Hey folks and welcome to another episode of Builders Business Success Podcast!

So if you’ve never participated, listened to engaged in a Builders Business Success Podcast in the past its purpose is to address all of the common and often costly problems that a builders find running their building business.

And we took a little bit of a left turn a number of episodes ago and we decided to write a book and the book’s content is all about everything that we talk about, teach, coach, support our Builders Business Blackbelt members on.

So all of that content from soup to nuts from end to end and each one of these episodes is basically either a chapter or a sub-chapter of that book and how we’re doing it is we’re creating the content through the podcast.

And then that’s going to be turned into a transcript and then obviously into a book. So the cool thing about that is if there’s something that you want to know about.

If there’s something you would like to have addressed in the book, you can actually contribute to that content by simply reaching out to us through Facebook, we’re currently going live in Builders Business Success Forum which is a free Facebook group. You can jump in there, you can message me through Facebook messenger.

You can email me on [email protected] and make your suggestions about what you would like to have covered.

Obviously we already have a plug process and it’s a well thought out and a proven process because Builders Business Blackbelt is kind of like a laboratory where we have ideas as a group. And those ideas are implemented into a real live building business.

In fact quite a few of building businesses and we do this day by day, we are having what’s called a momentum call four days a week in Blackbelt.

So we talked to the whole group four days a week.

We invest an hour together every single day and we’re sharing ideas within the group.

Those ideas are implemented into businesses and we get feedback as to whether this works whether it doesn’t, whether it kind of work so we can throw ideas around to fix it, to refine it and then it’s implemented again.

So we’re constantly getting feedback day by day about what works and this is the information that we’re talking about in the podcast. And also that will go in the book but as I said if you’ve got something specific that you would like to cover all you need to do is reach out to us.

And we can tell you that it’s already gonna be covered or that we could add it to the content. No problem at all.

So what we’re doing today, just clear the throat. That’s not what we’re doing.

We’re talking about stuff and the focus of today’s episode is really all about knowing your ideal prospect intimately with the great deal of detail.

We’re also going to answer a very common question.
And one of the most common questions is how do I get more leads?

I’m also going to give you a personal productivity hack so you can get more effective activity outcomes results done in your day.

*Transcription of the show*

Let’s get into today’s topic and today’s topic is “Knowing Your Prospect Intimately” and keep your mind out of the gutter.

That’s not what I’m talking about. I just want you to know everything about them. What they think, what they feel, what their priorities are, what their concerns are and so forth.

Super important of quite often asked builders in an initial conversation with them, who is your ideal prospect and understand the difference between a prospect and a client. And we’ll sort of talk about this in future episodes.

People go from being a suspect to a prospect, to a client.

A suspect is someone that you suspect that could be interested in your services whether it’s renovations, extensions for home whatever you specialize in that you suspect that they maybe interested.

Then when I show their hand and I ask questions or engage or whatever, they become a prospect.

And then if they’re the right fit they go through the process again that we’ll be talking about in future episodes, they then become a client. But we’ve got to understand the mentality of each of those parts of the process that your suspect then transforms into a prospect they transform into a client.

So the level of understanding the knowledge and most importantly the trust in you is different at each of those points. So we’ve got it. We’ve got to communicate differently at each of those different points.

And so I often ask, you know who is your ideal prospect or and straightaway I think I get the answer from most builders that they tell me who their ideal client is. And it’s a different question. And often they’ll just say, “you know someone with money.” That’s their criteria of the ideal client and I just think really that’s it?

That’s what you understand. No wonder you’re complaining that you don’t get good quality clients. No wonder your clients are always priced focused.

No wonder there is such low levels of trust between builders and clients when the only criteria the builder has is someone with money because if you’re thinking about that, what are you interested in? You’re probably only interested in the money. If you’re only interested in the money, guess what?

They’re only gonna be interested in the money and then we get into this tug of war and it’s just a lose lose situation for everyone.

So we need to do things very different. You remember in a previous episode, we talked about the three questions for attracting quality prospects. And the first question you needed to ask yourself is, what are the ideal projects that I just love doing? Because when you love something it ceases being worked.

Then the second question is who are the ideal people who would have those projects? Because it’s so much better when you’re working with ideal people. People that you get on with.

People that you know there’s a high level of trust and you work together as a team, it changes the energy on a building site or over a building project completely. So who are those right people? But then the third question is, are we attractive?

That’s the main question but you can’t ask question two until you’ve asked question one and you can’t ask question three until you’ve asked question two. So you’ve got to ask all of those questions but we need to be asking that question once you’ve got one on two down are we attractive. Because you need to know the person you’re trying to attract.

You need to know them intimately. And yes I said a person. And it’s really important to understand that whenever you’re doing any sort of attract content so that is Facebook posts or emails or videos or whatever it might be.

You’ve got to create the content as if talking to one person as I am talking to you right now. In my mind I am talking to one person at the other side of this camera lens here at the other end of this microphone I’m just talking to you not talking to everybody.

I’m just talking to you and if you are our ideal client, prospect for Builders Business Blackbelt. I guess this information is going to make sense to you. If it doesn’t resonate with you, probably not a right fit for us, which is totally fine. You can still get this information and implement it but we probably wouldn’t be working together.

So that’s one thing about one person. The other thing we’ve got to remember with our messaging and our position, if your ideal clients are a couple from you know of a specific age and socioeconomic bracket or I put it to you that only one of those people are going to be the person that takes the first action.

And that’s really important to remember with your attract strategy content is that it’s almost impossible to put really magnetic attractive content out there that will attract both of the partners in you know if you’re looking at husband and wife or whatever the case may be, only one of them will tend to take action at that early stage through the rest of the parts of your process, through the qualification process.

And definitely the build process you need to be catering for everybody but if this attract stage you need to be getting as clear as possible as who will be that person that makes the first move, takes that first action. And that’s reaching out to you by phone or filling out a form or downloading something on your website or whatever it might be. And as I said, all messaging and positioning needs to be written to one person not a group, one person. Not a partnership, one person.

So I hope I’ve made that clear. Now the person that you need to be speaking to may not even exist because the case with this is for you to build what is commonly known as an avatar.

You’ve probably seen the movie it’s a digital representation of a personality. Maybe something that might and this is probably a lousy analogy as well.

If you’ve seen the movie you know Frankenstein’s monster I’m not asking you to create a monster but I’m using that analogy from the perspective that we create this one person, this ideal person out of all of the best bits of the people that you’ve perhaps worked with in the past.

So building an avatar is really that simple. Go back and go who have been our ideal clients and what was that ideal about them?

And you look at all of their personality traits and you think about what were their desires? what were their aspirations but also what were their fears and what were their frustrations.

And as you build this Frankenstein’s monster as you build your avatar, you get all of the best bits from everybody and build this person and ask all of these questions about what is their age.

So as you’re building your avatar, it’s not an age bracket between 40 and 50 because I’ve been both of those ages and I’m just about to be another decade on after that as well and your priorities and the way you think.

And what’s important to you is very different between 40 and 50, even 40 and 45 and very very different between you know 40 and 60 or even 50 and 60. So you need to select a very specific age. Also you know what is the marital status? Is it their first marriage?

Is it their second marriage? Ask yourself would this ideal client have kids? And if so how many? And if so, what ages and are they working, living with your potential clients?

Or are they at school? Have they moved out? You know all of this sort of stuff. If they are going to school, do they go to a private school or they go to a public school. Remember this person may not exist. You’re just creating the ideal person.

So when you put out your messaging and all of your positioning statements you are speaking to this one person. And the cool thing about this is that you are narrowing and narrowing and narrowing your message and a narrower message gets more rich than a broad message. Now it sounds counterintuitive but that’s how it works folks.

Get really, really narrow. A lousy example of used in the past is you’re at a party and you’re meeting people for the first time and you meet this snoozer and he says, you know getting to know them and you go, what are you doing?

He goes oh well I’m an accountant. You got a good house business, you know? And he was a nice person and all of this sort of stuff.

And then you made a few other and then a bit later in the in the evening you meet another guy and you know you get to that, what do you do conversation? And he says, “well actually I’m an accountant but I specialize in left-handed plumbers.” That’s going to get your attention.

Okay, that message there just cut through more than the first guy who said that I’m an accountant because basically if you could imagine what we’ve all got in our minds are pigeonholes and we’ve got pigeonhole for the doctor and the dentist and the candlestick maker and all of that sort of stuff.

And we’ve got a pigeon hole for an accountant. Okay and generally for most of us that pigeon hole is full. We’ve got an accounted but believe it or not folks you have a pigeonhole for an accountant that specializes in left-handed plumbers are better to empty.

And so if this person says I am specializing in this very, very narrow field there is a place in your mind for remembering that. And here’s the thing that you’re at another barbecue and he just happened to be talking to your left-handed plumber mate. And he’s talking about some problems he’s been having financially.

He goes I remember talking to a dude who specializes in left-handed plumbers and we all love getting support direction and help from specialists.

Generalist know, you know a little bit about a lot of things. Specialists now a lot about a few things and then I can help you to a greater degree when the generalist can’t fix our problems we generally go and see a specialist.

And so we are attracted to specialists. Specialists get remunerated a much higher level than generalists. So you need to become a specialist and you can do that with your messaging and positioning but you need to know who you ask speaking to.

The more you know about your ideal prospect, the more refined your message will be therefore it will resonate. It will cut through and it will resonate. It will be remembered and it because it resonates with them. When a message resonates it tends to begin the whole trust process that the trust starts to elevate.

So we need to do all of that learning as much as possible. Like I said, you know the kids their interests and passions, what their household income is, is this person that’s gonna take the first action working or not. If so what sort of work do they do?

What sort of car do they drive? What sort of suburb do they live in? And when you get all of that detail, you start to have the ability to put yourself in their shoes. And that’s when it starts to become easier to build a list of fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations from their perspective.

And this is going to be okay bit of information for you in the future. Because as you start to put content out there, what we’ll be talking about is the content you need to put out there where people see it for the first time, is simply talking about their fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations. In other words their problems and their priorities from their perspective.

You don’t need to talk about yourself. You don’t even need to talk about solutions because it has been proven that if a person genuinely feels that you understand their problem as well if not better than they do, they convict you of being guilty of having the solution.

You don’t even have to mention it. So it makes it so much more simple for the content creation or your social media and website and you know all it’ll be digital media. All you need to talk about are those fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations.

And the more accurate you can get them, the more refined you get them, the more magnetic they will be, the more impactful they will be and you will get better reactions and better people, quality people more I suppose qualified people reaching out to you. So I hope that has been valuable.

One more thing before I leave this, as you’re writing down fears, frustrations wants and aspirations. What I want you to remember is this, that a fear and an aspiration generally sort of whatever the fear is, the aspiration is probably the solution to that fear but a fear and an aspiration are in the future. Remember that?

That’s something they’re thinking about in the future whereas a frustration and a want, a want is normally the solution to the frustration but they are present.

They are in the now. Just think about that as you’re capturing your fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations.

Some are in the future. Some are now and that is really relevant for when you’re going to be putting your content together and we’ll talk about that in future episodes.

So if this is making sense and you wanna have a chat about anything that we’ve talked about so far. I encourage you to book a call in fact what I have done right now I’ve just put have I, no I haven’t. Here we go. If I click there. Paul James is with us live and I had my comment all ready to go and press the button.

But Paul beat me to the punch and he put a comment in to put it back in there but it’s in there. There’s a link there. If you hit that link it just takes you to a form, fill it out.

It tells us a little bit more about your business because there are so many resources in Builders Business Success Forum and all sorts of other places that if you jump on a quick call tell us what it is that is in your way. We can point you to those resources real fast and it’ll save you a whole lot of time.

It will be exactly what you need and it just increases your progress. And you don’t have to be sort of mining the dirt to get to the gold as we say so we can point you straight there.

So if you hit that link, it’s in the comment section or if you’re watching this on the blog there’s a button underneath the video, just hit that, fill out a little form tells us a bit about you. And then you can schedule a quick call and we can point you in your own direction.

So thank you for doing that Paul James. And just as a reminder if you are watching live as Paul James did put a hashtag live in. If you’re watching the replay put hashtag live.

Q & A

Now Q and A. The question that we get last very very frequently is how do I get more leads? Fair enough.

Because if I haven’t got enough work, your mind goes to I need more leads but in fact you don’t. You need more quality clients.

That’s what you need and if you haven’t got a process that can create a quality client, generating more leads means that you will just burn those leads. You will burn your money, you will burn your effort.

So my solution or my answer to that question is always are you sure that’s the right question?

We see in 99% of the cases it’s the wrong question and we just started to talk about that in the previous part of the podcast about what we need to do to attract better quality leads but you need something in place before you start spending major time, money and effort into lead generation.

So how do I get more leads is probably the wrong question.

You must first have a qualified process and a qualified process is something that we’ve been building, refining, implementing for quite some time now.

And it is profound in its effect as to how it’s saves you time, gets rid of the wrong people out of your business but gets somebody who could have potentially turned out to be a bit of a nightmare with a bit of education.

They become a really, really good quality client. So the qualified process even though it kind of says, you know your in and your out. That’s what the word qualify means.

The purpose and the function of the qualification process that we teach at least. And it’s called the quality client pathways is what we call it because that’s what it is. It’s a pathway for quality clients.

It’s not just getting people, you know in and out of the system but instead of asking how do I get more leads, ask yourself have I got a quality qualification process in place first because that gets rid of the time-wasters that prevent you from burning time, money and effort in lead generation when you haven’t got a quality process to deal with those leads when they come through.

So we’ll be talking about that obviously in future episodes because as I said, you know where we’re unpacking the content of the the whole Blackbelt process from end to end.

So again you know if you wanted to learn about that qualification process more than happy to share how it works and what’s necessary and all of that sort of stuff.

All you need to do is just go and click that link or if you’re watching this click the button underneath.

Book a call, we’re on you need to be on the call for like I don’t know 17 minutes something like that. And we can go through what you need to put into place to make that happen.

And just as a quick reminder, again as Paul James has done, he’s putting hashtag live.

Thank you Paul. Put that in if you’re watching live, put hashtag replay if you’re watching the replay.

Now one of the biggest issues for not just builders for most people is that they really, really busy.

And so and quite often don’t feel that they have the time to do the things that they wanna do.

Personal Productivity Hack

So I wanna give you a personal productivity hack. There’s a ton of them.

I just wanna give you one that can make a difference.

And this one is a big one because we quite often hear you know I just didn’t get what I needed to get done because I just had so many interruptions.

And so how can I prevent interruptions? Well here’s the first thing is some gurus say “allow for them, like allow some space for interruption.”

So you still get done what you need to get done.

I call bullshit on that. Like if you are allowing space for interruptions you will attract them. So I say, don’t listen to them and don’t allow for interruptions.

You basically attract interruptions just by expecting them. So I’m saying to plan your day so there is no room.

Ensure every action that you put in your plan has both high impact for you and high leverage for you and your business.

So it has to have high levels of importance. If your day is filled with things that have high levels of importance, it’s very difficult to distract you. It’s very difficult to interrupt you, you know in the all classic analogy that I always use when you’re on your way to the airport.

And you’re a little bit late, you know and your mind ask you to stop off at his place on the way to feed the goldfish because you forgot.

You’re probably going to say no, because you are on a mission and you can set your day up every single day with a thing called the prioritized daily action list in some people in a Blackbelt family have coined the name of it, the “PDAL” which is just the letters the prioritized daily action list.

And they swear by it makes a massive difference to their productivity, their effectiveness and that feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day.

So do not allow for interruptions.

Takeaway & Jump On A Call

I always like to give you a takeaway with all of these podcasts.

This particular takeaway is pretty simple and that is much of the stuff we see as problems every day.

And we wish that it would go away is of our own doing. And quite often the solution is changing the way we see that problem.

And I love the quote from Stephen Covey. He says, “the way we see the problem is the problem and then when we flip that around the problem disappears.”

The classic example of that is something I just talked about a little minute ago with the quality client pathway the way that most builders interact in that sort of conversation with prospects is that the builder wants to be picked. Okay?

And the problem is that they not being picked. They’re not being selected for the job.

If you change that mindset, you change the way you see that problem and you see yourself as the prize, you see yourself as the judge, you then communicate with your prospects in a very different manner and it changes the whole dynamic and they are then selling you while you should allow them into your business.

It’s a very different approach.

So as I said, if any of this stuff resonated with you and you wanna talk about where some resources are you can find to get into this. All you need to do is book a call. You can do that by clicking the link in the comments.

You can do it by clicking the button underneath the video if you’re watching it on the blog.

If you just listening to the audio version of this, the audio only version you just need to navigate to buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au.

And they schedule a call buttons on that website and you just press them and follow that process.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and then we can jump on a real quick call point you in your own in the right direction away you go.

And of course if you still have questions, you can jump into the Builders Business Success Forum and ask away.

There’s a lot of really cool people in that Facebook group and you can ask a bunch of questions and everybody learns from everybody’s questions and answers and engagement.

So it’s a very cool place to be. So that’s it for this episode, episode 40 something. What did I say? 43 I’ve just been told. Episode 43 and it’s written on the screen in front of me. I don’t know why I just didn’t read it.

That’s it for this episode 43 of Builders Business Success Podcast we will be back again at 10:00 AM next Tuesday in the Builders Business Success Forum. If you wanna join us live I love to see you then.

I’m Mick from Builders Business Blackbelt. That is it for today. Bye for now.