Episode•April 6, 2026•41 min

EP265: Why Most Contractors Struggle to Get Leads (It’s Not What You Think)

A lot of contractors still believe that if they do great work, the jobs will just come. But in today’s market, that mindset can quietly hold your business back. In this episode, Brad talk about: The importance of marketing and visibility for your business Why relying solely on word-of-mouth referrals can hinder your growth The key elements of effective branding and how to create a recognizable presence Strategies for increasing your visibility through consistent marketing efforts The three pillars of a strong brand and how to communicate your message effectively Link to Resources: This episode is sponsored by iGUIDE — the smarter way to capture, measure, and market your projects. With accurate floor plans, immersive 3D tours, and detailed property data, iGUIDE helps contractors and real estate professionals showcase their work with confidence and precision. Learn more at https://hammerandgrind.com/iguide 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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You don't have a lead problem. You have a visibility problem. Hey, it's Brad here. It's 2026 and you're still using a tape measure and grid paper to do your drawings. That's why I'm excited to tell you about today's sponsor, iGUIDE. With the iGUIDE Planix R1 camera and laser system, you can capture an entire home in about 45 minutes. all of your measurements, photos, and a detailed floor plan all at once. No hand sketches, no guessing, no more, was that wall 10 foot or was it nine foot? Or, oh man, I forgot to measure the window offset. You just hit start and walk away. That's it. You're starting the job with accurate as-builds. And you can export straight to DXF, DWG, or RVT files so you and your team can get to work immediately. Miss something? Well, you don't have to worry about that because it's all right there in virtual land waiting for you. This is how you avoid costly mistakes. This is how you reduce change orders. And this is how you run a tighter operation. And more importantly, it's how you protect your margins. If you're serious about operating like a pro in 2026, it's time to upgrade. Go to hammerandgrind. com forward slash iGUIDE. That's I-G-U-I-D-E. to order your iGUIDE Planix R1 camera today and start running your jobs the right way. Hey, welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Brad. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about why you don't have a lead problem and why it's actually a visibility problem. Plain and simple, people don't know you exist. A lot of contractors like to use the field of dreams method. Have you ever watched the movie Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner? They build a field out in the cornfield and then all these deceased athletes come and they play. And the whole motto of it is if you build it, they will come. If you build the field, these people will come. That's what most contractors think when they start their business. Well, if I just start a business, then everyone's going to come. Everyone's going to know that I exist and everyone's going to be reaching out because they want me to do their work. Wrong. You do not exist to anyone. The only people that are going to know you in the beginning are your friends and family. And so what happens a lot of times whenever contractors start a new business is they burn through their friends and family network. And so they kind of, you know, they start their business and their brother, you know, it's a pity job. So their brother wants them to come over and tile their bathroom. So they do that. And then maybe they get the neighbor across the street because they see it. And then they get a couple more jobs that way and their uncle wants a job and blah, blah. And they go through all their friends list. And then three months, six months, nine months, a year later, all of a sudden they have no work. The phone just dies. That's because you didn't do anything to actually create a brand that people recognize. So you have to have visibility. How do you do that? It's plain and simple. You have to market yourself. Part of owning a business. is actually marketing yourself. You have to go out and tell the world that you exist and you have to give them reasons to want to hire you as a contractor. So it's all of the above. Whenever people say like, I need more leads. I'm like, what are you doing? Well, I have a Facebook page and I've tried running ads a couple of times and that's it. That's like, well, no wonder you're not getting leads. You're not doing anything. You're barely, barely doing anything. Whenever you first start out,40 to 50% of your effort should be on marketing your business. 40 to 50% of your effort and time should be marketing your business for the first six months. You're not going to probably have jobs lined up to where you're doing job after job after job. You may have a couple of weeks, a couple of days here and there, a slow time here and there. You need to be marketing when you're not working. And then you need to be marketing before, during, and after you're working. This is one of the things that contractors and business owners, for that matter, they don't realize how much effort you have to put into marketing your business. It's a non-negotiable. We've all seen restaurants in our town and you're driving down a new part of town and you turn down this street that you hardly ever go down and you see a new restaurant that you didn't know existed. right? Because you haven't been down the street in like six months or a year, two years. You go down the street and it's a, let's say it's a new taco stand and you love tacos. So you decide to stop there for lunch, right? And you have lunch and you love it. It now becomes your brand new favorite taco stand. The only way that that taco stand got you as a client is because you just happened to be driving down the road and see that place and be hungry to want to go and eat there. And you had to like tacos. If you had turned on a different block, if you had went down a different way, you would have never seen that because those taco stands and those new businesses, they don't do anything to market their business. That's why they say location, location, location, because if you're not going to market your business, but you have a great location with tons of foot and car traffic, then that alone can be enough to raise awareness. Right. But sometimes you get these people that want to open up a restaurant or a store like three blocks off the main drag and nobody goes down there and they do nothing to market because they just think it's going to be word of mouth. Every time I talk about marketing, I always get the one person in the comments, right? I've been doing this for 100 years and all my work is word of mouth. Guys, that is not the norm. OK, there's so many factors that go into that. that can determine why that's true. This contractor may be a one-man show and only does six jobs a year. So he doesn't need a lot of leads and a lot of jobs to stay busy. He can just do one job for three months, do another job for another two months, and so on and so on. And that's how they've been doing it their whole life. That's not a business, really. That's just, you're just self-employed. That's not the same as somebody that's like, I want to grow a business. I want to have employees. I want to have a team. I want to build my business. You can't take that same philosophy of I just work, you know, all my work is referrals and then apply it to a scaling business. It does not work, period. Right? So if you're only doing two jobs a year and you do all the work, sure, you don't need anything. You can just do word of mouth. But for the rest of you listening, you cannot rely on word of mouth until you're like four, five, six, seven years into your business. Because over that period of time, you've built up clients and you're getting referrals from those clients. And the more clients you have, the more opportunities for referrals. So there is a point in which all of your work can start to drive word of mouth, right? But if you don't do word of mouth, I mean, if you don't do any marketing in the beginning, you rely on word of mouth, you're never going to make it to four or five, six years in. Because people are, you're not going to know you exist and you're going to go out of business. You're going to run out of money. You have to make sure that you're being visible. So what does that mean? Right, I hear you're visible, but what does that mean? Well, you have to understand that there's visibility, there's marketing, there's branding, okay? So the lie about branding is branding is not just logos, colors, and fancy websites. Okay, branding is what people say about you when you're not around. In other words, like your reputation. So it's reputation plus consistency. plus perception. What is your reputation? How consistent are you with your reputation? And then what is the public perception about what you do, right? All three of those kind of combine to create a brand. Now your brand does include logos and colors and websites, but those in and of itself are not a brand, right? So if you're not consistently seeing, then you don't have a brand. So we use the word brand and branding to really mean that you're doing You're making an effort so that everyone knows who you are, what you do and what you stand for. And you consistently tell everyone that across all platforms and mediums. OK, that's kind of what a brand is. So the game here is visibility. So we talk about brand, what that is. Now we're talking about visibility. OK, marketing equals attention. Attention equals trust. So if people see enough of you, they start to trust you. that you maybe know what you're doing, or that you are going to be reliable, right? So what you need for visibility is you need frequency, you need familiarity, and you need proximity. So you need frequency, you need to show up often for your potential client base, right? Your ideal customer avatar. You've heard me talk about that. It's just, who is my target demographic? So you need to show up frequently for your, ideal customer avatar or your demographic. Your familiarity is like the same message in the same style. Now, this also applies to like colors. So let's say your colors of your business are green and yellow. Okay. You're a landscaping company. Everyone wants to use green and yellow. It's overdone and you're not going to stand out, but let's just say that's what you do. So you like green and yellow, right? But you drive a blue truck because it's a truck that you had. You already had that truck when you started your business and you think it doesn't matter. So you have a blue truck and you put your logo on the side. And so now you're driving around and you're telling everyone that your business is blue, yellow and green, right? Even though you don't have blue and they see it and maybe they go to your website and your website is like all black with white letters because you just like dark. You think it's cool to be dark and black. And then you have inconsistency. across all of your mediums. If I see a truck and my colors are, the colors are white and yellow or green and yellow, I see a yellow truck with green letters on it, right? Then I go to the website and I see a green website with yellow letters or a yellow website with green letters. And I see you in the picture and you're wearing a green shirt with yellow logo on it. That's consistency across different channels. Whenever you make video content and you put like a theme to your pictures or your videos, you're using your logo, you're using, you know, you're putting some colors in there to match your theme. Right here, if you're watching the landscape view, you see my logo right here behind me. There's my logo on the wall, the hammer and grind logo of the podcast. Okay. Now I also have the profit club. So today I'm wearing my profit club hat and my profit club shirt. If I wear my hammer and grind shirt, I make sure to wear my hammer and grind hat, which I have over here on the wall. I want to be consistent in what I'm wearing, right? And I have certain colors of shirts and stuff that I wear. I want consistency across the board. Familiarity. This is like more about the message, more about the way you do stuff. If you're trying different things, every time you're putting out content, then you're not familiar. Like you... you seem like a different style or a different person every time. So if you have like, you know, five employees and every time you do a video, a different employee does a video and you're posting that every day, someone who's scrolling, who may be following you, who may be seeing that, it's not familiar because it's a different person every day, right? Now there's nothing wrong with including your team, but you need to make sure there's some level of consistency in the familiarity of what you're doing. And then the proximity. Most people think marketing is, I run an ad or, you know, I put a Facebook ad out or I put a billboard on the road or whatever, like you do one little thing and then everyone's going to see that and that's it. If your demographic doesn't use that platform or doesn't see or doesn't live in that area or doesn't use that medium, they're never going to find you. So part of your job is once you know what your demographic is. then all of your marketing efforts should be focused on them and within the proximity of who they are. Now, I mean, obviously, you know, we're going to have clients like all over the city, right? But if you're going after people that are like high net worth or they're doctors or lawyers, or they have a certain makeup, you know, they're typically family, they have kids, whatever, they're going to live in certain zip codes. They're going to live in certain subdivisions, right? So if I'm not going to go to, if I'm looking for people that live in homes that are half a million to a million, I'm not going to go market my services in the neighborhood of homes that are one to 200,000, right? Because the proximity is not there. My client is never in that neighborhood. So all my effort there is wasted, right? So if you're doing things like just doing blanket marketing, you know, blankets, direct mail, you're doing. things like Facebook ads and you're just doing open to everyone, you're going to get bad people, bad clients, but you're also reducing the effectiveness of being in the proximity of the people that you're looking for. So let me use this example. Let's say we're going to use a subdivision, but we're going to talk about Facebook ads. So let's say Facebook ads. I'm going to run Facebook ads. And with Facebook ads, you can do targeting, right? You can target different demographics, different people. So if I was going to go and hang door hangers in a neighborhood, right? I would, and let's say I have a hundred door hangers because I have a budget, right? I have a limited budget. Wouldn't you want to go hang the door hangers in the subdivision of the people that are your ideal clients? Most of you would say, yeah, that makes sense. But if you take the door hanger, and you swap it out for a Facebook ad, you're not doing that. You're just blasting it to everybody, right? So this is why you hire professionals. And I understand there's a lot of scammers and people out there that suck at marketing and they take your money. I get it. But if you hire a professional and know what they're doing, they're going to know how to target the right people. Okay, so let's keep going. Here's an example for contractors where you can get frequency, familiarity, and proximity. Facebook groups, specific Facebook groups for specific types of people, for demographics, local community pages, job site content, before and after photos of what you're doing. Now, I've always talked about, like if you're doing marketing, if your target demographic likes golf, like the majority of them like golf, then I would be making golf content, right? I may go to the driving range one day and record myself doing, you know, taking hits and stuff and doing different things. I may shank a ball off to the right, you know, and I turn to the camera and say, you know, I may suck at golf, but I don't suck at remodeling bathrooms, right? So if you're looking for a professional to do that, or like I suck at golf because I spend all my time working for my clients providing beautiful bathrooms. The thing is, is that the person playing golf who loves golf is going to stop the scroll. They're going to stop and look at anything that's golf related because they love golf. If it's boating, if you like to do boating and that's where your people boat, you're going to create boating content, right? If they like doing hunting, you're going to create hunting content because that's the proximity to the types of people that you're working for and what they like. You understand what I'm saying? You can't just throw a big net out in the lake and just haul in whatever you get and think that you're going to get clients that way. Because you're going to get 16 crappy clients, one really good client, and maybe three okay clients. Because you just threw a net out there. And then you're wondering, like, man, all these people that call in suck. I call them back, they don't answer. You know, I give them a call and talk to them, and then I never hear back from them. Yeah, because you're marketing to the wrong people. But we're talking about visibility here. I don't want to go too far into marketing. We're talking about visibility. So here's a... Three Pillars of a Story Brand. Now there's a book by, what's his name? I'll have to think about it. Donald Miller, that's his name. There's a book by Donald Miller called Story Brand or Creating a Story Brand. Okay. And this is, it's a really good book. I highly recommend you read it, but it's about how you create a strong brand using stories. Okay. But there's three pillars of a, of a strong brand or a story brand. The Clear Message. What do you do? Who do you help? And what problem do you solve? It's that simple. Who do you do? Or not who. What do you do? Who do you help? And what problem do you solve? You need to answer those three things on every video and piece of content that you make. So here's bad. Here's a bad example. We do quality work. Barf. Every time I see a contractor that has, we do quality work, I just want to puke. Because it's so generic and so unoriginable. And actually, most people that say we do quality work actually don't do quality work. They actually suck at it. They're just trying to use it as a way to get in there, right? Bad is we do quality work. Bad. Good. We help homeowners fix botched remodels and finally get it done right. And that's just an example. We help homeowners turn their home, you know, turn their house into their dream home. That's a good hook. Like that's a good marketing. We help homeowners. We help busy professionals turn their home or turn their house into a dream home, right? That's a good message. Not we do quality work. Not one call does it all. Not we do it from the foundation to the roof. You're not specifying anything. You're not specifying anything. We help professionals turn their, you know, bathrooms into dream bathrooms. Something like that. The other thing is you have to have consistent identity, consistency within your identity. OK, so you have to have the same tone, the same style, the same type of content. People should be able to recognize you instantly. Hey, you're the you're the the water heater guy. You're the guy that you're the Bigfoot guy. Well, my clients, past clients, Chris has Bigfoot Blue Mountain Bathrooms. He's got a big Bigfoot mascot. He gets recognized by the mascot. He's created a strong brand. Oh, I know you. You're that guy. I know you. You're, you know, you do that. I've seen your commercials. They're great. I've seen your ads. I've seen your videos, right? So if you're consistently putting out the similar stuff, people get to know you and they get to, it's familiar, right? You become familiar. You become a household name. So same tone, same style, same type of content to the point, like I said, people should recognize you instantly. Examples are like always direct and blunt. That is my style. I had a call yesterday with a contractor and he says, I like your style. You're a no BS, you know, very direct person. Yes, that is my style. My podcast and my videos have a certain style to them. I'm always direct. I always, I don't beat around the bush. And, you know, some people love that. Some people hate it. Because people are going to like different styles and different people and different things and all that, right? So part of knowing who your demographic is, is not doing stupid stuff. Hey, just a

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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 it 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 know, if you're a conservative and the majority of your demographic is Democrats, Democrats. You should not be going on your personal page and posting all kinds of crap about why Democrats suck because you're isolating, you're alienating your actual ideal customer. Okay? So like you have to make sure you know who that is. Your ideal customer is not anyone that calls me. That's amateurs. That's just amateurs. Your ideal customers are the same person almost identically repeated every time. It should be almost the same type of customer every time because that's who you're marketing to. You always be direct and blunt or you're always educational. You always show process, whatever it is, like whatever your identity and style is, you're always doing that type of thing. You know, I see people who always post videos with their Lambo in the background. They're always talking about how rich they are and all this and that, you know, just dripping arrogance and dripping all this crap. That's a style. Some people like that. Other people like myself don't like it. Right. So you have to make sure when you're doing something that you're not alienating the actual people that you want to work for. So you have to have proof everywhere. Jobs, testimonials, videos, reviews, behind the scenes. It's just everywhere and everything. OK, if it's not documented, it didn't happen. This idea that you do a beautiful kitchen and you hire a professional photographer and you take pictures of the kitchen and you put it on your website. That's great. That's awesome. But then you don't take any other pictures. You just have that one profile, that one portfolio, and you don't think it matters anymore. So you don't do it again. That's not good, right? You need to have consistency. I don't just have, you know, if I'm a bathroom or kitchen remodeler, I don't just have one portfolio of stuff we've done. I may have 30 or 40 or 50 portfolios of work that we've done. Why? Because it shows consistency. oh man, this guy's done 60 amazing projects. They must be very trustworthy and do what they want because everyone's hiring them. If you have one project on your website, well, it looks like they've done a good job, but I don't see any other evidence that they are even still in business. So it's consistency along with the right messaging, the right tone, right? So here's a visibility framework for you. I'm going to give you something kind of tactical. You need to pick one platform and you need to be good at it. Okay. Now with reposting, you can actually do multiple platforms, but you really need to go all in on one major platform, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, it doesn't really matter, but you need to go in, go all in on one platform and then cross post to the other. Now I go all in on TikTok. That's where I go all in. Now I obviously do podcasts too, but from a, from a content perspective, I go all in on TikTok and then I cross post to Instagram. and to Facebook and others. Now, I mean, I hardly ever get on Instagram. I don't care about Instagram. I don't get on there. I post videos there. I may respond to comments, but I really to put no effort into Instagram. Now, that may be a bad decision on my part, but I'm just telling you, you go all in on one platform. You don't want to spread yourself thin because if you're trying to post original content on TikTok and on Instagram and on Facebook and YouTube, and a bunch of different places, you're going to get worn out very quick because you're trying to create original content. You can do a long form content and then slice it up and post it on multiple. That's what I do with the podcast mostly. And then you can also do like individual content. But pick one and go all in, okay? Post daily. This should be a non-negotiable. You need to create before and after, in-progress work, rants, you know, what homeowners do wrong. tips, teach them something, educate them, client wins, all of the above. You just, and you can rotate. So you don't want to just do three weeks of before and afters. You spread it out. You know, Monday you do it before and after. Tuesday you do a check-in or behind the scenes. Wednesday you do a rant video. Like you kind of mix it up a little bit, but you're still doing the same style and you're being consistent in all the different videos. Number three is like talk like a human. Don't talk corporate. Don't talk polished and be real. Like being real is better than being perfect. A lot of times when I have people create video, clients that tell them to create video, they do like 45 takes. It's like, no, like do three takes and take the best one. Even if you screw up, it doesn't matter. That's why blooper reels are so popular. You know, a lot of people will post a blooper reel at the end because it makes you more human. It shows that you're not perfect. It actually makes you seem more like the person who's watching. You don't need to be polished and perfect all the time. Show your face. This is a big one. Like when you show your face, it builds trust faster than anything else. You as the owner should have your face somewhere on the website and in videos. And you're like, well, bro, bro, I don't like being on. I don't want to. I'm not an extrovert. I'm an introvert. And I don't want my face out there. And I don't want people to know who I am. then what you're saying is, I don't want to be successful. I get people all the time that have some of the stupidest rules or some of the stupidest little things that they don't want to do because of whatever. So for example, I know a contractor that didn't want to wrap his vehicle because he has road rage and he doesn't want to make his business look bad by having road rage. Well, hello, stupid. Stop having road rage. Go to therapy, do whatever it takes to eliminate road rage and wrap your freaking vehicle, right? Well, I don't want to be on camera. So you don't want to be successful then. Go do the stuff you don't want to do so that you can actually be successful. That's what owning a business is. It's not just doing all the stuff you want to do all the time. It's doing the stuff you don't want to do consistently all the time so that you can actually grow your business. You can become visible. If you're not good on camera. then go get help. Go hire a professional to teach you how to be good on camera. I did that. When I started coaching, I hired two Hollywood screenwriters and actors to help me be good on camera. I paid them $6,000 to help me be good on camera because when I first got started, I wasn't the greatest on camera. That's what you do when you own a business is that you go out and you do the things and learn how to do the things that are going to make you successful. You don't just keep making excuses as to why you can't do something or don't want to do something. I'm not an introvert or I'm an introvert, Brad. I don't want to be an extrovert. I hate talking to people. Well, then close up your business and go do something else. Go live in a basement. Like you have to be an extrovert if you want to own a business. And you can do it for. two or three hours at a time, and then go back and be an introvert. A lot of people do this. Believe it or not, I'm actually an introvert. I'd rather sit at home and not go out in the public and not do anything. My wife's the exact same way. My wife is a professor and owns a PT clinic. So all day long, she's in front of people being an extrovert. And when she comes home, she's exhausted because that's not her natural self. But that's what you do if you want to be successful. You do the shit you don't want to do instead of making excuses. I don't want to be on camera. Too bad. Go do it. The reason why most people stay invisible is because they say, I don't know what to pose. I don't like being on camera. I'm too busy. All excuses. What I hear, what that translates to is, I have fear of judgment. I lack discipline. And I prioritize comfort over growth. That's what you're saying if you use those excuses. You're not invisible because you don't know how. You're invisible because you won't execute. You won't get out of your comfort zone. You won't do the stuff you need to do. If you go back to my TikTok and you scroll all the way to the very beginning. By the way, I have over a thousand videos on TikTok. If you go to TikTok, you'll be scrolling for a while. If you go to the very beginning when I started posting content, it's not very good. Why? Because I wasn't very good at it. But I did it anyways. Because the more and more I do, the better and better I get at it. I've even had people comment and say, hey, I've been following you for like two years. And I have to say, your content has gotten really, really good over the years. Yeah, because I got practice. Because I put effort into it. You can't do a thousand videos and not get good at something. Like that's just, it's not possible. If you do one video a month, you're never going to be good at it. Ever. So do what it takes. Post one times per day for 30 days. This is a 30-day visibility challenge to you guys. Stop saying you don't have leads. Start saying I'm not visible because that's what it is. Your clients don't know you exist. You have to tell them. They're not going to come because you built a business. So here's the 30-day visibility challenge. Post one times per day for 30 days straight. Yes, Saturdays and Sunday. By the way, You can schedule posts. You can batch record. You can come in on Monday and spend three hours recording a bunch of videos and content and making posts and then schedule it the rest of the week. You don't have to remember like, oh, I got to record a video right now and post it because I want to post every day at 3 p. m. No, you just batch record it and then schedule it for 3 p. m. If you try to do it every day, you're never going to be able to do it. So post one time per day for 30 days. Show your face at least three times per week. Share real jobs. Share real thoughts and real lessons. But don't rant, okay? I see guys ranting all the time on their personal page. Stupid. Your clients are social proofing you. Keep your personal opinions to yourself unless it's something you strongly believe in. That's fine. Or you don't care if you alienate your people. That's fine too. But make sure whatever you're posting, you need to think. Whatever I post or whatever I comment on, all of my potential clients are going to see this. Some of you think that you're invisible. I mean, you are invisible because you think you're invisible. You think people aren't going to see your stuff. You have no idea how many people that did not call you because they saw something about you they didn't like. There's no way to measure that. But if you're always posting, by the way, I follow a lot of you guys on social. You know, I mean, a lot of people I follow on social and I'll see the stuff in my newsfeed on Facebook and I see the crap you're posting. And I think, what a freaking idiot. This guy is a complete moron because he's posting political stuff and, you know, all of these things. And your clients are going to be able to see that. That's stupid. That's what they call career suicide because you're more worried about expressing your opinion. than you are about being visible and professional to your right clients. Again, just because you have an opinion, keep it shut and to yourself or keep it amongst your friends and family. Don't post it out there. I'm very opinionated, very opinionated. Sometimes I do that on the podcast. There's things that I would love to say that I don't say because I don't want to alienate some people, right? I make sure I don't talk really about religion, about politics. I try to keep that out of here. Now, I may talk about politics, but I always stay neutral for the most part. All right? So understand that. Show your face three times a week. Real jobs, real thoughts, real lessons, no skipping days. Now, I'm going to tell you right now, you're probably not going to go viral. You may not even get a lead in the first 30 days. This is a long game, guys. You have to do it consistently. for years. You can't do it twice and then say, well, this doesn't work. Brad told me to post for 30 days. I did it for 10 days and I didn't get a single lead. You might as well not even try. Like do it every day for a year and then see what actually happens. And I have plenty of testimonials and plenty of actual case studies to prove it with my own clients who are consistently posting and then they get business from it. So here's what I want to close with. You don't need better marketing. You need more exposure. You are invisible, right? If only try to think of how to do that, how I could put this in an example. You know, like if you go to a festival or whatever in your town and you have like the airplane that flies overhead and has the big banner. Well, potentially, if you do that, everyone on the ground in that area can see that. So you're getting maximum exposure because you have Everyone, you're showing it to a large area versus you stand on a street corner with a yard sign that has the same information. You're only going to be exposed to the people that drive down that street that go to that intersection. You're going to be limited to who you're exposed to. Every person at a gas station, when you pull up, you should be talking to them. You should be handing out business cards every day. You should be cold calling realtors and other strategic partners. You should be making connections. You should be doing all these things every day. That's the 40% effort of your time that you should spend on marketing. If you're not getting enough leads, it's because you're not doing enough. If you want massive results, you have to take massive action. I promise you, if you go out there and you take massive action and you execute, there's no way you can't win. The majority of people want to do minimal effort and get maximum results. And the only way you can do that is by spending a lot of money. Because you can hire someone, a marketing company, a video company. You can spend money and pay someone else to do that stuff for you. That's possible. That's going to give you minimal effort, but you're going to be paying a lot of money. And if you don't have money, then the only other currency you have is time, which is what you should be doing. And by the way, even as an owner, you should be doing it regardless if you pay people to do it. People want to see the owner. They want to see the person who's in charge. They want to know who you are. They want to know if you're a good person. They want to know if you're secretly a piece of crap. They want to see all that stuff. You have to show them. I want you to start today, not tomorrow. When you listen to this, it's going to be Monday. Perfect time to start. So start it, and then on Monday, and then every day after that, start for 30 days. Don't say next week, I'll do it. Don't say next month, I'll do it. Start immediately upon hearing this. Just start doing it. By the way, what's the chance of something working better than nothing? Some of you are doing nothing. and hoping for the best. But even if you do something, and that something may not be the best, it may not be the right channel, it may not be the right type of content, I guarantee you, I'll bet any amount of money, that doing something is going to have a greater chance of success than doing nothing. So do something instead of doing nothing, and you will potentially have some success. And then you get better and better and better and better and better at it. I'm burning up in here. My office is so hot. There's no air in here. I'm like sweating. So I do all this for you guys. I suffer for you. So have pity on me. All right, that's about it, guys. That's all I really want to go into. You have to be visible. Seriously, I'm being serious now. If you're not getting leads, it's because you're not visible. You got to have Google reviews. You got to have a website. I talked to a contractor yesterday. He's not getting enough work. He has no website. He didn't even know if his website was on. I say, well, what's your website? He's like, well, here's my domain. I go to it and it says like this, you know, this domain is hosted by GoDaddy and there's no website. And he said, yeah, we've been having problems. I would not go to sleep. I would lose sleep. I would stay up all night if my website was not on. Like that is critical, guys. It's critical. You have to have your vehicles wrapped. You need to have uniforms. You need to have all these things in place. You need to wear your uniform when you go out on date night. And yeah, your wife's going to be pissed off and annoyed, but who cares? You're trying to grow your business. Well, Brad, when I go out at night with my family, I just, I don't want anybody talking to me. Okay, you don't want to be successful then. If you have enough leads and you're successful, that's fine. If you don't have enough leads and you're not successful, you wear your crap everywhere you go. That's the difference. You have to wrap your vehicles. One of my friends, he's a roofer. He doesn't have his personal vehicle wrapped. I'm like, hey, man, you need to have your vehicle wrapped. He's like, no, I don't. He's like, I don't want people knowing who I am. He's very successful. He's very successful. He doesn't need to have his vehicle wrapped. He's like, I've had contractors literally chase me down, follow me, and pull into a parking lot and jump out to get my attention. He's like, I want to be invisible. That's fine. He can do that because he's very successful. If you don't have leads and you don't have money and you're struggling, you don't have that luxury. You have to go out there and tell everyone and shout from their rooftops who you are. So just almost to the point to where you're annoying to everyone. That's how much you have to execute on. Stop being comfortable. Get out of your comfort zone and start doing what you know you need to do. That's all I got for you guys. Thanks for hanging out for me. or hanging out with me, you can always leave comments. You can always give me advice on what you like to see. If you want to hear different content, if you want to tell me I'm stupid or whatever, I've had people call me and say, you know, you lost your way and all that stuff. I don't care. Just let me know. Like it can be good or bad. Just tell me. I have to come up with this information, these ideas all the time. So if you want to hear about something, tell me, I'll do a podcast on it. If you want to interview certain, you know, if you want me to interview certain people, tell me who that is. If you're successful and you want to be on the podcast, let me know. I want to interview contractors. My goal for this year is to interview contractors, not experts, but contractors so that you guys can get more relatable content and see your peers out there. So if you know successful people, let me know who they are. I'll reach out to them. All right. Thanks for hanging out. You know where to find me. You can go to the show notes or just search for the Hammer and Grind podcast. Until next time, remember, profit is not a dirty word.