Episode•November 10, 2025•38 min

EP244: Why Referrals Are Drying Up (And How To Fix It)

Historically, referrals were the cornerstone of many businesses, particularly in industries like construction and home services. The idea was simple: provide excellent service, and satisfied customers would naturally spread the word. However, this model is becoming obsolete as the way consumers engage with services evolves. In this episode, Brad talked about: Reasons why referrals are drying up and how to effectively address this issue in your business. Understand why relying solely on referrals is not a sustainable business strategy. How modern homeowners shop and communicate differently. Five key reasons for declining referrals Actionable tips on how to market your business beyond referrals. How to turn clients into raving fans for better referrals. Link to Resources: Grab Brad's tell-all book: The Contractor Profit Blueprint https://thecontractorprofitblueprint.com Help us get the word out to other contractors by leaving us a review or sharing our podcast! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Transcript

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Referrals are not a strategy. It's a reward for doing a good job. Hey, welcome back to the show. On this episode, we're going to be talking about why referrals are drying up and what you can do to fix that problem. So listen, I love referrals. Referrals are great. They're still the number one type of lead that we can receive, right? Almost, there's almost no selling required. There's no haggle on price. Like whenever we get a referral, it's almost a slam dunk. And so, yeah, we want referrals. 100% we want referrals. We should still be seeking referrals, okay? But here's the problem with referrals. Referrals are not a strategy. It's a reward for doing a good job. Now, think back when you were a kid and you got, you know, all A's on your report card and your parents are like, hey, we're going to take you out to get ice cream because you got all A's. That's a reward. This is the same thing with referrals. You could do an amazing job for a client, you know, beautiful, whatever it is you do, it's beautiful, great service. If the client is just not inclined to want to give you a referral, guess what? You're not going to get a referral from that client. You're 100% putting the lifeline of your business into a stranger's hand and hoping that they are going to give you a referral. I've had clients that were kind of difficult to deal with and the job wasn't that great. It was pretty straightforward. Like, you know, a monkey could do the work. Like it wasn't difficult. And that client went on and gave us lots of referrals. You're like, oh, you know, because, oh, Jane gave us, you know, gave us your name, said you did a great job. Like, wow, I didn't see that coming. I would have never expected Jane to give me a referral. And then I've had jobs where. I'm like this, you know, the clients are going to, their minds are going to be blown. They're going to love us. We're going to get tons of referrals out of this person. And then crickets, not a single referral comes from that person. And that's, that's the problem with relying on a referral strategy. Now, yes, there are ways that you can help. cultivate more referrals from people. It's not a strategy though. I can't go out and get 10 referrals today if I need 10 leads. I can't do that. I can call people and ask them. I can bug them and maybe I can get some referrals, but it's a push, right? I'm not pulling them into my world. I'm pushing against my clients, hoping that they're giving me a referral. In other words, I'm not attracting that type of lead into my life. I'm making it happen through force. And that's just not a great way to have to rely on to get referrals. And so what happens, a lot of guys, I see this mostly with contractors that have been in business for like 15,20,25 years. They're calling me and be like, hey, Brad, I don't understand. I've been in business 20 years. All of a sudden, we're not getting any leads. I've been getting leads through referrals for 20 years. I've never done marketing, but now I'm not getting leads. And it's obvious once you understand why this is happening. So let me just unpack this real quick and why this is happening to people. Here's the thing. The modern homeowner, which is going to be younger people. So now we're talking about, you know, potentially 20 year olds,30 year olds for sure,40 year olds,50 year olds. These are younger generations than some of the people that have been in business for 20 years. Like if you're in your 50s and you're selling jobs to. People in their 30s, there's two generations of trends and buying habits and all that stuff that's changed. When you were in your 20s or 30s and had your business and you were selling the 20 and 30 year olds, you were on the same language. Like you spoke the same language. It was easy to connect. But now that you're older and you're selling to younger crowds, you're not fully understanding where the disconnect is. So the modern homeowner. now shops online. That never happened before. When you were younger, people didn't shop online. I remember when I was like, I don't know about this Amazon stuff. I don't know if I trust it. And I wasn't like a long time holdout. I kind of jumped on the bandwagon, I would say earlier than most people did. But I certainly wasn't the first people that did it. I wasn't the early adopters by no means. But I've always been an early adopter in most things. And that's, that's served me well. But here's the thing. The modern homeowner shops online. They compare providers. They read reviews. They research personalities and they consume content. That's how they learn. Okay. So here's the thing. Like why here's five reasons why referrals have slowed down for most people. People don't talk like they used to. Think about this. If you're older, if you're in your 40s or older, when you were younger, you would go and you would do things in person. Social media wasn't around. You didn't spend hours a day or hours a week on social media or online. You were doing things in person, right? So we don't have the neighborhood grill outs anymore. That used to be a weekly thing when we were younger. People would have weekly grill outs and you would get around and talk and have conversations. That doesn't happen anymore. People don't chat at kids' baseball games. Like parents aren't really chatting with each other. They're on their phones in between pitches, right? They're not actually having conversation with the other people on the field. You know, I mean, and the other parents. And half of the communication that we do now is digital. It's email, it's text. We're not having good old-fashioned conversations. And in those conversations, lots of different topics come up. Right. If I run into you at the gas station and I've known you for a long time, we have a conversation. We might have a 10,15 minute conversation and we're talking about all kinds of stuff. What are you up to now? How's the kids? How's the wife? You know, how's this and this and this and this? And, you know, in a conversation they go, yeah, we just got done remodeling our bathroom. Oh, that's it's crazy. It's funny. We were just looking for somebody to remodel our bathroom. Who did you hire? And you have this conversation. If I'm texting someone, that same person, and I have a question, Hey, John, I just had a quick question. You know, where did you buy that thing? This, this or whatever. And then he answers the question and that's it. There's no additional dialogue that happens. It's just a one, you know, like a one way I ask a question, he answers it. That's the end of it. There's no conversation that happens. So the opportunity for things like that, that could come up don't happen anymore. Right. So now, and I don't know if I don't follow him on social and he didn't post on social media that he's having a bathroom remodel. I have no idea to ask him. who they used for a bathroom remodel. Now, I could post it on social media. Hey, I'm looking for a contractor. You know, who do you guys recommend? If John doesn't see that post, he's not going to respond. If by happenstance, he does see the post, he might say, oh, I use this company. So now it's all happenstance. It's all like luck, if you will, that you're going to get the information you're looking for. So the conversations are gone. The old, good old fashioned conversations are mostly gone. Also, Number two, homeowners forget you. I know this is going to take a hit on your ego, but the reality of it is it doesn't matter how amazing of a job you did, six months, a year, two years later, they've completely forgot who you are. They don't remember the name of your business. They don't remember your name personally. That's just a reality because there's so much information now that we consume. Our brain runs out of storage, essentially. I joke that like, this is a joke, but I say, yeah, I've learned so much information. Now I have to like rewrite things. Every time I learn something new, I have to rewrite something old because I've run out of storage. Right. Because I know so much. Again, it's a joke. But there's some truth in that. Like we've consumed so much information. There's no possible way we can remember everything. And so I don't remember the name of the company, you know, who did this or who, you know, who services our lawn care or cuts the grass or whatever. I don't even remember half the time. I have to like go and think about it or go look at a bill or something. That's just reality. I know you think you're amazing and everybody loves you. People, the reality of it is they forget about you. And so if you're not doing a top of mind marketing after the fact, they're going to forget who you are. They can't even refer you. Okay. Number three in the construction, it's competitive, right? So customers have endless options. They can search Google, Nextdoor, Facebook, TikTok influencers, Yelp. They have endless options of where they can look for information. Again, before social media, you had to rely on either the phone book or somebody that you knew that did work, had work done. So referrals were super important. 20 years ago, referrals were very, very important. Today, referrals are not a viable. strategy for getting leads for your business. And if you rely 100% on that and you don't do any marketing, you're going to get left behind, guys. Guaranteed, you're going to get left behind. Number four, four reason. The fourth reason, homeowners are distrustful, right? They've heard all the contractor horror stories. They know that people are... shady. I mean, even yesterday, just yesterday on TikTok, I saw a guy that was, he was duetting a video about another contractor marking up materials. And then he responds like, this is exactly why people don't trust contractors because they're all trying to mark up money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. First of all, his opinion is wrong. Okay. Like the guy, the guy that was recording the video, he's a hundred percent wrong. But the truth of it is, is that people homeowners will watch that video. And then be like, yeah, that's right. Contractors are trying to screw everyone. You and I know that most contractors are the ones getting screwed. We know that. The homeowners are the ones thinking they're getting screwed. So there's a ton of distrust in the industry. And if you have nothing on the internet that gives a taste of who you are and why they should trust you, you have a huge hurdle to overcome. If contractor A has 500 pieces of content and lead magnets and blog posts and all of this education content about construction and all this, he is the expert. He is seen as the expert. And then there's you who does great work, but you have zero content online. So essentially you don't exist online. Who do you think gets the eyeballs? I tell you right now, it's not you. It's the guy doing the education content. Okay. It's just a requirement. I mean, even in my group, there's guys that are like constantly like, no, I don't want to record video. I don't want to be on video. I hate that stuff. It's stupid. I don't want to do it. I'm like, I hear you. I get it. You still have to do it. Either you want to win or you don't. And if you want to win, you're going to do what's required of you in order to do that. And that's just how it is. As the marketplace shifts, you have to shift with it or you will be left behind. Okay. And number five reason is because you don't stay top of mind. This is the same as they forget you, but you're not doing any marketing after the fact to stay top of mind. You're not sending out, you know, holiday cards or emails or newsletter or, you know, a gift card on their birthday or whatever it is. You're not doing anything. So you don't stay top of mind for them to want to refer you, you know, to somebody else. But the main thing here is like when I saw this, it just like clicked in my head. Referrals are a reward. If you do a good job, you get a referral. But the thing about that is it's 100% subjective. You could do a good job, but if the client doesn't think you did a good job, or you didn't do a good job in the way that they wanted you to do a good job, they're not going to refer you. And it absolutely blows my mind that people want to put all of their lifeline, not just their business, their family, they're trusting the livelihood of their kids. You're trusting the livelihood of your kids to a complete stranger to recommend you. And you think that's a viable strategy to grow and scale your business. Now, I always get pushback on this. I always get the contractor. Oh, I've been in business for 100 years, and I've never advertised one time. I don't make any videos. I don't do anything. People just call me because they know I do good work. That's going to end eventually. It will end, but good for you because you were established over a period of time. If that same person started a business today, they would go out of business. Because they're basically in legacy mode where they've got enough referral, you know, enough clients over the years that they can get enough referrals. And that's usually only the case for type of contractors that are doing small quantity of jobs. Now talking about size of jobs, I mean small quantity. If you only do four jobs a year, you know, you do like four big remodels a year, you obviously don't need that many leads. If you're trying to scale your business, you know, to whatever,10,15,20 million, and you need to do 50 jobs a year, referrals are not going to get you there. It's not, it's no way. It's not a strategy. It's not going to work. I promise you. You have to be able to turn leads on and off. And that's where the disconnect is between those guys are like, I've never, you know, advertised a day in my life. That's because you're not living in that world of trying to scale your business. And there's always going to be exceptions. You have some weird. trade and you're the only person, you know, in three state area that does that and it's in high demand, of course, you know, you're going to have tons of business, but that's not the same as the guy who's starting a remodeling business or a deck builder or landscaper. And there's 20 other people that do the same thing. It's just, it's not the same. You can't compare those. That's the people that always want to argue with me that they don't have to advertise. I have lots of clients that have been in business for 20,25,30 years and they, their leads are drying up. That's why they reached out. And that's the reason why. So here's the ugly truth about referrals. Referrals dry up whenever you don't educate your clients, when you don't follow up with your clients, when you don't create content, when you don't ask for reviews, and when you don't automate communication, right? You basically are invisible. Some of you don't even have vehicle raps or any kind of lettering on your vehicles. You're invisible. You're completely invisible. You have to go out there and like a loud stereo, blare into the world who you are. And I understand for some people, it seems kind of egotistical and it's just not you because you're more of an introvert and you don't like being seen and you kind of want to be under the radar and just do good work. And unfortunately in business, it doesn't work like that, guys. It just doesn't. You have to get out of your comfort zone. You have to market your business. It's not an option. It's a mandate. It truly is a mandate. Okay, let's keep going. When we rely on referrals as a strategy, here's what we're actually doing. We're actually gambling. I mean, that's really what we're doing. We're gambling our entire lives that someone's going to refer us. Okay, you might get three this month. You might get two, you know, the next month, and then you might get zero referrals for two months. Like there's no way to scale that. There's no way. You can't. That's the roller coaster ride. I see us all the time in the Facebook groups. Hey guys, has your guys' leads slowed down? It's been really slow here the last three weeks. We haven't got a single call in three weeks. That person is doing zero marketing. Guarantee it. They're relying on referrals. And again, it's not a strategy. It's like a leftover thought. Too many of you think if I build it, they will come. If I'm a great craftsman, they will come. No, they're not. They're not. It's not going to happen for you. You see this every day with restaurants. A restaurant, a brand new restaurant opens and six months later, it's out of business. Why? Because they did zero marketing. They thought as long as they had the location open, then the word of mouth would tell everyone, hey, you got to go try out this new barbecue place. It's amazing. It doesn't happen like that. And then they go out of business because they had zero marketing strategy. In restaurants, kind of the, if you want to call it the pinnacle of marketing or business plan rather, when you open a restaurant is that you should have a two-year marketing strategy and budget. You should have the first two years of your marketing planned out and have the money allocated for that. And the reality is a lot of mom and pops open up and they don't have any marketing budget. They put all of their money into the infrastructure in the building and they put zero into marketing and they think that's going to work. It doesn't. They go out of business. It's the same in your business. You have to have a marketing strategy. Referrals are not it. What happens when you only rely on referrals? Here's what happens when you only rely on referrals. Hey, just a

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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.

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You can't scale because you can't make it happen. You can't make leads happen. Your pricing usually stays low. You don't take any or you take any job you can get because, you know, no referrals for two months. Lead comes in and they want you to build a patio and you've never done it. But, you know, you typically do kitchens. It's like, oh, I got to do something. I got to put food on the table. Let me take this patio job. I'll figure it out. And then you lose your ass on it because you've never done it before. You accept bad customers. See, this is the thing that most people don't even think about. Referrals are great. Yes, they are. But whenever you don't get referrals and then you get a lead, you know, somehow they saw your truck or whatever, but it's a bad referral. I mean, not a bad referral. It's a bad customer. You take the job anyways because you're desperate. So you open yourself up to taking jobs you shouldn't be doing and working for people you shouldn't be working for. You can't niche down because you're relying on it. Well, you know, Brad, he remodeled our kitchen. I don't know if he does room additions or not. You might want to give him a call. So they call, hey, do you do room additions? In reality, no, we don't. We don't do room additions. But today I do because I need a job. Yeah, I can do a room addition. And then that person may refer you to someone else to do a room addition. And then all of a sudden you have like five room additions, but you don't have your system set up for that. You're not optimized for room additions. And so you kind of, you don't make any money because you're not optimized for it and you can't niche. And then the kitchen leads dry up because you're not marketing. So now you think, man, I got to get into room additions because that's where all the leads are coming from. It must be a new thing is room additions that everybody needs a room addition. They don't need kitchen. That's not. No, what's happened is you haven't done any marketing. I don't care what you do. You can go out there and market it and do it. There's always people looking for that service. The reason why you're doing so many different services is because you're just like a fart in the wind. You're just whatever comes your way is what you have to do. And so that's because you're relying on referrals. You can't raise your standards and you become desperate, right? Whenever you are the best kitchen remodeler in your town and you've perfected your systems and your standard, now you can charge whatever you want. Now you have people lining up. begging you to come do their job because you're the best, because you've set the standard. That's very difficult to do when you only rely on referrals because you don't have, you know, supply and demand. If there's 20 people that want you to do their kitchen and you can only do five a year or whatever, there's a huge supply, or I'm sorry, a huge demand. And so now you can increase your prices. So those are the, that's kind of what happens when you only rely on referrals. Referrals create slow growth. I experienced this myself. I did a lot of marketing. I did. But it was about five to six years into my business before I had enough market share to where organically I was getting leads, not referrals, leads through Google and past clients and, you know, seeing the vehicles and all that stuff. Facebook, social media, like before that stuff started working organically, it was about five years. Now today, that's probably a little bit shorter timeline because of the how much people rely on social media. But back in 2009, when I started, it was still, you know, we didn't have, people weren't having websites. There wasn't social media. So it was still very much kind of on the end of the communications and referral type of strategy. But then I got to experience the shift, the invention of the Google reviews. and then Facebook, and then Facebook reviews, and then Facebook advertising, and then Google pay-per-click. Like I got to experience all of those things and see how it moved across, you know, the generations of contractors and how it affected them. And so, yeah, there's a difference in the shift in how that marketing works. And so it's a slow growth. It's slow when you only rely on referrals. If I wanted to go out and scale, and I know I'm only getting two referrals a month, and I need 10 leads a month to scale to the next level, the only way I can do that predictably is with paid ads. That's it. That's the only predictable way I can do it. And once I know what that cost is, then I just know I need to spend more money, right? So if I spend, let's say $3,000 a month and I get 10 leads, then if I want to get 20 leads, I can spend $6,000 and get 20 leads. That's the predictability of paid ads. Now it takes a minute to get there. You don't just start running ads one day and then you get, you know, you get in leads. There's a, there's an education process through that, but it does, it is predictable. Okay. So here, here's just a few tips on what you can do to kind of get away from the referral only. Okay. So one, number one, show your face on video, pick a, pick a medium, pick Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. I don't care what it is. YouTube, just pick one, put your face on video. and make some content. People want to see the owner. They want to see who you are. They want to humanize the business. This is why a lot of in the last probably five years, it's kind of gotten away from it now, but about five years ago and then the previous five years before that, putting your face on the website was a good strategy because it humanized your business. It made it seem like you were a local. A lot of you are local, but I'm just saying humanize it and make like, oh, that's the owner. It's not just some franchise or some random person I've never met. So humanizing the business is always good. So show your face on video. Also put your employees on video. That's a big thing for some guys. Educate through social media. Create education pieces. One video I did that was a huge success, and this was a long time ago. But the number one, because we did some service work too, the number one service call that we would get was rotted door jams. You guys know the bottom of the door jams, exterior doors, they rot out because they don't get caulked regularly. They don't get painted. Water sits on the seal, rots it out from the inside up and out. And that was the number one service call that we would get all the time, rotted door jams. So I made a simple video and I said, I'm recreating this video. Hey guys, I'm going to share with you today the number one service call that we get and how you can prevent this from happening. And then we would pan the camera down to a rotted door jam. Rotted door jams are the number one service call that we would get. And the reason why this happens is because you're not doing regular maintenance on your house. You should be checking at least once a year. all of your exterior doors and windows to make sure they're properly caulked and that they're painted. Over time, the caulking will fail, the wood and the paint fails, and then it exposes the raw wood, water comes in underneath, it soaks it up like a sponge, and then it rots it from the inside out. By the time you see evidence of rot, it's too late. So the easiest thing you can do is just check your homes once a year, walk around, check all your doors and windows, and make sure they're caulk and painted. That's it. That's the whole video. That video got a crap ton of views. It got shared, comments, because it was such a prevalent problem for people. And that's all you got to do. I educated. I, in that video, in the expert on door rot now, what do you think happened in that video? What do you think people did? They went home. They check their house. Sure enough, they see evidence of doors and windows rotting. And then what did they do? They called me. Hey, Brad, we saw your video. We went home and looked and sure enough, we got some damage. Would you be able to come over and fix that before it gets too bad? Instant credibility, instant expert, instant leads. That's the power of doing stuff like that. So you got to educate your customers of social media. Another thing, email your past customers. We had a monthly newsletter and I would put in there different things like service spotlight. Here's a service that we offer. Here's a new kitchen gadget, you know, where it'd be like some new appliance in your kitchen or something, whatever, just kind of like a new thing, like new technology. We would also have like from the desk of Brad Hebner, what's going on in the business or whatever, or in construction. So there was like four or five different. you know, things in this newsletter, we would send it out once a month, email, and without fail, every single month when we would send that out, I would get one to three replies to the email saying, hey, Brad, we actually need you to come out and do a new job, or we want to get an estimate on a new job or whatever. Like that newsletter would trigger a response for work because it's front of mind. Sometimes it was the thing in the newsletter. Oh, I didn't realize you guys did this type of work. We actually need someone to do this. So that's another education piece front of mind, email and pass customers. Another thing is ask for reviews immediately, as soon as the job's done, get the reviews. It's going to help you. And then create shareable content, right? So like if you create content of like, this is why you should hire us because we're the best. That's not really shareable. People aren't going to share that because they don't really care about you or why you're the best. But if you share something that's like, here's a hack that most of you don't know. If you do this, this and this, you'll get this result. Right. And so now it's like, oh, my mom actually deals with this. I'm going to share that to my mom or my neighbor was just talking about this. Let me tag them in the comments. That's a shareable piece of content. It's not about you. So like, yes, it's the same as educating your customers, but it can also be things that you purposely plan to share. you know, content that you want to be shareable. So those are just some things you can do to help boost your presence, help boost your lead flow beyond referrals. But there's lots of things you can be doing, guys. There's lots of things. You just can't refer or rely 100% on referrals. So your new referral is your Google rating, your Facebook group engagement, if you have one. your Instagram feed, your TikTok authority, your email presence. That's your new referral source. Those are your new referrals. Those are the 2025s of referrals are those things. And yes, we're still going to get referrals. They're still going to be the best, but we can't rely on them completely. Now, I will tell you this. This is the last thing. If you want better referrals and more referrals, you need to turn your customers into advocates or into raving fans. So in the experience that you're giving them, if you do like post-project celebration photos or you do a small thank you gift or a handwritten card or a discount referral card, which I don't really believe in, but for some services it does work, a before and after album they can actually keep at the house. Like little things like that is a great book called Giftology. It breaks down how to give great gifts. And so the best thing you can do for a lot of clients at the end of the job is giving. And obviously the size of the job matters. If you're doing a $2,000 job, you're not going to spend $200 on a gift. If you're doing a, you know, $100,000 job, you can afford to spend $200 on a gift. It doesn't have to be expensive. It just has to be personalized. You know, I've had clients that have had, you know, cutting boards engraved with their name. One of my clients, you know, their client was having a, I forget if they had a baby or if it was a, there was something going on and the husband liked one thing and the wife liked something else. And so he went, got two different gifts. One was for the husband, one was for the wife and they loved it. Right. Another client has, you know, had a, they had a baby and they had a, like a baby blanket with the baby's name embroidered on it, was given as a gift. has nothing to do with the house or the project or your business. What do you think happens whenever the baby gets the baby blanket, it has the baby's name on it, and now the baby sleeps with that every single night? What does that do to the homeowner? Every time they see the baby blanket, they think about you and your business and how thoughtful that gift was. Now they become raving fans. They become advocates. They're out there demanding that people hire you because... Because of the experience you created. I saw a guy on TikTok the other day. He's like, here's how we dominate. You know, we had these custom boxes with a coffee mug and something else in there, a travel mug or something. And it had the company's logo on it. The box was in branded with the company logo. You open the box, there's the two mugs. They're branded with the company's logo. And they're, I mean, they're very well done. They look very nice. And they're very expensive. And he hands those out to general contractors and people as a kind of a gift. Guys, people don't want your logoed crap. They don't. They don't want a hat with your business name on it. They don't want a jacket with your business name on it. They don't want that crap. You're doing it because you think it's going to help brand and market your business. Stop that shit. Seriously, stop doing that. Create personalized gifts for them that they will enjoy. not some logo travel mug. That stuff drives me nuts. If you do that and you spend some effort and you give a personalized gift at the end, you watch what happens. If you do that and you don't get a very overwhelmingly positive response from your clients, come back and tell me that I'm stupid and don't know what I'm talking about. Do that. I welcome you to do that. Because I know what's going to happen. If you truly give a thoughtful, personalized gift at the end of a job, what will actually happen? Try it and see. Prove me wrong. I always challenge people to prove me wrong. No one ever calls me and tells me that I was wrong, though. I'm not saying that I'm right. I'm just saying no one ever actually calls me back and tells me I'm wrong. I wish people would. I love being wrong because it proves or gives me a reason to challenge that thought and then look and see if maybe there's a new or better way. So I always welcome people to come and challenge me if I say something that's wrong or that you've done the correct way and didn't get the same results. I do get people sometimes say, well, that doesn't work. Hey, Brad, I tried to charge for an estimate and that doesn't work. Well, that's because you weren't doing it right. That's not because it doesn't work. It's because you didn't actually execute it properly. That's a totally different thing. I digress. So I know we're running low on time and I just want to... Kind of button this up here. Here's the harsh reality. Referrals are slowing down because of what I mentioned before. People just operate differently, okay? It's not the economy that's the problem. It's not people these days that are the problem. It's because you stopped marketing your business when you got busy. You had a run of referrals. You got super busy, and so you stopped marketing. I had this question come up this week. On a marketing call, one of my clients is like, hey, you know, I'm booked out till June of next year. Should I stop marketing my business? The answer is no, you should not 100% stop marketing your business. You can reduce like ad spend if you're spending money on ads. You know, if you're spending three grand a month on ads, drop it down. Maybe you only spend $500 a month on ads. The problem is when you stop doing those things, it takes months to restart it and be effective. And so you can lose three months of time. And the problem with marketing is that whenever you notice something isn't working, it's too late. It's already not been working for a couple months. And so you start new marketing, it takes three months. And now you've gone five months with no leads. And now you're kind of screwed again. So don't ever stop your marketing. Just reduce the effort until you kind of start catching back up. And then you can turn that back on. So that's my recommendation for that. All right. I mean, that's pretty much all I got. I hope this kind of wakens your eyes to the fact that you cannot rely on referrals. It's not a strategy, guys. It truly is not a strategy. I love the people that can work 100% off referrals and they've been doing it for a long time. I promise you, you're going to wake up one day and the referrals are going to dry up. And with the technology and the information that's available now, the playing field is definitely leveled out. A guy starting a business today. has just as much information and advantage as the guy who started five years ago and learned all this information the hard way through the school of hard knocks. You know, in the past, everyone had to go kind of through a rite of passage of learning information because it wasn't readily available. Now it's readily available. So, you know, a 19-year-old kid can start a business and have the exact same advantage of a 35-year-old guy who's been in business for 10 years. There's no difference. That's the project. Well, I've been in business for 15 years. You know, I'm better than ever. No, you're not. You're not better. They have the same advantage you do. And they will probably pass you up because they're using new technology. The older you get, the harder it is for you to want to learn new technology. And so when the new people come in, they learn the new technology that makes things 10 times easier or faster, i. e. chatbots, you know, AI. chat, all that stuff. AI technology is surpassing everything. And so the young kids who have, you know, spent hours and hours and hours learning AI is going to surpass the guy who's been in construction for 20 years because they know how to apply that technology and you don't. And it's an equalizer. So you can't just sit on your butts and say, well, it's worked for 20 years. It's always changing, always changing. So, all right, guys. Thanks for hanging out with me. That's all I got for this episode. You know where to find me on the socials. You can search for the Hammer and Grind podcast or go to the show notes. And just a reminder, if you haven't bought my book yet, why not? Like a lot of stuff that's going to help you make more money is in this book. All you got to do is buy it. It's in the show notes and you'll learn a great time from it. If you buy the book and don't learn anything, hit me a message. I'll refund you. No problem. I don't care. All right. That's all I got for this episode. Thanks for hanging out with me. I appreciate you all. So next time you know what to do guys. Remember profit is not a dirty word.