasn't like a professionally cleaned. job. So we just overall, we weren't that happy. I mean, they did an okay job on the kitchen. We thought they did pretty good. It just wasn't a great experience. Now, me as a contractor on a call like that, that is gold. I just got a ton of information from them. Now, that particular situation, I don't think that they're a difficult customer because to me, it sounds like the contractor didn't meet the, didn't do the expectations, right? They didn't set the expectation. They weren't following through. So if I hear that, I'm like, okay, this is an opportunity for me to identify what's important to you. You know, John, it sounds like it's really important that you have good communication, that the contractor, you know, communicates well with you. Definitely want to protect your property. We don't want to leave dust and stuff everywhere. and really just have a pretty good handle on the subcontractors and the calendar and the scheduling so that we don't have these gaps in the schedule. Because you're going to be out for a while and we want to make sure that your inconvenience the least amount is possible. Does that sound fair? And they're like, yes, that's exactly right. So see, I figured out what the expectation was by asking these questions. Now, conversely, You're on the call and you're talking to someone and you say, how was that experience? And they say, it was terrible. It was terrible. What happened? Well, they wouldn't stay late. They would come and work all day. And we told them we needed to have this done by Friday. And they said that they didn't work late. And we really wanted to get this done because we were having a party. And it just seemed like they didn't care. And then they're bad-mouthing the contractor. And then I go look at the contractor, or maybe I know the contractor, and I know that they do really good work. Well, something's not jiving here. I know the contractor personally. I've seen their reviews. They have really good reviews. They're well-known. They do good work. The customer's saying that they didn't have a good experience. So what's happening? They're kind of being demanding. They expect them to work late and do all these things. They wouldn't... They would charge us a bunch of stuff and they wouldn't show us their receipts. We demanded to get their receipts and they said they don't do that. We told them they were trying to rip us off. These are red flags. We don't just give receipts to customers. We don't just show them all the expenses. This sounds like a difficult customer. This sounds like something that's going to be an issue. Have you had other projects like this? Yeah, we've had two other projects. How did those go? They weren't good either. We had one contractor that quit halfway through the project and we had to find two more to finish because the second one quit too. Well, crap. I mean, there's red flags everywhere, right? What's going on here? This is probably not a customer that I want to work for because these are red flags that there's something going on. So those are like identifiers of like, that's someone that I just wouldn't want to work for, period. There's no amount of money that I would ever want to work for. You can also do things, guys, if you have like your spidey senses is going on and you're talking to the customer, like you can social proof them. You can find out if they have a Google profile. And a lot of times it will show, like if you go to my Google profile and look, it will show all of the reviews that I've left for local businesses. You can go read them all. So if I go and look at this customer and they've left 20 reviews for local places and almost all of them are like one, two, and three star ratings, that tells me that this person is just like hates life. And this is not going to be a good person to work for. So you can do research like that. You can look people up on Facebook. You can look them up on Google. You can find out information about them. You can even just search their name in Google. And you'd be surprised, like you'll find an article, you know, it says like lawsuit, you know, so-and-so 1999 lawsuit, so-and-so versus contractor. Yeah, I don't want to be a part of that. So like doing a little bit of due diligence early on can avoid some of these things. But let's say you're dealing with someone who seems like a very good person. They're just going to be demanding. We usually on the DISC profile, the DISC, It's usually a C personality, right? They're the ones that are going to be your engineers, your architects, your accountants. They're very detail-oriented people. They want all of the facts. They want all of the information. They want to know every single breakdown of your selection price. They want to know exactly how long it's going to take. They want to know on what day what sub is going to show up before the project even starts. Those are your super detail. Sometimes we call them OCD people that want control of everything. They could be the sweetest people on earth. They could be your son's best friend's dad, and you hang out with them and they're good people, but they're just a pain in the butt because they're very particular. They're very demanding of information. Those are the people that are going to be assessed the PETA charge. Right? Because they're going to be a pain in the ass. Not so much in the sense that they're going to make your job difficult. Like they're going to ride your butt the entire time. But they're going to want a lot of information. I've done work for accountants. I've done work for attorneys, engineers. And, you know, it's not like a stereotypical across the board. Every single one of them are bad. But there's enough to be a stereotype for a reason. And that's because they can be demanding. And I did one project for a... He was a corporate accountant for Shoe Carnival. And again, very nice couple. No problems with them whatsoever. But the numbers had to be perfect. Sometimes when we price things and we put numbers together, we're not too concerned if $2 amounts don't equal the exact amount. We're not like overly concerned if it should be $27.64. We just round it up to $28, right? Because it's just easy math. But for people like that, like, no, it's got to like, it all has to add up. Well, I don't understand here, Brad, because you have, you know, all the selection prices here, but there's a $47.66 discrepancy from what you showed me. Those are the type of people that are just going to require a lot more hand-holding and they're going to require a lot more attention. And those people will be assessed a PETA charge because it's going to require more of my time, energy, and effort in order to do that job. It's not because they're a bad person. It's just because they're going to be more demanding. And I'm going to factor that in because if you don't factor it in, and you get into the project, then what happens is you start to resent them. You start to have resentment because now every time they question you, it's taking away from your profits. As the project goes on and on and on, they start to wear on you. And then towards the end, you have a lot of resentment. Your communication breaks down. You try to avoid them. And then you leave them with a bad experience. when it was really your fault because you didn't factor in that into your bidding process. So what does that look like, though? How do you properly assess a fee? Well, there's no science to this. If I'm dealing with a client, a normal client, let's say on a normal client on a normal project, I may have, let's say,20 hours of supervision. Right. Unless I'm on the tools. Let's just assume I'm not on the tools. I'm a supervisor. I'm scheduling subs. I'm ordering materials. I'm showing up to the job site, making sure the materials are delivered, talking to the subs, talking to the customer, you know, talking to my employees, blah, blah, blah. And they're supervising, you know, if a normal project would require 20 hours of supervision, if I'm dealing with this client, I may factor in 30 hours of supervision. I'm going to add an extra 10 hours. of my time for supervision. I may add extra time to my employees, but I'm going to try my very best to let the client know during the handoff stage that they are not to reproach my employees and ask them a bunch of questions. If I have a lead guy, they can talk to the lead person. I'm going to set the expectation. Hey, if you have any questions about the project, you know, overall selections, anything like that, please reach out to me. My employees really don't have all that information. So they're not really going to be able to help you. So if you have any questions, just reach out to me. Or if you have any questions, you know, you're the foreman or whoever the project manager is who you're going to want to talk to. You know, if you have a basic question of like, hey, did the tile show up today? Right. Obviously, you could ask the, you know, ask the guys and they'll say, yeah, yeah, it showed up today. So you set that expectation from the beginning, and that's going to help eliminate a lot of the other two things that we're going to talk about next. But when you're dealing with the PETA charge, going to make sure that you assess it based on how much of a demand you think they're going to be. And I can tell you the first time you do it, you're probably going to be short. So the first time you do it, you might want to double it and give it to the next person. You guys know what I'm talking about. You may think, oh, five hours is plenty. I'd put 10 hours. You may think 10 hours is plenty. I might put 20 hours. So it doesn't have to necessarily be a dollar amount. It can be. If it's a $20,000 project and you're like, I really want to do this project, but this guy is going to be a pain in the butt. You might just charge him a flat $3,000, $4,000 just to deal with it. You might charge him $23,000, $24,000, $25,000 because you know it's going to be a major headache. They don't have to accept that. And this is one of the things that I was arguing with a person on TikTok about. I was like, oh, this is unethical and unprofessional. You can't just charge people more money. Yeah, I can. I could charge them whatever I want. I could charge them $100,000 if I wanted to. It's my business. There's no rule. There's no ethics that say you're only allowed to charge someone what the material cost and labor cost is times a certain factor. And that's it. No, I can charge whatever I want. It doesn't mean people are going to accept it. Right? So you need to assess a PETA charge, if you want to call it that, to help handle all of the headaches of this client. That's the easiest way. If you really want to work for them, you know they're good people, there's going to be a pain in the butt. You assess a PETA charge. The FU charge, this is the part where I don't really like it too much. I don't really agree with this. This is where you have... It can be a customer or it can be the job itself. Maybe they want you to demo out a basement slab and the only way you can do it is with five-gallon buckets and walking upstairs through the house, through the middle of the house, and you got to protect everything and out the front door. That's going to be a major project. It's going to be a major pain-in-the-butt type project. And I don't really want to do that. It's not a fun project for me. So if you want me to do it, I'm just going to charge you an extra $20,000 over what I would because I know it's going to be a major pain in the butt. That's kind of the FU charge of like, I don't want to do this project. But if you're dumb enough to pay that much money, I'll do it. Right? I don't so much have a problem with charging more because it's a harder job. I do have a problem with charging more simply because you don't like that person. It can be an engineer or somebody that you think is going to be difficult. It's like an over-excessive P to charge, if you will. The problem where I have this is when you start to get into elderly, lower-income people that are stuck. You may have someone who's low-income and really can't afford it. They got a hole in their roof, and the roofer comes in and is like, I don't want to work in this because it's a crappy neighborhood. So I'm just going to charge you an extra $5,000. for the inconvenience. And them maybe not knowing any better or really having no other recourse because no other contractor would come out. They have to hire you because they don't have any other options. And you just got a huge payday off of this person. That's where I start to have problems with that type of pricing. Just because of that, dealing with a difficult client or a difficult job. That's all I'm really going to say about that. It's your business to do whatever you want. Ultimately, they have the you know, the decision to make. I just always ask, you know, if someone did that to your grandmother, how would you feel about it? If another contractor charged your grandmother an extra 10 grand to do a job that you know shouldn't have cost that much, how would you feel about that? That's all I say. Okay, number two. What happens whenever you think they're okay, but then once you start the project, they like turn into a Karen? Or what's the male name? What do they call the male? I've actually even heard Brad. I don't know what the male name is. The male version of it. Carl. Karen and Carl. Chris. Anyways, they turn into a nightmare client after you start. They did a good job of hiding all of that. Now you have this problem. I remember one time I had a client. He was an engineer. Imagine that. We were doing two bathroom remodels for him. His master and his hall bathroom consecutively. And we start demo. Coming the next day. There's a note taped to the mirror. Hey, Brad, are you guys going to do X? Yeah, of course we're going to do it, right? I simply, I don't remember if I texted him or email, and he wasn't available during the day. He was working, didn't have access to his phone, so he would respond at night through email. And I was like, yeah, we'll take care of it. Or maybe I left it on the note. I don't remember how I handled it. The next day I come in, there's another note on the mirror. Hey, Brad, are you guys going to do this? And that happened two or three times. I don't remember exactly. And I had enough. I'm like, no, you're not going to micromanage us from a distance through a note taped to the mirror. It's just a frustration. And so because I couldn't call him, and it was more of a... I mean, these conversations really need to be had in person or over the phone. But in this particular situation, in this instance, I didn't really have access to him. So I emailed him. And I just simply said something to the effect of, Hey, Tom. I got your notes. I hope that you hired us because you trust that we're going to do a good job. Basically, it was like, stop leaving notes. We know what we're doing. And if you don't trust us, I put in there, if you don't trust our ability to do this correctly, then please let me know because we need to have a conversation about this immediately. That's essentially what I said. In other words, we're going to stop working. and have this conversation because you're not going to micromanage us through the whole project. And he didn't have any ill will, right? He wasn't like, these guys, I don't trust them. That wasn't the issue. It was more of a curiosity and really probably because of previous experiences with bad contractors who didn't do those things, you know, because sometimes in the process, when you don't, you know, when you don't put blocking in the wall and then you put drywall on, you can't. easily go back and put the blocking in. So it's like, hey, did you put blocking in the wall? Are you guys going to put blocking in the wall for the towel bars? Things like that. Because those aren't really conversations that you have with customers. But you just have to let them know that like, hey, if you don't trust us, that we know what we're doing, why did you hire us in the first place? And two, we need to have a conversation about it. And so when you have that type of thing, you have to... Have the conversation about have a meeting, call a timeout, talk about the elephant in the room. This is where a lot of contractors, because most of us are people pleasers, a lot of contractors have a lot of baggage from childhood. I'm just spitting facts here, guys. There's no judgment. I'm just spitting facts. A lot of us in blue collar have childhood trauma and things. It can be alcoholic parents, absentee parents, whatever. And that carries over. And so we become people pleasers. And because we tie our identity to what we do, I'm a carpenter, I'm a roofer, I'm an electrician. When we tie our identity to what we do, we now become people pleasers. And we want to go out of our way to make sure people are happy because we don't want an upset person with us. And so what happens is... we shut down. When a guy starts putting pressure on you, a client starts putting pressure on you about things, we just take it and grit it like, okay, I just got to get through this. I know he's upset and we'll make it right. We'll make it right. I just got to put up with it for another two weeks and then we'll be out of here. And we take it on the chin. We grit, smile. Yes, sir. You can't do that, guys. You have to stand up for yourself in a professional way. And so you do that by basically calling a timeout, having a meeting, and just say, listen, it seems like there's some expectations that you have that we're not meeting. And I really want to make sure that we are meeting your expectation. And so I'd like to just have a conversation and figure out where we're falling short with your expectations. Because you may think it's something totally different. And it's actually... Something else. They may be complaining to you that you're not cleaning up after yourself every day, right? But it may be something totally different. They're actually mad at you because you left the garage door open one day when you left and forgot to close it. They didn't say anything to you about the garage door, but now they're taking it out on you and complaining about cleaning up. When people are passive aggressive like that. And so you have to figure out exactly where expectations are not being met. And you just simply call a timeout. Hey, Cindy, Andy, guys, can we have a conversation? Yeah, what's up? I feel like we're not meeting some expectations that you guys have for us. And I really want to be able to do that for you. But to be honest with you, I'm not sure exactly. where we're falling short, would you be able to share with us maybe some concerns or expectations that you have that we're not meeting? And most people who are civil will be able to tell you. You may have to pry some of that information out. You may have to ask more questions. But simply ignoring it is not going to make it better, guys. It only makes it worse. It's so much better. I don't care if you hate conflict. I don't care if you avoid conflict at all costs. You have to confront them in a professional manner and get this out on the table. It will be 10 times better once you do it. And sometimes, even if you can't meet their expectation, even if they have a crazy high expectation and you're never going to meet it, just the simple fact that you let them talk, and you now understand where they're coming from, actually removes all of the issues. Because people want to be validated. They want to know that you care about their project. They want to know that you care about their house and their pets. And whatever it is, they want to know that you care. Remember that accountant that I had that was going to be a pain in the butt, the corporate accountant for Shoe Carnival? This was right kind of at the edge of COVID. And so there were still concerns. Well, his family had autoimmune diseases. So it's kind of a big deal to make sure we lower the risk of any kind of COVID or any outside diseases coming into their house. So what we did is we wore masks. If we were working in the bathroom with the door closed, we would take our mask off. But if we're walking into the house, we wear a mask out of respect. And at the end of each day, we would take Clorox wipes and rags. We'd wipe down the handrail because it was upstairs. We'd wipe down the doorknobs. We would go out of our way to make sure to mitigate as much risk as possible. Doing things like that, even with a difficult customer, goes so far. It just extends the well-being so far of that relationship. Even after we were done, he was referring us all the time to people. He was a difficult client to deal with. I charged him a little extra. We went above. And there were times where we didn't always meet. Sometimes we forgot to sweep up the floor. Stuff like that happens. But if it's just one little tiny thing that you forget, people will let it go. But if it's 15 tiny things that you forget every single day, they're not going to let it go. It's going to eat at them. So you have to get it on the table. So that's like if they're civil. If they're not civil and they turn into a complete nightmare, you have to make a decision. Are we going to stop this project right now and walk off or what? I've done that one time. I walked off a project and I hated it. And it wasn't really the customer's fault. It was actually the material supplier, their fault. But it was the people that hired them. And I had these conversations. And finally, I just had it. I said, I'm done. I mean, I lost money on that job. I was like, I'm done. I'm not finishing this. You don't have to pay me anything else. We'll take a loss on it. I'm just not going to finish this project. Because I had so much problems with the product. that I was losing money. Even if I stayed and finished the job, I was going to lose money because I was over on productivity. And it wasn't the client's fault, but they did hire this company. So if you have someone like you, it's totally difficult and you have to walk off a job, you really have to assess this. But you still have to have this elephant in the room conversation. Regardless, if they're a good client, bad client, you have to have this conversation. You can't hide from it. I see all the freaking time in Facebook groups. Hey, guys, we had this client and they were mad at us and they kicked us off the job and now they won't pay us and our tools are there and I don't know what to do. Well, that's your fault, guys. That's your fault for putting yourself in that situation. The percentage of people that are just straight up evil that are trying to ruin your life is so freaking minicule. It can't even be measured across the world. But yeah, that's what we think everyone's like. It's not true. Most of the time, when you have problems with clients, it's your fault because you didn't set the expectation and you didn't understand what their expectations were. So have those conversations. Try to be civil. Try to figure out a way to rectify this. And if you have to bring in a mediator, then do that. Hey, John. I know we can't come together on this. I have an idea. What if we bring in a third-party mediator just to try and square us up where we're at? I know you feel like we haven't done $20,000 worth of work yet and you don't want to pay us anymore, but we have expenses that are $35,000. And so we really need to come to some kind of conclusion so that we can at least be amicable and split and not... either one of us feeling like we're getting screwed. How would you feel to bring in a mediator? You can have a conversation like that. But because we're so freaking chicken shit, to actually have emotional conversations with people, we just avoid it and hope it goes away. We're like the little three-year-old in the corner who covers their eyes and ears and just goes, la, la, la, la, la, because they don't want to deal with it. That's never going to work for you. I promise. That never works, ever. So man up and have a difficult conversation. The last thing about dealing with issues that come up, one thing you can do is pre-frame this. This is a pre-framing technique. When you start a project and you, like in the sales process, when you're collecting a deposit, one thing you can do, they hand you a $10,000 deposit. You're at their house and you say, You know, Aaron, Cindy, I really appreciate you guys putting your trust in our business. But before I accept this check, I want to let you know something. You're like, well, what's going on? There's going to be a time during this project where something's not going to go well and I'm going to have to deliver you bad news. And I'm just letting you know now that at some point that's probably going to happen. So if I call you and I say, Remember when we started the project, there was going to be bad news? You'll know that something comes up. But I promise you that if that does happen or when it happens, we're going to do our absolute best to try and solve the problem as quickly and efficiently with as least amount of money as possible. Because we have your best interest, but this is construction and things do happen. That's how you can pre-frame. or Vanguard against that conversation that's probably going to happen two weeks, two months, whatever, into the project. When something gets delivered damage, there's a delay, guys break something, whatever. That's your get-out-of-jail-free card. So you get one of those, maybe a couple, right? But if you do that in the very beginning, it's going to make it so much easier when things do go wrong. And then when they do go wrong, guys, don't try to hide it. Again, let them know. You go there, you accidentally break something. You accidentally knock a vase off of a table when you're carrying stuff in and it breaks. Don't freaking try to glue it back together. I mean, seriously. Call them. Amy, I really hate to have this conversation. You're going to be so upset with me when I tell you what happened. Oh, no. What happened? Guys were carrying stuff in and it's our fault. They knocked the vase off in the hallway and it broke. Oh, my gosh. That was my grandmother's vase. Oh, my gosh. Oh, man. I'm not happy about this, Brad. I wouldn't be happy either, Amy. I'm so sorry this happened. We'll obviously replace it. Whatever we need to do. I know it's your grandmother's vase, so we can't replace the sentimental value. But whatever we need to do to make this right, please let me know. The guys feel terrible. It was an accident. And, you know, we're going to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again, you know, in your house. But unfortunately, it did. Like fall on the sword. Own up to it. Don't tread a freaking skirt by it and like hide it. Even if it's one tiny little chip, you think, oh, I just turned the vase 90 degrees. They'll never know. Come on, guys. Seriously. You got to have some integrity, but you still approach that even when you know they're going to be upset. I'll tell you one thing I had. I did a job. They had some, it was a house with a gable, had a gabled roof on the end facing the street and it had a siding on there, like wood, old wood siding and it was rotten. The flashing and stuff wasn't done right. So all of that siding was rotting out. It was like, and it was a gabled end that was sitting on a, on a roof. So there was like a 12 inch section of roof. You know, it was more like a dormer. But it wasn't really a dormer. It was just a roof gable. And so everything was all rotted out. And we were there doing work on the project. Prior to starting that project, I had done some lives on a video on Facebook about different types of gutter guards and why some are better than others. Like the day before we started or a week before. And when we're up on this roof, they had a particular type of gutter guard, which is not very good. like a micro mesh tile. And all I did was whip out my phone and say, guys, remember last week when I was telling you about this other one, here's an example of why we don't recommend these types because they get mold and all this stuff and blah, blah, blah. And I was like showing it. There was nothing in that video that in give away whose house it was, what the address was or anything, right? Nobody would know whose house it was. Except the owner of the house who watched my videos saw it, was very upset behind it, called me, and we had a conversation. And even though her response was kind of over the top and ridiculous, I still heard her. I still let her feel validated. And basically, all she wanted was like, before you do that, you should run it by the customer first and make sure it's okay. And I simply said, you're right. I should have done that. I didn't think it was that big of a deal because I always make sure I don't have address or anything that people would know. But I definitely should have asked you first and I appreciate you letting me know. And that was really kind of the end of it. Her husband was tickled pink. Her husband loved the project. She had some concerns after that because of that video. Now she's on a heightened alert. Now she's upset. Now she's nitpicking every single thing. And so we had to go back and fix a couple things, which in my opinion, were not bad at all. But she wanted to have some control because she was upset about the video. I embarrassed her because she thought people would know that that's her house. And I said something was bad about her house. And I learned a lesson that day. I still owned up to it. I still went above and beyond to make her happy. And at the end, she was happy. Her husband was happy the entire time. And I could even tell that her husband was kind of like, yeah, she's being a little ridiculous. I apologize for my wife. But I still wanted her to be happy. That's why you got to confront that. And if you don't confront one thing, then they're going to start nitpicking everything else after that. That's why you have to confront it. And even if it was an honest mistake, but you did something wrong, there is a purgatory period, right? If you do something stupid, like forget to close their garage door and the cat gets out and they spend all evening trying to catch their cat, they spend like six hours catching their cat. It was an honest mistake. They're still upset about it. So now they're going to make sure that every single day you're closing the garage, right? Like you don't get to just get a free pass because you made a mistake, an honest mistake. There is a purgatory period where you have to be a little bit on your P's and Q's to make them happy. And that could be a couple of days, a couple of weeks, whatever. But yeah, you are in the doghouse a little bit, especially if it's your fault. Right. And you just have to understand that that's just the nature of people. But if you just ignore it and act like it's not a big deal. I mean, yeah, we forgot to close the garage door, but it's not a big deal. Nobody stole anything. You're just going to freaking piss them off. Right? So don't do that. Own up to your mistakes. Go through purgatory. And then on the outside, on the other end of that, you'll be great. And at the end, they'll be singing your praises. They'll forget about the little thing that happened, the vase you broke, the garage door you left open. At the very end, they'll be singing your praises and recommending you to everybody. So guys, those are the three things of how to deal with difficult clients. I hope this was helpful. Do me a favor, leave a comment on whatever platform you're listening to. I know one thing that's cool about Spotify now, you can actually respond like a chat to the podcast episodes and I can respond to you. So if you have a question or a comment about anything in this episode, go to Spotify if that's what you watch and leave a comment there. And we can actually have it back and forth. I thought that's a pretty cool feature they rolled out recently. But whatever platform you're listening on, do me a favor, leave a review. It just helps to get the word out. And then if there's anything that you agree or disagree with or you want to have a conversation with, reach out to me. Go to my Instagram. Go to my Facebook. Go on TikTok. You can always just search for the Hammer and Grind podcast. I'm on all the platforms. Easy to find. And I appreciate you hanging out with me today. I really do. Guys, check out the Contractor Profit Blueprint Facebook group if you haven't already. Got lots of new things, exciting things happening in there. I got a webinar coming up, a free webinar in a couple of weeks that you're going to want to attend. It's with my former podcast guest, Mark Willis. And you're going to want to go to that free webinar, but you can get access and information in my free group. So guys, that's the end of the episode. I appreciate you hanging out. Until next time, remember... Guys, profits is not a dirty word.
