Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Brad. We're going to be talking about social proofing and why this is important. Now, this has come up several times in the past few weeks, and I really want to dive in deeper into what this is, what it means, why it's important. and how we can make sure that we have optimized all of the social proofs or the social profiles and stuff that we have on the internet. So what is social proofing? Well, social proofing is what every one of us do on a regular basis and we may not even realize it. What it is is basically we're going to social media, which also includes the internet. We're going to the internet and we're looking for proof that something exists, that something is true about someone. Now we're talking specifically about your business, right? But this also extends into you personally. And this is the thing that a lot of contractors don't fully understand. You as a owner of a business are an extension of your business, just like your employees are an extension of your business. It does not matter. If you don't think it's important, this has nothing to do with you whatsoever. This matters to your clients. So regardless of like, if you are as a buyer, do not go out and do this. It does not mean that your clients are not doing this. They are 100% doing this. I can guarantee you they're doing some form of social proofing. Some people are doing it much more than others. There's varying levels of it. but they're doing it to some degree, okay? And so they're going online and they're looking for, you know, any kind of evidence that suggests that you're a reputable contractor. They're looking for any kind of evidence to speak to your character. Are you a person of integrity or do you only care about making money, right? They're looking for evidence of this. Now, when I go and I hire someone, If I'm hiring a person and I've done this for my construction business, I've done this for my coaching business. When I go to hire someone, the very first thing I do when I get an application is I go to their Facebook page if it's available. Now, not everybody has one, okay? But if they have a Facebook page, I'm gonna go there and I'm going to go through your newsfeed, their newsfeed. And I'm looking for anything that's going to stand out as a red flag of them being a problem. So I've had people, they submit an application on paper. It looks really good. Like experience wise, it looks really good. I go to their Facebook page and I, you know, I search for them and there's ways, by the way, there's ways to find people. Even if you have a completely different name on your Facebook page, I can find you. I promise you. Now, you know, maybe this is some prior military experience on how to do, you know, intelligence gathering type stuff. There's ways to find people. I've found random people in my neighborhood that live four streets down to see who they were. And I've been able to find them using addresses and different things. Okay. So it's pretty easy to find you just so you know, if you think that you're like off the grid, I promise you people can find you. An average person can find somebody in about. 15 minutes max. Okay. So they can find you. If I go and I find you and your Facebook profile is you, you know, flicking off the camera or, you know, drinking a bong. or doing a bong or doing a beer bong or whatever, smoking pot or doing something stupid, right? Or you have a t-shirt on that has profanity on it or some idiotic kind of belief that you have. And I see that instantly you're disqualified, instantly. I don't care if you're the best carpenter in the world. I don't care. If your character is that of an idiot, of a foolish, naive idiot, immature idiot, I don't want you on my team. Period. I don't. And your clients are doing this for you personally, not just your business. Now you can sit here and argue with me all day long about how it doesn't matter. Your business is one thing and I live a different life. Does not matter. If you don't want that information out there, then you either need to make your profile private or delete it completely. But I promise you, I don't care if it's, you know, Twitter, which is now X or Instagram or Facebook. or TikTok or Clapper or Truth Media or whatever social media platform you're on, if it exists in the world, people will find you because here's how it goes. They go to your website. They try to go to an about you to find out about you. And we're going to get into that here in a minute too, but they're going to look for you. If they see you have a profile as the owner, then they go to Google and they type in your name. and they search for you personally. I found people who have a criminal record not doing a background check, just typing in their name. If you go online and you type in someone's name and hit enter, you will find all kinds of stuff about you on the internet. or them. So one thing you guys should be doing right away is going on Google and typing in your name and then do different variations of that. So your name, your city, you know, your name, high school, your name, business name, and see what comes up. You might be surprised. I found, you know, like a police report. This wasn't even like a background check. It was just like a public information police report just by typing in someone's name in the city they live in. And I found that information and your clients can do the same for you. Now, whether or not you think it's fair, it does not matter one bit. They are judging you based on your book cover. Right now, don't judge a book by its cover. Bullshit. People are judging you every single day. I've seen contractors in their truck, in their wrapped company truck, parking in a handicapped spot at their store while their wife goes in to get something and they're not handicapped. And what do you think is going to happen? What do you think I did? I said, look at this jackass over here. I will never hire that contractor because he's doing this very simple thing. It does not matter if you're in there for 30 seconds. It doesn't matter if there's some justification that you came up with. There was no other parking. There's 15 handicap spots and you only took up one and the other ones were empty. It does not matter. It does not matter to what level you justify it. You will look like an idiot. to everyone else who's paying attention. They call us your P's and Q's. You have to be on your P's and Q's nonstop. So social media in person doesn't matter whether you think it's important. It does matter. It matters 100%. So whenever I have employees who come on, if I hire them and I see something on their website or on their Facebook page, maybe it's not bad, but it's, you know, maybe it's not. ideal, I will ask them, Hey, would you mind like doing something with this? Right. But the reality is, is that usually I don't have to ask that. Usually it's either you're disqualified or you're good to go because your character doesn't usually change, right? Like you don't, you're not going to be one person on your personal Facebook page and then be completely different person in public. Usually now some people are fake and they lie to get jobs and all that, but usually you can see someone's character, right? If they vote against the, if they have a political stuff on their page and it's of the opposite political party that I believe in, I won't hire you. And you can say that's discrimination all you want. And I agree it is. It is discrimination. And I will do it all day long because it's my business. It's my culture. If I think you're going to clash with my culture, I'm going to discriminate against you. Right now. I'm not talking about like, you know, race and stuff like that. I'm talking about if you're an idiot in the public eyes, you're going to be an idiot in my business and I don't want you there. Right? So we can argue all day long about whether it's fair or not fair or discrimination. I don't really care. Your clients are doing the same thing I've had on my website. And this is something that I recommend all of you do. You should have an about us section on your website that has all of your employees, not just the leadership, all. If you have a brand new apprentice who's just started, one of your onboarding processes should be you taking a picture of him and then have him write a very one paragraph thing, like what's your hobbies, what do you enjoy doing, what are some goals or whatever, throw that on the website. You can do it in like 15,20 minutes. It doesn't have to be super long. If you wanna wait until the 90-day probationary period or until you do your little evaluation, that's fine, I don't care. But once that's done, you need to throw them on your website. People want to come and learn who's gonna be working at their house, okay? Now, some industries may not matter as much as others. If you own a roofing company, this may not apply to you as much because you're on the outside, up on the roof. People aren't really going and looking at every single crew member, okay? However, if you're doing anything inside someone's home or like around the backyard in their, you know, in proximity of their house, you need to have this on your website, especially if you have small teams. If you have employees and small teams, you need to have them on your website. If you're a general contractor and you use all subs, not so much, but you and any office staff should be on your website. You don't need to have all of your subcontractors on there. Any in-house employees you should have on your website. and have a little blurb about them. I can't tell you how many times I've gone and do look at a job or do a job and they know information about me based on my profile. Cause in my profile for my contracting business, I had the name of my church that we attended and I have information about me personally and hobbies and stuff. And people have asked me, Oh, I saw you go to this church. I saw you like doing this thing. And the only way they get that information is from the website. Right. That's it. So I know they're going there and they're checking me out. Your clients do the same thing. I had a, one of my clients just to this morning posted a thing that he posted in our, in our group community chat. He said, uh, I went out and looked at a job today. I had an onsite consultation and the client goes, Oh, you're the guy from the videos because my client has been making social media posts about his business and they recognized him. Right. They recognize this is the guy in the video. Sometimes you have companies where, you know, videos are being produced, but the people that come out there and meet with them or talk to them or do their work is not the same people. Right. So this is where you need to have like an opportunity for your potential clients to see who's going to be at their house. to see who the salesman is, to see who the lead guy is. I've had multiple comments from a lot of my clients where this has been true as well. Also, whenever you are doing a lot of social proofing, people get to know you. They actually get to see your personality. So when you're making videos on your social media sites, they get to see your personality. They get to find out about you. They get to like you. Hey, just a quick timeout 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 they don't like you, if they don't like something about you, they're not going to call you. If they really like you, they're going to want to work with you. If you do enough of this and there's enough social proof out there, people will get to the point to where they actually feel like they know you as a human being before you even go meet them. Now, little caveat here. If you are completely fake on social and on everywhere else, and then you show up in real life, it's going to be a disconnect. There's going to be a disconnect of, wow, you look, you act and sound totally different on your Facebook posts, but in real life, it's like. Totally different person, right? So you need to be your authentic self when you're creating content for your business. So let me go back to your profile for a second. We call this optimizing your profile. You should have your profile optimized. Now, some of you, and for the life of me, I don't understand it because I think it's really one of the dumbest things you can do as a business owner. But some of you don't want anyone to know you own a business. And so if I go to your personal page, there's literally nothing on there that says you own a business. Like not in your about me, nothing. It's just your profile with your information, your name, and then all of your content. There's nothing that says you work anywhere, that you own anything, that you do anything. Now, I can't think. for any reason why you would not want people to know your business existed unless you're like a felon, unless you are hiding from people, unless you know that you do shady things and you don't want people to find out about it. I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't want to scream from the rooftops that you own a business and that you're 100% invested in your business. I can't think of any good reason. I just can't. So if I go to your profile and there's nothing on there about your business, what that tells me is that you're not proud of your business. You don't care about your business. Now, I got a buddy of mine who owns a roofing company, very successful roofing company. And he has, you know, multiple crews. And so. He got to a point where he didn't want people to find him because he was having general contractors calling him and he's having clients like always trying to reach out to him. Everybody always wants to talk to the owner and I get it. He's got sales teams and managers and superintendents and all this. He doesn't want to be the guy that has to talk to everyone. And so his personal truck, his company truck that he drives, took all of his graphics off of it so people can't find him. And he wants to be... basically anonymous. And I understand that to an extent, once you have a certain level of success, right? Where if your phone's blowing up nonstop, because somehow people got your cell phone and they're trying to get ahold of you and message you on Facebook and everywhere. And you're just like, I need a break. I don't want people to find me. I can see that most contractors and business owners that I know are not at that level. Right? So there's not really a good, a good reason. for that. Another thing is like, I have a plumber, but the plumber that I use, he only, he used to do retail. So he had his truck all wrapped and everything. And then he decided that he was only going to work for general contractors and that's it as a subcontractor. And he didn't want people calling him. So he just, he took off all of his branding and everything. He just has seven or eight GCs that he works for full-time. They keep him busy. He has his lifestyle that he likes. You know, he's a lifestyle contractor, works by himself. There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that. But if you're trying to grow your business and you're trying to get marketing and trying to make sales to the general public, you have to have this information public. You have to. They're going to search for it. So your Facebook page needs to be optimized to show what you do and who you are, right? Like when I was running my construction business, I had my logo shirt everywhere. I'd wear it to church. I'd wear it to the ball games. I'd wear it out in public. I'd have my jacket on, my fleece on, whatever. I'd drive my company truck, which was also my personal truck. It was wrapped. I drove it everywhere because I wanted to be present everywhere. I wanted everyone to know what I did. And I don't understand why you wouldn't want that. And so you have to optimize your social media presence so that it doesn't conflict. with the core values and mission that you're trying to do in your business. If your core values and your mission is, you know, take care of people and do good things for the world. And then I go to your Facebook profile and you're getting drunk and partying and, you know, doing stupid things and wasting money and just like irresponsible things. And I can see it in your profile. You're a liar. You come across as a liar, straight up. You're a hypocrite. You're not a person of character. So you have to decide what's more important. Is it more important that you can act like a fool or is it more important to have a successful business? You have to make that decision. I've had contractors tell me they don't want to get a vehicle wrapped because they have road rage and they don't want people to know that it's their business because it'll look bad on their business. I'm like, how about you just stop having a road rage? How about that? How about you just stop acting like an idiot? and actually act like a responsible business owner. Maybe, just maybe, that might have an impact on your business, right? So the things we're talking about here is like social, your social media has to be optimized for your business. I tell my clients all the time, when you post to your business page, you didn't take that post and you share it to your personal page. You're sharing the business pages post. It helps you get double exposure because it's going to be shown to your personal audience. It's going to be shown to your business audience. But if someone clicks on it, it's going to take them to your business page. Someone on your personal profile clicks on it, takes them to their business page, right? And that's where they can learn more about your business, which is what you want. So you share, you post on business, share to personal. Then you start creating content so people can see who you are. They want to see the behind the scenes. They want to know who's going to come. You know, if Ricardo is the guy coming out to do on the work on their house, they want to see him. They want to know more about him. People want to know who's coming to their house. And then on your website, you need to have your about, you know, about section of all of your employees, all of your team members, all of that, and have a little short bio, you know, about what they do, maybe like where they grew up, something about their family, something about hobbies, right? Just a little bit of information so they can get an idea of who these people are. You know, one thing that you should do, and I did in my business is like, if I hire someone, I actually had it in the employee manual that they're going to be on social media. Like if they have a problem of me videotaping them working on the job site and they don't want that to happen, that's a problem because we show what's going on. I talk to my employees. I talk to what's going on and showing that. And that's going to be a problem if they have a problem with it, that's a problem for me. So that's something you may want to consider when you're interviewing and talking to people. It's like, hey, we're a heavy social media presence company. We do a lot of social media. If you have a problem with being on camera and even talking on camera, this might not be the best fit for you. That's just the reality of it, guys. If you're trying to grow your business and you want exposure, you have to do that stuff. So just to recap here. Optimize your personal pages, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever. Don't post stupid stuff, right? Don't post super polarizing stuff unless that's a position that you want to have. You know, if you want to be a certain political party and you want everybody to know that, that's fine. You just know that you're going to polarize some of the people on the opposite side. Right. And that is an actual strategy. Like you can actually do a polarizing stance. Maybe you're a big time hunter and you love hunting and you're constantly posting things about hunting. Perfectly fine. Just know that if you have clients who are opposed to hunting, they may not want to hire you because of that. And you just have to be aware of it. Right. One of my other clients posted an Instagram. I can't remember if it was Instagram or Facebook. He posted a video. It was like him working, like pictures of him working. And then there was music playing in the background, but it was like heavy metal rock and roll type music. And I just sent him a message and I was like, Hey, just a heads up. I know you like that kind of music, but your clients who are probably in their fifties and sixties and seventies. they probably don't like that music. And it was funny because like the next day or two days later, he posted another video of him and I believe it was his wife doing something. And then it was like a totally different music. And one of his clients saw it and messaged him about how wonderful it was. And he was showing it to me and was like, you know, maybe you're right. Maybe, maybe the music choice does matter. And the truth of the matter is it does. And this is why you really need to know your customer avatar. Like you really need to know who your customer is that you're trying to attract. And then everything that you do outbound marketing wise should appeal to them. Again, this isn't about being fake, but let's say I love, you know, death metal, right? I can listen to my death metal when I'm driving. But if my, if 90% of my client base is,50 and older, you know, Christians who listen to Christian music and I'm listening to deaf metal and putting that out there. Don't you think it's going to be an issue? The answer is yes. So I don't have to publicly put out in the world, Hey, I listen to deaf metal. It doesn't mean I have to fake and put out, you know, that I listen to Christian music. If I don't do that, if that's the case, like I don't have to be a fake person in public. I just don't have to reveal. everything about me in public. So it's not about being fake. It's about actually restricting the amount of information that you let out there with the little voice in the back of your head saying, hey, your clients may not enjoy this. This conflicts with your ideal customer avatar. You might think twice about it. So I hope that with this podcast episode, you start thinking more about your personal image. and your social proofing. Same with reviews. I didn't touch on this, but same with reviews. Like if you have a bunch of reviews and the way you respond to your reviews, that's going to show who you are as a character. It's going to show your character. So always have positive reviews, you know, positive responses to reviews. I've talked about this in other episodes. Like you always want to respond positively, even to bad reviews. And just, it shows that you are, you know, engaging in a professional manner. So go and audit all your stuff. Do a search for your name. You might be shocked. You might be shocked. Audit your personal Facebook page. Have someone else who is not like a, you know, a close family member, but have someone who you trust, who maybe has an unbiased opinion. Have them look at your stuff. Have them look at your Facebook page and just say, what do you think about this? What does this say about me as a business owner? Right. And then audit your face, your, uh, I'm sorry, your web, your website and make sure you're about us is all updated and accurate. Guys, that's all I got for this episode. Hopefully this is helpful. Your image does matter. Optics matter in your business, whether you think it does or not. So heed this and take a look at it. And I promise you, you'll start seeing some feedback and changes around that. And let me know how it goes. Like if you've had experience with this, shoot me a message. or comment on any of my socials and let me know what kind of experience you've had around this, whether you think it's a bunch of bull crap or you have evidence that proves that this is actually accurate. I want to hear from you. Let me know. I appreciate all of that. And guys, until, hold on, I'm trying to, Brad, you're trying to end it too early. All right. If you find me, you can find me on all the social media platforms. Just search for the Hammer and Grind podcast. And remember, guys, until next time, profit is not a dirty word.
