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, guys, to the Hammer Grind Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about the lie that you've been sold. Most contractors, including myself, were sold a lie whenever we started our own business. And it wasn't a specific person that sold you the lie. It was ourselves. Ourselves sold us the lie. What do I mean by that? Well, I was on Facebook. where I get a lot of inspiration for these podcasts. I was in a Facebook group and a guy made a post. You can hear the desperation. You can hear the frustration in the post itself. I'm going to read just one little section over here of what it says. It says, what can you tell newer contractors that will help with their business to deal with the stress, the anxiety, and the insane workload it comes with as a small business owner, contractor or not? No one tells you about the time away from family or the stress or that customers will be a bigger issue than the job will ever be. The friends will understand why you're busy or kids wanting to know why you're working so late or on the phone all the time. And this is the common thing that happens for contractors who start out as a tradesman, a craftsman. You start out working in the trade. And then you transition into being a business owner. And he goes on to say that he's been in the industry for 12 years and been doing it on his own for two years. And he's struggling. He gives some situations where he was dealing with customers and how they get upset with him and all these different things. And here's the reality of it. I don't care if you've been doing construction for 30,40 years. If you're a carpenter, a painter, electrician, plumber, whatever, you've been on the tools for 20,30,40 years. and you are just a crack at it. You can just hear a sound and know what it is or see something and know instantly how to fix it and do it with extreme proficiency and all that stuff. You're just the best at it, what you do, your craft. That means zero, zero to running a business. It does not translate over whatsoever. And this is the lie that people have been sold. This idea that you're good at your craft craft automatically means that you're good at running a business, right? And so because we spend 10,15,20 years developing this craft that we have, it's become second nature to us. We don't even think about it. It just happens. It's muscle memory. It just, you know, you can like almost be asleep, your eyes closed and you can do your craft to perfection because you've spent 10,20,000 plus hours of developing it. And then all of a sudden you start a business and you spend zero time developing your business skills, your leadership skills, your communication skills, your sales skills, your marketing skills, your productivity skills. You spend zero time developing those things. And then you get frustrated and you start out by undercharging. Because nobody told you correctly how to charge to begin with. And you create this scenario that he just describes where you're working all the time, where your workload is insane, where you're on the phone all the time, where you're spending time away from family and all these. And the thing is, is that none of that is a requirement. I want you guys to hear me loud on this. None of those things are a requirement to own a business. Those are the byproducts of not knowing how to run a business. So you don't have to work weekends. You don't have to stay up late into the evenings doing free estimates and all that stuff. You don't have to go look at jobs after hours. You don't have to work 12,15,16 hour days. You don't have to work six, seven days a week. You don't have to do any of those things. Now, yes, when you start a business, there is a grind in the beginning. Okay, don't get me wrong. But it's not a requirement to grind. People that want to have success faster will put more effort and time in in the beginning so that they can achieve that level of success quicker. But it's not a requirement. It's not a requirement whatsoever. eventually have a successful business, but it may take you two to three times longer than the guy who works 80 hours a week for the first year in his business because he's spending twice the amount of time than you are in the same period of time that you're working your 40. So he's literally doing twice the amount of work than you, but he's not working on the tools. He's working on his business. And that's the thing where people get tripped up. My response to him was, you just need to charge more. If you start charging more, most of your problems will go away. And that's the truth. If you're charging more, you don't have to work as many hours because you're making more money per hour. So therefore, you don't have to work as many hours to make the same amount of money. If you charge more, you will automatically eliminate the customers who are the nitpicky complainers because they're wanting the deal. And those are the ones, people that are cheap that want the deal are the worst clients to work for. They are the most needy clients you could possibly have. This is why, I mean, I've said this on the podcast. I mean, we're on episode 117. I probably said it a hundred times, a hundred episodes. I probably said you need to charge more. I mean, that is the single simplest answer to all of these problems is you charge more. Because when you charge more, you work less hours. You pre-qualify your clients. In other words, you get better quality clients who have less demands, who are easier to work with. When you have more money, you now have more flexibility to hire people and staff that can take some of the workload away from you. There's just endless benefits to charging more for your services. But that's not what we do. We start our business based on our craft that we have, that we've known for 10,20 years. And we think it's if we build it, they will come. Right. I'm a great carpenter and we've all heard it. It's all about the quality. If you do high quality work, the phone will ring off the hook and you'll never be out of work. And, you know, you'll do this and that and it'd be great. That's a bunch of bullcrap. It's a bunch of bullcrap. There's way more involved in doing high quality work. You have to learn the side of business. You need, at a minimum, a bachelor's degree in owning a business. And I don't mean formal education bachelor's degree. I mean personal development level of learning bachelor's degree. In other words, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, hiring coaches, getting mentors, whatever. Two to five hours every single week, making yourself a better business owner, making yourself a better leader, making yourself a better salesman, a better marketer, whatever. Whatever needs to be done in your business, you have to invest in yourself to become a better leader. A lot of these things that he's complaining about in this post are a combination of having bad clients, but also... not understanding that one of the major skills that you need to learn in business is how to communicate with people. It's how to become a people person. If you ever look at the most successful people in general, not always across the board 100%, but most successful people are very, very good at communicating with people. They're very good at dealing with people. They are people. People, not people pleasers, they're good at understanding people and behavior, human behavior, and how to address that. So in other words, they're leaders in the sense that they know how to communicate well, because they get people to do things for them. They get people to be motivated to want to do things for them. When you have a strong leader in charge of you, you are compelled to want to work harder, to perform at a higher level. Because you want to make them proud. You want to do it for respect of them because they're such a great leader. And in the military, I had lots of different leaders. I had really terrible leaders and I had fantastic leaders and I can remember them by their names. And, you know, I remember ones that, that I would do anything. If they said, Brad, go storm that machine gun nest, that's, you know, shooting at you and you have a very high probability of dying. I would do that in a heartbeat because I respected that person, that leader. And there were other leaders that if they said that, I'd probably tell them to go F themselves, right? Because I did not respect them. That's the difference of understanding how business works. Has zero to do with how good you could swing a hammer. Absolutely zero. Zero to do with how good you can paint or, you know, run a brush. How you can lay tile. whatever your trade is, has zero to do with how good you are at that job. Has zero to do with how hard you can work. It's actually, if you're a really hard worker, if you grow up working on a farm where you worked all the time anyways, and you have a really good, hard, strong work ethic, it actually is a disservice to you because you can rely on working hard to try and solve the problem. And that's not the way you solve the problem in a business. You solve it through your brains. You solve it through intelligence. And so if you're a really hard worker, like I was, you know, in the military, Marines, the infantry, worked hard, busted my butt. It's easy to say, man, I just got to work harder. I just got to double down. If I want to make more money, I'm just going to have to work harder. I just work harder for the next six months to six years. And I'll make enough money that then, you know, in six years after working, you know,12 hours a day, then I'll have enough money that I could maybe get off the tools. Then I'll have enough money that I can maybe, you know, hire people or whatever, whatever we think is going to solve the problem. The reality of it is like literally the next day, you know, if I was working, if I had this belief of working hard. And I'm working 12,16-hour days either on the job side or returning calls, doing free estimates and all that stuff. And I'm like, man, I just got to work harder. The reality is if the next day I just woke up and decided to double my rates, I would probably never have to work another 16-hour day again. It can happen that fast. Now, there's challenges with raising your rates. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's easy to do, but it's very simple to do. It's a very simple thing to do in your business to have success much quicker. If you raise your rates and you start getting the 50% or better gross profit, everything changes almost instantly. The first time that you sell it, you're getting a 20%,25% gross profit on average. And let's say you're doing a job where you're going to make $2,500 profit. Maybe it's a one-week job and you're going to make $2,500 profit. And you say, you know what? This time I'm going to double and I'm going to charge and get a 50% gross profit. So instead of making 25% gross profit, I'm going to make 50% gross profit. So instead of 2,500, I'm going to make 5,000. And you do the exact same job in the exact same amount of time. And you literally double the amount of money you make. And you go, holy crap. Why have I been killing myself all these years when literally all I had to do was raise my prices? And now you have an extra $2,500 in your pocket that you didn't have to work one single ounce harder for. You didn't have to work more hours. You didn't have to do twice as many jobs to get the same amount of money. What do you think that does to you? What opportunities would that open for you? If you could have double the amount of money profits on one single job, what do you think that would do for your business? I know what it does because I did it in my business and I see it every day in my clients. The people that are in the profit club at some point now, when they first come, you know, people that first come in, they're not always instantly getting 50% the next day. But within usually 60 to 90 days, no later than six months at the longest, everyone in there is getting the 50% or better gross profit. And it doesn't matter the size of the job. One of my clients, he does large buildings, agricultural buildings, pole barns, stuff like that. And he's selling $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 projects at a 50% gross profit. One of the things I get on TikTok all the time is, well, that's great on a $5,000 job, but you're not getting that on two $300,000 jobs. I'm like, well, I know people that are. So I don't know what to tell you. Is it easy? No. Is it simple? Yes. See, some of you have this belief that you have to sell every job that comes in the door that calls you. What I'm telling you is that you would normally sell a job for $200,000. And now I'm telling you to sell that exact same job for $300,000 to get a 50% gross profit. You're going to sell it for $100,000 more than you normally would. You're like, there's no way that's possible. There's just literally no way that's possible. And that may be true for 95% of your clients that call you, but there's 5% out there that will pay that. And that's your job to find those 5%. So you think that if you can't sell 90% of the people, then it's not possible. It truly is a numbers game. And once you understand on a sales perspective, that selling higher profit jobs is a numbers game. It's 100% numbers game. If it's 5%, If only 5% of your clients will pay the higher rate that you're charging, then that means that you need to talk to 100 people to find five people that will pay that. And you're like, well,100 people? Damn, I only do 20 jobs a year, Brad. I only do 20 a year. I mean, I wouldn't talk to 100 people. I get referrals from... All my jobs come from referrals. So I get 20,30 referrals a year and I sell those and that's all I need to do. And I do free estimates and I go out and spend all my time because I have a high closing rate. I get 90% closing rate. I'm like, okay, well, who do you think referrals come from? They come from people that you've already sold to. So if you sell a job undervalued or underpriced to a customer and they really like you because they realize that you're too cheap, they're going to recommend all of their friends who are also cheap. Because birds of the same feather flock together, right? People are friends with people that are typically in the same wealth class. Not always, but typically. So if you're selling a cheap job to someone and they like it, they're going to recommend all their cheap friends. And you're going to keep getting the same low-grade customers over and over again. And so if I tell you that you only got to sell 5%, which is low, by the way. I mean, most of my clients are getting 20% to 30% close rates, even at a 50% gross profit. but I'm just using like worst case scenario, you only got 5%, you know,5% close rate. Then that means you got to whittle through 100 people to find five that will pay that, but they will pay the higher price. They absolutely will pay that. And they will be the best clients that you've ever had. Because people who appreciate the value of a higher priced... you know, contractor who's actually good at what they do. Don't get me wrong. You don't just charge a lot of money and then do crappy results. You got to produce, right? You got to be a level three contractor. But if you can be a level three contractor and you sell those five people, they will be the best customers you've probably ever had. They won't complain. They will actually make your life easier and you will enjoy working for them. And as a result, you will actually want to do a better job for them. That's the crazy thing too, is that when, if someone, if two people come to you, okay, you can only do one job. Let's say you can only do one job a year, whatever it is you do, you just do one job a year and two clients come to you. And one client, client A says, I'm not paying you a penny over $200,000. And it better be right. Like you better bust your butt and do good. And client B says, I'll pay you $300,000 and I'm going to make your life easy. First of all, which one would you pick? Every single person would pick B, right? You're going to make $100,000 more and they basically, you know that your life's going to be easier. But from you as a contractor, which one would you perform better for? Which one would you want to do a better job for? you would want to do a better job for the person who's paying you more money because you recognize that they're paying you a premium and you better deliver. So from a performance standpoint, when you charge more, it actually elevates you as a person, as a contractor to want to deliver your best. When you undercharge and you get halfway through the project and you realize that you're going to be under on your time, like, I mean, you're... You're over your hours that you estimated. And every day that you work, you're losing money. Do you want to do your best? Do you want to be like, oh man, I can't wait to just do my highest quality work for this customer where I'm losing $500 a day. I just love it. This is what I dreamed about when I started my own business is losing $500 a day and delivering my best quality work. Absolutely not. You're 100% screwing the customer. Because you're just trying to get the job done so you can get out of there. You're trying to stop the bleeding. So tell me how you're helping your customer by undercharging them and delivering a lower quality product and experience. This is the difference, guys. When you charge more, you get better quality clients and you actually perform at a higher rate, a higher performance output. because you want to make that experience great. You want to be able to deliver that for them. And you have plenty of money in there to do that. So even if you go over three to four days and it's costing you $500 a day, it's not a big deal because you're still making plenty of money. You can still get it done. And at the end of the day, you lost $2,500, but it doesn't matter because you made an extra $30,000 over what you would have charged. See, this is the lie that you have to be a good employee. That's what it boils down to. You've been trained to be a really, really, really good employee, to be self-employed. The term self-employed basically means you own the job. You created a job for yourself to where you're the only employee who does the work. You are an exceptional employee. except you're a terrible business owner. And for whatever reason that I still to this day cannot figure out, you believe the solution to all of your problems is to double down and work harder. It just blows my mind every day. I have conversations with contractors every single day on Facebook, on TikTok, email, text, everywhere, Instagram. conversations every single day with contractors who absolutely refuse to get help in their business to learn how to own a business. They want to learn how to be a better employee. They don't want to learn how to be a better business owner. And you need to be a better business owner. You need to go to school, not formal education. You need to go to continuing education, to professional development education, to self-mastery. You need to go to that level and start working on the core skills that you need to own a business. For some of you, that won't ever happen because you put your identity in what you do. You put your identity in being a really good employee. You live for the attaboys from your customers. Oh, Brad, that piece of trim there is just so tight and so beautiful. It's so perfect. And you're like, yeah, I did that. I'm good. Look at how good I am. Pat myself on the back because I put the perfect crown molding up. Look at what I do. I'm the greatest. Meanwhile, you go home and cry at night because you just got done working 16-hour days and you lost money on that job and you missed your kid's baseball game and you don't ever get to take your wife out on dates because you're working all the time. And you think about... you know, suicide and you're depressed, but man, you got that piece of trim perfect and they noticed it. I mean, that makes you feel great about yourself because they noticed how great you are as an employee. I hope this is pissing you off because I'm starting to get pissed off talking about it. Like seriously, I'm getting, my hair's staying up, I'm getting pissed off because too many of you are ruining your lives. trying to be the best employee you can be in your own business. And you need a hard reality wake up. This is your wake up call right now. Stop being a great employee and start being a business owner. Start taking control of your business and learning the information that you need to become a business owner. I wish there was some kind of magic pill or magic wand that you could wave. that once you decide to be a business owner, you literally lose all of the skill. You forget. You completely forget all of the skills of your craft. I wish that was something that you could do. I wish I could create a pill that I could sell you that as soon as you take it and you start a business, you would forget all of the skills of your craft because it would force you to have to rely on other people to do the employee part. and it would force you to be a business owner. Some of the best business owners out there have no idea how to actually do the craft that they're selling. I know people that own painting businesses, very successful painting companies, and the owner has never painted anything in his life. He doesn't even know how to paint. I know people that own heating and air companies and plumbing and electrical and remodeling companies who've never actually done that thing that they're selling. And they're the best at it because they don't rely on their skill sets of being an employee to run their business. They know they have to hire, train, and retain top talent in their business to do that. Because if they don't, they won't be able to produce any work. And that's what I wish you guys would do. I wish you would forget how to do all of the craft because you wouldn't be able to come in and save the day. as the craftsman whenever stuff goes south. I'll just do it myself because it's so easier than just trying to teach you how to do all this stuff. Just quicker if I do it myself than teach you. That's the mentality of a lot of you guys. You want to be the craftsman because you're a really good employee. You've been trained well to be a good employee and you're a terrible business owner. That's why I wish you could forget all of that. I wish you could eliminate that, erase it, and not know how to do your craft whatsoever. Because it would force you to develop new skills. It would force you to learn how to be a better communicator. And that's what you need to do to be a good employee. See, I even got my own brain messed up. I don't want you to be a good employee. Those are the things you need to do to be a good business owner. Forget the craft. You need to decide right now. Do you want to be a good employee or do you want to be a good employee? a business owner. Which one? Decide right now. And if your decision is to be a business owner, then stop acting like an employee because you're not going to be a good business owner being a good employee. Those two can't live in the same world. That's all I'm going to say on that. This is a short podcast. I'm getting fired up and I need to chill out for a second. I hope you guys understand what's at stake here. You're not going to get back those memories with your family. You're not going to get back to lost time with your wife. You're not getting any younger. When you're 20s and 30s, you think you're going to live forever. You can work hard and it's going to be great. You're not. You're stealing from the future is what you're doing. You're stealing today. The present day, you're stealing from your future. And quit doing that. Guys, you can find me on all the platforms, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. Leave a comment in. on Spotify or leave a comment, shoot me a DM, do something, reach out to me, let me know where you stand. I want you to tell me, I want you to draw a line in the sand and tell me, are you going to be a good employee? Are you going to be a good business owner? Make that commitment. Tell it to me, send it to me. I don't care how you do it. Carry your pigeon, smoke screen. I don't give a crap, but I want you to declare to me when you hear this, what are you going to be, a good employee or a good business owner? And I want you to send it to me and I'm going to hold you accountable for that. I'm going to follow up with you in the future and see how you're doing. But I want you to declare it out loud to somebody that you don't know, not to yourself, not under your breath, not in your mind. Declare it out loud in public for people to know and then be held accountable for that. Do that. I'm serious about this. I'm 100% serious about this. Send me a message and tell me what you're going to do. Are you going to be a good employee or a good business owner? Guys, remember, profit is not a dirty word.
