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

Super pumped about this episode because it’s talking all about what the bloody hell are we doing this for? That’s the purpose of the episode.

What’s the purpose of your business.

Now, if you’ve never ever tuned into an episode of Builders Business Success Podcast before what you’ll find is what we constantly are talking about the common and often costly problems that are experienced just about by every builder in the industry.

And the big majority of those problems are created by how you think, I suppose your beliefs, and just looking around and copying the building industry norms.

And so if we’re all kind of copying a fundamentally flawed business model, the problems will be widespread, they’ll be it experienced by pretty much everybody in the industry. And they’re the sorts of things that we’re going to talk about.

And in this particular episode, the focus is really on the purpose of the business.

Like, what are we doing this for?

Because you would have to agree if you’ve been running your own business for any length of time you probably get presented with some problems from time to time, some stress, some unsatisfactory results, perhaps.

And that wasn’t what we signed up for when we created our business but it is a big part of it so I want to address that.

Of course, we’re going to do a Q&A and it’s going to be relevant to what we’re talking about and I’m going to give you a personal productivity hack as well.

*Transcription of the show*

So let’s get into this, and it’s a really vexing question. It’s a super important question that I think never really gets asked. And when it is asked.

The answers aren’t really forthcoming.

Maybe the answers were there right at the start but if I asked you why did you decide to start your own business, go out on your own rather than being an employee, what would be the reasons?

And I think that when I asked that question, if you’ve been in business for a while you kind of have forgotten.

But all of this was brought about by a question that was asked by one of our Blackbelt members. In Blackbelt, it’s called a momentum call, so every day of the week, Monday to Thursday we spend an hour together.

The group spends an hour together on Zoom and we share our wins, which is super important because we’ve got to measure our progress. Otherwise, all we tend to do is focus on the fly sheet on the glass rather than the beautiful view behind it.

So we’ve got to focus on and give ourselves appreciation for what we’ve done well. It’s super important. We also share our lessons.

And the reason for that if there’s a bunch of us that are making mistakes we can share the lessons from those mistakes to save the rest of the group making that particular mistake.

And the upshot of that is since we’ve been doing this, so back in the day we were the normal standard garden variety, one-to-one coaching, business coaching business.

But when we changed our focus to narrow it down to the custom home building businesses we also changed the model of the company and now it’s a group focus. There’s one-on-one available and we do one on ones from time to time whenever anyone needs it.

But we’ve found group is far, far more valuable. And since we’ve been doing it, the progress of the members in that group is in excess of 400% faster than it used to be when we were doing it one-on-one. And I can tell you for sure and certain that I’m not 400% better.

So it’s got nothing to do with me. It’s got everything to do with these guys being in a group, sharing their wins and sharing their lessons, which accelerate progress. Because if you are the type of person and it seems to be a bit rare, funnily enough that people learn from their mistakes.

That’s a rarity.

But if you’re one of those rare people that learn from your mistakes, you’ve still got to make every mistake there is to learn and make progress.

Whereas if you’re in a group of people making mistakes and I go, Hey, this is a mistake I made today or this week and this is the lesson I got from it, you can learn that lesson without making the mistake.

So it makes your progress far more rapid. And then the other thing that we cover in the momentum calls are questions obviously.

And one of our guys, he’s probably been with us maybe three years, only a really young fella, amazing young guy and he’s, he’s kind of gone from struggling getting work and work on quite small projects to getting quite high quality projects and he’s got leads around the block.

So he’s inundated with quality leads. And believe it or not, that is a problem for him. You might be thinking I wouldn’t mind a bit of that problem.

Fair enough, that’s something you can aspire to. But when it arrives, it is a problem.

So how do we deal with it? And this guy, he was under pressure because he had too much inquiry.

I mentioned, it is a good problem to have and if you haven’t got the problem aspire to having that problem. But when you get to that point, the default emotion is stress, being overwhelmed. What should I do? And your mindset automatically goes to how to do it all.

That’s just seems to be the default mindset. It got me thinking about this, like, we’ve got to go back and ask, What are we doing this for?

Because if your default mindset is how do I get all of this work done? How do I get all of the inquiry into my business? and then you’re feeling stressed about it, it brings me back to what is the bloody point?

Like, why do you work for yourself? Was the purpose of your starting your own business to be overwhelmed and to be stressed? If it was, great, job done. I suspect it wasn’t.

I suspect that the reason that you started your business back in the day was because you thought you would have more time freedom, because you are the boss you can call your own shots, you will have more choice. You can choose to do what you want to do, when you we want to do it, who you want to do it with.

You’ve got all of those choices. I also suspect that you thought you would have more financial freedom. You would earn more money than working for somebody else.

And in some cases, I know a bunch of builders that do very very well financially, but going back to that first thing about the time freedom, not so much.

They are still a prisoner to their business although they might have the flashy house, the flashy boat, the flashy car, they never get the chance to use the boat because they are working so hard in the business.

And then the third thing that we probably don’t talk about enough but I think it’s probably more important than the previous two, is enjoying what you do.

So my coach, he talks about it in these terms: Time, Money, and Meaning.

They’re there three reasons that we get into business. And I think the meaning one, having something that you are contributing to, there is a meaning of purpose to what you are doing, is really more important than the time freedom and the money freedom.

But I think all three of those things were motivators. At least the first two were motivators for pretty much everyone when they first started their business. Is that the reality? Does that turn out to be the reality of your situation when you start business?

My observations are that most builders I talk to have far far less time freedom and far less opportunity for choice to do what they want to do than the people that they employ. More often than you would think the team members earnings, the net money that they earn is far higher than their employer.

So the people that you’re paying potentially get more net cash, spendable cash, than you do as the employer.

Being the employer, you tend to come in when you’re a sick as a dog although that’s really not how we’re allowed to do it things these days.

Before the COVID, the owners of the business would show up on when they’re on death’s door, but employees, team members, any sign of illness or whatever, they tend to pull the pin.

So there tends to be more freedom being an employee than being an employer, seems to be the reality of the situation even though the absolute opposite of that was the reasons that we started. So let’s go back to this problem.

The problem is, too much inquiry. Great, let’s say you’ve got that problem. If you’re at that point, I think so it’s an amazing opportunity for your business to become a genuinely oversubscribed business. And we had this conversation in Blackbelt the other day too. Being busy isn’t oversubscribed.

What oversubscribed is, and you really need to read Daniel Priestley’s book called “Oversubscribed”. He’s an Australian entrepreneur, it’s a great book. There’s x amount of capacity in your business. You are genuinely oversubscribed when you have far more inquiry, but quality inquiry.

So obviously you need to have a qualification process.

In Blackbelt we call it the quality client pathway. You’ve got to have that established in your business so you can assess the quality of the inquiry. Inquiry is irrelevant, it’s got to be the quality of the inquiry.

But if you’ve got far more quality inquiries then you have potential to be able to serve in your business.

You are oversubscribed and you can start to implement some of the things that Daniel Priestley talks about in his book. But here’s the thing and these are the questions I put to our members the other day. If you are wanting more time freedom, more financial freedom, and more enjoying in your business.

Does it make sense to do less work? If you’re overworked, wouldn’t it make sense to do less work? You’ve got to say yes, if you’ve got too much work to do the answer to that is do less work. But where does the brain goes straight away?

The brain goes, If I do less work, less money. Well, here’s the thing. What if you charged more for that work? Mathematically again, you can’t disagree with this. If you did less work and charged more for it that would fix this problem.

But where does your brain go as soon as I say, Do less work, charge more for it. Your brain goes to, I’m not going to get the work if I charge more for it.

And you’re probably right, unless you are adding more value from your client’s point of view. If you add more value from your client’s point of view your clients are absolutely prepared to pay more for your services to have you manage their project for them.

If you do less, increase prices, add more value so you’re still getting the work, that also gives you the opportunity to choose the people that you work with and the projects that you take on.

So this formula that I’m talking about here is giving you everything that you want. But what is the thing that is missing?

What’s in the way of this? The good thing is, and you might even be getting a little angry with me now, and that’s cool get angry but do something about it. Don’t just sit there and call me names and do nothing about it. Do something about it because the road block is you.

Your thinking, your belief system, that’s the roadblock because you simply cannot argue with the logic and the math that I’ve just put in front of you. If you do less work but charge more money, so you’re still profitable, and you add value from the client’s perspective so you get the work so you can get the higher prices.

That means you’re working less, you’re still profitable and then if you cherry pick the people in the projects, you’re doing the stuff that you absolutely love. And if you’re sitting there with your arms crossed and your toes crossed and everything saying you’re a bloody idiot. That’s not my problem, that is your problem. That means that you are in your own way.

So what you need to do is start to change your thinking, start to change the beliefs that you have. And so you’ve got to start to think, What can I do to add value?

And to do that you need to start to learn about your ideal prospects. What are their fears, their frustrations, their wants, their aspirations?

And your business’s purpose is to be able to allay those fears, take away their frustrations, deliver their aspirations and their wants. But to be able to do that you’ve got to understand what they are.

And I can tell you for sure and certain, it’s got very little to do with the house that you’re building. It’s got everything to do with what that project represents, what problem that project is solving, what aspiration that project is delivering for your customers.

And if you can understand that and change your communications, change your systems, change your priorities to deliver on their fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations;

I can guarantee you that will represent massive value to your prospects and your clients. And when you start down this path, one thing that we do know is people tend to hang around with other people just like them. We know that.

So when you start to attract and work with the type of people that you love working with, that have the projects that you love working on and you absolutely go to term in understanding them and delivering on their fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations, they will be remarketing to their friends who were just like them about you.

And that starts to contribute to the front end of your business again. I hope all of this is making sense. The other thing you need to get past is, people will pay big money when they see the value. People will pay big money when they see the value.

There’s a buddy company in the United States, believe it or not, that sells disposable nappies of $4,000 US, a pack of ten, a box of packet of 10 of disposable nappies, 4 grand! Unbelievable.

I watched the TV show some time ago and there was a chap that charges 6,000 pounds in the UK to detail a car. I don’t know, that’s over $12,000 Australian to get your car detailed.

Obviously they’re top of the line cars and this guy has got customers around the block. But that’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

He’s oversubscribed, he’s got people lined up around the block, the type of people he loves working with, the type of cars he loves working on, and they’re prepared to wait.

So that’s the other thing that I didn’t mention with all of this, is when you nail this, when you understand this, you will find that your customers will be prepared to wait. They’ll be prepared to pay and they’ll be prepared to wait.

So here’s the thing. If all of this is true, if everything I’m saying is true, wouldn’t it make sense for you to work on the improvement and increasing the value that you deliver every day?

In other episodes we’ve talked about, I think maybe in the personal productivity hack, time blocking. Where you block out a chunk of time to do something that is high leverage.

If this is what you want for your business, the answer lies in you being open to what I’m saying, that’s the first hurdle that you’ve got to overcome. The second is you got to start bloody doing something about it.

Don’t complain about it, start doing something about it.

And it is as simple as investing a small chunk of time every day brainstorming with yourself or other team members in your business, if you want to engage them in this, in what can we do to add value to how we do things, not what we do, to how we do things from the point of view of our ideal customer.

If you did that every day, every day, every day, and worked out not only what could we do but how do we do it and then start doing it and measuring the effectiveness of your ideas, in a short space of time, and I’m talking just a few months, maybe even weeks, you will start to notice the difference in how your customers are responding to you and reacting to you, and it’s very, very powerful stuff.

So very thought provoking. And if you want to agree with me and send me some comments, you can do it in the Facebook group, Builders Business Success Forum. If you’re not a member of that come in and give us your thoughts.

If you want to start an argument with me about it, I’m quite happy to engage in an argument about it as well. Because it seems a little silly if you wanted to argue the point with me about this.

If you want to defame the limitations that are preventing you from having a business where you’ll earn more money and have more time freedom and work on better projects with great people, and you want to argue the point about that, that seems silly to me. But if it’s something you want to do, I’ll engage, I’m more than happy to.

So I hope all that makes sense. You’ll notice that I’ve moved away from the iPad just for this episode. The people listening, that’s what paper sounds like. Using old fashioned paper today.

Q & A

Q&A time. I got asked a question the other day and I think it’s a really important question and so I want to answer it cause I think financial problems are the worst problems.

If you’ve got financial problems it seems to amplify the intensity of all other problems in every other area. So BAS and tax and all that sort of stuff can be a problem. And someone asked me a profit-first question.

If you haven’t read “Profit First,” go read it. It is a US book, Mark McKellar, a good friend of ours wrote the book and it’s based on the US tax. And he talks about putting 15% tax aside from every dollar you get to pay for all of the tax implications. It’s a little different in Australia.

So I was asked the question, how do we do it in Australia? So here’s the quick tips how I would suggest to do it.

Create an educated guess. I want to say that from the outset like there’s no exact formula here. It’s an educated guess and you just polish it and refine it as you go.

So the first thing you need to do is get last year’s total revenue and then figure out how much money went on GST, Super, PAYG, Company tax, anything in that space, how much went out and then figure out what that amount represents as a percentage of your total revenue, and you’ll get a percentage.

That could be your starting point. And every dollar that comes in from progress, payments or whatever, you take that percentage of that check that comes in and put that money aside in a tax account.

And if you do that every time any money comes in you put it in a separate account and that purpose of that account is only to pay the BAS and Super and tax and, and things like that, you will always have enough money to at least pay that.

And I say this because feedback from our Blackbelt members when we teach them how to implement this into their business entities absolutely life-changing, game-changing, I can’t encourage you enough to do this.

Is the first thing that they say with a massive grin on their face is, it’s just so good when the BAS comes that I’ve got the money to pay and you just pay it rather than how do I pay the BAS because you’ve already spent the tax money and so forth running your business.

So I hope that answers that question. Simple formula, if you didn’t get it rewind, rewind again you get the answer.

Personal Productivity Hack

Personal Productivity Hack. Procrastination.

I’m led to believe and a lot of the gurus in this space tend to agree with it, procrastination is the biggest time thief that there is.

So we’ve got to get rid of procrastination. And the best tool I have found is reading a book, it’s called the “The 5 Second Rule” The author, her name is Mel Robbins.

And there’s a whole bunch of cool stuff in this book but the one thing that you can take away from this Productivity Hack is what she talks about is having a countdown.

If there are things that you know you should do but you don’t do them, you procrastinate, is you implement this little idea of a countdown and you literally, you can do it out loud if you want to, you count down from five.

When she says five, four, three, two, one.

Does that sound like something’s going to happen when she get to one?

The subtleness of this when I read the book was quite amazing and I’ve watched a bunch of videos as well, because if you think about it and you did it the other way and you say, I’m going to do this on the count of three or count of five, and you go one, two, three…

What comes after three? Well, four and five comes after four.

You can keep going. If you count backwards, it’s like blastoff, there’s action. It’s kind of in our nervous system when we do a countdown, there tends to be action.

And it’s quite amazing. It’s it may sound like a silly little idea but give it a go.

Next time you need to do something, whether it’s getting out of bed and not hitting the snooze alarm or whatever it is and you count backwards, you will find that once you get down to zero, more often than not, there will be action. And that’s all we need.

That’s the antidote to procrastination.

Action is the opposite of procrastination and that’s what we need. So I hope that makes sense.

Takeaway & Jump On A Call

So Take Away Time. What is the takeaway from this episode?

And I think looking back over my notes that I’ve prepared for this episode is, everything that we’ve talked about has something in common and that thing is that it’s all fixable by you.

All of the problems that we’ve talked about are real All of the problems that we’ve talked about, the big majority of you out there builders experience them, pay the price for them, and the good news is they are all fixable by you, and they’re all free. Like, it’s all just mindset stuff.

You’ve just got to make different decisions. It’s all free. It’s all can be done by you. And you might be thinking, But I don’t know what to do. Well, there’s a ton of resources all about the place.

You can go into the Builders Business Success Forum. You can ask questions in there. It cost you nothing. Just go in there and start asking questions.

I’m more than happy to answer them and there’s a bunch of really other smart people in that group as well with a lot of experience that you’ll be able to get answers from as well.

But get in there and start to ask your questions because all of this stuff can be fixed, it can be fixed by you. Stop suffering from these problems, get in and get some solutions.

So I hope all of this made sense. If you want some help from us, if you want to ask us some questions, we’re more than happy to, all you need to do is book a call.

And you can book that call by hitting the button underneath this video. We’d love to talk to you. We’d love to learn more about your business, point you in the right direction. There’s a ton of resources out there.

Some you’ve got to pay for but I can guarantee you, they are awesome value. There’s a bunch that are free. It doesn’t matter where you are, what you need we’ll be able to find something that will be helpful for you. All we need to do is now a little bit more about your business.

So if you hit the button, says, schedule a call. If you’re listening to the audio only version of this, if you navigate the buildersbusinessblack belt.com.au, at the top of the page there’s a couple of schedule a call buttons. You just hit the button, that takes you to a form. Fill out that form, tells us a little bit more about your business.

Once you submit that form, you’ll be taken to the calendar where you can book in a call.

And it’s like a seven to 10 minute call where we just find out really what would make the biggest difference to you? What direction do you want to go in? And we can give you some suggestions as to way you can go to get the resources that are appropriate for.

So I hope all of this today has been valuable. I feel like it’s been thought provoking.

Some of you may be angry. Some of you maybe stun, some of you may be pumped. I want to hear from you no matter where you are with this because I think today’s episode is really, really important because if you started a business for a specific purpose and you’re not getting that outcome, you’re not achieving that purpose, I want to help you to get that purpose, that outcome.

And as we’ve discussed, pretty much it’s all up to you. It’s it’s in your hands. It’s now up to you as to what you do about it. We’d love to help.

So jump on a call, join the Facebook group all of that sort of stuff.

So I hope this episode was valuable. There’ll be another episode around before you can know it. And that is it for this episode of “Builders Business Success Podcast”.

I’m Mike Hawes from Builders Business Blackbelt. too many words. That is it. Bye for now.