Contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, welcome back to the Hammer and Grind podcast. On this episode, we're going to be talking about a confused mind always says no. And this is topic that we're talking about is as a result of a lot of conversations that I have with. clients and contractors. Whenever we have a new client joins the Profit Club, I always do a launch call where we really dive into their business, see where they're at, figure out their numbers, look at their financials, really get a great overall picture of what they're doing. And a lot of times it reveals instantly a lot of challenges that they may have specifically in the sales process, but also it's an indicator of how they do everything else in their business. And I had this conversation yesterday with a new client. You'll know who he is when I start talking. But hopefully this will help other people as well, because I've also been victim of this, right? I've also done this just through sheer ignorance. And so hopefully this will shed some light on really what some of you may be doing to sabotage your entire business and or sales process or employees or whatever. And really what that is, it's just, it's overcomplicating everything. I tend to see this more. with like type C personalities or people who are very analytical, people who love data, people who love Excel spreadsheets, people who really look at numbers and like make decisions based on that. You know, so if you're kind of an accountant, think of an accountant, engineer, you know, could be an attorney potentially, just people who like are more C personalities who really like facts. We really like data and information. And what it ends up being a lot of times is they're using very complex formulas to figure out their pricing, or they're using a lot of data to try and make a decision. And I always say, you know, we need data to make decisions. No doubt. We got to have the right data. We don't want to make decisions based on emotion. Data helps remove emotional decisions so that you can make a sound. you know, choice whenever you're faced to make a decision with something, if you have the right data. And that can be like just on a regular day. That could be walking down the street and someone's coming at you and it's a dark alley and it's at midnight and you're in your unfamiliar place and you made a wrong turn and you're not sure where you're at. And this guy's walking towards you, you know, and he looks a little shady. Like your brain is processing data in that moment. Your brain is like, okay, this doesn't feel right. This looks shady. You know, what are we going to do here? Are we going to cross the street to the other side? Are we going to turn around and walk the other way? Are we going to get ready to fight? Like, you know, what are we doing? Your brain's processing this information. And then that's where a lot of times you have this fight or flight mode comes in. And so anytime you have a confused brain where you're not really sure what's going on, the brain will always say no instantly. Because your brain's responsibility is to keep you out of trouble. And so if there is a, you know, an opportunity or a situation where you're giving too much information, your brain will be like, nope, let's get out of here. Nope, shut down. Nope, we're not going to make a decision. So on and so on. This is why a lot of people say don't sell past yes. You know, things like that. Because once you have a yes out of them, then the more information you spill out, the more. data they have to process, the more confused they get, then they start changing their mind and they start saying no. That's why a lot of people say, you know, don't sell past yes. But what I see a lot is a very complex sales process or a very complex estimating process or a very complex, you know, work order process or project management process or order materialing process, order material. Material order, a material ordering process. There we go. Use, use words, Brad. Sorry. I, uh, I started, I started feeling a little sick this morning when I was, when I was working out. So I'm not at a hundred percent right now. So forgive me if I use, uh, if I make up words or seem like I'm a little bit tired, I just not feeling the greatest, but I got to get this podcast out for you guys. Cause it's so important to make sure we have this on a daily, uh, on a weekly basis. I've only missed. I think two episodes in the last two years, last little over two years,149 episodes. I think I've only missed two weeks, if I'm not mistaken. So I try to keep this consistent as possible. Okay, nobody cares. Back to the show. So we overcomplicate, guys. I've said this before. Complexity fails. Simplicity scales. If you want to have a simple business, build a simple process. If you want to have a complex business, build a complex process. If you're tired of having frustrations and headaches and dealing with employees making the wrong decisions and breaking things, make it complicated if that's what you want. But if you don't want that, if you're tired of that, then make the process simple. There's a very, very easy saying to put this in perspective. If an eight-year-old cannot understand it without further explanation, you have it too complex. An eight-year-old should be able to be handed a piece of paper with a process on there, and they can understand it and comprehend it without any questions, without any follow-up questions. If you can do that, then you are well on your way to having a very simple business. And simple is the way to go. Simple is simple. I know it's profound. Simple is simple, right? Complex is complex. So I was meeting with this client yesterday and we were looking at some of his pricing structure. It's a very, very complex pricing structure. I'm not going to get into what he does or anything, but there are some elements to it that need to be figured out. Like there's some formulas that need to, because it's not just a straight cut, you know, cookie cutter type of service that he provides. And so there's a little bit of complexity to it, but that complexity and how you figure it does not need to be passed on to the client. Like you can do the complex calculations in the background and then present your client with a very simple solution. And most of the time when someone wants work done, all they care about is what's the final number? What's this going to cost me? I don't care if there's, you know, unknowns in there. I don't really care if there are allotments that I have to be in. All I want to know is what's this going to cost me? If you hand me a document and it says, well, for this, we use this, we use a 10%. And for this, we do it by the hour. And for this, we do a combination of hourly and percentages. And for this, we take that time. It's like, dude, make this simple for me. Keep it simple, stupid. The KISS method. Dumb this down. So all I have to do is look at a number and then make a decision. I don't want to do math. I don't want to do math in my head. in order to decide if it's something that I want to do. A lot of places do this with sales. My wife and I recently been looking at purchasing a camper and we've been to a couple of different places. You know, it's like they have the price on there, the MSRP. And by the way, this is like a high anchoring technique. This is what we kind of like what we teach. We went to a show in Indy a couple of weeks ago and they had one camper in there. And we like to go look at like all of them, not just. what's in our price point, right? But they had this fifth wheel. It was MSRP was $160,000 and the show special price was $99,000. Now you're telling me you're taking $60,000 off the price, right? Everybody does this and everybody knows it's a bunch of crap because they're never sold for MSRP ever. It just doesn't happen. And then you get in there and it's like, oh, well, you know, we'll give you an extra deal. But then you go to, you know, maybe you go to actually buy it and it's like, oh, but here's all these extra fees. They give you a $2,000 discount and then you turn around and have to pay an extra $2,000 in fees. So it's all this, you know, bullcrap games that they try and play with you. Car dealers do it. RV places do it. You know, maybe even service places do it. Cable companies do it. Oh, we'll get you in, you know, free installation and you can get the first two months free. And then you get a bill for $300 and like, what's this? And like, oh, that's the activation fee. Yeah, but you said free installation. Yeah, it is free. It's free for the tech to come out there, but we do have an activation fee of $300 that we don't tell you about. Right. And so all of this hocus pocus magic bull crap, everybody's skeptical. everybody's frustrated with the sales process, you have the opportunity to come in and make it so freaking easy that it's a no-brainer. You want to make it so easy that when they're done, the only option they have is to say yes. And a confused mind will always say no. So in my last podcast, I talked about saying less in your sales process. When you say too much, that's what you're doing. You're interjecting noise. into the conversation. And now the brain has to try and process all of that. And they're already in an overwhelmed state because you're asking a bunch of questions. You're talking about all these options. You're talking about, oh yeah, there's 18,000 different types of tile you can pick. And there's, you know,4,000 colors and you're just overwhelming them with information because you believe that more information allows them to make a better informed decision. Wrong. It doesn't. Less information, less information, more clear, precise, and simple information removes the roadblocks in their mind to be able to make that decision. So if you want to have an easier and more repeatable, by the way, if you want to hire sales teams, if you want to hire salesmen to come and do stuff for you, if you have a complex sales process, it's going to screw them too. Right. So make it so easy that an eight year old could come into your business and go out and sell your product. If you can do that, you will be 99.9% ahead of all the other competition because nobody does this stuff. So you have to look at this in your business in all areas. How do I make my material ordering process simpler? How do I make my job scheduling process simpler? How do I make my. you know, work order process simpler? How do I make the actual job simpler? How do we, how do we, you know, do our scheduling simpler? Some of you have some of the most complex scheduling processes. It blows my mind. I'm like, you got to have like a PhD to understand how do you do your scheduling process? I get, I get caught, but people ask me like, Hey man, We're so busy and what do you, and then we get rain delays and it screws up our entire schedule. And now we don't, you know, it just makes everything so hard and we got to call 50 people back and it just makes it so difficult. You have any, any ideas? And I'm like, yeah, you just put gap days in your schedule. What do you mean? I'm saying if you're booked out for six months, you should have about three days of nothing scheduled about every six weeks. 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. So you book a job that's going to take six weeks, and then you put a three-day gap in there. Well, I don't want to do that because then I, what happens if we get there and there's no work to be done? Guys, you can always call a customer a week or two out and say, hey, great news. We're going to be able to start your job three days earlier. But what happens half the time is that you always go over on jobs. And so then you have to call. everybody, especially if you're doing smaller jobs. So if you're doing like a service work and you have five jobs a day and a client and one of your techs or whatever calls in sick, now you have to reschedule those five people, right? And then they have, they're usually expecting like the next day or the next available. And then you have to move those people and then move those people and then move those people. And before you know it, you're calling 30 people to try and reschedule five people. Because you didn't put enough buffer in your schedule. Worst case scenario, if you don't have anything to do, use that time to PM vehicles, to do training. Like you build that into your system, guys. You build growth. You build training. You build downtime. You build gaps in your schedule on purpose. And then you can also even have like little, maybe you do like. bigger jobs, but you also do repairs. If you have a gap day, you can use that day to fill in for some, some repairs. There's so many ways to do this, but you guys make it so freaking complicated. No wonder you're wound up and stressed out and working 80 hours a week and freaking drinking alcohol and doing drugs. Cause you can't keep up because you've made your life so freaking complex when it doesn't have to be because you believe that you're the only one on earth. That can do your job. I got news for you guys. There's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people that can do your job. And they can do it better than you. I know that's a stroke to your ego. I know you're like, F you, Brad. Nobody can cut crown the way I crown. Nobody can cut crown the way I cut crown. Screw you, man. I'm the only one that can lay pavers. I'm the only one that can do painting. It's like, you guys are ridiculous. Everybody can do your job. The whole point of owning a business is to work yourself out of a job. Have other people to leverage other people to do the work for you. It's not so that you have 80,000 responsibilities you have to do. That's not the purpose. You make it more complicated. You make it complicated for yourself. You make it complicated for your team. I'll give you another example. I talked to a client one time and they wanted to check. They had a form that their site foreman or project manager had to fill out every day. They had a written piece of paper with like,15 questions that he had to fill out every day is like a daily work log sheet. And the number one question was, the first question was, what's the weather today? How was the weather? It was like an open-ended, you know, with the blank fill in. What was the weather today? And I said, this is an interesting question. Why do you ask this? And they go, well, we want to know if sometimes if it's raining and we're doing outside work, it shuts down production. And we want to know if the... if the schedule was affected, if the production was affected by rain. I said, okay, that makes sense. But how often does it rain throughout the year where your projects are shut down? And I let them think about it for a second. And they said, I mean, I'd probably have to guess maybe 20 days. I'm like, okay, so out of 365 days, obviously minus weekends, but out of all the working days of the year,20 of those days, it could potentially rain. which would affect your jobs. Yes. And you want your superintendent, project manager, foreman to answer this question every single day. Yes. And you don't understand why they don't like filling out this paper. Well, I don't know what you mean. Well, you're making them do something that only affects like 15% of their schedule and the rest of the time, it's just a waste. It would be much easier if you wanted to know that information. to have a little question with a checkbox and said, did it rain today causing delays? And they just check it. Otherwise, they leave it unchecked. So they don't have to answer that question. They only answer that question if it pertains to that day. That is an example of how you've made a complex problem of filling out actual words with their pen and made it a simple check. Now, I can tell you right now. Your guys will be 100 times more likely to fill out or answer that question if you set it up that way than requiring them to write out an actual sentence or three words every day. This is what I mean by making it complex. And that's just one thing. That's one tiny little thing out of probably 500 different processes they have to do. You have to look at your business from every angle. from every level, from every light to see where you can simplify the process. If you make it so complex that you're the only one that can do it, you will never get off the tools. You will never replace yourself. You will always be the weak link of your business. You will never be able to go out of town and take vacations because you've made the business dependent upon you. Instead of making the business so simply processed that anybody can do it. Because you have a fear, maybe, maybe you have a fear that if it's too simple, somebody will steal it and start their own business or they'll come in and rip off your customers or whatever, whatever, whatever. And that's all scarcity mindset stuff. And if it happens, it happens. Sometimes it does. Sometimes you can't stop that. But you can't live in fear your whole life. The reality of it is most people can't replicate what you do. A very small percentage of people have it in them to even try and start a business, let alone be successful at it. Because it takes a ton of self-mastery to get to the point to where you can build this business that runs without you. But you cannot do it if it's too complex. A confused mind will always say no. You have to figure out how to remove all of the complexity of everything in your business. So back to sales for a second. If you are giving too much information at the end, they're going to say no, right? Because you've confused them. If you give them a few choices of what they can do, then now you've made it simple. Here's the three choices. We can do super elegant. It's going to be. $30,000. We can do middle of the road. It's going to be 20,000. We can do conservative. It's going to be 10,000. Which one makes the most sense to you? That's it. I gave him three choices. High, middle, low. Which one makes the most sense to you? Well, we don't want to do cheap, Brad, but I mean, you know, we don't want to go the cheapest. We want to have a good quality. So probably somewhere around the 20,25,000. Perfect. Perfect. We can definitely come up with something. that will meet all your demands and provide you with a great experience. Sign here. That's essentially what you do. Some of you, they're like, how much is this going to cost? Well, it really just depends. It just depends on if it's a full moon out. It depends on the tide, if it's a high tide or low tide. The trajectory of the earth kind of comes into play. and, you know, how many days it rains and this and that. And so I have this super complex formula here. Here, I'll just give it to you so that you can see exactly what it's going to cost. You go take a math class and a physics class so that you can understand this complex formula and then let me know, you know, when you're ready to move forward. Now, obviously, that's a gross over-exaggeration, but it's not too far off from some of you because some of you have made it so freaking hard. One of my clients, he does post frames and he has figured out how to be able to design on site and give a price right there. And that's fantastic. If you can go out and look at a job and do the estimate or the bid right there on spot and get a signed contract and a deposit, that is fantastic. You should aim towards that. Okay. Some of you. May not be able to do that depending on the complexity of what you do, but there's still ways to continually try to shorten that process. And this is where Kanae, Constant Never-Ending Improvement, comes in. If you're familiar with the Japanese, they have Kaizen. It's a process that they use in their manufacturing, you know, in manufacturing where they say, how can we basically remove waste? How can we make this process simpler? And so if you do Kaizen in your business, You look at a process and you say, how can I make this simpler? How can I remove roadblocks in this process? And I love what Elon Musk said one time in an interview. A guy was asking him about, he was talking about his car, Tesla. There was a specific issue they were having with the battery where the battery, the way the battery goes together. And there's like a dampening material they would put in between. And they were having problems trying to, you know, fix this process. And it was a bottleneck in their assembly line. Like cars would get to this section and it would slow down because it took too long to fix this problem. And so Elon looked at it and said, you know, I don't remember the exact steps. Let's just say it was 15 steps to do this process. He said, what can we remove from this process? to make the steps shorter. And they looked and there was like two or three steps they could remove. So they went from like a 15 step process to like a 12 step process. And then from there, he was able to optimize the actual process, the steps to make them quicker. But he said, the first thing is you need to remove so many things from the process that you're forced to have to put a step back in. See, some of you are sitting in an office in your ivory tower and you're like, gosh, dang it, my guys always screw up. They never do whatever. They never do X properly, right? They always leave something. I need to have a checklist. I need to have a process. So you sit down and you write out in fine detail a 27-step process to remodeling a bathroom, whatever. Just use that example. Here's the 27-step process to remodeling the bathroom. You know, it's like step one, start the truck. Step two, drive to the customer's house. Step three, put the truck in park and turn it off. Right. Because you're like, you want to make sure you don't miss anything. You want to, you told me to get it down to an eight-year-old to understand it. I'm like, okay, that's, you completely missed the point. But let's just say you have this 27 step process. How can you reduce that? Right. How can you make it from 27 down to maybe 15? Make it a 15 step process. Better yet, how can you get it down to 10? If you had to condense this 27 step process down to 10, what would you take out? Right. And so that, that exercise of removing all of the unnecessary steps and or combining certain ones first shortens the overall, you know, length of it. And then you optimize for what you have, because if you have a 27 step process and you try to optimize that, what you usually end up with is even more steps. And it's unnecessary optimization because you could have removed five,10 of those steps and you don't need to optimize those steps. So in your sales process, in your workflow process, in your checklist, in your order material, your material ordering process, I'll get it right eventually. In your order material process, in your material ordering process, in your hiring process, like onboarding new workers, every area of your business can be simplified. And it will remove a lot of this confusion, which will keep people's brain from shutting down, okay, from saying no. So keep it as simple as possible. Don't overcomplicate it. And if you want help with this, reach out to me. I'd be more than happy to share with you how we can take your business from overcomplicated to very simple. And it makes it so much easier. And you actually start enjoying your business. You actually start waking up excited about what's ahead because you have a process that's simple and easy to operate each day. So if you want help with that, always feel free to reach out to me. There's links in the show notes. You can schedule a call with me. We can talk about it and see if you qualify for the Profit Club. And if you do, then we'll definitely take your business from, you know, confused and hopeless to confidently focused. Right? I like that. Confused and hopeless to confidently focused. That may be a new saying. I just came up with that on the spot. Are you proud of me? Pat myself on the back. All right, guys. Thanks for hanging out with me today. in my delirious mind. If you know where to find me on the socials, hammer grind podcast on Tik TOK, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, just search for it. You can find me there, send some love, leave a review. And then remember until next time profit is not the dirty word.
