EP53: Fishing For Clients

going to some local lake and throwing the pole in there and, you know, catching bluegill as we all pretty much start out on bluegill. And it was a great time. It was a great experience. I've done that with my kids, all three of my kids. We've taken them fishing and had that same experience, and it's a great bonding moment. Now, what does phishing have to do with marketing or finding your clients? Well, it's a great analogy. It's a great metaphor. And I want to dive into that today to talk about how we're phishing for our clients the wrong way. Okay. So with this idea of phishing, I think most of us can agree that if you're going to go fishing, at least for the sport of it, bass fishing is... where you want to be, right? And specifically largemouth bass. That's the sport fisherman's fish of choice. So if we're going to identify our ideal clients that we want to work for as our largemouth bass, then that's what we're going to go with. Now think about to the time if you went fishing or if you didn't go fishing, I think you understand the principle, but think about back to whenever you caught that little bluegill. and how fun it was and how it worked, right? Well, when we start our business, we are basically going fishing for the first time. And we're probably going to start out with something that's going to be easier because we just need points on the board. We just need the score. We need to get clients. We need to sell jobs. We need to get money in the bank in order to stay in business, right? So we're basically going for the easiest thing that we can find. Usually that starts out with friends or family or... you know, people from your current work, wherever you're working at, whoever you can find to get you jobs. A lot of times, you know, they're mercy jobs where your parents may say, oh yeah, I need a new patio in the backyard. In reality, they don't really need a new patio. They're just trying to give you work. Well, we're going to take it, right? We're going to take that bluegill and we're going to run with it. The problem is we get a bunch of bluegill to keep us busy and We just stay there. Like we never graduate onto bigger fish. We get stuck in this idea that the bluegill is our safety net because it's easy to catch. And so we continually fish for bluegill. Well, you can't do that if you want to grow a sustainable business because if you've ever caught bluegill and if you've ever tried to fillet a bluegill or eat it, you have to catch a lot of bluegill to generate enough food to eat. And it's the same principle in your business. So I like to use fishing as the metaphor for marketing. And that's what we're diving into here. So think about it like this. If I'm looking for a largemouth bass and I catch a bluegill, no matter what I do, that bluegill will never, ever, ever be a largemouth bass. A lot of you guys are catching bluegill. and trying to convert them into a largemouth bass. And that's never going to happen. And you wonder why, you know, they compete on price. When you guys compete on price, you lose. Because you're competing with other fishermen who are catching bluegills. And the bluegill doesn't care. All the bluegill wants is the worm. So when you try to compete with other fishermen with bluegills, you're going to lose. Okay, you're going to lose every time because that's not your ideal fish. It's not your ideal client. You're looking for largemouth bass. So what do a lot of us do as contractors? We use what we know. We try to throw a bobber in the water with a worm on the end and we try to catch bass with that. Does that work? I mean, maybe if the bass is really hungry and... it's in the right spot and they like it, you might catch a bass. Yeah, sure. You might catch a bass with a worm on a bobber. Not likely, but it's possible. Or some of us will do the fishing net approach where we'll go out in the middle of the lake and we drop a fish, a net in the water and try to catch a bass that way. Well, what happens if you drop a net in the middle of the water of a lake? you're probably not going to catch a bass because that's not where the bass hang out. Now, there's a very low chance that you might catch a bass. So let's say you throw a net in the water and you catch 10 fish. Well, maybe one of them is a bass. Let's give you the benefit of the doubt and you catch one bass that way. But you're going to catch seven bluegill and you're going to catch two crappie as well. So you've spent the time to catch 10 fish, okay? And only one of them is your ideal clients. You may convert to two crappie. You may get one or two bluegill. But more than likely, you're not going to catch or convert all of those bluegills, right? Because they're going to want to compete on price. And you're not doing that because you've listened to the podcast and you know you shouldn't compete on price. But what's happening is a lot of you are taking the tips that I'm giving you and you're raising your rates and you're trying out some of these sales techniques. but you're still trying to catch bluegill and you're wondering why you're failing at it. Again, you can't convert a bluegill to a bass. So you have to change your marketing. You have to change up your positioning of your business. Now, branding applies in here, but I'm not going to get into branding today, but your brand that you created affects the positioning that you have. If you're a general contractor and the name of your business is Brad's general contracting, that doesn't really tell me what you do. I don't know if you do new homes, remodels, additions, kitchens, bathrooms, basements. What do you do? That's a positioning problem. That's a branding problem. If the name of your business is Seven Day Baths, and that's what you do is bathrooms in seven days, I have no question whatsoever about what you do. So if I need a bath done in seven days, you're the company I'm calling. That's a branding issue. That's not a marketing issue. That's your brand. So you're dealing with, we're dealing with marketing here. So with your marketing, you have to go after your ideal clients. You can't throw a net in the water and expect to catch the fish. Now you can, but like I said earlier, You're catching 10 fish and nine of them are not your ideal clients. So you have to go through nine fish to catch the one bass. That's a lot of work. Throwing a net out there, fielding all the calls and doing all that work. That's a lot of work. Or if I go out there and I just fish with a bobber and a worm, it's going to take a long time to catch a bass. I'm going to catch a lot of bluegill, but it's going to be hard to catch a bass. And I have to go through all those bluegill. Every phone call, every email, every estimate to try and catch that bass. So when you learn that you need to do targeted marketing, it will shortcut this process. This can be done with your website. You can pre-qualify people through your website. You can pre-qualify them with your organic post, any paid advertising, vehicle wraps. There's lots of ways that you can pre-qualify your customers, your prospects. based on what you say and do. So let's go back to fishing for a second. I remember also when I was a little kid, my grandfather, he had some land and he had a lake on there. And I went with him one day to restock the lake or stock the lake for the first time. And he had three or four big boxes of fish in bags. It's the first time I've ever seen anything like it. I was a little kid. And I didn't really understand what we were doing, but he was stalking the lake so that he could fish it. He loved to fish. He was a fisherman. And so he was stalking his own lake. So he had fish to catch. And there were many different types of fish. There were bluegill, bass, catfish. I don't remember all of the different species that we have, but there were multiple species. And it was fun to see them release into the lake and they go on and do their thing. So if you think of your customer pool as fish in a lake, Okay. Think of the lake is the area that you're trying to fish. If there's only a thousand fish in the lake, let's just assume that you have a thousand customers that you can pull from. Maybe you do higher end stuff and you only do 10,15 jobs a year. Well, you know, in a 10 year period, that's probably won't even get through a thousand. Right. So. You may only need to get 1,000 customers in your lifetime of your business. Maybe you only need 300. My point is there's 1,000 in this lake. There's 300 of them are bass. And then the other 700 are a variety of species, bluegill, crappie, catfish, whatever. You have all these different fish in there, but there's only 300 bass in this lake. 300 out of 1,000. Would you rather go through all thousand fish to find those 300 or would you rather just go through four, maybe 500 to find those 300? I don't know about you, but I would rather do the easy route, which is go and find just the large mouth bass. So how do you find the bass? Well, if you're going to be fishing for large mouth bass, you have to go where they are, right? If you want to fish for bass and you're a fisherman, you know the best way to catch bass is in a boat. So you go in a boat. You go early morning, you go to the, and you troll the shores and you fish around structure. There's trees that are laying down, different structure. You fish those structures and you use different types of baits. Now, if you're a fisherman, you will know these, but you know, you may have a stick bait, a spinner bait, a crank bait, a jig, a worm, a grub, a topwater frog, or a jerk bait. Like there's several different types of baits that you can use. And you have to try them out. I know a lot of fishermen that have, you know, they have six, seven, eight poles because they have those baits, each different type of bait on a different pole. And they'll try out and see what works. So as they're trolling, if they throw out a topwater frog and they start getting bites and catching fish, then they'll fish the topwater frog. If that doesn't work, they'll start fishing with a crankbait or a jigbait or whatever it is. And there's different times of the day that work better with different types of bait. And there's different times of the year that work better. And you have to figure this out for your customers. You have to figure out where they hang out at. You have to figure out what type of bait they like. And this is how you target your ideal prospect, your ideal customer. Now, one little tool you can do is go back over all of your customers and find the top 10 customers that you love. If you had to only work for those 10 customers for the rest of your life, you just cycle through them, you know, one through 10, you got done, you started over at one. If you could only work for these 10 customers, who would they be? And write this down. Make a list of your top 10 customers. Now, if you're just starting out like day number two, it's going to be very difficult, but there's still ways to figure out who your ideal customer is. Okay. I can tell you right now, it's not going to be Bluegill. Now, are there certain industries, certain niches that can work with Bluegill? Sure, there are, but that doesn't apply to most people, most contractors in their businesses. Okay. So let's not talk about the exceptions. Let's talk about the normal. So you have your 10 customers. Now, what do you do? Well, you find out everything you can about them that you know. You go to Facebook and you stalk them and you find out where do they, where do they like? What's their profession? Are they married or not? Do they have kids or not? If they're married, does the wife stay at home? What's their profession? Are they a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, blue collar? Like, what do they do? Write these professions down. Write everything down about it. What zip code do they live in? What type of house is it? How big of a house is it? What's the value of the house? What's the neighborhood that they're in? Is it a nice neighborhood? Is it an older neighborhood? What's their ages? Are they retired? Are they young? You write all these demographics, everything you could possibly think of about them, and you will probably start to see some type of pattern forming. If you do this with your 10 best clients, you will see a pattern that starts to form. Those are the patterns you want to look for. Those are the keys. Those are the keywords, if you will. So you find out what those are. Let's say seven of the 10 of your ideal clients. Play golf. Okay, that's a start. So where would I want to target my clients around golf? Well, there's lots of options. If there's a local golf club that does advertising, maybe you want to put advertising there. Now, I'm not suggesting that these specific tactics will always work, but that's why we test and record our marketing strategies. We test and record what works so that we know. When you're fishing, and you're trying different lures, you figure out which ones work, and you use those, and you use those more often. It's the same principle. So now that you know that I like golf, now I can cater posts, social media posts, around that specific topic. So if my ideal client likes golf, I may do a post about golfing. And it may be something like, for example, I may go to a golf club. Even if I don't play golf, I may go to the golf club, rent some clubs, go out to the driving range and videotape me trying to hit a golf ball that I've never hit before. And I look like a complete fool. Right. And I may say something like, if you've ever hired a contractor who didn't know what they were doing, let me know or something like that. I'm just I'm just riffing off the top of my head. You can use it however you want. But I could post a video of me swinging a golf ball, looking like a complete idiot and saying, does this ever feel like when you've hired the sheep contractor or something to that effect? Right now, if I'm a golf lover and I'm scrolling my posts and I'm following you or even a paid advertisement and I see you hitting and getting ready to hit a golf ball, I'm stopping and I'm looking and watching what this video is about. And if you say something like, you know. Hiring the wrong contractor can sometimes feel like the first time hitting a golf ball or something like that. That resonates with me. Now you've hooked me. Now I know that this guy is a contractor and it may be someone that I want to do business with. This is advanced tactics, guys. I'm giving you the bread and butter of how you do your marketing. These posts of, hey, here's a bathroom we just did. We do high quality work. Let us know if you want an estimate. Those are absolutely terrible. No one's going to call you. You may get one or two bluegill call you, but those are terrible posts. That's all about you, right? You can do posts like, here is this beautiful bathroom we just finished. We really like the tile accent border in the shower. What do you guys think about it? Nothing in that post says, we're the best, hire us. We'll give you a free estimate. This is how you get people to engage. Now, this podcast is not about post topics and how to do it and ad copy, but it ties in. You can see now that by me having my top 10 avatars, is what we call them, or your customer profiles, I can really, really, really dive in deep and start creating marketing that works for them. This is how you attract your ideal clients. This is how you attract largemouth bass. You have to use the correct lure and you have to be in the right time of the day, in the right position in the lake. And you have to even use your pole a little bit. Like the way you throw your pole and the way you spin it, reel it in, I mean, and the way you jerk your pole, creating all these different actions with the bait, that attracts your clients. So you guys need to get really, really good at figuring out how to attract your ideal client. Quit wasting time. trying to convert bluegill into bass. It's a waste of time. Now, a lot of you are how I was when I was a kid. Also, I would go fishing with my grandfather. And I remember one time we went to a local lake camping type thing over the weekend. And I was probably maybe eight,

And my grandfather liked to fish for catfish. Now, he was a jug fisherman. He would tie the string to the jug and throw it in the water. But he would also like to go out there and just sit in the middle of the lake and throw lines out and try and catch catfish that way. Well, me being a young, probably ADD, young kid, hyper, I would fish for like 10 minutes. And then I couldn't sit still. And I'm bouncing all over the place, turning, the bolts shaking. My grandfather would get so upset. And finally, he's just like, honey, sit down and quit moving. And then I wouldn't do that. I'd do it for like 10 minutes. And then he'd finally take me to the... take me over to the bank and tell my parents, he can't sit still. He's not fishing with me. So this is some of you guys is how you handle your marketing. You go out there and you try one ad. You try and run ads on Facebook. You don't get any results. And so you quit. And you're like, this is stupid. It doesn't work. That's not how you do ads. You have to try new things to see what works. You have to test it. And here, I love Gary Vaynerchuk's take on this. He says, if you run Facebook ads and it doesn't work, it doesn't mean Facebook sucks. It means you suck, which is true. The reason why it works is because there's millions and millions of people that have success with it. You just haven't figured out the right formula. You're not using the right bait on the right median at the right time. And you have to figure that out. Guys, it's so important to track your marketing. Every call that comes in, I'm asking them, how did you find out about us? If I ask 10 customers, how did you find out about us? And I only sell two of those 10 customers. And the two that I sell say, I saw your truck, your vehicles in my neighborhood. Okay. That's a good indicator of something is going on there. And I'm going to look at them. If the eight. that I did not sell, say, I looked online and I just, I found your company. Well, then maybe that doesn't work. So you have to track this stuff. It could be the complete opposite. I go look at those two that I sold and I see that they're in the same neighborhood. And coincidentally, they're in the neighborhood that's my target demographic for my top 10 customers. What does that tell you about your marketing? It's effective. Your vehicles parked in front of these people's houses. for a week or two or three weeks at a time is getting attention. And that works. So how can I possibly recreate that or double down on that effort? This is how you track your marketing. Marketing is not a passive action of your business. Marketing, it's literally why they have full-time marketing experts because it's a full-time job. Now, most of us can't afford to hire a marketing professional. It just doesn't happen. But if you listen to the other podcast I had Matt Thiebaud on, he's a marketing professional. He can help you with the marketing if you want to outsource it. But you still need to track what you do in-house, every call that comes in. And there's lots of different ways you can do this. You can do it with different phone numbers, different links. There's lots of ways you can do this. I'm not going to get technical on it. But the main thing I want you to understand is that you need to track all of your marketing. You should be able to go to every single... customer of yours and see how they found out about you. Now, I realize that sometimes you may get a vague answer like I searched on the internet. Well, that's pretty vague. I would ask a clarifying question. Oh, that's great. What did you search for? Well, I searched for bathroom remodeling my town. All right, thank you. And I'm going to put that in the notes. Now I'm going to go write a blog post about bathroom remodeling my town. If I get 10 people say, I searched for bathroom remodeling my town, I'm definitely writing a blog post about that because that's a keyword that people are searching. I hope I'm driving home to you guys that marketing is a very proactive, very active part of your business. A lot of you rely on referrals. And I'm here to tell you that referrals will keep you from growing your business. Now, you're going to disagree with me and that's fine. But let me explain. Referrals are the best type of lead to get, right? Referrals are much easier to close. So I agree that getting a referral is a great lead. However, you're putting all of your business into other people's hands. I can't make referrals happen. Now, I can call past customers and say, hey, John, I'm just calling to see if you knew anybody else that would benefit from our services. You can do that. And that's a viable option. But you're still relying on John to give you names. And he may just give you names out of feeling sorry for you, and he really doesn't know if they need help or not. So it's not really a viable option. And I can't scale that. I can't wake up tomorrow and say, I want 10 referrals this week. I have no control of that. The only thing you can scale is the marketing effort that you put out. For me, I use Google pay-per-click ads. And that's the only paid advertising I do is Google pay-per-click. Now, Google has about 10,000 videos on how to set this up. So don't ask me how to set up Google pay-per-click. You guys need to get off your butt and find it out yourself or hire someone to do it for you. I figured it out myself. I went and watched the videos and figured it out myself. It's not that hard. You just have to start small. Don't spend a bunch of money because you'll blow through all your money quick if you don't know what you're doing. But again, test. record, repeat, test, record, repeat. All right. So if you, if I use Google pay-per-click ads, I know I can, if I run, if I spend $150, $200 a month and I get say 50 leads each time, then I know that if I want to scale my business, I just have to spend 300 or $350 a month. And now I'll get a hundred leads. And I know if my closing rate is X amount, like 25% or whatever, I know how many leads I need in order to close to get my closing rate to hit my revenue goals, my sales goals. It's all about numbers, guys. Running a business is about data. It's not about emotion. It's about data. And you have to have data to analyze. This is why you track in your marketing. If I haven't driven this home yet enough on this podcast, then let me know. But I'm going to try one more time here from a different angle to get you to see the importance of marketing. If I called you and I said, what is your number one source of marketing? And you don't know the answer to that, then you're losing in business. That's not a winning business answer. You should know. Now, you may not know percentage-wise. You may not know referrals or... 34% of our business, you may not know the exact percentage, but you should know which ones are your number one moneymakers. You should know that all referrals are our best or internet marketing is our best or vehicles are our best or whatever it is. You should know that because you should be in touch with that. Now, unless you have a full-time marketing person on staff, if that's you, congratulations. You don't really have to even listen to this podcast, although you should still understand the basic level of this. If you hire someone else to do this for you, you need to understand it better than most people because you need to know that if you're paying someone $500, $1,000, $3,000 a month for advertising, whether or not you're getting a good return of investment. And it's not just about how many times the phone rings. It's about the quality of the leads that come in. You see, I would rather have, if you gave me two options, I would rather have 20 leads a month that I close. say seven of them, then I would rather have 100 leads a month and I close 20 of them. Why? Because it's more work. It's a lot more work to try and go through 100 leads. It's not the number of the leads that you get. It's the quality of the leads that you get. And if you show up at four or five in the morning when the sun's coming up over the lake, and it's a little chilly and there's a fog on the lake and you get in your boat and you go over to the bank where the tree's falling down and you use the crankbait and you throw it out there and you jiggle your pole and reel it in, you have the highest percentage of catching a largemouth bass at that time because you understand it. So the last thing about fishing I want to use as a metaphor here is if you think about how it's related to advertising or marketing, the lakes, Think of lakes as the different types of mediums. Okay. So one lake would be Facebook. I mean, you can lump in social media as one, but honestly, each social media platform is different. So one lake is Facebook. One lake is Instagram. One lake is whatever else, billboards. Another lake is vehicles. Another lake is internet search or pay-per-click. Another lake is referrals. So on and so on. You get the picture. So the different types of lakes are the different mediums. Some lakes are stocked with catfish. And no matter how much you market in that or go to that lake, no matter what you do, you're never going to catch a bass because there's only catfish in there. You have to identify what that is, right? I'm on TikTok for coaching because it's a national platform and my coaching program reaches internationally. However, in my construction business, I would never use TikTok because it doesn't go locally. It's a waste of time. I focus most of my effort in terms of social media on Facebook only. I really don't do anything on Instagram or Twitter. So this goes back to the analogy of going where your customers are. That's where a lot of my customers are on Facebook right now. If my customers were on, say, Twitter, I would be going on Twitter hard. It's not relative to what you want to do or what you think is good or what you like doing. It's relative to where your customers are at. It has nothing to do with you. It doesn't matter what your opinion is about the platform. If you hate Facebook and you hate Mark Zuckerberg because you think he's taking away all your rights, it does not matter. Do you want to be in business or not? It's that simple. Do you want to win at your business or do you want to complain about some guy and all his bullcrap? If you want to win in your business and your customers are on Facebook, you better get your butt on Facebook and start advertising or at least doing some organic posting on there. Guys, quit making everything so personal. Use the data to figure out where to market at. That's what business is. Take the emotion out of it. The only time emotion comes into play is when you're pre-qualifying your customers because people buy on emotion. That's a totally different subject. Besides that, take all emotion out of your business. Make data-driven decisions. So back to the different types. I got on a little tangent there. You guys got me fired up today. I apologize. I'm going to calm down here. Take a deep breath. All right, I'm back. So legs are the different types of mediums. The lures that you're using, those can be different types of posts. Okay. So different types of posts can be like live videos, before and after pictures, informational posts like blog posts or just articles about different trends in the industry. Those would be like the different types of lures. And you track it. If you're doing organic posts or even ads, you know, when I run ads for Hammer and Grind. I'll take maybe the same ad copy, but I'll do five different variations of that ad copy with five different pictures. Why do I do that? Because I want to see what works. And if I run it for two weeks or a month and these two ads here do the best, then I can turn off the other three that aren't doing very good and I can run those two ads. Or maybe I try a different picture or maybe I try a different ad copy or maybe I try a different platform. It's a nonstop. constant tweaking to the point to where you know, like you will know if I run this ad on this platform and spend this much money, I will get X results. That's how you dial in your marketing. And that's how you can literally scale your business on demand. Because you just turn it on and you get 30 leads instantly. Or you know what I mean? Over the time, you know what's going to win. That's how you do marketing, guys. The only thing that is different on your post is kind of like the jiggling of the pole, how you throw it out there, how you reel it in, how you move the pole and do all those actions. That's going to be like your ad copy. Now, if you don't know what ad copy is, it's just a fancy word for the words on your post. Whatever words you use, that's considered copy. If it's in an ad, it's ad copy. The words that you use... is what attracts the fish. So you could use the right lure, but if you just throw it out there, if you're doing like a topwater frog and you throw it out there and let it sink to the bottom, you're probably not going to catch the fish because that's not what frogs do. You know, it's supposed to go on top of the water. So your ad copy, what you write in your post, also needs to be attractive. And you have to practice this stuff. You have to go read a book on ad copy. There's all kinds of books out there on how to create winning ad copy. So marketing is a very, very specific thing. That's why there's entire degrees. That's why there's marketing agencies. There's a lot to it. But you guys can pick one thing. Do your 10 customers. Find out where they hang out, what platform they're on. Go to that platform and start testing. You don't have to get it right the first time. Just start testing. Start trying to get some type of results. If you run an ad for two weeks and you get zero calls or zero clicks from it, you probably have either bad copy or if you put pictures or whatever, it's not very good. You got to try something else. That's why there's analytics on everything. That's why there's all this data. You guys don't understand that Google and Facebook and Twitter. and Instagram and all these companies, they're not technology companies. You guys understand they're data collection companies. They collect the data of you and your clients. They know, they literally have all of the information about your customers. All you have to do is find them and use them. That's it. So remember, you can't take a bluegill and convert it into a bass. Find out where your bass hang out. First of all, find out what your fish is. Find out your top 10 customers. Find out where they hang out. Find out what platforms they're on. Tailor your marketing and your ad copy to them and then go hard at it and then test, record, adjust. Test, record, adjust. It's that simple. All right, guys. That's the end of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Again, you can check us out on all our social media platforms, Hammer and Grind podcast. And if you want to learn more about the Profit Club, hit me up. I'll be more than happy to talk to you about that. Again, it's a 10x guarantee. Definitely worth looking into. And until next time, guys, be the best you.