The contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, welcome back to the show. On this episode, we're talking about the contractor's curse. Now, this is something that I have kind of created on my own based on experience from working with contractors. from working with them one-on-one, working with them in groups, talking to them on social media, just interacting with contractors, seeing their behavior, seeing how they run their business, and more importantly, their personality. And so the contractor curse is the exact thing that keeps them stuck in their business. It's what keeps them from getting to the next level. And we've heard that before, marketing, lots of... Coaches and marketers like to use the term, let's get to the next level, right? Get to the next level. I've even said this myself. It's just a kind of a visual representation of like taking your business to where you want it to go. That can mean many different things for a lot of different people. But in general, we're talking about, you know, more success in our business, whether that's more money, whether it's more employees. whether that's getting off the tools, whether that's franchising, having multiple locations, doing millions of dollars, whatever. Success is really defined internally by you. But I think generally across the board, most people would define success as having a profitable business that doesn't require you on the day-to-day to be able to survive. I think most people would agree with that kind of. definition of, you know, what success is. So how does the contractor curse play into this? Well, there's two things that I've identified that make up the contractor curse. And we're going to deep dive in each one of these. The first one, and probably the most important one is ego. You've heard me talk about ego before pride, ego, death to ego, you know, so on, so on ego suppression. As a matter of fact, one of my first videos in my course trainings is called Ego Suppression. Because before you're able to really reprogram your brain around these beliefs that you have, you have to kill off your ego, right? You have to be open-minded. And your ego typically does not allow you to be open-minded. There's a psychology around open-mindedness, and there's actually some even hacks. I've talked about them on here before. There's sales hacks that you can use. One of the things you can use when you're talking to people, not necessarily sales, but if you want them to be more agreeable with you or have a higher percentage of getting someone to do something, you always ask with, would you be open-minded to X? Would you be open-minded to having a conversation? Would you be open-minded to trying out Milwaukee tools, right? I know like for some of you, that's like I just crossed the line. Some of you are diehard DeWalt fans. Some of you are Milwaukee. We won't even include the Makita guys because, I mean, can you really be a contractor if you're a Makita fan? I mean, come on. I think that's pretty universally known to be true. All right, I'm just teasing, guys. It doesn't really matter what tool you have. But still. Are you open-minded, right? Because nobody wants to believe that they're closed-minded. Every single person on earth believes they're open-minded. The reality of it is most people are not open-minded. And so it's a simple way to honestly manipulate people by asking them, are you open-minded? Because if you are open-minded, it's really more of a, the term open-minded, I wish I would have got the definition of open-minded. But it's really more like, are you setting your ways? See, if you're not open-minded, you're setting your ways. That's the guys I get. This is the ego side talking when I'm talking to contractors or I say something, especially, I know I'm going to trigger contractors every time I say this. Every time I talk about marketing and I talk about you can't scale or grow a business or be successful on referrals alone, you know,100% on referrals. Always,100% of the time, I will get people that tell me, I've been in business for 20 years and I only work off referrals. That's the ego side of it, talking. That's, I know better than you. You don't know what you're talking about. Because I've had success doing it this one way, therefore you don't know what you're talking about. And that is a closed-minded approach. That's a closed-minded viewpoint of the world. I don't need a website because I've only worked off reviews, or I mean referrals. I don't need reviews. I only worked off referrals. I don't need to do outbound cold calling. I only work off referrals. That viewpoint of the world is a closed-minded viewpoint, a belief, because you don't need any other way of doing it. And these are the guys, believe it or not, that reach out to me. And say, Brad, I've been in business for 20 years and I'm struggling now because the phone's not ringing. I've never had a problem for the last 20 years, but all of a sudden now the phone's not ringing. And that's because they've relied 100% on referrals. They've done absolutely nothing to build their branding, to build their marketing. They've had no website. They have no reviews. They've done 300 jobs, but zero reviews. No social media, nothing. And the reality of it is people's behavior changes. Their buying patterns change. In the marketplace, you also get, you know, like marketing fatigue. That's why you have to constantly be creating new ads if you're running ads. If you just use one ad and you use it over and over and over again, eventually you'll get marketing fatigue. People will get tired of seeing the same thing. This is why trends exist. And then with the help of, you know, apps like TikTok, which shorten your attention span to like two seconds, now trends can last only two weeks. If you're on TikTok and you see a trend, like a song, you know, there's a new song or there's a filter or something that comes out, it'll take off the first week. You may have a little bit of success. And then the next week, it'll blow up. It's everywhere. And then within three to four weeks, you would never see that again, right? So you literally have like a one to two week window of success. There's a guy on TikTok, Oliver Anthony, just a regular dude, wrote a song about Richmond, North of Richmond. You've probably heard it. And I mean, he is just blowing up everywhere. Everywhere. Within one week, he went from nobody knowing who he was to number one on iTunes. So trends like that can happen, right? Especially if it resonates. It's the same with marketing. It's the same with how you run your business. And so when your ego says, I know how to be successful. I know how to do marketing, Brad. You know, yeah, I've never done any marketing whatsoever. I just rely on referrals. But I know better than you because I know all I need is to get referrals. Right? That's that ego. That's that closed-minded perception of the world. You see this a lot in politics. And I'm not going to talk about one side or the other. But if you're on one side, you don't want to talk to or hear anything about the other side ever. Right? You're closed-minded. And I'm not saying that's good or bad. in that situation per se, but it can be hurtful. It can be bad if you're very closed-minded. You don't have to, by the way, you don't have to agree with someone to be open-minded. Open-minded just means that you're open to hearing new information that maybe you've not considered before. You can be open-minded to new information and still make the decision that you don't agree with it. And that's okay. But if you're close minded to it, it just means that you're not even willing to hear the information. I know what's best. I don't need your information, right? Webster's Dictionary of Egotism, which is ego, is an exaggerated sense of self-importance. An exaggerated sense of self-importance. Now, there are times where it's beneficial to have ego. And there's times where it's not beneficial to have, you know, an elevated sense of self-importance or an exaggerated sense of self-importance. One place that is beneficial, it's kind of a double-edged sword, but it can be beneficial to have an ego is on the battlefield, right? If you're in the military, it's kind of critical. For you to have an exaggerated sense of not necessarily self-importance, but of an exaggerated sense of you're better than the enemy. Like that can be healthy on the battlefield. It can also be unhealthy because if you think you're invincible, then you can put yourself in precarious situations and get yourself hurt or killed or somebody else hurt or killed. Right. So, but it's, if you have someone who's very meek, who's very shy. on the battlefield that usually doesn't always work out to be the best personality trait right when i got out of the marines i had a pretty good ego i thought i could do anything i remember very very vividly when i first got out of the marines i needed a job and i took um i took a job with a local cable company doing door-to-door sales going around knocking on doors hey i'm with the cable company you want to get cable internet and all that stuff So I did that for like three or four months. And then they opened up an inside sales position where you're just taking sales, you know, incoming sales. So I took that job. I'm on the phone all day, just signing people up for new cable and phone, internet, all that. And one of the, there was like a group of four of us. There was four inside salesmen. We had a kind of an assistant and then another lady who was like in charge of apartments, apartment sales. And we were all like in this one little cubicle area. And I remember having a conversation about unions. We're talking about unions. Now, one of the ladies that was a salesman, and I liked her, like she was awesome. I loved her personality. She actually worked in the coal mines. This is a female that worked in the coal mines. I mean, she was a no BS kind of person, right? But she was in the coal mine union. And then the other guy that sat across from me, his dad was in the union. sheet metal workers union. And I was, I was staunchly against unions. Like back then my ego was so high. I was very closed minded and had a very strong opinion about unions. Right. And so I'm talking against unions and I'm saying, yeah, there's definitely, there's definitely a use case for unions. Like in Diane's case, the lady's case, you would need unions in the coal mine because it's such a bad environment. But, you know, like in construction, like plumbing or electrical, you don't really need unions. Like, that's just what I was saying. And one of the assistants who I believe her husband, I don't remember the situation, but she was overhearing us talk. And we weren't having a heated conversation, but we were just talking for a while about it in between sales calls. And she turned around and she said something like, I don't remember exact words. She was like, you listen here, you little brats. you know, you don't know what you're talking about, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like she just snapped and, you know, gave it to me. And that kind of ended that conversation. Like later that day, the next day, she apologized. I apologize for, you know, whatever. But my point of that story is that I was so closed minded. I had such a high ego and I had such a very, you know, very fixed opinion about something that it caused me. to hurt other people's feelings. It caused me to not look at it from their perspective. It just caused a lot of problems. And that's what we do as contractors. We have egos and we have fixed opinions about things that keep us stuck. I'll give you one example right now. Nobody in my town charges for estimates. There's no way I can charge for estimates in my town. If I had a penny for every time I've heard that from a contractor, I'd be a millionaire. It's literally that bad. That is a fixed mindset, a closed mindset around what's possible. You don't understand, Brad. Hold on. You don't understand, Brad. I mean, everybody just does free estimates and it's never going to work. Okay, I hear you loud and clear. I hear you. Have you ever tried it? No. Then how could you possibly say it's not going to work? Well, I just know. You know, I just know. No, you don't. You don't know. And that ties in the second part of this equation, which is ignorance. See, the contractor's curse is a combination of ego and ignorance. When you have those two things prevalent in your person, right, in your beliefs, that is the contractor's curse. You are destined to be stuck where you're at in your business. Hey, just a quick timeout from the show. In the next 30 seconds, I'm going to tell you exactly how you can transform your contracting business. Imagine being part of a community of winners where you can find out exactly what they've done to be successful. That's exactly what you get when you join the Profit Club. But it's not just a community. You get lifetime access to all of my course-related material, including all future material that I add. But wait, there's more. Each week, you'll get access to three group coaching calls to talk about sales, marketing, and business problems and answer any questions that you may have. Still not convinced? How about personalized one-on-one coaching to help you overcome your limits? And here's my promise to you. I guarantee you will double your investment within 90 days, or I personally will work with you one-on-one until you do. So don't wait. Elevate your game with The Profit Club today. Now let's get back to the show. When you have the contractor's curse, you will be stuck in your business. Guaranteed. Ego plus ignorance. And it may sound like a almost like a an oxymoron, a contradiction. Right. How can you be confident about yourself and then not know? Well, here's the thing. Webster's definition of ignorance is lack of knowledge, education or awareness. So in the sense of I can't charge in for estimates in my town. Right. It could be because of a lack of education or knowledge or awareness. The reality is I can almost guarantee you that if you're the guy that says everybody in my town charges for or does free estimates, my first question to them is always, so you've talked to every single contractor in your town, literally every contractor you've talked to, every one of them. Well, no, not every single one. Okay, then how can you say with 100% certainty that everyone does free estimates? Well, I can't really say that. But everyone that I've talked to, which is like 15 of them, but none of them charge for estimates. Okay, now unless you live in a town of like 200 people, where there's only a total of 20 contractors, maybe then if you've talked to 15, I could say that you've talked to a majority and have a pretty good data sampling. But most people in their towns have hundreds of contractors of each trade, right? Different trades. And I can almost guarantee you that there's a high probability that at least one person in your town is charging for estimates. Now, it may not be in the exact same trade that you're in. If you're a remodeling contractor, it may not be a remodeling contractor. It might be a landscaper or vice versa, or maybe it's a fence installer, you know, or maybe it's a plumber, whatever. Like, but I guarantee you, I shouldn't say I guarantee you. high probability that there's at least one contractor in your town that's charging for estimates. But because you have not talked to every single contractor, your ego takes over and says, there's no way this is going to happen. And I've talked to a few people and that just reinforces my own belief, my own closed minded belief, my own ego, that it's not possible. Ergo, it's not possible. Right? You see how this works? The lack of awareness of the potential for it to exist is the ignorant side of it. Your ego not wanting to believe that it's possible is the other aspect of it. And so from that one perspective, your ego and your ignorance will keep you doing free estimates for the rest of your life. You see how this works? That is the contractor's curse. That is why you are stuck in your business. I could show you 10,000 contractors across North America that charge for consultations or charge for estimates, and you would still come back and say, that might work in other areas, but it won't work in my area, or it won't work for my trade. Because here's the deep-rooted part of it. We haven't gotten to the deep-rooted part of ego. What's really going on here is that you do not want to accept the fact that for the last 2,3,5,20 years of doing free estimates, you don't want to accept the fact that this whole time you could have been charging for estimates and saving yourself hundreds if not thousands of hours of your life. That's the deep rooted subconscious ego that's keeping you right. It's more about admitting that you're doing something wrong than it is about learning how to do something new. And for, I'll tell you, this is no joke. When I first learned, when I first heard about charging for estimates, I said, there's no way ego, there's no way it's going to work. I live in a small town that might work in big cities, but it ain't going to work here. I said that. Ego. Ignorance. Right? The fact is other people were doing it. Then once I started learning about charging for estimates, I hadn't done it yet. I started learning about how you can charge for doing estimates or consultations. I knew of the concept. I was slightly more interested in it. I went and looked at a job for free. And I was talking to the client. And they said, Hey, we got another estimate, or we talked to another contractor, rather, but we didn't want him to come out here because he wanted to charge us $500 to come out and do an estimate. And I remember when they said that, I thought, huh, there is another contractor charging for consultations. I did my estimate, right? It was kind of a screwed up job. It was like a shower redo. There was leaking and stuff. It was one of those situations where it's several thousand dollars to fix it. And you know they probably don't want to spend that much because they're talking about repairs type thing. I looked at the job, spent an hour or so, gave them an estimate, never heard back. I did hear back. They ended up hiring another contractor. And after I heard that guy, after they told me that there was another contractor in my town that was charging for estimates, I thought, well, it is possible then. Because if they're doing it, then it has to be possible. Otherwise, they wouldn't be in business. They wouldn't stay in business. And that opened up my brain to be like, you need to learn more information. You need to become less ignorant. You need to become more educated, more knowledgeable, have more awareness around what's possible and how to charge for estimates. And then after that, I started my journey of learning how to do it. And then I started doing it. The point is like that other contractor, maybe he was the first one that actually started charging for estimates or. Maybe there's 50 other contractors that I don't know of because they're not in my field and I don't have conversations with customers because we're not competing that they've been charging for years. The point is you're not aware. Your awareness level of what's happening in your area is keeping you to believe that it's not possible, even though it may already be happening. So a lot of us use your emotions. our feelings to justify not doing something. And that's the ego part. The ego protects our feelings. Our ego protects our emotion. You can go one step further and just look at people and their personalities and there are certain types of personality groups or personalities, certain types of people that act a certain way. They may be very outgoing. They may be very loud. They may be very, you know, opinionated. They may say whatever's on their mind. And they're doing that to cover up an insecurity they have. There's lots of different types of people groups out there that do this. And you can use your imagination. But if you've ever come across somebody who's like very, very outgoing, almost to the point of annoying. where they're like just in your face and you can't get away from it, you can almost see something in their life, whether it's a physical characteristic or a personal choice of how they live their life. You can see that. And so this elevated, exaggerated ego, if you will, personality is to combat the emotion of that characteristic or personal choice. Right. They're compensating. And that's what your ego does. Whenever you get information that you don't want to hear, like charging for estimates. Whenever I say you should be getting a 50% gross profit, which means you're going to have to raise your prices by thousands of dollars. Right. And then you say, there's no way. People are already telling me I'm too expensive. There's no way, Brad. I can raise my prices. That's your ego protecting you from the reality. that you've been cheating yourself. And that's what hit me. When I first found out that I wasn't charging enough because I didn't understand because I was ignorant. When I first found out that I could charge more, and that's all I had to do really to be successful was just charge more. I was depressed for two weeks because the previous nine years, I had been cheating my family and myself out of what I estimate to be almost a million dollars. If I was charging what I should have been charging, I would have easily been able to produce an extra $100,000 a year in gross profit, if you will. And over nine years, that's close to a million dollars, right? Now we can argue about whether those are factual numbers, it doesn't matter. But I think you understand that it's definitely more than $1. If I was able to raise my profits by 20%, which is about what I did, that's a lot more than $1 that I screwed myself out of. Even if it was only $200,000 and not a million, that's still $200,000 that I screwed myself out of. And my ego doesn't want to hear that. My ego needs to protect it. Because I had to look in the mirror and say, you, Brad, you screwed yourself. This is 100% your fault. It's not the economy. It's not that you can't find good help. It's not bad customers. It's you. It's 100% you. And that's a hard pill to swallow. So when you have that ego, Combined with ignorance, you get the contractor's curse. You ever see the contractor on a Facebook group or social media? And they're kind of braggadocious. Like, yeah, I know what I'm doing. I've been doing this for 10 years. People love me. I'm awesome. And they're really bragging about themselves. And then they post a picture of their work. Finally, someone's like, well, if you're so good, show us some work. And they post a picture of their work. And it looks like. dog crap. Like it's not terrible, but it's, you know, maybe barely above average. Their ego was way out of line of reality. And then they post a picture and then people just start ripping them a new butthole. Dude, that sucks. Dude, look at that grout joint. Look at this. Look at that. You think you're a professional, you suck. Right. And their ego takes a little bit of a hit. And then, and then if they're really like beyond reality, like if they're perspective is so out of whack, then they'll clap back and be like, well, you just don't know what you're talking about. Let's see you do better. We've all seen those types of those interactions. That's their ego is way higher and their ignorance, their self-awareness is preventing them from understanding that they're not better. They're not as good as they think they are. And so you can get in those situations where you're overconfident of your abilities. But your ignorance to your own awareness is going to hurt you. Right. So ignorance is really just people think ignorance is a bad word. Like if I say, well, you're ignorant. Well, what do you mean? I'm going to I'm going to fight you. Ignorance is not a negative word. It's not a an attack on you. It's just a state of knowledge. Like you're are you ignorant? I'm ignorant to a lot of things. My wife would probably say I'm ignorant to being in touch with her emotions. And that's probably true. Right. So being ignorant is not like you're dumb or stupid. It just means lack of knowledge or lack of awareness. So a lot of us are very ignorant to business. We don't understand the things that we need to know in our business. Right. Like we, you know, the fact that you can charge for a consultation that if you've never thought about that before and you've never considered it and you're ignorant. to the possibility of eliminating tire kickers and saving 10 to 15 hours a week of your time. You're ignorant to that ability. If you're ignorant, if you don't understand that you can charge more and you should be getting around a 50% gross profit, but you're only getting like a 30% gross profit and you think that's doing well in business, you're not killing it, but you're paying your bills and you believe that that's all there is. You're ignorant. To the fact that all you have to do is raise your prices. See, so the lack of knowledge and the overabundance of ego is what keeps you stuck. That's what keeps you stuck. That is the contractor's curse. And I hope I've kind of opened your eyes a little bit to this. Because contractors who are able to be humble, who are able to suppress their ego or completely eliminate it, will be humble. allow them to become more open-minded. And when we are truly open-minded, then we are open to receiving new information. And when we receive new information, our ignorance about said information goes down. So as we educate ourself, our knowledge goes up and our ego goes down. And now when you have someone who's humble about where they're at, but they're very knowledgeable, now you have a contractor who's on their path to success. As long as you have an ego, you're going to be stuck in your business. Now, are there exceptions to people that are super arrogant, super ego, and have success? Yes. But history says that later on in life, they end up losing all their success. They become very arrogant. They make a lot of money. They get a lot of success. And then the next thing you know, you hear, see the headline where they got arrested for, you know, underage pornography or something. Some other, something outside of business. Because their ego just keeps getting inflated to the point where they think they're untouchable. So, yeah, there's some people that have major egos that have success in business, but usually ultimately lose in life. The people that are humble enough to recognize that they're not anything without their customers. and they have enough education to understand how to win with customers and their team and how to build teams and all that stuff, those are the ones that are going to be super successful. So the contractor's curse is what you need to get out of. If you're stuck in your business right now, you've tried multiple things. You've tried hiring people. You've tried using subcontractors. You've tried raising your prices. You've even tried doing consultations. And none of that stuff works. It's because your ignorance is keeping you stuck, right? You don't know how to do that stuff. I had a guy on TikTok argue with me about charging for an estimate. And I asked him if he tried it. He said, yes, I did try it. It doesn't work. I said, well, is it possible that you just tried it the wrong way? Is it possible that your delivery method was incorrect? And they said, well, I mean, I guess it's possible, but not likely. Right? That's that ego protecting them. What do you mean I did something wrong? No, I didn't do anything wrong. You told me to charge for an estimate, so I charged for an estimate. I'm like, yeah, dude, that's the principle. What's the actual tactic? There's an actual tactic involved in how to do it. There's an actual strategy in how to do it. So you have to learn it. This is exactly why I have a coaching on how to do sales, because it's not something that's intuitive. It takes time. It takes training. You have to actually learn how to do this stuff. Just because you hear me on the podcast say go charge for estimates doesn't mean you just go charge for estimates. Some small percentage of you that have enough wherewithal and have enough training outside or have enough interpersonal skills or communication skills can do it without training. But there's a reason why I have an entire module. In the Profit Club, it's the largest module as far as how many trainings there are in there on the sales process. Because sales is not linear. It's a dynamic situation where every single customer is different. So you have to understand how to talk to each different personality. You have to understand how to ask different questions. You have to understand how to present the consultation. If I present the consultation to somebody, the consultation charge or charging for an estimate, if I present that to somebody, who calls in and says, hey, do you guys do free estimates? And you say, no, we actually charged $250. And they go, oh, yeah, that's great. I'm not doing that. Bye. Well, I tried it, Brad. I tried it. I told them I charged for an estimate, and they said, no way. So it doesn't work for me. I'm like, dude, that's not even trying. Like, you literally did not even try. You know, a different way would have been like, do you charge for free estimates? That's an interesting question, what makes you ask. Well, we just, you know, other people have charged for estimates and we didn't want to charge. Huh. Why is that? Why are some people charging for estimates and some are doing free estimates? I don't know. I guess some people just like ripping people off, you know, by charging. Really? So you equate if someone charges you for an estimate, that's ripping you off. Right? Like there's a whole nother way of having this conversation. But if you say. Hey, do you charge for free estimates? No, we charge for it. Okay, bye. Well, I tried it, Brad. It doesn't work. See, I'm going to go back to my old ways, right? That's ego saying it doesn't work and ignorance saying you're not doing it the right way. This is why training exists in the world. This is why people have to actually get training to do stuff. None of you knew how to do your trade the first day you did it. None of you. None of you picked up a paintbrush and became Picasso the first day that you did it. None of you picked up a hammer and could build the Sistine Chapel the first day you did it. None of you did. All of you understand the value of experience in your trade, but you don't understand the value of training or experience in every other aspect of your business. And that's where the ego and ignorance, lack of training, lack of experience keep you stuck, right? So the contractor curse is having too much ego, too much ignorance, lower your ego, lower the ignorance. In other words, raise your education or awareness and you'll have much success in your business. I appreciate you guys hanging out with me today. You know where to find me, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Just search for the Hammer and Grind podcast. You can find me there. I appreciate you hanging out with me and all the... thoughtful replies and comments that you guys give me really means a lot. If you do me a favor, go and leave a review of this podcast on your favorite platform. I'd appreciate it. So next time guys, remember profit is not a dirty word.
