Your journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, welcome back to the episode. On this show, we're going to be talking about the Yes Staircase. So let's get right into it. What is the yes staircase? Well, this is a concept that I developed after, you know, doing sales and learning about sales, studying human nature. I've spent a great deal of time over the past years, really diving into mindset, human nature, you know, traits, how our childhood affects what we do every day. Like all of these psychological things I've been studying and indulging into. and seeing how it intertwines into our daily lives, our leadership styles, and our sales. So the yes staircase is just a visual representation of the conversation that you should be having with your potential clients. It's the goal, right? It's what you're trying to accomplish. So what does that mean? Well, think about it this way. If you were trying to get to the second floor of a building, right? Your goal is to get to the... second floor, well, you need stairs, right? If there's no elevator, obviously, but let's just say there's no elevator. The only way you can get to the second floor are stairs, right? And so you would have to, you know, as a carpenter, you know how to build stairs. You just, you know, you could frame it up, build a stairs, no problem. As a customer, for you to make the commitment to hire a contractor, it's, you have to get to the second floor. Okay, so I'm painting the visual here. So what is this yes staircase and what does this have to do with sales? Well, in construction, we all understand that in the sales process, there are objections, right? There's common objections. If I were to ask you, what's the most common objections? You're going to say price, time, and quality, right? Those are the three main ones, price, time, quality. It's got to be cheap enough. It's got to be able to do it in the right time. You know, they want it done right away and I'm six months out. I'm not getting the job for quality. They want it done right. Now, the problem is, is that most of you, most, and I say you, I mean, contractors, most contractors hang their hat on quality and they just, that's your whole sales process. Look at our high quality work. That's the only reason that you should hire us. Right. Unfortunately, that's not sales at all. That doesn't even classify as sales because you're not you're actually not selling something. Right. Sales is the process of getting someone to buy your product or service. Right. Saying here's a picture of a really nice bathroom remodel that we did. And the quality is phenomenal. And that's why you should hire us. That's not sales. I'm sorry, guys. It's not too many of you are like, well, we do high quality work. You know, I used to say this. I remember this was many years ago. This is before I took my head out of my own butt. But I remember being on his Facebook group and somebody was talking about, you know, getting leads and stuff. And my comment was, if you do high quality work, then you'll get as many leads as you need. Like the quality will speak for itself. I said this and someone responded and like laughed and it's like, What are you talking about? That's ridiculous. And I got mad. I'm like, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He probably does crappy work. So I was that guy, right? Like this isn't lost on me. Like I was that guy. I laugh about it now because he was right and I look like an idiot because I was making the comment of as long as you do high quality work, you'll have work forever. Now, the problem here is, and I needed to do some clarification. A lot of contractors who say this, who say quality is all you need to do, are what I call lifestyle contractors, meaning they own a job. So they work on the tools. They may have one helper, maybe, you know, they may even have a team, three or four guys that work together, but they're still on the tools. And they only do, you know, anywhere from six to 20 jobs a year. That's it. Like they're doing room additions and it takes them a month to do that. And that's the only job they do. Or they're doing bathroom remodels and they do two or three a month and that's it. Or they do kitchens and they do one or two a month and that's it, right? You don't need a high level, high volume of leads coming in if you're only doing 12 to 20 jobs a year. You don't. Even if you only have a 10% closing rate, you're only talking like 100 to 200 leads total. Other people. are doing far more than that and they need to have one to 200 leads a month, right? And you can't augment that with referrals and quality work. It just doesn't work. Mathematically, it doesn't work, right? You have to find work somewhere else. So whenever you are saying quality speaks for sales, yes, if you are a You know, if you own a job, if you're a lifestyle contractor, you can probably get away with that because you only need to talk to two or three people a month at the most. And then you could sell a job and then, you know, you do that job next. So you really don't even, I mean, I don't even know why you're listening to this podcast if that's you, because you're not really interested in growing your business. You're just interested in making it easier for yourself, but not really actually building a bigger business than what you currently have. And there's nothing wrong with that, guys. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a lifestyle contractor. Nothing. But you're not who I'm talking to. I'm not talking to you, okay? So if you're still with me and you're like, yeah, I wanna grow my business, I wanna stop doing free estimates, I wanna be able to grow to six, seven, eight figures, whatever it might be, whatever floats your boat, right? Then you're gonna have to learn how to sell better and you're gonna learn how to market better too. You gotta do better marketing. So back to this quality thing. Quality does not sell jobs, okay? Again, take out the lifestyle contractor. For the rest of you, quality does not sell jobs. Quality will get the phone to ring. For sure, it will get the phone to ring. So that can be one of the three objections. In other words, if you don't do good quality work, you're not gonna get the job. If they want high quality and you don't do high quality, that's an objection for you, you're not getting the work. 90% of the contractors that I talk to,90%, now think about this, If I'm talking to them, it's because they are in the mode of, you know, getting better. They want to get better. If we take out the meth heads and the crack heads and everybody else and the people that are lazy and don't want to do anything, those people aren't actively looking to get better, right? So we remove those people from this conversation as well. We're not talking about the guys that literally suck at their job and deliver the crappiest product, you know, out there. Those are the ones that don't stay in business longer than six months. So 90% of the contractors that I talk to, they do good work, at least acceptable in the customer's eyes. We can argue all day about being a perfectionist or just doing good enough, but by the industry standards and the customer's eyes, they do good enough work. The quality is there. So how is that possible? If everyone's doing average or acceptable quality work, it can't separate you, right? And beyond that, your customers, that's a basic expectation they have is that you're going to do quality work. That's like saying you're going to go to a Mercedes dealership, right? And then the Mercedes dealer is going to say, well, our cars are the highest quality ever. Well, I mean, there's other people out there. There's BMW, there's Lexus, you know, there's Audi. There's all these different manufacturers that make luxury cars. It doesn't make you stand out, right? So quality is not why people buy. It's not the only reason. So we can take quality out of this equation because it's the minimum expectation. What I was trying to say with the car dealership scenario was, if you buy a new car, you expect it to have a certain level of quality. You don't expect to buy a brand new $100,000 Mercedes and the door falls off when you're driving home. You just expect a certain level of quality, okay? Sometimes when I'm talking, my mind goes, you know, three minutes into the future. Completely lose track of what I was gonna say. That's exactly what happened with the car dealership scenario. Okay, back to it. Bring it back. Sometimes I get lonely in here, guys. I start losing my mind. You might need to text me or email just to check up on me because it can be lonely in here sometimes. I start going crazy. All right, back to the show. Quality's out. Time is pretty self-explanatory, right? I need it done in two weeks. I'm booked out six months. I'm not getting a job. Time's pretty easy. You know, the last one is price. Everyone wants to hang their hat on price too. I got to get as cheap as possible. All people, everybody cares about price. You know what? Price is important. It's not the most important. It's usually two or three on the list. Yes, that's true. It's been proven. Studies have been done. Price is usually two or three on the list of things they care about. So that puts us in a predicament. If price, quality, and timeline Or the three things that contractors believe are important, and I just debunked why two of them really aren't that important, and one of them you can't control very much. What does that leave us with? Well, it leaves us with everything else. It leaves us with every concern and expectation that your clients have for you, right? And so you are going into a sales call or a sales meeting, and you're trying to solve for X, Y, and Z. Price, time, and quality. That's all you're focused on. Meanwhile, this particular potential client of yours is really, really scared about working with someone who uses subcontractors who maybe has felonies, right? They're concerned about the type of people that are going to be in their house. They've heard horror stories about people coming in and stealing things. you know, being aggressive towards them and basically telling the clients to shut up and we're going to do this. And they felt, you know, some old lady, she's scared to death. Like you don't know what that person is worried about. So it's your job to discover in the discovery call. That's why we call it a discovery call. It's your job to discover all of the concerns and expectations that your client has. That's your job. in the sales process. How do we do that? Well, the client's not going to say, hey, Brad, I'm so happy that you're coming out here to give us a bid. Here are my top concerns and expectations, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, list them off, all 12 of them. And you say, oh, okay, well, let's go through them and I'll address each one of those. That's not what happens. Your clients usually will not tell you directly, this is what I'm concerned about if I hire your company. I'm concerned that you're not going to take care of my dogs. I'm concerned that you're going to steal from me. Right. I'm concerned that you're going to get into the middle of the job and then miraculously find a change order. And then I'm going to end up paying twice the amount. I'm concerned that I'm going to you're going to hire people that are going to come in and, you know, potentially cause problems for me. I'm concerned that you don't have license. I'm concerned you don't pull permits. I'm concerned this. I'm concerned that you don't know what those concerns are. Right. And then on the expectation side, we're talking about, you know, it can be communication. I expect that if you say you're going to show up at eight o 'clock every day, I expect. that you're going to be there every day at eight o 'clock. You may think as a contractor that it's okay if you tell them we normally start at eight, but on Tuesday, you're gonna run by the store first on the way in and get some supplies, so you're not gonna be there till 8.30, nine o 'clock, and you think that's okay, and you don't communicate that to the customer, and the customer is staying home from work that morning to meet with you to discuss something, and you don't show up till nine o 'clock, you don't think it's a problem, the customer is furious. Because now they're an hour later to work. You see how this works? You could literally lose a job because you did not address a concern that you're going to be late to the job site. This is the root of it, guys. Hey, just a quick time out from the show. If you're a frustrated contractor who's dealing with low profit margins, stuck working on the tools every day, or doing free estimates for people who are never going to hire you in the first place. I invite you to my private contractor community, The Profit Club, where contractors just like you are adding two to three times more profit each year without producing any more jobs and finally getting completely off the tools to never do another free estimate again. So if you're ready to increase your profits, stop doing free estimates and get off the tools, then all you have to do is click the link in the show notes to learn more about The Profit Club. and see how I can easily two to three times the cash in your pocket, give you a proven sales process that will convert more jobs with ease and get you off the tools once and for all. And the best part is you can do all of this without having to produce more jobs than you currently are. Click the link to learn more. Now let's get back to the show. If you just get this correct, if you just figure out how to address all their concerns and expectations in the sales process, you will sell way, way, way more. than what you're currently doing. The problem is you're going into these sales calls with the three conceived, you know, objections and you got your word tracks and stuff ready to handle that objection. Why are you so expensive? Well, we're so expensive because we do quality work and we've been in business for 25 years, right? That's what you do. Meanwhile, you completely negate the pets. You completely negate the fact that they don't want a dumpster in the street because it disrupts their neighbors. They're actually concerned about their neighbors because here's a news tip for you. A lot of people actually care about their neighbors and other people. Not everyone on this world, in this earth is completely selfish. People actually care about the optics of their neighbors, right? So if you're doing a landscaping job, Are you going to be out there at five o 'clock in the morning with your equipment making tons of noise and my neighbors who I know work third shift are going to be really upset about it? There could be hundreds, hundreds of variations of concerns and expectations, not three, hundreds. Now, most people aren't gonna have 100 individually, but there could be 100 different variations of that, right? So the yes staircase is you building the steps one step at a time by answering and addressing their concerns and expectations through the sales process. So if I have a concern of, let's say, theft, I'm worried that people are gonna be in my house or they're gonna steal my stuff. Maybe I have a lot of collectibles. Maybe I'm into, I don't know. I'm into sports memorabilia and I got autographed footballs from, you know, Peyton Manning and jerseys from always different people to autograph, like lots of money, you know,10,20,30, a hundred thousand dollars worth of memorabilia in my office. And you're going to be working in the area where you're going to, they're going to be walking by the office and see this stuff. I could have legitimate concerns that someone knowing that I have that, even if they don't steal it while they're working, can come back after hours and break in and steal it because now they're aware that it's there. They're telling their buddies, man, we're working at this house and this guy has got probably $100,000 worth of stuff. We should get in there and steal it. Or even if they don't say it, they're telling their buddies to hang out with the bad people. Their buddies go over there and steal it without their friend even knowing it. This is stuff people are worried about. If you're not addressing this or understanding this, you're missing out, right? Again, they're not going to come out and tell you this is what we're concerned with. They're going to skirt around it. They're going to ask some other questions. So they may ask you a question like, what kind of verification process do you typically do with your subcontractors, right? Do you do any kind of drug testing? Do you do any background checks? I'm just curious. Do you guys do any background checks on your subs and employees, right? And if you don't do that and you're just like, No, we don't, we don't, we don't have any problems. We've never even, even considered it. You just missed, you just lost the sale right there because that's their concern. You didn't address it and then you lost it. Right? So let me, let me paint this picture and then we're going to come back to some of these other examples. The goal of the yes staircase is to get to the second floor. You have to build the steps. Now the difference is like. Some people may only have three concerns or expectations. Some people may have 20. Regardless is your job is to uncover them. So as you uncover them and you address them, you know, with an acceptable answer, then you're building the step. You're building the staircase one step at a time. If you address all the concerns and expectations, you have now built the stairs all the way to the second floor. And now the customer just has to step onto the second floor and hire you. It's an easy transition because you've addressed everything that they're concerned about. Conversely, if you don't address these things, and let's say you only address three or four, the main price, time, quality, and maybe permitting or insurance, you answer those, but you're not addressing the theft. right? Or you're not addressing the communication or any of these other ones. What you've done is you've only built a partial staircase and now the client has to make a decision. Client has to decide, do I want to jump from where, you know, where they currently build? Let's say you only built five steps out of a 12 step, you know, staircase. They got to make a pretty big leap to go from the top step to the second floor is a very big leap, you know, risk of getting hurt because they're not going to make the job. you've made it very difficult for them to make that decision. I mean, I wouldn't physically try to jump that. I'd probably fall and die or get hurt or break a leg or whatever, right? Or maybe you answer 10 of the 12 and now you only have a little bitty gap there, a foot gap. That's a much easier transition or risk for your clients to take. Yeah, he didn't answer anything about the communication, but they knocked it out of the park on everything else. I can let that one thing sly, make the step. Your job is to build the staircase metaphorically through the sales process, right? So how do you do this? Well, you ask questions by, you ask calibrated questions to extract this information. Here's an example of one of the calibrated questions that will pull some of this information out. Have you ever done a project like this? Or have you ever worked with another contractor before? It's an open-ended question. It's not a yes or no. I mean, it is a yes or no, but there's going to be more on the backside of that. Have you ever worked with a contractor before? Yes, we have. Oh, okay. What kind of project was that? Well, we had our other bathroom remodeled three years ago. And how was that experience? It was not great. I mean, it wasn't a very good experience. That's why we're calling you instead of them. Ah, that makes perfect sense. If you don't mind me asking, what happened? What went wrong? Well, let's just say that we found out afterwards that they weren't, that one, they weren't even licensed. Two, they didn't even have insurance. And three, they didn't pull permits. So we had ran into a problem at the very end. And whenever we called, like we called to check and see what, you know, what we can do to make sure it's done right. The building, you know, the inspector building commissioner said, we don't even have any record of this contract or let alone any permits pulled. Right. And now we're like, what the heck? I mean, they were like two days away from being done. And so we, we ended up letting them finish because didn't know what else to do. And, um, you know, I mean, it turned out okay, but you know, we really were kind of surprised once we learned that, well, they just told you that license, permitting and insurance is important. I mean, they just told you that. Now, if you have those three, which you should then, or, you know, do those three, then you're good, but they don't know that about you. So if they don't know that and you don't address it, then you leaving them with guessing, right? Maybe they go to your website, it's on your website, maybe it's not on your website. But if you didn't ask that question, have you ever done a project like this before? You would have never got that. You would have never figured that out. You would have never got that information, right? Or if they say, no, we've never worked with the contractor before. Now I have a new set of questions. Oh. Awesome. Well, we love working with, you know, clients who are brand new to this process because we really like to make sure they have a wonderful experience just to make sure that we're addressing any, you know, concerns or expectations you may have. You know, what's going to be really important to you whenever you hire a contractor? Well, it's, you know, obviously communication is going to be important. Okay. Yeah. Communication. How often do you typically like to be communicated with? Oh, I mean, we just, you know, weekly, daily, hourly. whatever, right? Like you just, you can just go down these series of questions to find out more information. But if you don't, if you're not even aware from the get-go that this stuff exists, you're never even going to try and answer for it. You're never going to try and find the, you know, the problem. Too many of you are trying to, you're trying to be an order taker and you're just trying to produce a quality product because in your mind, you believe as long as I do good quality work, that's all that matters. And I'm telling you as much as I can screaming it from the rooftops, the quality of the work you do is one of the least important things that you can do. in terms of selling jobs it's the eq stuff guys 90 of what i teach is eq related it's how to be a good leader it's how to talk to people it's how to communicate sales is eq sales is not product knowledge When I'm working with my clients, you know, a lot of times we'll role play a scenario where as a contractor, I'll role play an entirely different industry where I don't know anything about it because the scope of work does not matter in the sales process. It doesn't. I don't care if you can argue with me till you're blue in the face. I have empirical data to support this. It does not matter. The scope of work matters for giving a price. It does not matter for the sales process. So what most of you do, hey, Bob, tell me about your bathroom. What do you want to have done? Well, we want to gut it. We want to have a walk-in shower and a new floor and, you know, vanity and stuff. Okay. Well, what kind of shower do you want? And what color tile and what size and what pattern? What color do you want the tile? Do you want porcelain? Do you want ceramic? You want granite? You want culture marble? What kind of countertop do you want? What kind of cabinet do you want? You want a full overlay, a three-quarter overlay, or no overlay? This is the stuff you think is sales. That's not sales. It has nothing to do with sales. That's order taking. Sales is, I hear you as a human being. I acknowledge all of the concerns and expectations you have. I validate those. And I explain to you why we're going to make sure that's done right. Sales is emotion. It's not logic. People buy things based on emotion and they use logic to justify the decision. I've said this many times. which is a non-tangible item. You can't sell emotion. It's non-tangible. Scope of work, porcelain tile is tangible. Concerns about someone stealing things from their house is intangible. It's emotional. Once you learn how to become an emotional... communicator, in other words, don't you learn how to tap into people's emotions and talk to them like that, you will increase your sales closing rate by a factor of five at least. And I mean at more profit because we're all about more profit here. See, the reason why when you hear me say 100% markup,50% gross profit, and you say there's no way that I can do that, yeah, because you suck at selling. You suck at it with a capital S. You don't know how to sell. That's why you'll never be able to do it. So what do you regulate yourself to? Well, I guess I'll just have to be the cheaper contractor because, you know, as long as I do three times the amount of jobs that the other guy does for twice as much money, I can still be okay. If you want to sell high ticket jobs, if you want to sell. more value added jobs. If you wanna make more profit on all your jobs, you have to learn how to sell emotions. It's non-negotiable. There's no way around it. Sure, you can use all the used car tactics and increase the price and then give them a 10% discount and high pressure sales tactics like, well, if you sign today, we'll give you a free Cracker Barrel gift card or whatever stupid crap you guys offer. But if you learn how to sell with emotion, you don't need to do any of that. People will just give you their pocketbook at the maximum price because they will recognize that you're the guy that gets them. You're the guy they feel the most safe with. By the way, if you have trouble dating, if you have trouble with like relationships, that's a clear indicator that you don't know how to sell because dating is selling yourself. So if you have a trouble with dating, then that's a, that's a very clear indicator that you need to work on your sales process. I can't make this any more clear. Okay. I have a, I even have a graphic that. I don't know how you can't do it on the podcast, but I have a graphic upstairs just as a visual representation. I try to make things, a lot of the things that I teach, I try to put into visual representation because most contractors are visual learners and audible or kinesthetic learners are not, you know, you don't learn by reading too much. So I like to try and break things down into the, you know, dumb it down philosophy. So I do have a graphic of upstairs, but I hope I painted that picture for you. Guys, start using. calibrated questions to discover what's really important to your clients. When you do that, you will increase your sales. If you want help with this. Every podcast episode, I got a little commercial in the middle. This is exactly what I help contractors do. Sell higher profit jobs and more of them so that you can actually enjoy what you do. So you can stop doing free estimates so that you can save 10 to 15 hours a week. The average time my clients save per week is 10 hours by eliminating free estimates. What would you do with an extra 10 hours per week? That's the average. The average contractor adds two to three times more profit, not revenue, not sales or cogs profit in their pocket. They're adding two to three times the profit. So if you made, if you only made $60,000 profit in your pocket last year, you can expect to do anywhere from 120 to let's say 180 or so in additional revenue in just one year, in 12 months. That's very, very realistic. All you have to do is reach out. All the links are in there. I have it completely laid out, step-by-step, exactly what to do. I've made it as easy as possible because I made it for myself because I'm not a very intelligent person. So I made this as dumb as possible so that I could understand it and hopefully others like you would understand it as well. Reach out to me. We'll do an evaluation on your business and see what we can do to get you off the crazy cycle. Guys, thanks for hanging out with me. You know where to find me on all the socials. Just search for the Hammer and Grind podcast. And remember, until next time, profit is not a dirty word.
