The Agenda

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Builders Business Success Podcast!

• I’m super pumped to be able to be talking with Ian Bosler. Ian Bosler’s a great mate of mine. And I speak to Ian every two weeks, we hold each other to account, we share ideas and just our sounding boards for each other, and it’s a really valuable relationship to have.
• I’m gonna be talking to Ian about building authority, and in building authority in a way that you, when we talk about it, I think you will go, “I would never do that.” And that’s the beauty of this, and this is what I want you to get out of it.
• Ian is going to share with you a pathway to build something that can really elevate your status as an authority more effortlessly, without a whole bunch of time involved, create really quality content for your marketing purposes to promote your business.
• Obviously, we’re going to do a segment of What Do I Say. We had the cameras rolling just in case I said something worthwhile, turns out there was a nugget of gold this week!
• Also wanna share with you a bit of tech, a bit of online stuff that is going to save you a bunch of time, and make your content that you put out to promote your business significantly more valuable, without adding a whole bunch of time to your efforts.

Links

• Ian’s Business – https://www.intertype.com.au/
• His Book – https://www.amazon.com/Ian-Bosler/e/B019F11HQA%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
• Where to get transcriptions – https://www.rev.com/

*Transcription of the show*

Hear my conversation with Ian Bosler!

• So one of the things that I’m constantly talking to our guys about is getting a much more professional image, and also being able to present themselves as an authority.
• And one of the things that I learnt and it was probably from from you and a long time ago, is a book is a really great way of doing that.
• I’ve suggested that a number of times over the years, and tend to get a bit of a, “Are you kidding me?” Sort of a response. How difficult or, slash, easy is it to write a book these days?
• It can be as easy and as difficult as you like to make it? For me, my preference is easy, always. And that’s the, keep it simple process. It just seems to work.
• And lemme just, I’ll explain a simple process on following for a book I’m just about to launch for myself. I believe in following and utilizing the tools and approaches that I advocate. And this one is where we actually don’t write the book. I perform a book.
• So you might need to explain that
• I think I’m just about to performing through the whip. But how can we do it to start with, you’ve gotta get some structure first.
• And once you lay out your structure, you can then create a series basically of chapters, and each chapter, I perform. And the way I did it was pulling together each chapter being like a mini-training session.
• And a mini-training sessions lasting around about 15, 20 minutes. And by doing that always creating a Facebook live, to a group of authors, Aussie authors, people who wanting to launch a book, and it was all about building an author platform.
• And so for 13 weeks, I just did a 15 minute training.
• And then I’ll get that training, that audio stripped off the video. I then got that transcribed and then edited. Suddenly I had 15 quite meaty blog posts, 15 meaty articles.
• Then I also have the chapters for the book. And now I’m just doing the final little tidying up, like an introductory chapter, and linkages between each chapter, job done. So it was not difficult at all.
• So all after total amount of time taken to produce this, the content of the book, I would say it’s in the order of about 20 hours. And that was done over a 13, 15 week period.
• And that’s a fairly substantial book too. Like it’s very content-rich book. So I wanna get back to the how it’s done in a bit, but I’d like to sort of cover why? Particularly if we’re talking about builders and trade based people, why they would write a book? I went to a book launch of a very good friend of mine. He used to be the marketing manager for the Mars Corporation, Mars Bars.
• And I went to his book launch and he basically got up and said, “Well, this book, “it’s the world’s most expense business card,” is how he described it. So why would somebody particularly in a trade based business, wanna write a book, or have a book?
• Well, first off, I don’t like the term the most expensive business card. That’s really really–
• You’re gonna have to take that up with him. He’s in Vietnam, I can put you in touch.
• Okay I will. Well it’s not a very good marketing ploy to take. But I actually say it’s the most valuable business card you could use. Because it actually demonstrates that you are an expert and an authority in that marketplace.
• Now, if you look at something like a building, doing a residential building of the builders, per se, if I was a consumer wanting to buy a house build, or getting a major RENO done, that for me is a massive investment.
• It’s the biggest investment you make in your life, is building a home, buying a home. And you really want to make sure you’re going with the best person who’s going to not just, be a great mate, you have a few beers after knocking off work or whatever.
• You wanna be going with somebody who can actually build you a home that’s going to last for either forever, or it’s going to be a home that’s going to appreciate in value, that’s going to be a bit more timeless, so you don’t have to continuously update it. That’s also going to be just an amazing place to live in. That’s what I would be looking for. And a book is a great way of demonstrating your ability to deliver on those big key promises, I believe most house buyers would be looking to satisfy. So a book is a great way of demonstrating your credibility, your authority, and your expertise.
• What would you say to a builder because I’m sure they’re gonna say this. And I know this because they say it to me, “I haven’t got anything interesting to say, “I haven’t got anything worthwhile to say, “how could I fill up a book?”
• Okay. Here’s another one that I use for, a format that I use for what we call business books. So business books are those… And I see a builder will be building or will be creating what I call a business book.
• So it’s not like a fiction book or a poetry book. It’s a business book, it’s designed to bring in business. And the thing that I look for to start with, this is a very simple structure, is the 10 frequently asked questions, and the 10 should ask questions. So suddenly you’ve got 20 mini chapters for a book.
• They don’t have to be big, but you could then dive into each one of those questions. And basically you’re getting out upfront and showing that you’re trustworthy, and you know what you’re talking about by being upfront and open with how you should ask these questions, and not by the way other people ask these other questions, have you thought of this?
• Have you not thought of that? It just clears the air and that just makes it look like you’re really professional, and you know what you’re doing.
• Again, it’s a very, very simple structure and approach, and maybe the very best way for, I think for a lot of builders to start with. Another one would be looking at the sequencing. The journey. A person who’s looking to get a house built has to go through. What are the steps?
• Just spell out those steps, try and bring it down into either five or seven steps. With books we like… like with marketing we like odd numbers. So three, five or seven. Don’t get more than seven structured so that you’ve got like a process and step them through that process.
• Now your process, and this might be the exact same process every builder out there uses, but it doesn’t matter. You’re the one who’s actually documenting and taking through that journey.
• So you’re the one who’s got the credibility. You’re the one with the authority. You’re the one who’s the expert in this.
• And you’re the one who’s gonna use, get and build massive trust around that book, just because you take them through that journey.
• And the creation of it, the content creation, as you said, could be that the seven steps, but that they might be sort of seven major chapters.
• Those bits can be broken down into smaller bits. And in my mind, I’m thinking to go back to what you said, how you created your book. One of the things we talk about with our members all of the time is that the real secret to a marketing strategy that is going to be reliable in the future, is a quantity of content.
• Then it needs to be regular, and needs to be a quantity of content. And even just creating a video a week, for instance, on the sub subject of a chapter, you can use that for your social media platforms, breaking that up as you say, you get it transcribed, you can use that for other social media platforms, but that transcription can then be used as a book. Is that how you’d suggest it?
• Oh, absolutely. It’s taking it… You take a strategic approach with the structure of the book, but also a strategic approach to the use of the content that you create. So what we talk about there is just multi purposing the content. Create it once, use it many, many times, and just get it out there.
• So that way you’re really leveraging your time, and your expertise. Now, this book that I’ve just nearly completed, I’ve been putting it out in social media and chopping it up. I’ve been recycling and reusing bits and pieces of it all over the internet in the last six months.
• I’ve probably got another 12 months worth of content that are already in the can, that I can actually use for the next 12 months. Already, I’ve seen a massive uptick in my organic search results. Google just loves that sort of thing. My YouTube views, way up.
• My engagement on Facebook and Instagram, way up. So it just works by creating that content. It just builds that buzz and get your brand out there.
• Hm, so by following that process it makes sense to me that you’re going to have, whilst you’re actually creating the book, you’re creating all of this social media content.
• And one of the things that I suggest is when you do your video, you send it away to… We use a company called rev, R-E-V.com just to get the transcription. And we upload that onto our blog on the website, and paste the transcription underneath it for SEO.
• The transcription can be broken up into articles that you can send out via email, and to Instagram, and Facebook, and LinkedIn and so forth. There’s just a ton of benefit creating the content for the book in the first place. So, it makes a whole lot of sense what you’re saying.
• Yeah, absolutely. I’m a big fan of rev as well, to do that transcription. Another one I use from time to time is Otter AI. That works reasonably well as well. So there’s alternatives to rev, but it’s so cheap. I mean, rev’s a dollar, US $1 per minute.
• It’s actually going up, it’s $1.25 a minute now.
• Oh there you go. I’ve been using Otter. It’s a little bit different. It works not on the minute basis. You basically pay a monthly fee. If you’ve got a lot of volume going through, Otter’s more economical. It uses basically the same engine to do the transcription. So, it works really well.

What’d I Say?

I do want to do that, that if you want to have a relaxed day on the weekend or a whole relaxed weekend, that’s what you plan for.

So you open up your diary system and you block it out and say, “I’m doing whatever the hell I want “from that time to that time.” It gives you a sense of control, like just deciding to do nothing or to relax or whatever.

It adds to the experience of, “I am more in control.” It is pretty good advice that lazies just put out to everyone and it’s something that I’ve experienced that in over 30 years of doing this is the thing that you never master is the prioritized daily action list, planning part of your day.

You can always get better at applying priorities and figuring out the consequences of doing this and not doing this and getting really clear, and constantly proving to yourself because we never seem to believe it, constantly proving to ourselves that we can’t do everything.

We keep falling back into this trap that we believe we can do, or should be able to do everything, and you can’t.

Because what generally happens is what your everything is right now, you can set up systems and procedures, and delegations and automations, and outsourcing to get that off your plate.

So you go, “Oh, this is pretty good. I’ve cleared my plate.” And then you start doing more reading and listening, and, “Oh, I think I might do that, “I might add that to the process, “I think we’ll do this and we’ll do that, “and we’ll do the other,” and we start filling our plate back up again.

And so we end up doing this up and down, up and down, up and down. And it’s just a constant challenge to add stuff, add challenges, add goals to your life, but figure out more effective ways of doing what needs to be done to accomplish.

The Review

I wanna share with you a resource that we use, and we even use it for this podcast. If you’re watching this podcast, you’ll see that there are captions.

Everything I say is translated into text, and turns up at the bottom of the screen. Now, why is that important? Well, it’s important because statistically over 70%, something around 75, or it might be even a little bit higher by now, percent of videos that are watched globally, are watched without the sound on.

It won’t take long, unless you’re demonstrating juggling or something like that, where nothing really needs to be said, if you’re sharing information via video to promote your building business, most of the videos are going to be watched without sound. So people will click away from your video if it doesn’t have the captions.

We use a service called rev.com. And if you go to rev.com, and by the way, we’re not sponsored by them or anything like that, it’s just a service that we use and I wanted to share it with you.

What you can do is upload your video to rev, once you’ve got an account. And the fee for creating the captions is around about $1.25 US per minute of the video.

So if it’s only a five or six minute video, it’s a really small investment to make that video significantly more worthwhile and get you more traction.

And the beauty of it is that if you put the order in and ask rev to send you the captions, what you will also have access to is the transcription of your video as well. So you’ll get the whole thing written out.

The cool thing about that is, that you can then pull chunks out of that, and use it for static posts. You can put your video up on your blog for your website, and you can put the transcription underneath the video.

Now that’s really great for search engine optimization for your website, because Google will see there’s new information going onto your website. Even if you’re doing a blog post, that’s new content going onto your website, if it’s relevant and content rich, Google love that. But if all you do is put a video up, Google doesn’t really realize that there’s been new content, but if you get the transcription, and put that underneath the video in your blog post, now there is a massive amount of new text appearing on your website, and that the Google spotters love the look of that, and they’ll come and look at all of the content, and so you get better such as search engine optimization, and can be found more easily on Google if you use something like rev.

But the main reason to use it is to put the captions on your videos, to make sure that your videos are far more usable, far more accessible to people that are watching it without the sound.

Otherwise, you’re kind of only getting to around about 25% of the potential audience that you could have. Now in the conversation with Ian, we are talking about creating content in an effort to create content for your book, which is such a fantastic idea.

This is a great way to get that tech so you can break all of the videos, break all of the chapters and sub parts of your chapter into parts that you can create in content with video.

That you can then use the video to go out on all of your social platforms. It will have captions on it if you’re using rev, you can turn it into written content to put out on all of the platforms, as well as your website, as I’ve just said.

But what you can use the transcript for is content for your book.

So you can just keep that, and keep it in order, and you can get a service on Fiverr or somewhere like that that will do editing. And all of a sudden you’ve got the content for your book and away you go.

So, get on to rev.com. It’s a really good platform. I hope that was helpful.

Back to the conversation with Ian!

– I guess the other question or concern people listening or watching this would have is, okay, creating the content, but all of the other suggestions of creating, chopping it up and doing all of this sort of stuff might seem a little bit like it’s too much work, or I won’t have the time to do that.

Have you got suggestions about how you might be able to outsource that sort of thing as well?

– Yeah. What you’re talking about now is you getting into an editing role, and that there was a lot of editors out there. I would advise against going through people like Fiverr.com, offshore editors.

You really want an onshore editor, and they’re quite economical and then depending on how much effort you need them to put in. But they don’t really cost a lot and that makes a big difference to the quality of the book when it’s finished. But that’s really only one part of it.

So once you’ve got the content done, you really need to take it through to the publish process. And now that’s another story as well, because you’ve got to wanting to be making the book look professional.

Otherwise it’s just a bunch of words, put down on a piece of paper. You wanna to turn it into a book that’s got value, or perceived value. So it’s got to look like it’s been professionally published.

At the end of the day, that’s really what you’re doing. And the process we use for particularly these types of business books is what we call a self-publishing approach. There’s sort of basically three phases to that. The first one is preparation.

So that’s where we will do things like, design a cover. We format the content pages so it looks good, it looks professional. We register ISBNs, do all of that. So that’s what we call in the preparation phase. Then we move into the publish phase and that’s where we print the physical book. Now no longer do you need to print tens of thousands of books. All of our books are printed on demand.

So, we typically do a batch of 50 books for an author to start with, 50. So it’s not costing an arm and a leg. And then everything after that is printed on demand. And then we also set it up so it’s available globally.

So one of the things, if you’re looking at a builder, a local builder, you think, “Well, why do I need it global? “Why do I need to get it out to the American marketplace?”

You don’t, you could survive quite well without it. But having it done globally, again positions you as a higher authority.

Even if you never sell one book in America or Europe or wherever, it doesn’t matter. It’s seen as being set up globally, and that just builds that brand perception around you and your book.

And then the third part of it is promotion. And that’s where we take it, build a landing page’s to sell the book, promote the book, start to build your author platform.

And it’s your author platform build, that drives the building up of a database of potential building customers for you. And that’s why it’s a very, very important element of it.

So we quite often will integrate that author platform with business clients, existing CRM systems, their existing websites, and their existing social media platforms. And by tying that all together, you get a synergistic effect, and it just starts to build a life of its own.

And in no time at all, you’ll actually have your first thousand books sold, which is always the first level that we look for, is once you get your first thousand books sold, and not just all given away, but actually sold, you’re really humming. Your business is really humming.

– And I just wanna emphasize to builders listening to this, how important this is because it just differentiates you from the marketplace of builders out there. Even in your local geography.

We talk about, in Blackbelt we have a quality client pathway. And after the first phone call, you’re organizing the first face to face meeting, it’s called the initial meeting.

But in between the phone call and the meeting, we ask them to send out a credibility pack. And I know that you’ve set up a couple of credibility packs for some of our Blackbelt members. Imagine the value of adding a book to that. And it’s got the photo of the person you’ve just been speaking to on the phone, and then that’s the person that shows up. And I know for myself, I’ve had a book ,and I kind of did it a hard way.

Like I was using things like fiverr.com and different people all around the globe I wish I had known you back then, but you’ve given my book a make over, you helped me relaunch it.

It became a number one bestseller in America and Australia in multiple different categories. So we can put their little sticker on the front of it. The saying, it’s the number one best seller on Amazon and so forth.

And I’ve been amazed how many people have bumped into me and said, “Oh, I read your book.” And there’s this air of authority like I really am an expert in something and it’s a really quite a bizarre feeling.

But I just can’t help to think it would make a profound difference to the trust and the relationship between a builder and their prospect, and absolutely help 100% to get selected for the project.

– Yep. I totally agree on that. So one of the things I see is that I think most people have a book in them. So not talking to just builders, I’m just talking general population, they have a book in them. The biggest issue is very few of them get that book out because they see it’s so difficult. They see it’s such a big task.

So when somebody else has got the book out there, their own book out there, they appreciate how big an effort it must be, and they appreciate that, “Wow, you really do know your stuff.” Because they know how hard it is for themselves to be able to make that leap.

But that’s one of the key, I think one of the key personal drivers people see when they see a book, it’s internalizing how much, how big the issue is if they were trying to do it themselves.

– As I said, one of the things that I wished I had’ve done was known you before I started the whole book. And one of the really great things now is that when we need more books, we can just put in an order for 50 or whatever.

– Yeah. And you don’t have to have hundreds and hundreds of books, which is what I had to get done the first time I had it printed, the first run, you had to like get a thousand books or something minimum.

And so you’ve got boxes of books in your garage, everywhere and wondering how the hell am I gonna get rid of these things. You don’t need to do that anymore.

You can just sort of basically get them on demand, which is great. So how do people find you? How do they start stalking you and all of that.

– So you just come and visit us a website, pop in there. At intertype, so www.intertype.com.au You can find us there. Or you can come and join our Facebook group, whereby we’ve got a bunch of authors who are already published, as well as those who were thinking of publishing or thinking of writing a book, and that’s called History Creator.

So it’s all about helping people document their knowledge and their wisdom. By doing that, my view is that they’re helping create history. Until it’s documented, it’s not history. So, that’s why we’re calling this group History Creator. And if you’re popping over there, ask to join, and you’ll be away. And you’ll start to get to learn a lot more about how you can go about building and creating your first book.

– Yeah. That’s excellent advice. I really hope that we’ve been able to inspire some builders out there. Obviously we won’t inspire them all, but inspire some to start to go through this process of content creation and it be the basis of a book in the future, because it is a fairly simple pathway as Ian has mentioned. So I really encourage you to reach out, jump onto that Facebook group and start to figure out the steps to be able to create your own book. So thanks very much for joining us Ian.

• My pleasure, happy you guys got something out of that.

Summary & Takeaway

Now, what is the takeaway? If it were me, the thing that I would take away from this episode is, “How can we utilize the interactions and the activity that we get into every day, if you as a builder, and turn that into valuable content?”
So it’s a little bit like multitasking.

So you could be talking to a prospect. If they like what you’ve talked to them about, you can just get your phone, you can get one of these things here. If you’re listening to this, I’m holding up our little tripod that you can put your phone on.

If you’re watching the video you can see it. But it’s just a very small thing.

You can leave it in the car or whatever. You can just plunk it on the desk and have a chat with somebody and grab a testimonial, but that can also be used for content. You can be doing certain things around a job site.

You could be driving in your car and as ideas come to you, you can flip your on and capture that information, that becomes content.

Don’t make the mistake that many builders do when they’re trying to create content is start from a blank page, and what can I create for content? Because most the stuff that you do every day, is really valuable information that your prospects would want to know.

How you go about doing things, getting some footage of you talking to your guys, and building stuff, and talking to customers, and at suppliers, and talking to Subbies, and all of those sorts of things.

There’s a lot of really valuable information that can be captured every day. And I know that a bunch of our Builders Business Blackbelt members, they do this every day.

They’ll give you little tips on how to better waterproof a deck, or how to do this, or you’ve got to do that when you’re putting a roof over you, whatever, at outdoor the time and errand, things like that.

Many of them have just purchased a drone and they’ll fly those above the project, and create really great footage, it’s really quite easy these days.

But most of the activity that you do on a daily basis, if you just step away from it for a little moment, most of the content that you can capture is while you are doing what you should be doing anyway.

From time to time, you might step aside from that and record the information about what you just did. But it’s all relevant, it’s all valuable, and it creates a massive amount of content that you can use to promote your building business.

That would be the takeaway that I would take from this show. I hope you do. I hope it was worth it. I hope it makes sense.

So that’s it for this episode, as I say with every episode, there are probably a whole bunch of questions that have come up. I hope we’ve given you a lot of answers to your questions, given you a whole bunch of ideas.

But I’m sure that most of the time questions will pop up into your head. “How would I do that? “How can I do that with my business? “What sort of equipment would I need? “What sort of guidance do I need “to be able to get these ideas “and implemented into my building business?”

Well, the good news is we’re here to help. If you’re watching this video on our buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au site, underneath this video, there is a button where you can schedule a call. If you’re watching it on our blog, up on, I wanna point this way, I think.

Up here to my left in the corner of the page, there should be a Schedule a Call button.

So you just hit the Schedule a Call button, fill out a quick form.

We’ll jump on a call and answer all your questions to get you moving in the right direction.

If you’re listening to the audio only version of this podcast, all you need to do is navigate to buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au.

There’s a big Schedule a Call right in the middle of the screen. Just hit that and we’ll be on a call before you know it answering all your questions and helping you with all of the common challenges, the common and costly challenges that most builders face on a daily and weekly basis with their building business.

So I hope this podcast episode has been valuable. I hope you’ve learned a lot, I hope it made sense, and we’ll be back with another episode of Builders Business Success Podcast before you know it. I look forward to talking to you then.

I’m Mick Hawes Builders Business Blackbelt, bye for now.