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. I'm your host, Brad. Listen, today we're going to be talking about something fun, exciting. Well, maybe not exciting, but it's going to be enlightening. I hope it's going to be enlightening. Today, we're talking about why your perception is not reality. And we've been having a lot of conversations about this in the Profit Club with a lot of my clients. I have several clients that are... considering rebranding their business because they realized that when they named it after their last name, it just wasn't the best option. And you've heard me say this before. You should never use your name and your business name unless you have a very, very unique and specific name that ties right into what you do. It's just my belief right now. Does that mean you can't have a successful business as your name is in your... No, it doesn't mean that at all. I'm just telling you from there's easy ways and there's hard ways, but both ways can get the same result. So would you rather do something the hard way or the easy way? That's what we're talking about here, right? You can get to the same result, but if I used my last name, Hebner, which can never be pronounced correctly. If you've ever seen my name, it's H-U-E-B-N-E-R. It looks like Hoobner. It's pronounced Hebner. No one can ever pronounce it. It doesn't bother me. I get pronounced every time we go out to dinner or we go anywhere, it's always pronounced wrong. A lot of times when we go out to dinner, I actually tell them it's spelled H-E-B-N-E-R, leave out the U, and they usually say Hebner and get it right. So it's just a reality. Can I have a successful business if I named it Hebner Construction? Yes, I can. Is it going to be more difficult? Yes, it will be compared to something else that may be more in line with what I do. So we're not talking about naming today, per se. We're talking about perception, how this factors into everything we do in our business. So back to the conversations that we're having in the Profit Club. I got one client who wants to rename. I have another client who he's not really renaming, but he wants to redesign his logo. And he's experimenting with some things like some different scripts. typefaces for the logo. He's doing a lot of himself. A lot of the guys are doing it themselves. I have the same one that's renaming, wants to rename his business, is doing some vehicle wrap designs. And the vehicle wrap design came before the renaming of the business. I had a conversation with him last week on one of our accountability calls that we have. And I said, well, he said, I'm thinking about changing the name of the business. And I said, well, if you're going to do that, you need to change the name of your business before you rebrand everything, like before you put wraps on your vehicle. Because I was asking him, like, how soon do you think you're going to do this? He said, probably within the next year, I'm going to change the name. So I said, dude, if you're going to do it within the next year, you need to go ahead and do it now before you spend thousands and tens of $20,000 rewrapping all of your vehicles. Like rebrand now, then go forward and not have to mess with it. He was thinking like, I'm going to do wraps now with my existing name. And then in two or three years, maybe change the name and then redo everything. And it just doesn't make sense. Now, if you're thinking like two or three years down the road, you're going to rebrand, then I would say, go ahead and do your wraps now. And then whenever you want to rebrand, it's going to cost you more. But hopefully down the road, you're going to be more profitable. So where we're at on this is that a lot of the guys, even in the profit club, a lot of my clients and a lot of contractors try to do this stuff themselves, right? You're a contractor who knows how to do your technician, right? You know how to do your job. You know how to do plumbing or electrical or build houses or remodeling or tile or whatever it is that you do. And somehow that makes you an expert in how specific typefaces. of text that you use in your ads and logo is going to be the best. Like I was saying, one of my clients, and I'm not picking on any of these guys. They know that I'm a straight shooter with them. I don't hold back. It has no benefit to anybody for me to blow smoke up your butt ever. And by the way, totally off topic. If you're looking for someone who's going to make you feel good, about your business. If you're looking for a coach or a mentor who's going to make you feel good about your decisions in your business, they are not a good coach. They are not a good mentor. Coaches and mentors are not designed to make you feel good about yourself and your decisions. They are there to point out what you're doing wrong and to challenge your perspectives on what you think. to challenge your mindset, to make you better. See, a lot of guys will post things in my group going back. And I know he won't mind me saying this, but he posted the picture of his vehicle wrap that he had designed. And I straight up told him, I said, dude, this looks like shit. I mean, it just looks like it's terrible. Like there's no way I would even put this on a vehicle. It looks so bad. Right now. How would I say, oh yeah, man, that looks, that looks really good. Yeah. You should definitely do that. Because I don't want to hurt his feelings. I don't want to make them feel bad about themselves. If that's you, if you're looking for that type of feedback and make you feel good about yourself type of environment, don't join the Profit Club. Don't do that. Maybe don't join any of my coaching programs because I don't do this to make you feel good about yourself. I do this so that you can be the best version of yourself in the quickest amount of time to receive the maximum benefits of the coaching. That's my goal. Now, when you do that, when I challenge your beliefs and you make a change, and because of that change, more benefit comes to you. You make more money. You get more free time. You have a better business that runs without you. You actually start enjoying what you do. Do you think the side effect of that is that you actually feel better about yourself? The answer is yes. So long term, when someone is direct with you, when someone has given you real, honest feedback that's not biased, that's not trying to save your feelings, you will feel like crap in that moment. But you will feel 10 times better in the future. Whereas if I make you feel good about yourself now, in a day or two or two weeks, you're still going to go back to feeling like crap because you're not seeing results. Right? So keep that in mind. And by the way, I don't mean like, you know, telling you you're a piece of crap human being. I'm not talking about that. I don't mean like talking down to people. I mean, just giving you honest feedback. That's what I'm talking about. Whenever you have a perception of what you're doing in your business, like trying to create your own vehicle wraps and trying to create your own logo, I tell my guys all the time, quit wasting your time doing low value tasks that you're not an expert at because you want to save a little bit of money. We had a marketing call yesterday. I brought in an expert. He's somebody that we're working with that I have been behind the scenes developing a marketing program specific for my clients in the Profit Club because I know what kind of needs they have in their business. And so over the last several weeks, I've been working with this company and we'll probably have him on the podcast soon. But I've been working with him to really develop a specialty built advertising, marketing, all that stuff. program that's going to fit the exact needs of the majority of my clients. And so we were talking about that yesterday and he came into our weekly marketing call that we have and he led that call, talked about how to do Facebook ads, Google ads, some of the basic stuff that you need to do. And really at the end of that call, most of the clients, most of the people in the profit club, the contractors were like, yeah, I just need to hire someone. I need to hire an expert instead of just throwing darts in the dark. That was a term that he used. Stop throwing darts in the dark. And that's what most of you are doing when it comes to any task in your business that is not directly related to your skill, to the actual trade. So you guys know how to do your trade, right? You know how to do your craft, okay? But anything else that you try to do in your business, bookkeeping, Advertising, marketing, branding, design. What else? I'm trying to think of all the other things that we try to do on our own. It just doesn't make sense. We're not experts at it. Business development, structure of our business, how to hire, all that stuff. I have another person that I'm working with behind the scenes who is an HR specialist. I'm working with her. to develop curriculum for human resource resources like templates and things so that whenever you need to hire someone or whenever you need to develop like an employee handbook or onboarding things that you need when you start hiring, I'm working with a specialist who I used in my business to come in and start developing out that curriculum inside the Profit Club. Why? Because she's an expert. She's an expert at human resources. But for some reason, you want to save $500 or $1,000 or $2,000 because you don't want to spend that money because you think for whatever reason, even though you've never been officially trained in human resources, you're going to be able to provide the best solution in your business for human resources. Guys, hear me loud on this. Guys and gals. By the way, guys is universal. I would say it's non-binary, but not in the sense that you think I'm saying. Non-binary meaning it applies to everything. So this is a unisex term, guys. It's a Midwest term. So just so you know, going forward, if I say guys, I mean guys and girls, right? I'm not trying to isolate women in the trades. So guys, stop trying to save money. Because you don't want to hire an expert. Any expert you hire, whether it's an attorney, an accountant, an insurance person, whatever, HR person, marketing person, salesperson, anybody worth hiring is going to be expensive and they're going to be worth every penny that you spend. Because a lot of you guys are trying to save, you know, you're trying to save $5. Instead, you're actually costing you $20 in the long run. Someone comes to you and says, I can do that for 20 bucks. You say, that's crazy. I can do it for five. You do it for five on your own. Six months later, two years later, you get sued. You get audited by the IRS. There's a compliance issue. You know, OSHA shows up, whatever it is. And now you get fined. You find yourself in trouble. Now that $5 that you spent, you saved $15, is now going to cost you $20. So you lose in the long run. We got way off topic. It happens sometimes. I get on these little tangents. But it's super important that you understand that you're not an expert at these things. So quit trying to do it yourself. If you can't afford, if someone's like, if you're like, hey, I need to hire a... a marketing person and they're $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month, I can't afford that right now, then you need to be raising your prices and be more profitable. You need to make sure that you're getting a 50% gross profit so you can afford these things. That's one of the benefits of charging correctly in your business is that it gives you capital. It gives you money to reinvest in your business by hiring experts. It's a cycle. You hire an expert marketer. They bring in more leads. You sell more jobs. You hire more people. You produce more work. You make more money. You hire new salesmen, so on and so on. It doesn't work where you're the cheapest contractor in the marketplace and you never make enough money to be able to afford to pay for anybody. And so you do everything yourself. You do the bookkeeping yourself. You do the marketing yourself. You come up with your own names and all that stuff. And all it does is stunt your business growth. So what you could have potentially done in two or three years, it's going to take you five to seven years. But you think you're saving money. You're not. You're not. Okay, now we're ready to start the podcast. Guys, perception is not a reality. One of the things that I have my guys do in regards to sales is record all of their calls. I tell them right off the bat, you need to start recording every one of your sales calls. Record your role plays because we do role plays inside the... Profit Club and also the Sales Accelerator program that I have. We do role plays in there and you should record every single one of them and then go back and listen to them. I promise you, I will bet you money on this. This is officially on record. I bet you $10 because I can't bet too much because if a thousand of you try to claim your money, I'm going to be broke. But I bet you $10 that if you record your sales call with your clients, and then you go back and listen to it, it will sound totally different than what you think you sounded like when you were actually on the phone. Every single time I have my clients do this, they say, yeah, it's not how I sounded. When I said this one thing, my intent was this, but it came across this way. I thought I was being really excited on the phone. I go back and listen to it and it sounds like I was sleeping, like I just woke up. I promise you, if you do this, it will open up your eyes to the fact that you do not sound like you think you sound. And for those of you that are all about puking all over the customers about how great you are, when you go back and listen to yourself, you will think, man, I sound really arrogant or I sound really stupid saying all that stuff. I promise you, I bet you $10. And if you do that and it sounds just exactly like you think, hit me up. I'll give you your 10 bucks. Of course, it'd be in the form of a credit towards one of my coaching programs, but I'll still give you $10. I'm not worried about it because I already know the answer because every single client that goes through this says the exact same thing. I did the exact same thing when I started recording and learning, getting official sales training and going through that and bettering myself. I learned the exact same thing. I was like, holy crap, that is not what I thought I sounded like. That guy on the phone sounded like somebody who was a dick who wasn't interested in your project. But me, I was really interested in it. So that's number one is you don't sound the way you think you sound. So your perception of what you sound like is not real. So record your role plays. You can record your podcast too if you want. If you're going to do a podcast, I would highly recommend recording it. Okay, number two, naming your business. If you are just starting or you want to rebrand because you say, hey, you're right, I shouldn't use my last name. Don't be cute, guys. Don't try to be cute with what you are using. There's all kinds of research that have been done on how to name businesses and different things. And I've talked extensively about this. I'm not going to go too deep into it now, but short words, one or two words. Two to three syllable words are better, right? Some of you are like, I don't know, I'm trying to think of names without pissing people off. But some of you are like, Tri-State, Tri-State's best remodeling company. That's a dumb name. One, they'll never remember it. Two, your website's going to be so long, they won't even be able to type it out. They'll literally get frustrated typing out the name and then quit in the middle of it. Three, every time someone writes you a check, they have to write it out. And then what do you end up doing? You end up abbreviating it. Oh, just do TSBCC. Yeah, just put in there TSBCC, D, F, G, Q, R, T. It's stupid. It's stupid. Quit trying to be cute with how you name your business. Quit trying to be cute with how you name products or services that you sell. Some of you understand the value of creating like a package deal or creating some type of product offering. You know, maybe you do like maybe you're a landscaper and you're landscaper and you do pond clean outs or maybe you do ponds and you do maintenance. You know, you use some type of maintenance plan. And so instead of just calling it like our annual maintenance plan, you try to come up with some clever name. And it's like the lilies and frogs plan or something like that. Because you're like, oh, you know, ponds, they have frogs and lily pads and it all makes sense. Hold on, hold on. They have ponds and frogs and lily pads and it all makes sense. I'm going to be lilies and frogs. Hopefully that came through because last time it didn't come through very good. My voice changer there. Don't do that, guys. You don't need to have this cleverness. Cleverness never works in marketing. I've been spending a lot of time this year. researching copywriting, advertising, marketing. And I'm going to read from this book here in a second, but I've been reading a book lately on copywriting for advertisers. This is basically if you're in the advertising space, if you're a copywriter or a marketer, these are things you would need to know to promote the services online or in print or whatever. And it's going to open your eyes when I read this here in a second. But don't be cute. with your stuff. Understand that people, they just want to have results. They don't really give a crap about the name. So if you're naming your business or naming your services something really cute, it's going to be lost. You got to get creative. Don't be cute. Okay. The next thing in that is, and this may hurt. He might get mad at me for saying this. I hope not. I'm not going to say his name, but he'll know if he hears this. One of my clients is rebranding his name and he's using a script because he wants to do, he's trying to promote, I get it. He's trying to promote elegance. He's trying to promote, he does natural, you know, natural landscaping, like hardscapes and stuff. And he's trying to promote this image of like nature and high-end luxury, right? Which is a good thing to do. It's good to want to have a logo or script. or branding that promotes a certain type of feeling and emotion, right? But don't be cute and don't use scripts. He used a script. A script is cursive. If you don't know what script is, it means it's like cursive. It's like fancy. I'm going to read a couple pages from this book here, so bear with me, but it's going to be valuable once I read this. So this is, and I'll tell you, this is from the book called Casvertising, How to Use More Than 100 Secrets. of Ad Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone by Drew Eric Whitman. And even the name of this book is good advertising. How to use more than 100 secrets of an ad agency psychology to make big money selling anything to anyone. Who wouldn't want to know those secrets? Here we go. This is ad agency secret number 11. The psychology of typefaces. If you don't know what a typeface is, it's just the fonts, basically, that are used in print. Okay? So the fonts. Typefaces can be playful, authoritative, creative, beautiful, dramatic, fancy, odd, refined, and yes, even downright hideous. And because of this, different typefaces can cover our messages with different meanings. For example, you wouldn't want to advertise frilly women's lingerie using a headline set in dark, bold, and masculine Cooper Black. On the other hand, you wouldn't advertise your hardcore bodybuilding gym packed with sweaty and grunting steroid-injecting monsters using Palace, a lovely, delicate, and wispy script font. Your ad would look ridiculous. Of course, your product may not suggest... a typeface that's so categorically expressive of any particular emotion or visual, but no matter what typeface you choose, just know that it will communicate something. So whatever your typeface that you use, it will communicate something. Now, I'm going to skip through some of this here. One little bold point they make here is it is possible to blow away three quarters of our readers simply by choosing the wrong type. If you rely on words to sell, that should concern you deeply. So in addition to dozens of studies done in the past few decades, several recent tests have been conducted to determine which type styles are easiest to read. I've heard a few people say, whatever you're used to reading is what's easiest for you. He goes on to say hogwash. Of course, some typefaces are easier to read than others. It's ridiculous to say otherwise. Still, you can't get used to scrubbing your dirty clothes on a rock, but that doesn't mean, or you can get used to scrubbing your dirty clothes on a rock, but that doesn't mean that pressing start on your washing machine isn't easier, right? So you can wash your clothes with a rock or you can just hit start on the washing machine. Which one's easier? You can do this yourself. and have crappy results, or you can hire a professional. Which one's easier? I just want to point out something. These are experts who study typefaces, the fonts. There's people out there that study the type of font that you use and how it impacts your customers. But you, the carpenter, the landscaper, You think you know what's going to be best for your business and your customers. There's people that spend their entire lives dedicated to typefaces. You have never studied one second of it, think you know what's best. You see what I'm talking about here? Do you see the difference? Let me skip forward to this right here. This is the really important part, the testing. So the difference between a Serif and a sans Serif typeface. Do you know the difference between a serif and a sans serif typeface? I don't even know half of these. I know what a script is. I don't really know what a sans or sans serif is. Maybe some of you do. You took some marketing classes in school. I don't know. But I didn't know what that was. But a serif typeface is one that has little feet and embellishments on the tips and base of each letter, such as this font. Oh, the font of the page that we're reading. Duh. Now I got it. Sans, the French word for without. Sans serif faces, such as this font, have no serifs. They're changing the type in the, you can't see it, but it's in the book. The serifs make each letter more distinct and recognizable. Multiple researchers confirm that serif fonts make words easier to read. Serif fonts make words easier to read. There were two studies, Worden in 1991, Hartley in 1994. Examples of serif fonts are Times New Roman, which is like the most common. Roman, Palatino, School Book, Georgia, Currier, Shelton, Shelit Ham, I don't even know how to say that, Bookman, and Garamond. In 1926, the British Medical Council reported that sans serif type causes iridation. It causes iridation. An optical anomaly in which the space between lines in... lines intruded into letters, creating a type of light vibration that made reading more difficult and uncomfortable. So literally the type of font that you use can make your customers make it more difficult for them to read and make them feel uncomfortable reading it. Now, some of you hearing this are like, I never even knew that. I never realized that text could actually have that impact on me. But I guarantee you've read something at some point that was in some weird font and you just like gave up because it was so hard to read. Right. And obviously there's levels to this game. Bear with me. It gets better. So in a study of comprehension, Wielden,1986, noted that only 12% of participants effectively comprehended a passage set in sans serif type versus 67% of readers given a version set in serif type base. Those given the sans serif version said they had a tough time reading the tests and had to continually go back or backtrack to regain comprehension. In a substantial test of several hundred thousand readers, Wilden set one ad in three different faces. This is where it gets good. One in Garamond, one in Times Roman, and one in Helvetica. Helvetica, however you say that. Here's what he found. He took one ad, ran it in three different typefaces. The Garmon was read and comprehended by 670,000 people, which is 66% of the test subjects. Times Roman was comprehended by 320,000, less than half of Garmon. And Helvetica was comprehended by only 120,000 people,12.5% of the subjects. So what's the bottom line here? Serif fonts, at least on paper, are simply easier to read. The findings are the same for virtually every researcher who's ever conducted the test. No wonder most newspaper and magazine publishers set their body copy in serif typeface. Let that marinate for a second. People spend their life researching what type of typeface you should be using. But you think you know what's best because you have access to tools like Canva, which gives you all different kinds of things. Your perception of how good you are at this is grossly overrated. You're not an expert. You're not an expert at typefaces unless you were in the high school newspaper publishing or whatever, and you actually have experience with that. But for whatever reason, you think you're going to know what's best. I know there was a lot there to read. I wanted to point this out because it's just mind-blowing to me that every single aspect of your business, there's people out there that dedicate their entire life to being the best at that one little thing, but yet you think you know what's best for your business. Start hiring professional people to do the things that you don't know how to do so you can save some money. Stop doing that. The next thing I want to talk about is the services that you think are important. I was going to do a whole podcast on starting a business from scratch and how I would formulate that. But I've already done some podcasts on that. But people who are serial entrepreneurs, okay? I'm talking about people who start businesses, grow them up, and then sell them off for millions of dollars, start another business, grow it up, sell it off. Thank Elon Musk. A lot of people don't know Elon was the founder of PayPal. That's where he got most of his money from. So he started PayPal, which is the financial payment processing company. He sold that off. He started Tesla. He started SpaceX. All these other ones, Starlink, the Boring Company, all these different companies that he's part of. Serial entrepreneurs don't look at a... service and say, I really, really want to do that because it's what I love doing. Now, there's all kinds of talk out there about find what you're passionate about, find what you love, and you'll never get paid. You'll never work a day in your life, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There is some truth in that. I'm not saying that you have to like, absolutely, you have to like something, right? It has to be a little bit of like, but from a business perspective. You find out where the voids are in your marketplace, and then you provide the solutions to those voids, regardless of whether or not you like it, regardless of whether or not you think it's a good service to have, regardless of whether it's something you want to do or don't like to do. It just doesn't matter. Now, if you're an electrician, you're going to do electrical, that's fine. Be an electrician. But don't say, oh, I want to do new construction. Because I just don't like working with people. I don't like going into people's homes and working with them. So I'm only going to do new construction. Well, that may work for you during a housing boom. But then all of a sudden, when the housing stops, what are you going to do? Oh, Brad, I don't have any work. Here, hold on.
