A contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Welcome to Hammer and Grind, the podcast built for contractors. Real contractors, true stories, real solutions. My name is Brad Hebner and I will be your guide on your journey to mastery of your construction business. Connect with us on social media platforms at Hammer and Grind Podcast. You can also check out our free Facebook group called the Contractor Profit Group, where I do free trainings and we have conversations in there to help your business. You can ask questions and get answers. It's a great community of contractors in there wanting to help each other. Or if you're ready to get off the crazy cycle and learn a proven system for winning, consider joining my coaching group called the Profit Club. Now listen, I'm doing something I've never done before and I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Friends, listen, I'm so confident that I can help your business succeed that I'm now offering a 10X guarantee. What's that mean? That means that if you follow our program and you don't make at least a 10 times return on your investment over a 12 month period, I will refund you the full amount of your investment. Now you can find out more about this, the Profit Club at hammerandgrind. com forward slash the Profit Club. I mean, I don't even know what to say because it's a no brainer. Like you'd have to be an idiot not to take me up on this offer. Guys, we're changing lives in the Profit Club. And I don't know any other way to get the word out that this will completely change your entire life and your business. So find out more information about that at hammerandgrind. com forward slash theprofitclub. On today's podcast, I am doing a little bit of a Q &A answer. These are the top five questions that I get asked, and I'm going to answer them all for you. I'll go ahead and read through. The first two are pretty much the same, a little bit different. Number one is where can I find good labor? Just general labor, young guys and girls that want to show up and work. Number two is where can I find skilled labor? People that know how to do the trade, that have lots of experience, where can I find them at? Number three, how can I pre-qualify my customers over the phone? And number four is how can I create systems in my business? Number five, and finally, where do you find good customers? Also, how do you find leads? Where can you find leads at? Buckle up and hold on tight. We're going to go through these here and I'm looking forward to it. All right. So number one, where can I find general labor? If I could answer the first two questions with 100% accuracy, I would be a multimillionaire. I wouldn't even have to be on this podcast. But what I can do is offer you some suggestions on where you can find these so-called general labors because it ain't like the old days where, you know, they were just had a pool of people that wanted to work and do this. Times are changing. So here are three, really four suggestions on where you can find general labor. Number one is my favorite, and that is actually people in the food industry, specifically cooks. Now, if you don't know anything about cooks, cooks work crappy hours. They work crappy conditions and they get crappy pay. So basically, they work their butts off and in crappy conditions and don't get paid for it. So they're already used to being in a terrible situation. So you coming along and offering them probably a lot more money in a much better environment can totally change their lives. And I've given this suggestion on TikTok, and I had a ton of feedback. Multiple contractors were saying, yes, I found cooks. to be great source. One of them even said, I was a cook for 12 years and never thought I was going to get anywhere. This was the best it was going to be. And then I was offered a job in construction and now I love it. So cooks are a great source to find general laborers. One of my employees, he was a really good employee, had great customer service. I mean, he didn't have a terrible amount of skills. He had the basics down. But he was a quick learner and he worked hard. And, you know, character is extremely important and a good culture and a good business. And he had those. And so he was a great employee why he worked for me. The number two tip for general labor is going to be like your big box stores, your Lowe's, Home Depot's, Menards, anything that has to do with construction. Even like could be the yard boy at your lumber yard. Anything, anybody who works retail in a construction industry type of business. So most of those people, and I'm not saying always are good. I'm not saying if you go find a cook, they're going to be a great person for your business. Or if you go find a retail employee, they're going to be a great person for your business. I'm saying that there are ones in those businesses that will turn out to be really good. You have to still vet them out. But in the retail, you know, they're used to, again, working terrible hours. A lot of times they got to work weekends or nights. They have different shifts. They don't all work. 8 to 5, Monday through Friday. They have to deal with the general public. And most people in retail deal with some really bad people. And so they typically have really, really good customer service skills. If you're doing like a service type business, these people do really well because they have great customer service. And they don't typically get paid very much either. And a lot of them that work in those industries have some knowledge around construction. simply because they work in that environment. Two of my employees I got from retail from a local Menard store. One of them was actually a recommendation to the other from the previous employee that I had that worked there. And they've both been great employees. One of them still works for me right now. So those are big box store employees or another one. The last one is high school trade schools, like your vocation schools. A lot of them, like locally, we have a trade center. You know, they have like mechanics and nursing and different things like that for the high school kids. And we have a vocation program for construction. And that is a good source because if you get in with the teachers, befriend the teachers, and maybe even do some donations to the program. because most of those are underfunded to begin with. But if you do some donations and you get in with the teachers, they'll be able to call you up and say, hey, you know, little Johnny here, he's exceeding in our class. Like he's the best student we have. He's very in tune with what's going on. He works hard. He wants to do construction. Like this is the kids you need to pick up. So you're going to pick them up right out of high school, train them the way you want. And they'll, you know, a lot of times turn out to be great employees. So the last one is not a place where you can go, but it's just in general. You always got to be looking. You always got to be recruiting nonstop. You're just constantly recruiting, okay? It doesn't matter if you need people or not. You should always be looking out for top-level A players. But you can, I mean, I've hired a kid from O 'Reilly's Auto Parts. I went in there one day to get some, I think, wiper blades. I don't remember. And the dude was super knowledgeable, very, very helpful. had great customer service, great manners. And I just simply asked him, I said, hey man, do you like what you're doing? And he said, well, I mean, sort of. He's like, what do you got? And I said, go to my website and check out the job position and tell me if you're interested. And the reason I do it that way is because if they won't even go to the job site and look at it, then they don't have enough interest, right? But about three hours later, he called me up and said, hey, I'm interested. How can I find out more? And we did a job interview and I ended up hiring him. So always look out for opportunities to hire someone that is just a rock star. Now this kid was like, he was working in a terrible store. All the other employees were crappy and he was the one doing all the work. And so he was looking for a way out and I was able to provide him with a way out. And so it's not always like just that specific person. Sometimes it's literally the timing of where they're at in their life. And if you come and present an opportunity for them to get out, they may take you up on that. So always look for opportunities. If you go to a restaurant and the server is awesome, hey, man, let me ask you a question. Do you like your job? It's a simple question. Do you like your job? And they say, yeah, I love it. Then no need to go any further. Oh, I mean, most days it's okay, but why do you ask? Oh, I'm just curious. I own a construction business. I don't know if you've ever thought about working in the trades. I'm always looking for talented help, and you really impressed me, and I was just trying to find out if it's something to be interested in. Yeah, actually, my dad was a carpenter for 20 years, and I didn't think I'd really want to do it, but I kind of been wanting to get into it. Been looking for an opportunity, but I didn't think anybody would hire me. Like, you just never know. Like, seriously, you never know people's situation unless you ask. All right, so number two, skilled labor. This is going to be a lot harder. And some of you aren't going to like this answer. Some of you might even get mad at me for even suggesting it. But really, there's not a lot of skilled labor on the workforce that's available. Okay, if you go to Indeed or one of these job platforms, we're not officially sponsored by Indeed. If you go to Indeed and all these platforms, and there's a carpenter that's looking for a job, then, you know. assuming that you need a carpenter. But why is he looking for a job? Did he get fired because he's not a very good employee? Is he not liking where he's at? Like there's some questions there, right? Because anybody who's worth, anybody who's good at their craft is going to have people begging them, knocking down their door to get them to work for them. But the only way you can really find truly good skilled labor other than a miracle of The company they were working for went out of business yesterday and you somehow got in front of them today and it worked out, that would be considered a miracle. The only other way you can do it is to poach them from other contractors. And I don't mean roll up on a job site, jump out and say, hey, who wants to come work for me? I'll pay you $3 more an hour than what you're making. That's not what I'm talking about. That would be considered unethical. I'm talking about... creating ads that attract those people away from their current situation. And I'm going to dive a little bit more into the ads because this is part of it, but it's really, it could be a whole podcast by itself. But your hiring ads are no different than your marketing ads for customers. When you put an ad out, whether it's on Facebook or Google Pay-Per-Click or wherever, a billboard, It doesn't matter. When you put ads out to look for customers, you're trying to get them to believe that hiring you is going to provide them with the best experience and quality project, right? Like you're trying to court them to hire you. You need a bathroom model? Let us build your dream bathroom, right? Like that's, you're putting all your effort into how them hiring you is going to benefit them. And if you're not doing that in your marketing, you should be. But this is what you need to do for your employees. Most of us, when we post jobs, it goes like this. Hey, we're the best in the area and we're looking to build, grow our business. And so we're looking for super talented teammates. And this is the qualifications that we need. You must have transportation and you must have your own tools and you can't have any tattoos and you can't have any felonies and you... You know, you have to do this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What's in it? You know, you have to be the perfect person for us to hire, for us to even consider you. You have to be the perfect person. That's all like, how does it benefit you as the owner? That's what your ads are saying. You need to flip the script on that. Start your ads with why it would be beneficial for them to come and work for you. Why would anyone want to come work for you? That's what you need to start doing. In your recruitment training, your recruitment videos and ads that you're doing, everything should be about why anybody would want to work for you. Why is your culture better than everyone else? Do you have cookouts every Friday at the shop? Do you take them to the range once a month and shoot a bunch of guns and do all this stuff? Do you have free daycare at your place for their kids? What is it that you're offering them that's going to benefit them? Do you have flexible hours? Do you give them a bonus? All those things first. And I know, listen, I know that all these, you know, the generations now are what's in it for me, me, me, me, selfish. I get it. Trust me, I get it. But you have to play by the rules if you want to get the right players. It's that simple. You got to attract them away from other businesses ethically. You can decide what's ethical and unethical. But as long as you're not, like I said, rolling up on a job site and poaching them, I don't think it's unethical. If someone on their own position to leave the company and come work for you, that's not an unethical proposition. So change your ads to say what's in it for them. Now, you're still going to have your stuff, your minimum requirements for sure. You're still going to have in there what you're looking for. But your article should be like, Hey, do you like working for a company that truly values their employees? I mean, does it sound exciting to be able to take off one weekend a month and do this? Or do you like having cookouts? And you can even start with labeling what they are, the situation they're in. Hey, contractor, are you currently working for someone that doesn't value what you bring to the business? Do you feel like sometimes you're just a number to them, just a paycheck, blah, blah, blah, blah? Well, at XYZ Company, we want to build a culture where the people here love to be here. And they love it so much that they name their kids after us. I don't know. I'm just making stuff up. But you get the point, right? You have to make it attractive for them. And that's really short of like mass media spending billboards and radio and TV and, you know, Facebook and LinkedIn and all the indie, like it's short of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign to find them. You just got to have really good ad copy. Oh, one last thing. You got to pay them well. You can't get an A player to come in here. pay him 20 bucks an hour and expect them to want to come and work. It's just not going to happen. Some of these guys are getting 30,40 bucks an hour as a lead carpenter in some of the lowest cost of living areas in the country. And you're in New York and you're trying to get somebody for 30 bucks an hour. It's just not going to happen. If you hire A players, they will make you money. It's that simple because you won't be putting up with bull crap and them calling in sick. you know, baby drama from home and all this other stuff that's going on. You don't get that with A players, but you got to be willing to pay for it. It's that simple. All right. So number three, how to pre-qualify client. Listen, I've done tons of podcasts talking about pre-qualifying, but I want to touch on a few things here. The pre-qualifying process for you as the contractor is the first is to make sure that you can do the scope of work. Okay. If they want you to build a deck and you don't build decks, that's not a good fit. So number one is to find out if the scope of work matches. Number two, does the timeframe match? They want it done in a month. You're six months booked out. There's no way you can do the job. Why continue the process? Okay, that's the second reason for pre-qualifying. The third reason is to make sure that you're in the same page of what the pricing is going to be. If they want a kitchen remodel and you're at $60,000 and they're at $20,000, you're just galaxies away. It's not going to happen. So the purpose is not to really 100% qualify them if they're the right customer or not. Now, during this process, you're going to... uncover things that are going to be key to determining what type of customer they're going to be. Are they going to be a really pain-in-the-butt customer? Are they going to be super nice and great to work for? Are they going to be easy? Are they going to be hard? Are they an engineer? Are they an accountant and they're going to check every single penny that you spend? That's part of that process to uncover. That's why we call it the discovery process. To discover what type of... client they're going to be. And so the way you pre-qualify them is you ask calibrated questions. And those are simply questions that are specific in how you ask them. Now, this is literally what we teach in the Profit Club. So I'm not going to sit here on the podcast and tell you every single thing that we do, nor would I have enough time. In our training videos that we have, there's hours and hours and hours of training videos on how simply to do sales because We have different tools of the trades. We use mirroring and labeling. We use cadence. We use different things like spirit of the conversation, vanguarding. These are all tools that we use in the sales process. And I can't cover them all here, nor would I give away the kitchen sink. So there's questions you're going to ask. The main questions are going to be, when do you want it done? Basically, How much are you willing to spend? What's important to you in terms of... With the scope of work, obviously, you're going to know what the scope of work is. But what's important to you in what you're wanting done in this? If you want a bathroom remodel, but what's really important to them is having a nice walk-in shower with body jets and all these different things. Why is that important? Figuring out the pain or pleasure of why they're wanting to do this project. It helps you to dig into that and then use that as a selling tool. So we also want to know if they've worked with other contractors. Have you had any other experiences? What was that like? If you hired my biggest competition last year to do a bathroom remodel, why are you hiring me this year? Or why are you talking to me? Why wouldn't you just hire them back? Did you have a bad experience? Okay. What was that experience about? What happened? Well, maybe this is going to give me insight. It wasn't the contractor. Maybe this customer is a pain in the butt and they did call the other contractor and the other contractor was like, screw you, we're never working for you again. So a lot of this stuff can come out through this call when you use calibrated questions. It also helps us to get some type of a commitment from them over the phone before we go out there. And we do that through a consultation charge because we don't do free estimates. And so if you're doing free estimates and you're listening to this, you're doing it wrong. I mean, it's that simple. You're wasting hours and hours of your life every week for people that probably aren't going to hire you to begin with. But if I can charge a consultation charge and they're willing to pay it, at that point, they're already 90% to 95% sold. It's a simple formality for me to go out there, look at the job. measure it up, give them a detailed price, collect the deposit and get them on the schedule. So I can't tell you how many times over the nine years before I learned how to actually sell. Over a nine-year period, we did an average of between 200 and 300 jobs a year. And like I said, we've done mostly handyman remodeling. So on the handyman side, a lot of these jobs were three, four-hour, five-hour jobs. And I would still go out and look at them. Some of these I'd go out and spend an hour and a half looking at them and it was only a two hour job. Now tell me how that makes sense mathematically. It doesn't. But I still did it anyways. But you're going out there only to find out that you can't fit their timeframe or that your budget is extremely higher than what they want to spend. And so this is what we do on the pre-qualification process. Again, I can't answer all, I give you everything on this podcast. You'll have to pay the investment to come into the profit club and learn how to do this so that you can start saving 10 to 15 to 20 hours a week of your life while you're making 50% gross profits and doing less jobs. So if that doesn't sound appealing to you, I don't know what is and I can't help you if that's the case. Again, I've done a bunch of podcasts on selling and stuff. Go back and listen to those. Number four is how to create systems. Now, I get this question a lot. And I think that people, contractors, want some kind of simple answer where it's like, here's a system in a box. All you have to do is plug it into your business. And unfortunately, that is not reality. Because every single business, unless you've bought a franchise, and even with the franchise, there are still variances. But every single business is totally different. Every business in construction has a totally different process for how they do things. They have sales processes. They have production processes. They have invoicing processes, marketing processes, onboarding process. Everything is totally different across the board. So there is no one size fits all. Plug it in and you're ready to go. You have to create the system. Now, there are cheat sheets and tools and softwares that make it easier. In terms of estimating, there's tons of estimating software out there that will do it for you. The problem is even with estimating software or CRM type software, like customer relation that keeps track of all your customers and invoicing and estimating and all that stuff, scheduling and timesheets. All of those have flaws. And again, you can buy one piece of software and it's still going to have gaps in there that you have to fill. There is no one piece of software that does everything. I've tried to find them. Trust me, I've spent hundreds of hours. I've tried out a dozen different softwares and none of them are going to fit 100% of what you need. There's going to be gaps somewhere that you have to augment with other softwares or other processes. But it can help you get 60%,70%,80% closer to creating a system that works. So I'm not dogging software. Software is super important. Zapier is a great software that I use. It talks between two different softwares to automate processes. But creating systems. Here's what contractors get wrong. They look at their business from a 30,000-foot view, and they say, I need systems. I need to create organization and systems to make my life easier. Okay, fair enough. But you look at your business and you say, I don't even know where to start. There's so much that has to be done. I don't have time. It seems like a daunting task. I'll never get it done. Therefore, I'm never going to start. And then six, seven years go by and you haven't created any systems yet. Ask me how I know this. So, what do you have to do? How do you conquer this issue of overwhelm? It's simple. You have to go to the micro level and you start by fixing what bugs you the most. Right now, as you're listening to this, there is something in your business that is bugging you every time you use it. Now, for a lot of you, it's going to be estimating. And that is a little bit more of a complicated system. However, you can still go out and try different softwares to alleviate this problem. Okay? But you fix what bugs you. I call this micro frustrations. A lot of times we go through a whole day of micro frustrations and it just builds up and builds up and builds up and it makes it enjoyable. It makes doing the work enjoyable. I remember when I first started, I was working out of a pickup truck and I had, all I had was like two little deep boxes in the bed of my truck. And all my tools were in there. And so every time I needed to get something, and I also had them in the, I had an extended cab pickup, so I had tools behind my seat. But every time I needed to get something out of those boxes, I had to climb up in the back of the tailgate, put the tailgate down, climb up in the bed, open the lid of the box, dig through all of the crap that's in there to find that one tool I needed. And it took me 10 minutes to try and find it. Finally, I got it and I would go and use it. frustrated that I wasted all that time knowing that it's costing me money because I wasn't organized. And day in, day out, I would do this over and over and over again. Because what happens is in that moment, you're frustrated, but then five minutes later, you forget about it until the next time it happens. And then you're frustrated. But throughout the course of the day, always little micro frustrations build up. It's not enough to make you want to do it. right then or change it right away, but it is enough to annoy you. But if you start by fixing those little things that bug you first, and I'll readily admit that sometimes it's a fairly large project that has to happen. It may cost money. In this case of my pickup truck, I had to buy high side boxes to put on there, you know, and that was like $2,400 or whatever to do that. So it cost me some money. But when I did that, and then I was able to organize all my tools, it made it so much easier to work out of my pickup truck. That frustration went away. Now it actually became a little more enjoyable to work out of my truck. And then over the years, I've upgraded to vans and all kinds of stuff. But there's a book I want you to go read. You can actually download it for free, a PDF version of it on the website. But it's called Two Second Lean, and it's by Paul Akers. He used to be a cabinet maker. He owns a company called FastCap. Some of you know what FastCap is. But he wrote a book called Two Second Lean. And it's kind of a very, very, very broken down basic look at how manufacturing companies lean out that process, meaning they eliminate waste. And so the two second lean is the principle of just make a two second improvement. Like all of you listening to this could right now. Do something that gives you a two-second savings of time, a two-second improvement in your process, and then do it again, and then do it again, and again, and again, and eventually, you will have a process that saves you 15 minutes every time you do it. And a lot of times, you will do one simple little tweak, and it will save you 30 minutes. But because you were intentional about looking at it and fixing what bugs you, Now you get into the mentality of creating systems. And systems don't have to be super complicated. And really, system in general is made up of thousands of little systems. So get to the micro level, find out what bugs you, and start creating corrections. Make corrections for that to try and save two seconds. Now, in the manufacturing world, they have Sigma Six and all these fancy things and black belts where you can... learn all these processes. Toyota uses it for Kaizen and all these things. But you don't have to get that crazy. The question I always ask myself is, how can I do this better, faster, cheaper? And not cheaper in the sense of cheaper materials and cheaper for the customer, but cheaper for... It could be through efficiencies. If I could do this in one hour, which would be savings of time, but if I could do it in one hour... versus two, then it's going to be cheaper to do it that way. Or the way I'm currently doing it requires 15 two-by-fours. Could I do it a different way that only requires 10 two-by-fours? And if that's the case, I just saved the money on five two-by-fours. It's a very archaic example, but you get the point. So when you do a task, sit back, think, how could I have done this task better, faster, or cheaper? Fix what bugs you. Start the process at the micro level. Two-second improvements. Eventually, over a period of time, you'll look back and you'll have a complete system working in your business. There are different checklists and things. I have worksheets that I have available. If you're interested in anything that I have, go to the free Facebook group. That's where I post them at. We've got job costing worksheets. I've got material selection worksheets. There are some other worksheets on things that you can do to help you in your business. Those are all free resources available inside the free Facebook group. So on systems, read that book, Two Second Lean. I make my employees read it to understand that it is based around a manufacturing facility, like manufacturing processes. But if you think about it, when you're building stuff, it is in a sense, it's a manufacturing process. When you start adopting these things and you actually make it a way of life, it will change the way you run your business forever. That's systems. Number five and final is where do you find good customers? So a lot of times it's in the context of like, all I ever get is cheap customers, right? I get 15 leads and 14 of them want it done as cheap as possible. And that's a simple fix. It's not necessarily easy to execute, but it's a simple fix. If you're getting bad customers in your lead process and your lead funnel, it's because your marketing sucks. Yeah, you're attracting those leads. This goes back to the skilled labor. If you apply, if you put job posting for skilled labor and you get crappy candidates, it's because your job ad sucks. If you get bad customers, In your lead funnel, it's because your marketing sucks. It's because your website sucks. And here's the thing. When you start out, a lot of contractors are like, I need any job I can get. And that's fine. You got to build your business and establish yourself. But if you go out and you do work for 10 customers who are cheap as dirt, you lost money on it, you didn't know what you were doing, you didn't know your numbers and you needed work, what are they going to do? What are those 10 customers going to do? they're going to recommend you to all their friends. And so now all of a sudden you're getting 20 calls from all those friends and they all want it cheap because you gave Cindy a good deal. So they're expecting a good deal too. And you may think, well, if I don't give them a good deal, then they're going to bad mouth me and blah, blah, blah. The way you fix this problem is by changing your marketing, respecting yourself, respecting your time. respecting your checking account, your bank account. Meaning, you need to be charging 50% gross profit. And if you don't understand that and respect that, then your clients are not going to respect that either. So you have to look at all these things and say, okay, what does my ideal client look like? This starts with creating a customer avatar. An avatar is a fancy word for like a profile. Like what type of customer do I want to work for? And if you don't know this already, the easiest way to do that is go back through all your customers that you've done work for and pick out the top 10 that you like were your favorite customer. Like if you could work for these 10 customers for the rest of your life, these would be the ones you would want to work for forever. And you never had to work for anyone else. Find the top 10. If you don't have 10, if you only got three, find the top three. Okay. Find the ones up to 10 that you like. Look at them, look at their lives, look at their professions, look at what they do, where do they live, what zip code are they in? What type of job do they have? What type of cars do they drive? What do they do for hobbies? Do they have kids? Okay, what schools do their kids go to? Like deep research all of these things about your customer. And that is your target demographic. So if my top demographic is doctors who live in a certain zip code, Okay. I'm going to cater all of my marketing around that specific customer. I'm going to do, maybe I'll do door to door pieces, you know, direct mail pieces in that zip code. Maybe there's, I don't know, there's like a newsletter or something that goes out. Maybe they have a Facebook group just for that neighborhood. I'm going to get on there and I'm going to start providing value. If there's a certain neighborhood where I live and it's a higher-end neighborhood, I don't live in a higher-end neighborhood, but there's a higher-end neighborhood close to where I live and it's got like hundreds and hundreds of homes. It's kind of like an exclusive area. Well, everybody wants to be in that neighborhood nonstop. Anybody that does services, home services wants to be in that area. Well, maybe that neighborhood has a Facebook page just for their neighborhood and they let outside people join. Join it and start providing value. Maybe you're a painting company and someone gets on there and is like, hey, I had a question about painting. Does anybody know the easiest way to whatever, paint cabinets? You could respond with, yeah, I'm actually a painter. Here's a couple tips you can do. Do this, this, this, and this. And if you run into any problems, let me know. See if we can help you out. That's how you provide value. Instead of saying, I'm a painter, I can come give you a free estimate. Don't do that. Provide value, people will come back and they will recognize that and everybody else who's watching from the sidelines will see all that. Oh, hey, I saw you commented on so-and-so's post. I'm actually looking for a painter. Can I get an estimate from you? So that's targeting in your demographic of your customer avatar. If you know that those kids all go to a specific school, maybe they go to a private school, there may be opportunities to sponsor things at that private school where you're going to be in front of them more often. You know, marketing is a lot about exposure to them. Billboards, you know, vehicles, direct mail, all these things tie into one bigger machine of marketing, which is going to... feed leads to you, right? Because if I go out to the mailbox this morning and there's a, let's say there's a direct mail piece in there and it says, hey, are you looking for new windows? We're a window company. I'm like, cool. You know, yeah, we're thinking about getting new windows here this summer. I'm going to hold on to this. And it's for ABC Window Company. And then I go to work and on the way to work, I see a billboard that says ABC Window Company, we got you covered or whatever. I'm like, cool. And then I go to work. And then on the way home, I got to go by my son's school to pick him up. And I pull up and on the fence out there by the baseball diamonds, maybe I see something that says ABC Window Company. I'm like, okay, that's weird. It's the third time of day I've seen him. And then on the way home, because I'm going a different way, I see a yard sign in my neighborhood that says ABC Window Company. I'm like, damn, these people are everywhere. And then as I'm pulling up to my house, Driving down the road, there's a vehicle that says ABC Window Company on it. Like that's marketing, that's branding. That's how you get in front of people. And then, you know, a month later, when I'm ready to get windows, I know who I'm going to call first, right? Some of you don't do any of those things. You don't even have magnets on your truck. And you're like, why can't I get leads? Why can't I get leads? That's because nobody knows about you. How the hell are they supposed to know about you if you don't market yourself? So that's how you find good customers. You have to create all your marketing around those customers. Your website should be to pre-qualify people. My website pre-qualifies people. If they're cheap, they're going to pre-qualify themselves. On my website homepage, it says, basically, it's like, we're a professional handyman for busy professionals. or something like that. I don't remember off the top of my head. You know, we do work for busy professionals. Well, if you're a, you haven't worked for 10 years and you're on welfare and you live in Section 8 housing, and I'm not knocking these people, but if that's the people that's calling you, they're not going to be a good fit for what we offer, right? So my marketing, if they come to my website to schedule a call or something and they see all this stuff, And they may think to themselves, wow, this company looks like they're really expensive. I'm not even going to waste my time. They've pre-qualified themselves. It's another reason why you should have pricing on your website. That's a whole other podcast. So I am going to basically recap and then end the podcast. Number one, labor, cooks, big box stores, high school. Number two, skilled labor. change your marketing on your ads to attract them. Number three, use calibrated questions to find out who, what, when, where, and why. Number four, create systems by using two-second lean. Okay? Narrow it down, go to micro level, start fixing what bugs you. And number five, change your marketing to attract your customer avatar. I hope you got value out of this podcast today. Guys, stick around. because I got a lot of guests lined up for future podcasts. Just to give you an example, I got a carpenter, a female carpenter who started her business a couple years ago, and I'm going to get her on to talk about being a female carpenter. That's going to be exciting. I got a contract lawyer who's going to come on and talk about contract law. I got a marketing expert come on and talk about ways you can market your business. I got a personal trainer who specifically works with businesses. business owners, I should say, to help because they're busy and help them on how to train and get the most out of that. So I got a heavy lineup coming up. Stick around and I'm going to be sprinkling in some other podcasts like I did today. And I hope you enjoy it. So as always, look us up on our social media platforms. I'm hitting it hard and heavy right now on TikTok. Tons of videos on there. If you're not on there, you should get on there just for... the Hammer and Grind podcast page. That is the username, Hammer and Grind podcast. Tons of traction on there, tons of videos, tons of free tips and great advice. Instagram, Facebook, check out our free Facebook group. And again, there is a 10x guarantee on the coaching. If you want to step up your game and change your business and your life, check that out. 10x guarantee. If you don't make the money, I'll give your money back. That's it. Until next time, guys, be the best you.
