Contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, welcome back to the show. Today we're going to be talking about something that I know a lot of contractors do. I just witnessed it this week and we're going to dive into it. We're going to talk about stop bidding with your money. There's going to be a little bit of a bonus in there about... how this also carries over into why contractors think that they can't lower, you know, charge more because there's competition. So we're going to be talking about stop bidding with your money and how that ties into how we think competition plays into this. Now, I got to warn you, I am feeling a little under the weather. And so I'm going to keep this one a little bit shorter. But, you know, the show must go on. I wanted to get this episode out. And so we're here in the in the office getting this recorded for you. So. Bidding with your money. What do I mean by that? Well, a lot of times I see and I witness, I hear contractors who will go to a job and they'll bid a job, right? And the customer's like, well, I want to do this, this, this, and this. And, you know, let's say they want to put a wrought iron fence in their backyard, which could be a really high-end fence. And the fence is going to end up being like $30,000. And let's say you're a fence installer and you're like, man, there's no way I would ever pay $30,000 for a fence. It's just not worth it, right? That's what I mean by bidding with your money. It does not matter if you personally would pay for whatever it is the client is wanting done. It does not matter. You're not doing a favor to the client by talking them out of something that they actually want. and that they actually have the money to pay for because you think it's not worth it, right? I see this all the time. I did an on-site consultation with a contracting company this week where I went to their location. I spent a few days with them learning about their operations, seeing how they do things. And so I went on several sales calls, and there were a couple times where the client was wanting some work done, and the contractor who I was visiting was like, well, let me give you two different options. for this work. One is like a more expensive, more complete option. And the other one is like the bare minimum, right? Now, I don't have a problem with doing like a good, better, good, better, best, you know, pricing structure or stuff like that. But what I do have a problem with is the reason why they were adding the secondary minimal option is because they believed. that the correct option to do it the correct way was going to be more expensive than what they wanted to spend, right? That's the contractor injecting their own head trash and their own thoughts and feelings in bidding with their money and using that to essentially bid against themselves. If I have a problem, let's say I have a driveway that's sinking, right? And I want to have it lifted up towards level. And maybe there's a bunch of cracks in there as well. And, you know, you're a company that does concrete leveling or whatever. And you come out to give me an estimate and you can, you know, maybe you can raise my driveway to where it needs to be. But you also know that with all of the cracks that are in the driveway, it's probably going to cause more problems like later on. So like, yes, you can raise my driveway, but, you know, it's it's going to. It's not going to be like 100% fix or six months from now, I may have more problems, right? And you know that the correct solution for this particular job is to tear out that 10 foot by 10 foot section of driveway and re-pour it because it's too cracked. And let's say you do, you offer, you know, concrete as work, work as well. If you're trying to just sell them on the leveling because you don't think they're going to go for, or I'm going to go for, you know, re-pouring a section of the driveway. and you just sell me the cheaper option because you think that's all I want to spend money on, in a way, you're doing a disservice to me, right? Because you know that if you just raise the concrete in six months, it's probably going to cause more problems. You're doing a disservice to me. And I don't care how many disclaimers you put in the contract. I don't care, you know, if you tell me like, well, you know, this is, we're not going to guarantee it. We're not going to warranty it. You have to sign here that says it's not warrantied. right? I don't give a crap how much of that stuff you do. If you do that job, knowing full well that the correct course of action is to tear out that section of concrete and re-pour it, and you sell me that lower offer, you just did a disservice to me. And you did it because you were bidding with your money, not mine, right? That's what's happening a lot of times. And that drives me nuts, okay? I witnessed it on two different sales calls this week. where the client wanted a specific type of thing. And then there was like additional work that could be done, which should be done, but we're going to bid that separately because, you know, we don't want, we want to do it as cheap as possible. And I asked them why, you know, why do you do this stuff this way? And they said, well, because we're already more expensive than everyone else. And so if we do it the other way, it's going to add more costs and therefore it's an even higher probability that we're going to lose the job. This is where the competition side of this equation comes in. Guys, listen, your job is not to find a price that your clients are willing to pay. Your job is to find clients who are willing to pay your price or the price to correctly get it done. Okay? That means if someone comes to you and says, hey, I want a bathroom remodel, but I don't want to redo the shower. because of this, this, and this, it's going to save money. And you know the shower is a piece of crap and it needs to be redone. It's not going to work well. The rest of the bathroom is not going to go well. Like you just know that the proper way to do this is to replace the shower, but you do it anyways because you want the job, right? That's a little bit different than bidding with your money, but you're doing it because you just want the job. You're doing a disservice to the client. If you know that the correct course of action is to tear out the bathtub and redo the whole bathroom to give the best experience, the best longevity, the best quality work, that is what you should be selling and what you should be bidding, right? Now, don't get me wrong here. If a client says, I want to put a hot tub on the roof, you can speak some sense into your clients. You don't be the guy that just says, well, they told me they just wanted to put four screws in it and attach it to the roof. And I don't know why the roof collapsed. Don't be that guy. Don't go 180 degrees in the other direction, right? To the extreme. Don't be that guy. Well, they told me to do it. I don't know why they're mad at me. Don't be that guy. But if you know that there is a better solution, you should be telling the client that. And if it's a situation where you know that if you do it, there's a high probability it's not going to get the outcome that they want, but they refuse to do it that way, then don't do the job. Period. Don't do the job. It's that simple. 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. You're not trying to sell every single person you talk to. You're trying to find the people who have the money to do it the correct way, and those are the ones that you're selling. But too many of you are trying to sell jobs based on your money. I would never pay that much money. I would never spend that. I would never do this. I would never do that. I guarantee you, every single one of you listening to this or watching, you've spent an exorbitant amount of money on something that you think is important to you and someone else thinks it's absolutely ridiculous that you spent that much money. I can probably talk about weapons and guns, how much money I've spent on guns. It's a lot, right? Other people will say, that's stupid. You don't need more than one pistol. Why do you have so many? Right? Because I want to. It's the same with clients. You don't need heated floors. They're not worth it. Well, I want heated floors. But you don't need it because it ain't worth it. No. You can say, hey, in my experience, the cost doesn't benefit. You don't get enough benefits out of the cost. So I would maybe recommend against it. But if that's what you want, we can absolutely put it in. Yes, that's what I want. Okay, perfect. No problem. We'll put it in for you. Right? So, I mean, you can give your opinions about stuff. You're the expert. They're asking for it. But you don't bid a job because it's like, well, they're never going to pay this much. You know, where's my voice changer? They're never going to pay this much for this. So, I got to do it cheaper. I got to do it as cheap as possible. Guys, people are willing to pay for things to do it correctly. One of the other jobs that we went to. I was talking to them about the work they do. And I'm trying to keep it vague because I don't want anybody else to know who it is. But they got a call to do some repair work in a bad area of town, like a really bad area, a place you don't want to be at after dark, right? We pull up. It's a small house, smaller house. But everything on this house, even though it's located in a bad neighborhood, is in like pristine condition. The guy who lived there was a, I believe he was an electrician, but he was a union electrician, retired. You know, the guy had like a brand new Sierra Denali truck in the driveway. You could tell that he had just had a bunch of work done on his house. You know, everything was in like pristine condition, even though it was in a bad area. This guy wants quality. This guy wants quality work. Right. So you can't go and say, well, it's in a bad area. This is why I tell people all the time. Don't assume. Don't assume because a zip code is calling in or an area code is calling in that it's going to be a bad client. You cannot assume that. Right. And so this guy is a perfect example of like had a brand new high expensive, you know, high energy, expensive air conditioner. All of the had a new roof on it, had new flashing, had new gutters. Like everything on his house was like on the outside, at least was brand new. He had a lot of work done. So this guy values things and is willing to pay for it, right? So you can't go in there like, oh, this guy lives in a bad area. He probably can't afford it. So I'm going to do it as cheap as possible because I want to work. If you're selling jobs because you need the work, guys, you are in a very bad position. Now, there's a difference between making sales in order to fill your pipeline and selling a job because you need it to pay your bills. Otherwise, you're going to get foreclosed on or go bankrupt. When you're selling jobs because you're needing it, that is a bad scenario to be in. And then you add on top of that, that you are doing stuff because that's just what the client wants. That's when you get in trouble. And you end up almost every time when you do stuff like that, you end up losing more money than if you just said no to that customer and sat at home for two weeks doing nothing. Because most of the time when you take those kind of jobs, when you're desperate, you end up losing money at the end of those two weeks. So you're in a deeper hole. than you were if you just had a home and did nothing. That happens more times than not, right? Because we take things out of desperation. But when you're bidding, you can't bid with your money. It's not your money. You just assume, I would rather you assume that they're all millionaires and have unlimited money and you need to bid it for what it is. That simple. If they come back and say, that's way too much, we can't afford that, then you can say, well, you know, I want to try and help you out. What's your budget? Our budget's this. Well, there's a couple of things we can do. It may not be, you know, ideal right now, but we can do this or this, or we can reduce the scope, or we can break this up into multiple projects. We can do half of it now and half of it in six months. There's always a solution to get the work done if indeed it is a pricing situation, you know, a money situation that they don't have. There's ways to work around that. But if you just straight up bid a job based on your money, Most of the time, you're going to rob yourself and rob the client in the process because you're going to do a disservice to them. There was another thing that was an additional service. And I talk a lot about adding value to what you do. And there was a specific type of thing that they could do. And I said, how come you don't do that? Well, it's just a pain in the butt. The guys don't like it. You know, people don't want to pay for it. There again, that's that bidding with your money. How do you know people don't want to pay for it? I have one client who does tile removal and tile work, and he has a dustless tile removal system. It's like a gigantic machine. He runs it in your house. It vacuum-attached. It sucks all the stuff up. They can remove all the tile in your kitchen without getting dust anywhere. Now, obviously, the machine's expensive, but people are willing to pay more for that type of service because they don't want the experience. of having dust everywhere in their house. But if you say, well, people don't want to pay for that, therefore I'm not even going to offer dustless tile removal, then you're missing out on an entire section of the marketplace that needs that service that you can charge more, make higher profit margins on, and actually produce a job that increases the value for the customer, right? Again, just because like, if you don't think people are willing to pay for dustless tile removal, And so therefore you don't invest in it or you don't even offer it to your clients. You're doing a disservice to them. And you're also cheating yourself. So you cannot, you can't bid with your money, guys. I would rather you go into a sales call and just pretend that everyone is a millionaire and has unlimited money. Now, if they tell you this is our budget or this is all we can afford, or they say, you know, we are not millionaires. We want to keep it very tight. Now you have more data and you can adjust accordingly. But if no one's ever said anything to you or let on to you that they don't have money or that they're on a budget or anything like that, and you just automatically try to bid stuff low to get the job, then you're doing a disservice to them and yourself. And you need to stop doing that immediately. The other thing you guys got to understand is that there is more competition at the bottom. When you actually charge more and you create a further distance between you and your competition, it actually allows you to get better clients. If your competition is $3,000 and you're at $3,200, $3,200, a $200 difference is not going to make a difference on whether or not they hire you or not. If they're at $3,000 and you're at $4,500, now they have to ask themselves, why are they so much different? Why is there such a difference in price? I don't understand. And then they can come to their own conclusion that you probably charge more because guess what? You're better. They trust you more. Just like the podcast I did recently on pricing bias, right? So when you charge more, you actually increase the value, the perceived value of your business. And you can actually provide more value to your clients, which is actually real value. So there is no benefit whatsoever to selling a job. with your money and trying to get it as cheap as possible. None. There's no benefit to you. There's no benefit to the client. So stop bidding with your money. All right. That's all I got on this one, guys. Hope it was useful. If you ever catch yourself saying, I don't think they'll pay that much. You're already on the wrong track. If that thought goes in your head, I don't think they'll pay that much. I don't think they're going to go for that much. I don't think they have, they don't want to spend this much money. You are on the wrong path. And if you want to get on the right path, I can teach you how to overcome all these limiting beliefs, teach you how to price your jobs correctly, teach you how to sell for more profit. Reach out to me. Let me know. I'd be more than happy to share with you what that looks like. Guys, until next time, I appreciate you. You can find me on the socials. Just search for the Hammer and Grind podcast. Remember, profit is not a dirty word.
