Yo, hello and welcome to the Builders Business Success podcast, episode 96. In this episode, we're going to be unpacking why successful builders, the small amount of successful builders make it look easy.

So how some builders make success look easy. It's not, but how do they make it look easy? And we're also gonna talk about why most other builders still struggle year after year.

So we're gonna unpack the differences. And if you feel like you're struggling in some area where it's too much work, so you haven't got the time or not enough work, you haven't got the money or you're struggling with team, or whatever, you know, we're going to unpack all of those areas in today's podcast.

The idea of the week also is going to be a simple productivity hack that can save hours a day. It's a simple thing and it can save hours a day.

The New Book!

"The Successful Builders Tool Kit," our second book, just being published. You can get a copy of that by scanning the QR code here:

And the retail price includes postage and everything. So, we'll deliver it to you for that price of the book. If you wanted to get a free copy of this, as I've done in the past couple of episodes, I'm gonna show you how you can get a free copy at the end of the podcast.

Transcription of the show!

If you've never listened to the Builders Business Success podcast before, it's basically the construction business podcast. I would like to be your construction business coach or your builders coach. However you would like to say it.

And the purpose of the podcast, if this is your first time, it is to help you overcome many of the common and costly challenges. And so what we talk about in this podcast is stuff that our group of builders, our Builders Business Blackbelt group are working on on a daily basis. They're all over the country in cities and in regional areas.

So all sorts of different geographies, all types of different size businesses, some that specialize in new builds, other smaller projects. So all different types of building businesses.

And we are testing and refining and stress testing all of our ideas to overcome these common problems and the results end up on this podcast. So it's not just theory being thrown at you.

So that's what this podcast is all about. As I said, in today's episode, we're talking about how some builders make success look easy.

To get started, I think it's a good idea to unpack or define what success is because, just because I say this is what success means, doesn't mean that it's right. It just means that's what I believe.

What is success to you? But this is probably a good place to start because I think that the three main motivations, perhaps not all of them for everybody, but at least one or two, I think would've been part of your thinking when you decided to take on the challenge of either starting or running your own business.

And it's time, money, and meaning. Time, meaning that, that you have more autonomy over your choices when you're working for yourself. So this is the thinking, when you're starting a business.

I work for myself so I can decide my hours, you know. I can decide how much I'll work. If I want to earn more, I can work more or less, you know. If I wanna take time off, I can. And so, we believe we had more time freedom.

The financial thing is that I can earn more money working for myself than working for somebody else as an employee. And the meaning side of it is I can choose who to work with or work for or whatever. I'm kind of the master of my own destiny there. So I can work on the things that I love doing.

And very few businesses, I think, tick all of those boxes, but even just have having some form of time and financial freedom and enjoying what you do, most of the time, I think is great success.

Because if you are able to step away from your business and continues on while you're away, you know, for two, three weeks-- We just had a momentum call earlier this morning.

And, you know, one of the guys was saying, we've basically been away from our business for the last three weeks, running a tournament, a club tournament for a club that they belong to.

And they've dedicated basically big hours every day for three weeks to run this club tournament that they have passion for. And the business allowed them to do that. Like to me, that is a fair degree of success in a business, that they're able to do that.

The financial side of it. If you are able to pay all of the bills and not have money distress, I would consider you successful. And for the most part, if you really love the type of projects you're working on, they're the type of projects that you really enjoy and the people that you're working with.

So your clients and what have you, prospects, you enjoy it, you enjoy working with them. I would call you successful. So we've talked about what success looks like, but what about defining unsuccessful?

And I would say that it's kind of the opposite of that. That if you find that you're saying about anything we talk about in the podcast, "Yeah, I agree with you. "That really makes sense." And I will do it when the dust settles, or I just haven't got time to do this sort of thing now. Maybe you need to look at that, you know.

If you're not getting the time freedom that you would like, we need to look at that. If you've not got the financial freedom that you would like, maybe we need to look at that. If you're taking on jobs with people that you're a bit concerned about, and they're not very nice people, because you've just gotta keep the till ticking over.

Maybe we need to look at that. And so at the start of the show, I said, you know, there are some builders that make success look easy, and it's not just builders. Like there are some musicians that just make playing music effortless. It looks easy.

It looks like it comes easy to them. There are athletes that are just so, seemingly so talented and they do things effortlessly. But when you scratch the surface and when you go behind what's going on, there's something that is in common with all of those people, whether they're athletes, musicians, or business people.

And nothing became more clearer to me than some years ago, I had a wonderful, wonderful opportunity where I was coaching a driver, a race car driver of a V8 Supercar, 'cause you know, I used to do sort of all sorts of performance coaching and so forth.

I got the opportunity to go to some race meetings. And one of them was Bathurst, which was just awesome because I just geek out in relation to all of the technology. And because I was coaching this guy, I had full access to all the pits and I had the headphones on with the thing and could hear what was going on between the engineer and the driver and all of this.

And I was in front of all the computer screens and seeing all of the telemetry and all of the information about the performance of the car and what angle the steering wheel was and how much back pressure and just, you know, most people are going, "Oh yeah." But I geek out on that. That was just amazing.

Then there's all of these people in the background, you know, just the tire guy, the amount of detail that goes into the preparation of the tires, different tires for practice and different tires for qualification and racing and da, da, da, da.

And the tire pressures and keeping them in a certain temperature before they go on the car. And then of course there's the practice of the pit stopping and all of this. It's just, it was amazing to me to witness all of this.

But the thing that dawned on me with this is to get the results that they get, how much preparation was involved. And when you step back from it, you know, the race meets are running over a couple of days. But the race time itself is sometimes minutes, you know, like less than an hour or something like that.

And other times it's a whole day, if it's Bathurst, you know, you're racing for seven or eight hours or however long it takes.

But when you look at how much to time there is on the track racing, versus how much time there is on the track in the workshop, in offices, in, you know, those beautifully clean, sterile environments in which they build the cars and repair them and all that sort of stuff.

How much time, how many man hours goes into all of that sort of stuff, versus how many hours are on the racetrack. There's a lot more in the preparation than there is in the racing. And that is one of the big lessons, is that if we wanna be successful, we've got to put the effort into preparation. We've gotta put the effort into preparation.

So you have learned your skills, the skills of building and carpentry and that sort of thing. But the skills of let's say financial management, let's say being able to pull a team together, inspire a team, to be able to get them to perform at a higher level, the skill to be able to take the average garden variety person and transform them into a quality, high quality client.

They're all of the things that we want, right? We want a high performing team. We want a really solid, sustainable, financially valid business. We want the rewards that come from that business, such as having the time to enjoy time with the family and enjoy time with ourselves, take holidays, pursue our passions and those sorts of things.

We want all of those things and your business is the best platform to give you all of those things. But we've gotta learn this lesson. This one lesson, is if we want to be successful in, let's look at these individual areas, we've gotta put commitment and give priority to getting better and refining our skills and our mindset in these spaces.

One of the things that we teach our blueprint members is a thing called a personal success ritual. A personal success ritual is, it's somewhere between sort out of 10 and 13 minutes long each day. And it prepares the person to be able to perform better throughout the whole day.

So it is an investment, a small investment in time that can make the whole day significantly better. You enjoy it more, you perform better. You make better decisions. You get better outcomes because of this investment of time.

One part of the personal success ritual is the thing we call the 62nd success system. And years ago, it used to be a process that I was taught called the dream catcher. And you fundamentally challenge yourself to write down anything that would be cool to have, become, accomplish, experience, as long as there are no limits to time, talent or money.

So that means that you are being challenged to write things down that fundamentally in your body and in your mind, you feel and think this is impossible, and people go, "Well, what's the point in doing that?" The point in doing that is this exercise does a couple of things.

But the first thing it does is, if you do it properly, it chips away at the self-imposed limitations that you have about possibility, your skills, your abilities, what can happen.

And that is the one big thing that is the difference between someone who's constantly struggling and someone is who is successful. The people and their abilities are almost identical. The difference is their mindset. And the mindset that comes from either holding onto and defending those preconceived ideas or letting them go.

You don't have to believe that you're a legend. All you have to do is let go of some or many of these preordained limits or these self-imposed limitations in your thinking. And away you go, like, it's amazing when that sort of thing happens. And so this exercise, this dream catcher, the whole idea of it is to chip away at those limitations in your thinking.

The other thing that it does, and this sort of is a nice loop back around to that whole V8 Supercar thing, is it doesn't attract opportunity because the opportunity's always there, but it makes you aware of the opportunities that are there. And that's how I ended up working with Tennis Australia.

It's how I ended up coaching the Supercar guy. It's how I ended up touring around the world, you know, with Sam Stows or on the women's tennis circuit and things like that. It was because of this dream catcher and opportunity presenting itself.

And you being able to say yes to it. One of the first things that happened was, I ended up teaching in jails and for whatever reason, in a jail, many, many, many moons ago in doing this exercise, I just used to write down, you know, I wanted to teach what I was learning, this mindset stuff in jail, in prisons.

And one thing led to another, an opportunity arose. And I was able to say yes to it. And I ended up teaching in a jail, and it was some of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had.

But you need to give priority to these actions, these behaviors that will allow you to become closer and closer to more effortly successful. Effortlessly. It's a hard word to say sometimes. Effortlessly more successful.

So if we look at specific things in the building business, team performance, what does a team need to perform at a higher level? It needs a great leader. And so that means you need to learn leadership skills, okay.

You need to put the time and the effort and give priority to learning leadership skills. So your team, and what I mean by team is not only your direct employees, I'm talking about your subcontractors and your suppliers, everyone involved in a project, even, you know, the client to a certain degree is part of the team that is working on this project.

And they need a great leader. And if it has a great leader, the problems are far, far, far less. The productivity is far, far, far higher. The enjoyment, the satisfaction is higher. But you need to give it priority. You need to give the area that you've feel is deficient, and you need to work on it.

You need to give that activity priority. And I keep harping on about what priority means. It doesn't mean that you know that that's the most important thing. It means that you behave in a way that communicates to yourself, so your subconscious, and everybody else around you, that you genuinely believe that that thing is important because you do it first.

You make sure it gets done before anything else. And what that does is it convinces you at a subconscious level that this is important, and it makes it easier for you to continue to do it. It's all well and good to do it once or twice.

That's not a pattern. It's not a pattern that's being picked up by your subconscious that really causes you to believe that this is important. So you've gotta give it priority. You've gotta give it that commitment. You've gotta do it first.

What if you are being challenged a little bit financially with your business, you know, and you want to have a financially successful business. Well, you've gotta learn the philosophy and the processes of profit first, and you need to give the implementation and the measurement and the time to learn these philosophies priority.

You need to do it first before you do all of this other stuff. And it's going to take commitment and discipline to do this. If you want better quality clients, okay, there is a process that we teach called the quality client pathway.

It's just a series of events. It's not rocket science by any stretch of the imagination. And then when you add these communication skills onto it as well, it becomes turbocharges, it switched to afterburners.

It becomes a really, really powerful process. And everyone goes, "Wow, that's great. "You know, I'd love to have that in my business. "And yeah, I'll do that when things calm down "or when I've got the chance." And it's like, no, if you genuinely want this, you've gotta break it down into small chunks.

And you've gotta perform those actions every day, and you've gotta do it first. You've gotta give it priority over everything else. Then you'll start to get the results.

I've just noticed that Toby has joined us live, Good day, Toby, say, give us a yeeha in the chat, if you'd like, Toby. And tell us where you are and what you're up to. This is an unusual time for this, for going live.

It won't matter for the replay, but the reason that we're on at bit after two o'clock instead of 10 o'clock in the morning is because somebody and no names will be mentioned, but somebody forgot to press the record button on our recording area. So I went out live, but we didn't have a recording to put up in the replay.

So this is take two of today's podcast. And so there you go, you get to join us live, Toby, because I buggered it up. But we're fixing it now, we're redoing it, and this will be the replay.

And as I said, you know, these better quality clients, if you want better quality clients, you've gotta put the effort into the quality client pathway and the skills that make it amazing. And you've gotta give those skills and the time to practice, learn and practice, learn and practice.

You've got to give that priority, which means that you've gotta do it first. Simple. So if you look at those, the athletes that make things look effortless and you start to scratch the surface of how they do things.

And I mentioned this in last week's podcast, I think as well, with that whole Michael Johnson and Jimmy Spithill documentary, I was talking about, where, you know, they understand, they've figured out what the behaviors are, the actions are that are going to push them towards their goals, whatever that goals are and whatever your goals are. We've gotta figure out what those activities are.

And we cannot, we simply cannot afford to perform those activities when we can, when we've got time, when things settle down. We've gotta do it now, and we've gotta do it first. 'Cause if we keep putting it off, it'll never happen.

But what's worse than that is we are teaching ourselves that that goal setting, that idea of a goal that I had and was all excited about it, isn't really that important to me. Because it is the behavior, the repeated behavior that creates that pattern in your subconscious of what is important and what is not.

And if you consistently run to site and fix problems in the business and all of that ahead of the activity that you have chosen to accomplish a specific goal, and I'm not saying you get all of these goals and all of the activity for all of these goals has to take priority because you'll never get any work done.

And that's a 100% right. So we select one objective. What's the most important objective. What's the next right thing, break it down. What's the activity. What do I need to do each day and each week and give that priority.

Then you will start to make progress. You will start to free yourself up emotionally, time wise, financially, by giving that activity priority. That then gives you a little bit more time for the next objective. It's quite amazing how it works, but you gotta start somewhere.

And so these musicians that make it look effortless, they spend a lot of time practicing and a lot of time sacrificing, like they don't do what everybody else does because they're staying there and they're practicing.

'Cause they give it priority. Your sacrifice is staying out of that comfort zone, like comfort isn't necessarily-- It's a weird term, comfort zone, 'cause it's quite often not comfortable. It's just what you are known.

Not what you know, what you're used to. And if you keep, you know, running to those emergencies on site and all of that sort of stuff, when you haven't done what you know you should have done first, that's your comfort zone.

You keep going to your comfort zone. What is uncomfortable is saying, "Yes, there's an emergency over there. "And I need to do my 20 minutes of learning "in relation to leadership skills "because that's my objective. "And that's my commitment. "That is my priority. "And once I've done that 20 minutes, "then I'll jump into the whirlwind "and start fix that idea or that problem over there." That is your sacrifice.

So you've gotta put time. You've gotta sacrifice, just sliding into your comfort zone. And you've gotta have that discipline. I just say this is an investment in your future. And I'd love you to invest at some time, a small amount of time.

So I'm not saying you need to be like the V8 Supercar driver where it's like 95% of the time is in preparation. 5% of the time is racing. You can flip that right around. You can flip that completely around. And 5% of your time is in preparation and 95% of your time is doing it.

And in the whirlwind and you know, running your business, all that sort of stuff. But 5% of your time. You think about how much 5% of your time is. Like, if you're doing 10 hours a day, what's 5% of 10 hours? You know, it's only a small chunk of time, but most people don't even put that time aside.

So I hope this makes sense. And if you've got any questions about this, I'd love to hear them, put them in the comment section. If you're watching the replay, you can whack them in the chat. If you are watching live, not sure-- Toby? Yes, Toby's still here. He says, "Nice to be on take two." It's great to have you on take two, Toby.

I didn't think we'd get anybody watching live, 'cause it's on at a weird time, but there we go. Thanks for joining us. So Toby or anybody else who's watching the replay. If you want help, here's how to get it. You can just go into the ToolShed.

There's a place in the navigation called get personal help, click on it, fill out a form. We'll organize to have a chat. That's one way of doing it. Another way of doing it is just reach out to me in the chat.

So you just go into the chat, in the ToolShed, find my name and start asking, tell us what you want, what the problem is. And we'll do our very best to help. You can also send me a message on email, which is [email protected].

Happy to talk to you across email as well, whatever we need to do to help you and help you overcome the problems. That is what we'll be doing. You just need to initiate that chat.

So I hope this made sense, and I hope that it's something that, you know, you will put some effort into changing because I just know through experience and observation with Builders Business Blackbelt, start to do this. It will make a big difference very, very quickly.

Idea of the Week

Let's move on to "Idea of The Week." We need a voiceover to introduce this segment, But I'm it for today and the voice isn't working all that well, but here's the idea of the week. And the idea of the week is an idea that can save you hours and hours and hours a week.

It can save you hours a day, but it can save you many hours a week. And it's very, very, very simple, again not rocket science. It's what I call the seven column system because it involves seven columns.

So you get a piece of paper, a book, whatever you want, and you create seven columns. Guess what else has seven? A week, it has seven days. So all those columns represent all days of the week.

So you've got Monday through to Sunday. How you use the seven columns system is, you basically look ahead for the week and go, particularly with what I was just talking about.

You know, you might be setting yourself up for a goal for leadership, becoming a better leader or whatever it might be. And so you will block out time to learn those skills.

You'd probably put your PSR in there. So that'd go right at the start of each day, seven days a week, you'd put your personal success ritual in there. And then even the working in the business stuff like, and the key with this seven column system is to ask yourself, "What mindset would I need to be in "to perform that task as effectively as possible?" Because there are some tasks that you really don't need to think too much.

So, you know, when your mind goes to sleep a bit on you, you know, at a certain part of a day, if you sort of got an afternoon fade, there are certain just physical activities that you don't have to think about too much that you could slot in there, but there are other things, and it might be the quoting side of things and preparing and planning and all, you know, your goal setting and what have you.

There are certain activities where your brain needs to be switched on. So when is that for you? Sometimes it's night for some people, most people it's probably in the morning. And so you'll schedule the activities in your week and the day of the week, because sometimes, you know, people take a little while to get started.

So maybe Monday's not a good day. Other people, Monday's the best day and they just fade throughout the week. You need to know yourself. So figure out which part of the week and what times of a day are the best times for the activities that you know are really important for your business.

Plus in the business activities, the onsite stuff, you know, when is the best time for you to be most productive and effective doing those activities. And you build yourself, wouldn't call it the perfect week, but I would call it an effective week on this seven columns system.

The next thing you do is you go ahead and do it. To the best of your ability, you follow your seven columns system for the week. And then at the end of the week, you simply go back and you go, what worked? Let's keep it there. What didn't work so well, what do we need to do to fix it? Or where do we need to put it, to move it?

So it works well and you just keep refining it week after week. And you'll start to find that you'll become incredibly more effective and productive by using a simple system like this. Because instead of just doing things at the time of day, when you're just used to doing it, like, I dunno how many builders will get up super early on site, blah, blah, blah, big day on the tools, come home, inhale some food, have a chat with the family, and then the kids go to bed.

And then they're in the office doing paperwork and doing quotes and what have you. Then there's some paperwork you might not have to think too much about, but maybe a quote or these really important things. Maybe at 10 o'clock at night, after a big day on the tools, isn't the best time to do that.

So just because that's how you've always done it. And you've hypnotized yourself into thinking that's the only time I can do it, 'cause it's the only time I got. Maybe we need to figure a way to flip things around. And again, I'm happy to get into a discussion with you about this.

If you want help with this, I've showed you where to get help, but things can change. You can do things very, very differently. There's multiple Blackbelt members that have compressed their calendar.

So they're only working four days a week, some three days a week. And their business is more successful than what it was when they were working six days a week. How does that work? It's because they use ideas like this. So it absolutely works.

You just need to figure out how to make it work for you. And we are here to help you figure out how to make it work for you. All you need to do is reach out and have a chat. So that was "Idea of The Week."

Wrapping Up

I'd love to know your thoughts on it. Jump into the chat and tell me what your thoughts are. If you're watching the replay, you're watching the live there, Toby, you can whack it in the comments there.

But what I'd also like to remind you of, as I do most weeks, is just remind you on how to maximize your value from the Builder's ToolShed.

So you you're in the ToolShed.

You might as well maximize the value that you get from it. And it's as simple as this, get off your ass and get into the ToolShed and start to post, start to ask questions. Have you got any questions?

Have I said something in a podcast or in a post that you've gone, "Oh, that sounds fine. "But I don't think that would happen for me." That sounds like a bloody question.

Give me the opportunity to expand on it in your particular situation, or maybe ask you some questions. So it then make sense and you can implement it. And all of a sudden you get value.

So post, ask questions, answer other people's questions. You've got something to contribute here and I know, and it's only early days with the ToolShed at the moment. But I know that when we can get a big group of contributors here, this is going to be one amazing place for builders and sub traits to be in.

You've got things to give. So when people ask questions, jump in and answer them, answer it for them, you know, help people out. Share your wins and share your lessons. And you've gotta have one or the other every day.

Like you either have a win, or if you didn't, what did you learn from that? Like you've got to have one or the other, and we'd love you to share both of those in posts because it help to inspire.

And it helps us start conversations where we can tip in our ideas, our experience and help everybody else that's in the background, listening to those conversations.

But I don't want you just to be in the background. I just want people to stop lurking in the background of this ToolShed and come forward and get involved, get engaged, join the conversation. To that end, at the start of the show, I said, you know, you'd be able to get a free copy of the book. I'll show you how to do it at the end.

And it's simply by helping us help you. We wanna learn and stay current with what you are thinking, with what's currently going on with restrictions and supply of both labor and materials and the pricing and da, da, da. We wanna know what your problems are.

The current problems, not just the generic problems of the building industry. We're pretty well across that. But what are the current problems? And if you help us understand that so we can go figure out some solutions.

We can use our amazing Builders Business Blackbelt laboratory of builders, to come up with some solutions that we know that work. If you jump on a call with us and help us understand what your problems are, we'll give you one of these. We'll send it out to you.

All without costs, we'll post it out to you, cost you nothing. Just to have a chat and in that same conversation, there's a fair chance where we're gonna be able to point you towards some resources, some ideas, something that's going to help with the current challenges that you have.

But until and unless we talk, I don't know how we can help you as much as we'd like to. So reach out to us, get yourself a copy of the book, have a phone conversation with us and take it from there.

So that is the show. I've done it twice today. I think this one was better. So you saw the best one there, Toby.

Toby's put a comment in. He said, "Yep, you're right. "Change is hard, but can be a most rewarding "or the most rewarding thing." I'm having trouble with my eyes, reading and trouble with my mouth speaking. Let me slow down.

"You need to take the time to commit to the change. "Too easy to fall back into old habits." A 100% right. And we don't have to fix everything today or tomorrow.

Like, let's figure out what the next right thing is. The thing that will give us the most value right now. And then let's just commit to that and leave everything else till another day. Let's get this right.

And then we'll move on to the next thing. So great comment from our lone listener, all by himself, Toby. But thanks for being with us, Toby.

Thanks for watching the replay, everybody else. This has been episode 96 of the Builders Business Success podcast. I'm Mick Hawes and I think that's it for this episode, but we'll be back again at the normal time of 10:00 AM on a Tuesday. I'll remember to hit the record button and everything should be right with the world, but love to hear your comments, jump in the comment sections.

Tell us what you thought, what you learned, what challenged you about this episode of the Builders Business Success podcast. Until then, I'll be seeing you on the next episode, episode 97. We'll talk to you then. Bye for now.