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 guide you on your journey to mastery of your construction business. You can find Hammer and Grind on all the social media platforms. Just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast. Now, if you're looking for more help, you can check out our free Facebook group called The Contractor Profit Group. I do free trainings in there and it's a great community to be a part of. Now, if you're serious about making more money, saving more time, and creating a business that supports your lifestyle, check out my paid coaching group called The Profit Club. I've put together a proven system for creating a winning business. Now listen, I'm so confident that you will succeed in my program. I'm now offering a 10x ROI guarantee. That means if you don't make at least a 10x return on your investment within a 12-month period, I will refund you the full amount. You can find out more information about The Profit Club at hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club. All right, on this podcast, we're going to be talking about minding the time, or as I like to say, mind the time. Now, before I get into this, I want to ask you guys a favor. I really want to start doing more interview-based type podcasts, but I need your help because I need to find creative, informational people that just can provide lots of value to the construction industry. I want to interview them and I need your help. So if you have a favorite podcaster or someone that you think would be beneficial to the show, please send them my way or send me their information so I can contact them. I want to get them on the show so we can bring even more value and do more interview style podcasts. But for today's podcast, we're going to be talking about minding the time. What does that mean? Well, you've probably heard the phrase time kills deals. That's one thing that we've heard before. Mining the time applies three different times in the buying cycle, a customer's buying cycle. There's three different times during the buying cycle where mining the time matters. And for bonus points today, if you can count how many times I say the word time, I'll give you a special bonus because it's probably going to be a lot. All right. The first, I'm going to identify the three times and then I'll get into how to mine the time and different parts of that. So the three times that you have to mine the time, I think we're like seven times in that make that eight now. The first time is the pre-selling time, right? So from first contact until you actually talk to the customer, that's going to be your pre-sale. It's the pre-sale time. And this is going to vary depending on your industry. If you're in the service-based industry, if you're an electrician or a plumber, you do repair services. If you're a pressure washer guy, if you do service-type work, cleaning windows, cutting grass, things like that, you're going to have a much, much shorter window of time that you need to respond because people are going to be impatient. This is very important if you're in the service-based industry where you need to get to them as quickly as possible. It's even crucial. It's the most crucial if you're using paid lead ads or paid lead services like Angie's List or Thumbtack or any of those. You almost have to have a dedicated person answering the phone as soon as they call in to get those types of jobs because people are calling, they have a need, they want it done as quickly as possible. So your time to respond. is very, very critical if you're in the service-based industry. Now, it's not like a rocket science or an exact measurement, but basically the higher the dollar amount of the project, the longer the timeframe that you typically had between pre-sale and post-job start date. But this is a very critical part of it is the pre-sale part. The second part is the post-sale pre-start. So you've sold the job. And now you have to do the work, right? And if a lot of guys right now are booked out real far because of material lead times, and they may be three, four, six,12 months out. Some guys are booked out 18 months, you know, or two years if it's a big project or a very popular thing. I know pool builders are crazy booked out. I know some home builders are booked out for a couple of years if they're custom builders. So those things are kind of their own little separate category, if you will. But again, for service-based industry, if I'm calling you and my toilet is leaking and overflowing, I can't wait two weeks for you to get out here and fix it. I need someone today, right? So the pre-sale or the post-sale pre-start time is going to also be affected by the size of the project or the nature of the project. And the last one is you probably not really have ever thought about before, and that is post-job, post-job time. And this includes predominantly the time it takes for you to do final invoicing or final payment collection, collecting reviews, things like that. Things you're going to do at the end of the job, the post-job timeframe is what we're going to get into. So those are the three different times during the customer journey. that we need to mind the time. Now, some of you may be hearing this for the first time and you're like, what do you mean? It's just what it is. I answer the phone. I schedule it for a week later to get on the call. I schedule the job six weeks later. And then it takes me two weeks. What's the big deal? Well, it's a big deal because your customers, they want to know what's going on. I've posted this question before in social media and Facebook and stuff. about how do you mind the time? And some of them were like, well, we just tell them it's going to be two months before we start the project. And then a week before we start, we reach out to them to get the final date. And I'm like, so you don't do anything during that two months between when you sell a job and collect like $20,000 of their money and then start the project? And they're like, no, why would we? We told them. You can't do that, guys. Put yourself in their situation. That's like going to a car dealership and that's like ordering a Ford Bronco, paying the full amount or paying a deposit of $20,000 or whatever it is, $5,000. And then they say, well, we'll just give you the car at some point. Or they say, we'll give you the car in six months. And six months comes and goes and you don't hear from them. Nobody likes to be in that situation. You've got money out there. They want to know what's happening. So you have to stay in constant contact with them. Now we'll get into a little bit later about how often or the frequency of that. But it's super important to make sure that you're minding that time frame. So let's get into the pre-sale and dig a little bit deeper with that. Now with the pre-sale, there's different ways that you can handle this. Some people will have like an initial quick phone call or a quick email response. And then set up a later on time, you know, a week or a couple of days or a week, depending on your schedule, to do a follow-up call. Now, the way that I like to teach for, and this is, again, service-based businesses are going to be slightly different. Okay, so I'm going to speak predominantly to larger type jobs are going to be remodelers, landscapers, general contractors. People that are typically doing, you know, larger size projects,5,000 or more up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Okay. Where you have a process, a sales process that has to happen. So if you're an electrician or a plumber and does service work, it doesn't mean that this stuff doesn't apply to you. It's just your timeframes are going to be much shorter. Okay. But typically what we would do is if someone calls in, and this also depends on if you have someone who answers the phone for you. Or if you're the one that answers the phone, do you have an office manager or a secretary? Do you have a salesperson? All that stuff factors in here. But if someone calls in and you answer the phone, you may not be able to talk to them about their project at that time. So what you're going to do is get a little bit of information, their name, phone number, address, email, all the contact information, maybe a very brief description of what they're wanting done. And then you can, you know, schedule a phone call follow-up, a discovery call. It could be later that day. It could be several days in the future. It could be a week or so into the future. Okay. You're going to get the information because if you're using the profit sales system, then you're going to be collecting pictures of the project ahead of time before the phone call so that you can do your research going into the call. Some of you may be set up to where you can take the phone call and go right into the discovery call right then on the very first call because of how you have it set up. And if you can do that, it's great. Continue doing that. Some people will contact you through your website, which I'm a big fan of funneling people through the website, which is where a lot of people will come anyways, because you can provide information and value to them, pre-sale value. through blog posts, through buying guides, just through all kinds of information on your website, instructions on how to send pictures in, all of that stuff can be done through your website so that you get the form, the submittal form from them, the work request form or whatever you want to call it from them. And you have all the information that you need. And so now it's just a matter of scheduling a discovery call. And there's ways that you can even automate it even further to where like if you have the form set up and they provide pictures, you can even have it set up as a two-step type process that once they provide that information, they can actually schedule a discovery call on the back end if you're using a third-party integration similar to like Calendly or something like that. And that could all be automated, right? You can do that. There's lots of ways to automate this process and we'll kind of dig into that a little bit later. So you're going to collect the information, you're going to schedule a discovery call, whether that's, like I said, later that day, next week or whatever, and then you're going to have that discovery call. So that is the pre-sale timeframe. If someone sends you a form online and you don't respond to them for a week, you've already basically killed that deal. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't still make the sale. But you're digging yourself deeper into the hole every day that you wait. The more time that goes by, the worse it gets. People are like, oh, I guess he's not interested. I mean, he didn't even call me back for a week or email me back. So what I like to do if they're emailing me through my website is I, as soon as I get the email and I have it set up to be notified, I like to respond to the email as quickly as I can. Now that may be several hours later if they email me at, you know,10 o 'clock at night because they're on the website, I'm obviously not going to respond until the next morning. But if they email me at 10 o 'clock in the morning, I might be sitting at my desk. I might be able to respond right away within like 30 seconds. It just depends on how everything's set up. So I'll respond with an email, right? So I'll respond and say, hey, John, thanks for contacting us about your project. I got your pictures. Thanks so much for doing that. It's really helpful. I noticed you put on the form that you're wanting to have us done in three weeks. If we weren't able to get it done for six weeks, is that going to be a deal killer? Is that going to be a deal breaker? Because some of these things that I put in my forms, which, wink, wink, you guys should be having on your website, these questions, is how soon are you wanting this project done? Because I can answer that in a simple email very, very quickly. If they say, I need it done this week and I'm three months out, that's not going to happen. And I can send an email back and simply say, Becky, thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately, we are booked out for three months and there's absolutely no way we can get it done next week. Is that going to be a deal killer? And then they can respond and say, yes, sorry, I need it done. And that's it. Now, I didn't have to schedule a phone call. I didn't have to waste one of my opening times for my calls, none of that stuff. So that's why I'm a big proponent of going and pushing people through the website. But even if they call on a quick call, on a by answer, I could say, what's your timeframe? And they say, you know, a week from now, I'm like, oh, we're booked up for three months. And then that's it. So I'm going to pre-qualify them with the basics, the timeframe, and really what kind of work they want done. Because people sometimes get confused. They'll call you, you know, they want to get a roof put on and you don't do roofing. Right. So like you just, I'm sorry, we don't offer that service. Here's somebody else that can help you. So that those are some prequalification things, but the pre-sale that time is very important for your first impression. Okay. Don't wait weeks or don't wait days or weeks guys to, to respond to leads. That being said, if, if a week goes by and it's just now the first opportunity that you have to respond, I would still respond. And I would say, So sorry for the delay. I don't know if you're still needing help or not, but if you are, please let me know. I'd like to talk to you about your project. There's a certain level of forgiveness that people have. I've contacted people two weeks after they've submitted the form because I got so busy or because somehow the email got read and then it wasn't put in the system and then I caught it later on. Like I've gone back and responded to people weeks later and said, hey, so terribly sorry. I dropped the ball on this. Of course, I fall on the sword every time. You probably think I'm just like all the other contractors. But I was just, I was reaching out. I know it's a long shot. You probably already got somebody to do it, but are you still needing help with this? And I've gotten jobs that way. So just because it is a long time doesn't mean you just throw it away. But if you want to stay on top of it, you need to do that as soon as you possibly can. So let's talk about the post-sale pre-start date. This is the biggest time gap for most people. And this is the one thing that I believe that contractors overlook the most. And it can be detrimental to the overall experience. That being said, your results are going to vary depending on your customers and your types of business and all that stuff. But if you're selling jobs, three, six, nine months down the road, you need to have some type of process in place to keep your customers informed because they want to know what's going on. One thing that I've learned and call it intuition or whatever, but if I sell a job and let's say two months later, I haven't really done a very good job of communicating with them or maybe I have done a good job. It doesn't matter. If that person comes to my mind, like I could be driving down the road thinking about, you know, all the stuff I got to do. And it pops up and says, you should probably send an email to Cindy. She's probably wondering what's going on. Or you need to email Cindy and tell her that you just got her materials in. I'm not kidding you. Like 99% of the time when that happens, if I don't respond that day or that within that hour, I will get a message from those people. and call it, I don't know if it's an instinct or ESP or whatever it is, but almost without fail, if that person pops in my mind, it's like the universe telling me, you need to contact this person and let them know what's going on because they're wondering. And then, I'm not kidding you, I'm not making this up, like 99% of the time, I will get an email, a phone call, or a text from that person within the next 24 hours asking me what's going on. So I learned to listen to that voice. And as soon as that pops in my head, I'll try to take action on that. But you can avoid a lot of that type of stuff if you simply have a process in place. So what are some processes that we can use for the post-sale pre-start date time frame? Well, there's lots of ways you can do it. You can use emails, you can use texts, or you can use phone calls. Those are really the only three ways you can communicate. I guess you could send a letter too if you wanted to do some mailers. That's another way you could do it. I guess you could physically stop by the house, although I wouldn't recommend that. But the three main ones are going to be email, text, and phone call. I prefer email and text over the phone call simply because phone calls can get dragged into, oh, you know, while I got you on the phone, I was going to ask you. Do we really need to do this and that? And then it can turn into a 30-minute phone call. So I like to avoid the phone calls because I'm not trying to have a conversation with them. I'm just trying to keep them updated on where we're at in the process with their project. That can be updates. Anything from, we got your materials ordered, your materials came in, got your color selections picked out for the materials. Whatever. I mean, it can be anything as far as the project goes in terms of updating where they're at with their specific project. It could be like, hey, you're three jobs out. We got three more jobs in front of you. We got one more job in front of you. You're the next one. Just want to give you an update. We're finishing up this job and you guys are the next one on the list. I hope you're excited. We are ready to get going on your project and we're looking at starting. The actual start date is going to be probably Thursday of next week. So, you know, we'll keep you posted as we get closer to the end of this job. Those are like timeframe kind of updates. And like, these are milestones that are happening behind the scenes of your project. And you can do that through text. You can do it through, like I said, emails or phone calls. Other things you can do are just value provided activities like sending them blog posts. If you have blog post articles written on your website, or if you have information that pertains to the type of work that you're doing, say you're doing a bathroom remodel, you may have information on tips to keep your bathroom looking clean all the time. It doesn't even have to be anything you've written. It can be a blog post from somebody else. That can be set up as an autoresponder or an email drip campaign so that every Friday, At 8 a. m., an email goes out to your client and it's a piece of information. It can be an update on their project. It can be predetermined articles that you've already picked out or PDFs or pictures or whatever you want to use, whatever kind of content you want to put out there. You can set up an email drip campaign so that every Friday it sends them information up until the point to where you start their job. Right. And there's lots of programs you can use to do that. There's MailChimp is one of them. There's lots of other. There's AWeber and any kind of email autoresponder. A lot of project management and CRMs will have that built in to do that for you. There's ActiveCampaign and HubSpot. And I mean, there's just there's hundreds of them. Right. So some of them are free. You don't cost you anything. So there's not really an excuse as to why you can't do it. But it just adds that extra flavor. It adds that extra touch to the overall experience that your customer is going through. You can have things on there. Like one of the articles that I have on my website is what to expect on your first day of your remodel. And I may send that two weeks prior to the scheduled start date. I have another blog post that is how you should prepare for your remodel. And I can send that a week or so before the project starts because that's about getting things off the wall, getting your personal items out of the way, things that are going to affect the actual project. I don't want to send that two months in advance. I may send that one a week or a few days before the project starts. So there's lots of ways that you can provide value. And that adds to the overall experience that your customer has with your company. friends, that is what people will talk about to their other friends and family and coworkers. Yes, they're going to say, oh, they, you know, the great, the work was great. You know, they did, they did a great job on the work, but they'd send us updates every week and they gave us all kinds of information. They had stopped by and one time they were coming. He called and asked me if I wanted some coffee because he was going to get some. He knew I was going to be home and he bought me some coffee. That's the type of stuff that people remember in your business. That type of quality of experience is what will allow you to charge premium prices. The ones that go, it's going to be $10,000. Give me $5,000 now. I'll call you back in six months and we'll get you started. Okay, we're ready to start tomorrow. Okay, we're done. Pay me. Some of you guys, that's the level of quality of experience you deliver. And you're like, I don't get much work. I'm not getting any leads. I'm not getting any referrals. Yeah, that's because your service sucks. Yes, you were the best. You put the best quality work in there. Because, you know, quality is so important. Everyone thinks that quality, quality, quality. I'm going off on a little rampage here for your entertainment pleasure. It's not about the quality. Every freaking contractor thinks it's about the quality. There is nothing unique to you about quality. Nothing. I promise you. I don't care if you're the only one who does that. Quality is the minimum requirement to be in business. There's a reason why companies that do shitty quality work go out of business because it's the minimum requirement. It is not what separates you from everyone else. And yes, I know there's 0.0001% of you out there listening to this that have some unique thing that you do that nobody else does. And so you're going to tell me that I'm wrong. And that's fine. I will give that to you. But the majority of you, like 90% of you think that quality is what sets you apart. And it's not. I promise you, it is not. It is the customer service that separates you from everyone else. Okay? This is what I'm talking about today is the customer service aspect of it. And these are things that a majority of you... have not even remotely thought about as being important. And it is. So make sure you take that to heart. Okay? Figure out a way to over-deliver on the customer service part of it. I feel like I'm a president up here and my fingers are going like crazy. If you watch the video of this on YouTube, you'll see me moving my hands like I'm giving a speech. If you're listening, then you just miss out on that. Okay, so listen, the post-sale pre-start date is super important. One app that I like, and I really, really love this, it's called Bonjuro. I'll put a link in the show notes. I do have a special deal with them. You can get 20% off. It's a monthly subscription. Don't ask me the price because it depends on how many people you want on the plan and all that stuff. But Bonjuro is an app on your phone. I really love this. I use it. If you scheduled a discovery call with me about the profit club, you've probably received a Bonjaro from me because it's completely automated that whenever someone registers a call with me, I get a notification on my phone and it says, you need to record a new Bonjaro. And I get on there and I record a 15 second video. welcoming them to the discovery call, telling them I'm excited to talk with you. So if you discover, if you schedule a discovery call with me, you're probably going to get a Bonjaro from me. But you can use this in your business to mine the time between like the post-sale and the pre-start date. You can actually create templates in there. You can customize it. I like it to be customized, meaning that I get a notification that says, Chris scheduled a discovery call with you. for Friday at 3 p. m. I get on there and I say, hey, Chris, it's Brad with Hammer and Grind. I just saw you scheduled a discovery call with me for Friday at 315 or whatever, Friday at 3 p. m. I'm excited to talk to you about your project or I'm sorry, I'm getting my destruction and coaching mixed up. I'm excited to talk to you about the coaching and how the Profit Club can help in your business. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Talk to you on Friday. Right. And it's a personalized. He gets an email and it says, Brad recorded a video for you. Or there's a video from Brad. And you click on it and there it is. And you can even respond. So they can respond to that video with questions or emojis and all that stuff. You can use that for your clients during the process. So if you're going to go to the store, let's say you're going to the store to purchase or pick up the tile. Let's say they ordered a bunch of tile and you're going there to pick it up. I can use a Bonjaro and I can pull it up because your contact list will be in there. And I can pull it up and say, Hey, Cindy, I just wanted to send you a quick video showing you we're picking up a tile. It looks beautiful. I can't wait to start on your bathroom here in a few weeks. Talk to you soon. If you do that, just that right there, that is a unique customized user experience. And they will eat that stuff up. Your clients will eat that stuff up. I promise you that will be like going over the, you know, above and beyond anything you could possibly do. Right. That's the type of stuff you want to do for your clients. So I like Bonjero because it just helps that you can even have pre-recorded videos that aren't user specific, like, you know, that you won't say their name, but it could be like, you could have one after they'd schedule a discovery call with you. They would get an email with a pre-recorded template that just says, Hey, I'm so excited you scheduled a call with us. We're looking forward to talking to you about your project. And it's going to be an email that gets sent to them. It's your face or whoever. And they're recording that. And it's not personalized, but it's to them. They get to see you or the salesman or whoever it is. If you have a sales team, you would probably have it automated to where... Depending on who they schedule the call with, that's the person who's going to send the template. And that's completely automated that you can set up inside Bonduro using some other automations like Zapier and stuff like that. If you don't know anything I'm talking about, don't worry about it. It is stuff that's possible. It's just software. Don't use that as a level of intimidation not to do it. If you want to just text people, put a reminder on your calendar. You can set up templates. in your calendar so that every Friday, like if I sell a job and I know I'm starting the job in two months, it's going to be, it's eight weeks. I just put a reminder in my calendar at 8 a. m. or 10 a. m. or whatever, whatever time you want it to be, repeat every week for eight weeks, send Cindy an update on her job. I get a notification on my phone. Hey, send Cindy a reminder. I just sent her a text. Hey, Cindy, just wanted to give you an update. Materials got ordered and we're waiting for that stuff to come in. We got a few more projects in front of you or whatever you want to say. But that's a very basic way of setting up reminders. That can be a little daunting if you have a bunch of jobs going on. If you have like 15 jobs going on, sold and trying to track, that can be a little overwhelming with time. But if you're only doing one project. that takes three months, it's not going to be that much, right? So you figure out a system that works for you. There's lots of different ones. You can do it. But use the email, use blog posts, set up drip campaigns, and just provide value during that time. Mind that time between the post sale and the pre-start date. Okay? That's the biggest one that's going to make the biggest impact. The final one I want to talk about, and I won't spend too much time here, is the post-job. Now, most of you shouldn't really have any post-job time for the most part. And that is you should already have your payment schedule figured out so that on the last day of the job, when you're doing your final punch list walkthrough or your final meet with the customer and they're going to give you your money, you should already have that worked out. You should already have the final invoice done before and so on and so on. But I know some of you don't have that set up and myself included. This was a big problem for me because a lot of times I would be so busy. I would, you know, I would have progress payments through. I would have my first three progress payments. But my final payment, you know, usually required me going through and looking at allotment totals, figuring out like what the actual final number was going to be because the number changed depending on what materials they picked out. And because I was so busy and I wasn't doing this while the project was going on, which is what you should be doing, you get to the end of the project, you finish the project, and they go, oh, can we pay you? And you say, well, I need to figure out the final total and I'll shoot you an email with the final invoice. I'm like, okay, great. And then you start a new project the next day and a week or two goes by and you haven't even looked at the invoice yet. You haven't looked at the numbers because you're so busy. And then, you know, the customer is actually messaging you and saying, hey, I just check and make sure we didn't miss your invoice. We want to get you paid because we're good people. You know, that's most people are inherently good and they want to pay you, but they haven't heard from you. So they want to make sure you didn't put it in the mail and the mail got lost. And, you know, you're waiting on them to pay and you think that they're non-payment piece of crap, blah, blah, blah. Like most people are going to try to figure out what's going on. And then you finally sit down like two weeks later. And you don't remember anything about that job. Like you don't remember all the little extras you did because you didn't keep track of your receipts very good. And it's just overwhelming. And there's like 15,20 grand sitting there waiting for you to collect. And you don't have all the information because you didn't keep good records and you didn't keep good track of what was going on. And there was a couple of change orders that you did some extra work that was on a TNM type situation because it was some. repair work and you told them, well, we'll just, we'll just do it by the hour. And you had seven hours in repairs. You knew you bought some materials cause you had to buy, you know, replace some plywood and some studs and stuff. And, but you can't find that receipt. And that was probably 60 bucks worth of materials. And you don't remember if you worked seven hours or five hours. It's hard if actually, man, I don't, I don't know. I'm just, I'll just going to send the invoice as is. I just, I'll just guess six hours cause I don't want to tell them it was nine and it was only seven. So I'll just put six hours and like 50 bucks in materials. And that stuff goes on. That's literally what happens. It's happened to me numerous times. And the longer the timeframe goes, the harder it is and the less motivated you are and the more frustrated you are. And the more money you lose, by the way, when you do that. So the post-frame or the post-job timeframe is getting the final invoices out, collecting the final payments. And the last thing is collecting a review or testimonial from them. That needs to be done as soon as possible. Okay. The longer you wait for a review or testimonial, the harder it is for them to get them to do it. And it's not going to be as good because it's not as fresh. If you're doing a bathroom remodel, a landscape project, a kitchen remodel, a brand new house, whatever. When they walk in after it's done, you like go out there and you have a big reveal and you're like, okay, guys, it's all done. We're finished. Come in. And they come in there and their jaw drops and they're like, oh my gosh. And they're so emotional and they love it. That is the optimal time that you want to get the information from them, the review or a testimonial. Not a week later, not a month later. Okay. Because a month later they've lived in the bathroom. Yes, it's beautiful. They love it, but they're not as emotional about it. They've already went through the emotions. The next two weeks, they were emotional about how much they love it. And then after that, it just slowly starts dying down. After several months, it's just another part of their house. Okay? So you want to get the review or the testimonial or recommendation, whatever, as soon as possible. There's another software that I've used that I'll also put in the show notes. And that's called Nice Job. That automates the entire review process. It's a very, very good piece of software. It's about $75 a month. It's worth every single penny, I promise you. When I use that software, within the next year, I added like 150 reviews more than what I had because it automates it. And there's lots of things you can do to put it on your website. There's a widget you can put on your website to show your reviews. You can even add pictures to it. It's all automated. It's pretty nice. So I'll have that in the show notes as well. Again, it's called nicejob. co and I'll have a link in there. I think there's a discount code. Don't quote me to that. I believe I have a discount code for them as well. If not, it's still worth it, but I'll put that in the show notes. So post job, that is making sure that you get the final invoice out, making sure that you get the payments. You want to get that as soon as possible, obviously. Again, the longer you wait on payment, the more difficult it can be to get the payment. And then also the review, and then you're good. You're good on the post-job portion of it. So that's to recap the three times. We have the pre-sale, right? The time between they first contact you and then you talk to them and give them an estimate. The post-sale pre-start date, which is usually the longest. time frame that you have to be aware of. Use software or email drip campaigns, something like that to mine that. Bonjuro is the one that I recommend to send out personalized messages. And then the post job is to get the final invoices payment collected and the reviews and nice job is going to be the one for that. So one last thing I forgot to touch on. I want to make sure I cover this. When you sell the job, after you sell the job, simply ask them what they prefer. Hey, Cindy, now that we have the job, you know, got you on the schedule, I wanted to ask you, how often would you like me to stay in touch with you? And they go, oh, I mean, just every couple of weeks would be great. Awesome. And then you make a note of that and then you can figure that out. Okay. Oh, one other thing, would you prefer email or text message or a phone call? What would be your preferred method? Oh, email would be perfect. Okay, great. If you ask them that, then you can customize it because maybe somebody will say, oh, I don't. I mean, you know, once the material gets ordered and the materials come in, really all that I need to know. Okay, great. So you may not need to do all that other stuff. If you don't, you know, if they don't want it, you may not have to do that. So ask them during the sales process, how often and frequently do you want us to stay in contact? Okay. So I hope that was helpful. And getting you to understand how to mind the time, it is very critical in the sales, or not the sales process, in the customer journey process to make sure you stay in contact with them. And it will greatly, greatly increase the value that you provide your customers. In return, you will get more referrals and better quality leads as a result. So I hope that was helpful. Guys, you know where to find out about me. All of the social media, Hammer and Grind podcast, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram. Look me up there. You can find out more information. Also, Discord. Make sure you go to Discord and search for Hammer and Grind to find me there. And then, of course, our free Facebook group. Jump on there. Lots of great value. Free lives going every week. We do live trainings on there. Live Q &As. So make sure you jump on all those. and share this podcast with other people so we can get the word out. Leave me a review or a testimonial if you can. I would really appreciate it. My final ask is to let me know if there's someone that you think I should interview on the podcast. That would be a huge benefit to other contractors. Until next time, guys, you know what to do. Be the best version of you.
