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 Brad here. Listen, this podcast is from a culmination of just conversations and posts on TikTok and Facebook and all these different places. I've had a lot of this conversation has come up a lot recently. And so I want to talk about it today. And that's why you're having trouble closing jobs at a higher percent, a higher profit margin, right? And it's because you're not providing value. And I've said this before, and I think people understand the concept of what that means, but they don't actually understand what that looks like in execution. And so that's what I really want to talk about today is really where you guys are falling short in the execution of what this actually means. And so I want to start with a story, and this has been proven to be true. I don't know if the exact details are, you know, correct, but this happened many, many, many years ago. Donald Trump was in his limousine, had a flat tire on the interstate in New York. He's on the side of the road, stuck. I don't know if they were waiting on the AAA or whatever to get there, but a good Samaritan pulled over and asked if they needed help. Now, Donald Trump never introduced himself. He's hiding in the limo, tinted windows, and I'm sure he's talking with the limo driver. and probably some other people on Donald Trump's team, who knows. Anyways, the guy offers to help change the tire, right? They had a spare tire. He helps change the tire. Not knowing who was in there, probably could have made some assumptions about being a limo and the guy is rich and thinks he's better than everybody else, whatever. But a good Samaritan stops. He helps change the tire. Donald Trump's on his way. And I think he might've been on the way to the airport. I'm not 100% sure on that part. But Donald Trump found out who this person was, and the next day he paid off his mortgage. Now, I don't know if that was a $20,000 mortgage, a $200,000 mortgage. I don't know. It doesn't matter. The guy provided value to Donald Trump so that Donald Trump could go on his day and finish doing whatever he needs to do. Right? That is what providing value looks like. The guy solved a problem. And as a result, Donald Trump paid off his mortgage. Now, that can be like a far-fetched story. And some of you are like, yeah, that's great, Brad. But we don't have rich people. We can't always get rich people with limousines. You missed the point of the story. The point of the story is the guy solved a problem and then got paid because of it. See, when you're talking to your clients, a lot of you are still stuck in order-taking mode. You're stuck in this idea that customer wants X and I can provide X solution and it's going to cost X amount to provide X solution. And then if that works out, then we agree and then everything is great. And that's what order-taking looks like. And that's not what we're doing here. Order-taking is that someone comes to you with a list of demands and then you give them a price to do list of demands. That's order-taking. That's not solving problems. Solving problems is figuring out the reason why they want this done. Why do they want this list of things done in their project? Not what they want done. Why they want it done. and then figuring out how that affects their life. Do they stay awake at night because of this problem in their house? Does it make them feel better as a human being because they can get this thing done? There's always a motivation behind the reason to why somebody wants something done. Always. It's either a pain or it's a pleasure. You need to start becoming problem solvers, not order takers. And when you just take orders, you're not providing any value through the sales process. And so if you're trying to get 100% markup, if you're trying to go for a 50% gross profit, which is what I preach about, it becomes way more difficult to close people at a higher percentage when you're not good at sales. it becomes significantly more difficult. I get people all the time. I close 90% of my jobs. All I got to do is get out in front of them and I close them. Again, you're an order taker and you're probably too cheap. Guys, it's easy to sell stuff when you're too cheap. It's so freaking easy. If you're at two-thirds of the cost of the expensive guy or if you're only doing a 50% markup on your... materials or a 25%, if you're only getting a 20% gross profit, it is so easy to sell jobs like that. You literally just have to show up and give them a price. And as long as you have a pulse and you have some good pictures on your website, or maybe you don't even have a website, but you answer the phone and you call them back and you show up and then you actually give them an estimate, you can land those all day long. That doesn't mean you're a fantastic salesman. It means you're a fantastic order taker. And I get so much pushback from contractors that I know how to sell. I know how to sell. I'm good at sales. I'm really, really good at sales. I closed 90%. No, you're not. And I know this because I used to do the exact same thing. I used to thought I was good at sales. And believe it or not, I know this might be hard to believe, I'm actually a very likable guy in person. I know it's far-fetched. I know people are going to be laughing right now. I'm actually a very likable guy in person. I'm very trustworthy. Contrary to what everybody on social media, especially TikTok, says that I'm ripping people off. I actually have a high-level integrity. It's literally one of our ethos on the logo here in the background. Discipline, integrity, respect. Integrity is my word. So it's very important to actually be trustworthy to people. So I'm very good in front of people to gain their trust and to take their order. And so I equate that as being a good salesman. It's not true. Being a good salesman is taking someone who's a maybe and turning them into a yes. A really good salesman takes a no. and turns them into a maybe and then from a maybe to a yes. And by the way, guys, I don't know if you know this, but you can never, you'll never be able to take someone from no directly to yes. You can only move them from no to maybe and then move them from maybe to a yes. So if you think that someone tells you no, that you're going to like, you know, song and dance them and turn them to a yes, it's not going to happen. You have to move them to maybe first and then move maybe to yes. And that could be like a fraction of a second. It can be a two-minute conversation. But if someone says, no, I'm not interested, you're not just going to go move them to a yes. And again, that's good sales. That's what sales really looks like. I had one of the... Well, before I get into that, let me back up. I'm looking at my notes over here. Sometimes I have notes. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I just wing it. Sometimes I have very specific things that I want to say. So here's the most common thing I get from people. In regards to selling, if you do quality work, you'll make all the money you want and your phone will never stop ringing. You'll get all the referrals that you could ever imagine. Yes, guys, you need to do quality work. 100%. Guy on TikTok, he's been calling me out on these videos. He says, I never talk about quality. I never talk about things like putting paper down and protection and all this. And that's because the majority of contractors across the country, really across the world, the majority of them do good work. It's not a quality issue. Yes, there's lots of guys that do crappy work. That's a small percentage of contractors that do crappy work. Most people, especially if you've been in business for more than two or three years, you want to do good work. You're not out there just trying to make money. You're not just trying to take advantage of people and make money. You want to do good work and then you want to be paid handsomely for the work that you do. You want to pay what you're worth, what your value is. Not be paid $45,000 a year or $27,000 a year or not even taking a salary while your guys are making $60,000, $70,000 a year. Most contractors want to do quality work. Now, quality work will get your phone to ring. It will get you referrals. That's true. And if you have enough people, enough jobs, then you can get referrals and then you can get into a position eventually where you work 100% off referrals and you never have to really worry about pre-qualifying people and you don't really have to sell too hard because you have this good quality. It's very difficult to get to there. If you're just starting out and you do one job, You have one potential person that can refer you. So when you're just starting out, you need leads. And even within a year or two, depending on how many jobs you do, especially if you start out and you only do three jobs, three bigger jobs in your first year, you're not going to be getting 50 referrals more than likely from those three jobs. As you do more and more work, you're going to get more and more referrals. But you have to build up to that. But quality gets the phone to ring. It will especially get the phone to ring when you do quality work and you're underpriced. See, a lot of these guys out here, especially the ones that have been in business for 15,20,30 years, these are the older guys that will comment on my videos and stuff and say, well, I've been doing it for 30 years and I haven't advertised since the beginning. It's all referral-based. That's all you got to do. Well, half these guys are undercharging. Half of these guys have very simple lifestyles. They live in a two-bedroom house and they're perfectly okay with that. And they drive an older truck, but that's nothing on it. And they don't take vacations. They just hang out, sit around the house. And they only need $30,000 a year to live the life that they want. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. You can live a very simple life. It's actually easier to live a simple life. But not everybody wants that. Some people want to build a big business. Some people want to build a legacy. Some people want to try to become millionaires. Again, there's nothing wrong with that either. But you have to understand that the guy that only needs $30,000 to live and his way of doing business is not going to translate to the guy that wants to build a $2,000, $3,000, $5 million business and be able to pay himself a couple hundred grand a year. It just doesn't work. It's not an across-the-board transaction like that. And so, yes, quality will get the phone to ring, but you still have to learn how to sell if you're going to charge premium prices. And if you're going to charge premium prices, you have to deliver premium quality. And you have to deliver, more importantly here, this is the meat and potatoes, a premium experience. Because here's the thing. People buy experiences. They don't buy the product. You don't buy a snowboard. I'm trying to say snowmobile and snowboard at the same time. You don't buy a snowboard because you absolutely love snowboards. You buy a snowboard so that you can go snowboarding and have the experience. You love the experience. You don't buy a sports car just because you want a sports car. You buy a sports car so that you can drive it and have the experience. So when people are looking for contractors, they're looking for a contractor that's going to give them a good experience. And here's the other thing on top of this. Most people believe across the board that all contractors are going to provide the same level of quality. Now, I mean, not every person believes this, especially if they've had a bad experience. But if you take someone who's never hired a contractor and they've never talked to anyone or had horror stories told them about contracting, they have zero bias about contractors. And they go and they try to have a project done. And they talk to three different contractors. In their mind, they will believe that the quality, like the product itself, will be somewhat equal across the board. There may be a little bit of variation there, but in general, it's going to be across the board. So how do they determine who they hire then? Well, price may be a factor if they're price conscious, but if you have people that are not price conscious, for the most part... Those are the people that you want to go after. And if that's the case, price is usually number three on the list. What people want to know is that, can I trust you in my house? I've talked about this before. It's the certainty of achievement. People want to have a certain level of certainty. They want to know that you're going to deliver the product, that you're not going to quit halfway through, that you're not going to have employees that are going to steal from them, that you're not going to forget to leave the dog, open the door and the dog runs out in the street and gets hit by a car. That's what people care about. They don't give a crap about what color the tile is. That's not what people are worried about. That's not the experience. If you're a kitchen remodeler, I was talking to someone the other day about this. Here's an example of how you can provide value to someone without... It has nothing to do with the quality of the product. We're solving problems now. I'm switching over to solving problems. Give you some examples. If I'm doing a kitchen remodel for somebody, they don't have a kitchen anymore. They can't use their kitchen. So what happens? They have to set up a little temporary microwave in the living room. All of their dishes and stuff are all over the place. They got to make do with not having a kitchen for the four to eight weeks that it takes to do this project. That's a major problem for people. You're disrupting their lives for one to two months or longer. So how can you solve that problem? The problem is the life is being disrupted. How can you solve that problem? Well, one thing you can do if you were a smart, profitable... You've got to have profits. If you're a smart, profitable contractor, you would go buy a mobile kitchen trailer. A little 6x10 mobile kitchen. And then whenever someone hires you, you offer that as part of the package. And you park that kitchen in their driveway. And so now they have a full kitchen that they can use during the life of the project. See, that's how you provide real value. Because you solved a problem that everyone has to experience. You don't really give a crap if they're displaced in their kitchen. All you care about is getting the job. But you're not seeing it from the customer's perspective of how can I make this transition, this process so much easier and more enjoyable. You could charge $5,000 more on a kitchen remodel just for the use of a kitchen. And people will love it. They will absolutely pay more for that type of experience because people aren't doing that. You can do the same with the bathroom. There's mobile bathrooms. If you're doing bathroom models and they only have one bathroom in their house, you can do the same. Now, I wouldn't say that that's probably as good of an investment because most people have multiple bathrooms and people that have only one bathroom are going to be in the lower price point. So that's probably not the best example, but it's still a way of solving the problem. You can get creative in your marketplace of how to solve problems that people have. And all you have to do is survey your clients. When you get done with the job, survey them. How was the experience? What could we have done better? What was the most frustrating thing about this whole thing? Well, you guys were great, Brad. Your team was phenomenal. We really loved it. If I had to pick one thing, it was just having to eat out of a microwave and going out to dinner for the two months during the duration. Okay. Interesting. I wonder as a contractor, if there's a solution that I can provide to solve that. Hey, landscaping project customer, how was your experience? Experience was great, Brad. You guys were phenomenal. We absolutely love it. The only thing that I would say, if there was any way you could do it, and I don't know if there is, but we have a newborn baby. And when you guys are out here with your equipment, it was very hard for the baby to sleep during the day. Okay. I appreciate the feedback. Now, I'm not saying that there's an exact solution to that. I'm not saying don't use equipment. But you can take that information and try to figure out a solution to that problem and then solve it. Right? And then apply that to your offering. That's how you provide solutions. And people will pay a lot more for those types of solutions. Lastly, I want to talk about is selling in your estimates. Now, somebody on TikTok was talking about estimating. And I'm not picking on this guy if he happens to listen to this. It's a very common thing. But I said, if you're still selling in your estimates, you're doing it completely wrong. Guys, if you're trying to send over an estimate to a person for an approval, and you don't know if they're going to hire you or not, then you're doing it completely wrong. All of the selling is done before the contract is ever signed. Think about buying a house. If you're going to go buy a house, a guy selling the house for $300,000, you offer them $280,000 or whatever. They counter offer at $290,000. You accept it. It's accepted. The offer has been accepted. Now, we just have to do the paperwork, the closing, if you will. The closing is just the finalization of that. It's already agreed to. The price has already been agreed to. It's the same with the vehicle. If you go buy a car, you talk to the salesman, hey. The car is $45,000. I'll do $40,000. No, we can't do that. $42,000. Okay, $42,500. We're sold. The price is agreed to. The deal is done. Now we just need to sign the paperwork. That is how estimates should be done. You do all the selling in advance, and then the estimate is just the final paperwork to complete. A lot of you guys are going out, and then you're using the estimate as an offering. you know, to the, to the emperor, almighty emperor, here is our offering of a very detailed and line item estimates for your consideration. Almighty emperor, please can, you know, have mercy on me and select us guys. That's not, sometimes I crack myself up. That's not how you do your estimates. Do all the selling first, whether it's on the phone, which is what I teach. or in person at the consultation, which you should be getting paid for that too. And then the estimate is the final step. If you're not doing that, you're doing sales wrong. I don't care if you have a 99.9% close rate. I don't care if you're booked out for two years. I don't care if you've been doing it for 48,000 years. If you're trying to sell in the estimates, you're doing it wrong. I'm just telling you right now. You don't sell in the estimate. And if you don't understand this, let me know because I can help you with this. Which leads to the last thing is that one of my clients in the sales accelerator, and I'm not picking on him. He had just sent over a recording of a sales call that he had with one of his clients. He recorded the sales call. He just shared that with me confidentially. We don't put it out there for everyone else. But guys in the Profit Club and in the Sales Accelerator, they will often record their calls and then let myself review them and I will give them feedback on what they did right and what they did wrong. That's just one of the benefits of being in both the programs, which I'll take a second to talk about. If you're interested in just how to get better at sales, if you got everything else in your business is good, you're making good money, but you're struggling with sales, you want to learn how to save 15 to 20 hours a week. not doing free estimates anymore, no longer selling in estimates. And you want to know before you even go out to their house if you got the job or not and you're getting paid to go out there. If those sound like something you're interested in, you can join my sales accelerator. It's way underpriced right now. Like super cheap. It's really too cheap. I'm actually screwing myself to be honest with you. But I'm trying to get people in there to understand the value of that and to help them. Check out the Sales Accelerator if you just want sales help. If you're looking for an entire business help to be profitable and really make life-changing profits in your business, that's what the Profit Club is for. That's my main coaching program. Either one of those two will help you with sales. Both of those programs will help you with sales. So check that out. But I was listening to one of them. He sent me one of my clients and the Sales Accelerator sent me a call. And on the call... The customer has a shower door. They're doing a bathroom remodel. And they have a glass shower door, custom glass shower door. And he was asking them if they were wanting to try and reuse the shower door. And again, I'm not picking on him for doing this. Because it can be done. It's possible to reuse a shower door. You and I know that if you've done this before, it's nearly impossible to make it line up and it never works out 100%. But is it possible? Yes. And in this call, he's really trying to say, yeah, I understand. We can definitely use a shower door. I know the guy said, we talked to two other contractors. They said they wouldn't use the shower door. We'd have to get a new one. And so a lot of us believe in this situation that we're providing value to the customer by letting them use the shower door. And in that situation, they're going to save some money. Which is true. They will save money and shower doors aren't cheap. It could save them $1,500 to $3,000. It's a lot of money. But is that going to be the best solution for them? So the whole reason I'm bringing this up is because we get caught up in this idea of like, oh, I'm going to provide value to them because the other guys won't let them use the shower door. I will use the shower door. And that could save you some money. And therefore, I'm providing value through a discount. And what I'm telling you is that that's not providing value. It seems like it from the outside that you're providing value. But you're not really providing value. Because the shower door really isn't what they care about in the bathroom itself. The value add is in why are they wanting this bathroom remodeled? How is it going to affect their life? How is having this new bathroom going to change your life going forward? Maybe they're embarrassed with their bathroom. Maybe the wife wants a soaking tub because she just recently got diagnosed with MS or something and she needs to be able to soak. Or maybe she has lupus. I don't know. Or maybe the husband recently became handicapped and now they need to have a shower transition so that... They have a curbless shower so he can roll in there and use the shower. When people have things like that, you're actually changing their life. If they don't have a tub and they need a tub, you're changing their life. If they have a shower they can't use because they're handicapped and you make it usable, you're changing their life. You're changing the quality of their life. And that's the stuff you need to focus on when it comes to providing value to your clients. And people will pay more for having the vision. And sometimes people don't even understand how much it's going to affect their life once they do these types of projects. It's your job on the sales call to get them there, to take them on a journey of where they're at now. to where they're going to be after the project's done. See, if you can learn how to take your clients on a journey to the end and let them see what the end is, how it affects their life, you are 100 times ahead of the guy who goes out there and just gives a free estimate. Even if you're 25% more expensive. Because you've connected the dots for them. For them to be able to see that. And once people can see the end in mind and how you're going to take them there, it's very hard for them to say no to having that done because the other two options that they had did not do any of that. The other two options were nice guys. They came out. They got good quality and they came out and they have good reviews and gave them an estimate. And maybe all your estimates are right in line. Maybe you're $20,000 more. I don't know. But it's very hard when you've... painted the picture for the new life that people are going to have after using you. And this is not an opportunity for you to brag about how good you are. I'm just saying if you're able to paint that picture for them and they can see it in their mind, it's there, it's tangible. They can reach out and touch it in their mind. If you can do that, you will sell that job because you provided value to them in the terms of this is, you know, this is going to, you're going to be the guy that's going to, allow us to get the dream that we want. That's providing value. Those are different ways you can provide value. It's not taking orders. It's not charming them. It's not selling yourself. It's none of that stuff. It's absolutely none of that. I got clients sell jobs for $50,000 plus, a couple hundred thousand dollars. And on these calls, when they sell these people, they don't even talk about scope at all. They never even bring up scope. They don't ask them what kind of tile they want, what size shower door they want. They don't ask them what color siding they want on the house or the barn. They don't ask them, does it matter if it's got a 14 foot or 12 foot? ceiling in it. That type of stuff does not matter because you're selling the dream. You're not selling the product. And that's where I want to end this is on people buy the experience, the dream, not the product. So I hope this has been helpful to try and clear some of this up. If you have any questions about this, reach out to me. Send me a message. Happy to... clarify. And if you want more information on the Sales Accelerator program or the Profit Club, the links will be in the show notes or you can always reach out to me, send me a message. You can go to my website, hammerandgrind. com. I just launched a brand new website. It's pretty awesome. I like it. It has the different programs on there. It has some information for you. So if you guys have not been, go check out the hammerandgrind. com website. If you've been in the past, Unless you've been in the last two weeks, go back and check it out because it's completely different. It's completely different. So with that, I'll leave you guys. You know where to find me. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, search for Hammer and Grind Podcast. Links are in the show notes. Do me a favor. If this is your first episode, go leave me a review on your favorite podcast platform. It really helps to spread the word for other contractors. And if I could do anything for you, please reach out to me. And guys, remember, as always, until next time, profit is not a dirty word.
