EP15: Not My Client!

That's probably what has been our best, our highest podcast ever. I

Dude, that's awesome.

Dude, that's awesome. I hate when people waste my time like that. Yeah, screw those people. Yeah, it's crazy. I hope you aren't one of the contractors that do that because I hear this all the time. I get so fired up about this, man.

So annoying. Oh, no, it's crazy. It's so crazy. It's like the blind leading the blind out there. A lot of these contractors go into these groups so they can feel better about their crappy sales. stats and how they do their, you know, in their business. So whenever someone else is like, yeah, man, I had this crappy customer and he wanted me to come out there for free. And I told him to F off. I ain't doing that. It's 500 bucks. And then they're all like, yeah, high five, high five, man. That's awesome.

They're not my client. I had this call earlier and they asked me if I had any experience. And I said, I've been in business for 75 years. I've done everything you could possibly think of. And then they had the audacity to say, yeah, but have you actually done this one thing? And I'm like, well, no, I haven't done that before, but I can figure it out. And they got all pissed off. And I was like, screw you. You're not my customer.

Dude, you just reminded me of the funnies. You just remind me of the funniest story ever. I hired this young kid. He was a good kid, and he was in the National Guard, which is cool. That's a bonus to me. And I said, how much experience do you have? He said, I got three years experience. I'm like, cool. And he was in the Guard as an engineer, like a combat engineer. He was a carpenter in the Guard. So I was like, cool. So I hire him and he clearly didn't have much experience, which I knew that going in, but I figured he had some more. So we were driving down the road and I asked him, I said, so where did you get all your experience? Like you said, you had three years experience. Like how did you come up to that? You know, that he goes, well, when I was in training for the guard and it was like, I forget how long, like eight weeks. He said, uh, Or maybe it was three months. I don't know. But he said when we was in training, they said all the training that we received in this eight-week period is the equivalent of three years of experience in the real world.

And I was like,

I was like, okay, dude, listen.

I was just like, dude, okay, listen, that's not how that works. With some of these contractors, yeah, we have over 80 years experience because we have six guys that have 10 years experience among each one of them.

Yeah, but listen, I'm really good at this. I have tons of reviews. People love me. I'm just the best there ever was.

Oh, so I guess your wife carries your balls in her purse, huh? You got to ask her for permission for everything.

So what's the main theme of this podcast? You're probably wondering like what the hell Eric and Brad are talking about. We hear this all the time. We hear this all the time about contractors and groups that are doing this. And most of the time, It's because they're not talking to their customer the right way and they believe that they're not the right customer.

yeah. That's a whole other topic. But, you know, people are spending three, five hundred dollars a month on Google pay-per-clicks and they're getting these leads in and then they're not the right customer. And it's like, why are you spending that much money on leads? If you think everyone's not your right customer, there's really only two things here that's happening. One is it's true. They could not, you know, it's possible they're not your right customer or not the right customer for you. That is a possibility. And two is you're not talking to them correctly. You don't know how to talk to them. And so anytime you have any kind of objections or, you know, they don't comply with your process and they get all pissed off and you're like, oh, they're not my customer. No, that's you. That's your fault as a contractor. Even today, just today, Eric, I had a lady that texted me on Facebook and the first thing out of her mouth was, hey, do you guys do free estimates? We want to have a bathroom done. Now, some contractors would jump all over that and be like, oh, they're a bunch of tire kickers wasting my time. And I would just respond with, no, we don't do free estimates. We charge $500 for an estimate. And that's it. The conversation's over. They never hear back from the person. And then in their mind, they have a validation of, see, they weren't my customer. Right.

Correct. And so my response to her was we do things a little different and a lot of our customers really seem to enjoy it. We have them send us pictures. And then we get on a phone call and we talk about their project. And then I can even share on there what type of investment they would be looking at for a project like that. And then if it makes sense, we can set up an on-site visit to go further. And she's like, great. Where do I send pictures to? Right? So I got them into my process without one telling them what my process is. I mean, I did tell them, but I didn't word it in a way of. well, this is how we do things. You either do it our way or get the heck out of here. Yeah.

Well, listen, truth be told, I don't believe she will be my customer. I think it will come down to money and we're probably going to be too expensive. That's just a hunch. I'm not going to make that assumption going into the phone call and then lean that way. And when it starts going that way in the conversation, like say, oh, I told you so. You're wasting my time. No, I'm not going to do that. I still have kind of a hunch and a belief around that. But here's the other thing. You never know who you're talking to. You don't know who those people know. Just because that person is not your customer doesn't mean that they can't provide you with other customers. You know what I'm saying? Maybe they're an interior designer and they have a certain time frame and you can't meet that time frame and you think they're being ridiculous about it. Well, I mean, they have hundreds of customers that maybe they want to use you for. Like you just don't shoot yourself in the foot just because someone's not your customer.

I've done it too, Eric. I've done it with people texting in. They're like, hey, I have an investment property. I need some work done. And I just respond and say, I'm too expensive.

I mean, I may have been a little frisky that day, having a bad day or something. But eat my own words. I don't know who that guy knows. Maybe his brother is the mayor of the town. I don't know. But you talked about marketing. That's so important. And that is a main part of this, right? If you're sending out the wrong marketing message, then you're going to get the wrong potential clients, right? And so you're going to waste more time weeding through those bad clients. And I do want to tell a little story. It's my fishing analogy. And this fits in here really well about attracting the right clients. And this isn't more like how-to. This is more... kind of a 30,000 foot view, if you will. But, you know, if you want to go bass fishing, have you ever been bass fishing?

Yeah, well, you're in California. You probably fish for something else. But out here in the Midwest, a lot of us like to fish with large mouth bass in these old stripper pit lakes and stuff. So, you know, if you want to go, fishing and your goal is to catch largemouth bass, there's certain bait that you have to use. And full disclaimer here, I am not a very good fisherman. I don't like fishing because I suck at it, but I've been fishing quite a bit. So I don't want you, I don't want to.

Stop. Stop ruining my story.

Go on, go on. I'm just vanguarding because I don't want to hear all the comments on Instagram or Facebook about how I don't know what I'm talking about around fishing and what the right type of bait you're supposed to use and all that crap is. So just if you're going to go bass fishing, you don't just roll up in your boat out in the lake, right? First of all, you don't go buy a $70,000 bass tracker or whatever the latest nitro boat is because you got to look cool. That's a metaphor for your $70,000 pickup truck you just bought. But you don't roll out there in the middle of the lake and just throw a net in the middle of the lake and try and catch all the fish. You know what I'm saying? If you throw a net out there, yeah, you might catch 30 fish, but there might only be two bass in there. The other one might be crappie or catfish or whatever else, bluegill, whatever else is out there. So if you're going to go bass fishing, you've got to use the lure. to catch bass, right? You got to use a specific lure. Not only that, you got to go and you got to fish the areas of the lake where the bass hang out, right? Because they don't just swim out through the whole lake. But here's the thing I want to say. If you're in a lake, and let's just say there's a thousand fish, there's a total of a thousand fish in this lake, and you are looking for largemouth bass, that's your ideal client. And in that mix of a thousand fish, there's only 300 largemouth bass. That's it. There's 300 out of a thousand fish in this lake. Your goal is to try and find those 300 largemouth bass fish, right? You don't do that by going through the other 700 fish first to try and find that those 300. So the more laser focused your marketing is, The more you fish with the right bait, the more you fish in the right location, the higher probability you have of catching those 300 largemouth bass. Are you going to catch some bluegill in there? Sure. You're going to catch some crappie in there? Sure. But you increase your chances of finding the right customer if you're using the right marketing, if you're targeting it in the right location. And then on top of that, now that you've caught the fish, you've caught the largemouth bass, that's just the beginning of the process, right? You got to set the hook. You got to reel it in. You got to do all these things to catch the actual fish or you're going to lose them. And that's the translation of the, you know, talking on the phone, how you talk to them. So it is possible to catch a largemouth bass, but if you don't catch, if you don't talk to them the right way, you can lose them. Right. How many times have you seen the guy gets the large mouth bass, a big old six, seven pound bass right up by the boat and they're getting their net in there to catch it. And the fish jumps off the hook. You're seeing videos like that.

They're out. Right. I need to talk to my wife. Right. That's all part of the analogy of it. But the main thing I want to say is that people want to show up in their boats and throw nets out there and then be like, they want to go through 700 people that aren't their customers. It's a hell of a lot easier, guys, if you figure out your marketing and your demographics and where you want to be at to narrow down that. So now instead of going through 50 phone calls to get one sale, now you only got to go through 10 phone calls to get one sale. So make it easier on you by... figuring out your marketing aspect. Yeah,

Yeah, and that's what I'm trying to, I want to get this across is that, yes, there are wrong customers and you are going to get those. I get them all the time. I even have a flaw in my marketing and aspect of what we do, but I can get through that and I can handle it. But the other thing about losing your bat, if you accidentally catch a snapper, a snapping turtle, you don't want him on the line, right? You're trying to get him off the line before he gets in the boat.

Most people don't want those on their line, so they're trying to get them off as quick as possible. Maybe that snapping turtle is best friends with the biggest bass in the lake, right? So if you just fling the turtle halfway, launch him across the lake, and you piss him off, you know what I mean? You still want to let him off the hook nicely.

Yeah, let him off the hook. that part where you catch that bass and you get ready to up to the boat and they jump off. That's the part where they say, well, come on out and meet with us and, uh, you know, give us an estimate and we'll see if it works. And you, Oh man, I got the biggest bass. I just caught this seven pound bass. He's, he said, if I come out there to his den, he's going to, you know, he's going to let me catch him. And I go out there and I spend all this time and I'm trolling around, you know, trying to find them and do all this. And then he calls back and, you know, I don't hear back from him. And I call him a couple of weeks later and he ghosts me and then finally I send him an email and he says, oh, we hired somebody else. You know, we fired, we found another fisherman that had a bigger, smaller bait than what you were using. So we went with him instead.

Well, define what you mean by recover. Recover from what?

Well, the first thing I would tell somebody is they got to get their marketing on point. And we're not going to talk about marketing, but you just got to start attracting the right clients. That's going to make it super easier on the back end when you're trying to talk to them. There's nothing worse than spending 10 minutes trying to reel in a bluegill thinking it's a big old bass. And then you get there and it's like, oh, it's just a stinking little bluegill. So you have to get the right clients to begin with. That's a no brainer. But you have to learn how to talk to them. You have to learn how to finesse the line, how to set the hook, how to do all those things. And you don't you don't just wake up one day, put on your tool belt, decide you're going to start your own business and then know how to talk to customers. Like it just doesn't happen like that unless you came from a sales profession before you went into construction. Most people don't have that skill set. It was eight years in my business. I thought I knew how to sell. And here's the thing, Eric, if I go out to a job for free and I spend 20,30 minutes with her, I had a high close rate because people trust me. We have good reviews. I can close on site, right? But I was wasting a ton of time going and looking at all these jobs. And so I thought I knew how to sell because I was closing jobs. But when I started learning how to speak, how to communicate and how to do it over the phone, it freed up 10 hours of my time. And so the thing you have to do is learn how to communicate. And I don't care where you get that from. There's lots of places that you can do that, but you can't treat your customers like crap and then say, not my customer whenever they don't hire you.

Absolutely, Eric. The time aspect, and I think it's definitely more prominent with the Gen Zers. I mean, they definitely value more freedoms and times and experiences, you know, even more so over than money. But, you know, it's a whole other topic that I don't want to get into. But you're right. A lot of the younger generations, they do value time better than or more than what we did at that age. You know, I think when I was young, I just felt like I had all the time in the world. And so for me, saving 10 hours of time. is far more valuable than say making an extra $10,000 a month. You know what I'm saying? Like if I can free up 40 to 50 hours a month of my time, that's worth more than thousands of dollars. A

Well, yeah, and I think you pretty much nailed it there. I mean, I think there's three takeaways that I would want everyone to have here. One is you need to look at your marketing and how if your phone is ringing off the hook and it's the wrong customer, it's more than likely your marketing, right? So take a hard look at your marketing, your branding, which we've talked about other podcasts. Take a look at that and make sure it's on point. If it's not, try to get help somewhere to get that under control. Because if you can get your, if you could hire a bass guide, bass fisherman guide, and he says, okay, hop in the boat. We're going to go right over here, half a mile across the lake. We're going to drop anchor right here,20 feet offshore. And we're going to fish underneath this fallen tree. And we're going to catch all the bass you can, you know, desire. Why wouldn't you want to hire that person, right? It's the same with, that applies to any aspects of your business. Hire a guide who can help you find what you need. So the first step is get your marketing under control. You got any thoughts on that?

That's the same contractor that would say, that's not my customer.

Right. Absolutely. So get your marketing in check. Number two is, oh, my mind just went blank, Eric. What's number two? I don't know. You can't read my mind?

You messed me up with your little.

Yeah, so get the marketing under control. Learn how to communicate with your customers, right? Learn how to talk to them. And the third thing is, and this is, we didn't talk about it too much. But the third thing is don't just treat the customers that you don't think are your customers like crap because you never know who you're talking to. You never know who they're communicating, who they have connections with. You just never know. It could be a sweet old lady and she wants something done and you're like, I don't have time for this. And, you know, her son is the head inspector of your city for your permitting. Now, is that you think it's going to affect? your business if you piss off the head inspector of your city because you treated his grandma or his mom like crap?

Talk about vendettas. I mean, you just never, ever, ever, ever know who you're talking to. So why don't you just do everyone a favor and treat everyone with respect, even if they're not your customer. Treat them with dignity and treat them with respect.

Have some integrity and respect. Well, that's all I got, Eric. Unless you want to add anything to that, you can take us on out of here.

Group. Yep.