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

What we are doing with these episodes, and this is the third one in the series is we are writing a new book. And the reason I wanna write a new book is we’ve already got a book, but it’s all sort of mindset stuff.

The book that I want to get to you basically has everything from end to end that we cover in Builders Business Black Belt.

Total start right from the attract strategy, what type of people that you want to attract and projects all the way through to the quality client pathway, all the way through to the build process and the systems and procedures you should be using there to how to scale the business.

What that means is how do you get off the tools and how do you create a business that allows you the time and financial freedom to do the things you really, really enjoy.

And doesn’t seem to be the case for most builders I speak to, it was certainly the motivation to get started was to earn more money than you could working for somebody else, being your own boss, having the choice to do this or do that and pick your jobs and all of that sort of stuff.

The reality is that most builders don’t earn as much money as they pay their team members and they’re prisoners to the business, they don’t get a lot of time off, they work very hard, very long hours.

And in a lot of cases there’s stress from money and either too much work or not enough work, but there’s a whole bunch of stress involved.

It tends to take choice away. So what we’re doing is in each of these episodes for the foreseeable future is we’re unpacking one of the chapters or parts of a chapter of this book of the future. So you’re gonna be part of the writing of this book.

I would love you to be part of this conversation, we’re live every Tuesday morning 10:00 AM, that’s Sydney time in to we’re streaming into the Builders Business Success Forum. That’s a free Facebook group. It’s specifically for builders.

If you’re not already a member, jump in there and join all you need to do is go to Facebook and put in the search Builders Business Success Forum.

You’ll find it hit the join button and all you need to do is answer a couple of quick questions.

One is what sort of business, building business do you have? Like what’s your focus or your niche?

We’ve got a really cool training that we’d love to send to you, so you just need to tell us where you want that sent.

And also if there is something specific that you would like to fix in your building business let us know that as well because there is an absolute truckload of resources and ideas, tools, tips, solutions, just in the Facebook group, but there’s a ton outside the Facebook group as well.

And if you let us know what you’re looking for, we can point you straight there rather than you have to scroll down for about six weeks to get to the bottom of the success forum, Facebook group.

There’s just a ton of information in there but we can find it for you and point you straight to it, if you let us know what you’re after.

So if you’re not a member, jump in and if you wanna join us live every Tuesday morning, for this live stream, the podcast being live streamed in the Facebook group, really love you to do that, ’cause you can ask questions make comments as we’re going along.

You can even sort of direct the conversation a little bit. So something that you suggest might end up getting into the book, which would be pretty cool as well.

In today’s episode we’re gonna start talking about the attract strategy.

The attract strategy is a replacement for marketing. Marketing tends to just get people to think about advertising, but it is so much more.

So we use the word attract and there is a bunch of questions you need to ask yourself to get a relevant attract strategy and we’ll cover that.

We’ve also got a Q and A, we’ve also got a personal productivity hack in this episode.

*Transcription of the show*

So let’s get stuck in and start to talk about what you need to do to build an effective attract strategy in your building business.

The attract strategy, and we use that word very very specifically, rather than talking about marketing because it, when you use a word, and all words are, are labels for your experience, that’s all they are, they give things meaning.

I’ve found over the years when I talked to builders about marketing, their focus goes straight to what they do for awareness and advertising. And the issue with that is there is so much more that can be done to attract quality clients and quality projects to your business.

And when you talk about marketing it really is just about advertising in most people’s minds.

But the key to shifting your mindset from marketing to attract is in essence, discovered by asking three really important questions. And those three questions are this.

The first question is, what are the type of projects that you want to attract into your business? Now, when you’re asking that question it’s really important not to think, “What do I already attract?” What do you want to attract?

If I had a magic wand and I could wave it and you would only work on the type of projects that you absolutely loved doing, you had a passion for them, what sort of projects would they be?

What would get you up early and keep you up late with enthusiasm, working on these types of projects.

So that’s the first question you’ve got to ask because what we focus on, we tend to start to see we start to see opportunity, you know wherever our focus goes, energy flows. That’s the saying.

So we want to get very, very clear on the type of projects that you wanna do.

The second question you’ve got to ask yourself is, what type of people with those projects, do I want to attract?

Super important to be able to answer that question because we need to get very, very clear and as deep as possible, understanding those people’s fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations.

And because that is what gets people to move they move away from their fears and their frustrations.

They try and get away from those things and they get drawn towards their wants and their aspirations. That’s the thing that brings them toward you.

And the real key to this is if you can articulate your ideal client’s fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations in your messaging, in your positioning, in your social posts, on your website, everywhere where you are communicating to your prospects.

If you can articulate those things, at least as well as they can to themselves, if not better, you become a very attractive proposition because when someone feels that they are understood by you, they also assume that you have the solution to their problem.

If you can articulate their problem equally if not better to them than they can themselves, they will convict you of being guilty of having the solution.

So we don’t need to get out there with our attract messages and telling everybody how good we are and how long we’ve been around and our knowledge and our experience and our skills and all of the family, you know, business and so-and-so, we don’t need to talk about any of that.

You need to talk about what are their problems from their perspective, that is it.

You just need to articulate that in as much detail as possible because then they will convict you of being guilty of having a solution and they will want that solution from you.

So that’s the second question.

First question was what are the ideal projects that you want to attract?

Second question is who are the people, ideally that would have those projects that you want to attract?

What type of people? And here’s the third question, the most important question. It never hardly ever gets asked, and it is this, am I, or are we attractive?

It’s all well and good to get clear on the type of projects you want and the type of people you want to attract, but if you aren’t attractive to them, nothing is going to happen.

And I think this is the missing link with a lot of builders. In fact, a lot of small businesses attract strategy or their marketing approach is that they talk about how good they are, this, that and the other first mistake, rather than talking about the problems that their ideal prospect has in great detail, but they don’t make themselves attractive.

So the processes in the first part of the process is this messaging that I’m talking about, but even if your messaging attracts them then the process that you have, the first phone call that you have, the first meeting that you have, all of the processes, the communications, their experience if that doesn’t match what they expected from your messaging and positioning, you will lose them.

So you, your business has to become attractive. All of the systems, the communications, the priorities need to completely match and be a complete fit for the ideal people that you’re trying to attract. Because what happens is people come into your business and they experience that.

And if they’re the exact type of people that you’re trying to attract, they experience everything being absolutely spot on for the way that they want to do things. Guess what?

They know people just like themselves. So if you can attract them and then give them the experience that’s absolutely ideal for them, they will become part of your attract team. They will start to remark upon your business and their experience.

And so they begin to put people into the front end of your business as well. There are other parts that can contribute to your attract.

So obviously the, the qualification process contributes to your attract strategy, the delivery part of your business, the actual build, the communication, their experience throughout the build contributes to your attract strategy.

Are you attractive? Are you remarkable? Are they talking about how amazing this experience is?

Remember, they’re not gonna talk about the quality of your workmanship.

They appreciate it, but they won’t talk about it. What they will talk about is how you made them feel throughout that process. That’s the thing that they’re going to be remarking upon.

And that is very attractive to that right type of people, again. What about handover? And what about after handover? How do you communicate? How do you stay in contact?

How do you continue to deliver value to your past customers, after the handover?

A good friend of mine says that the sale begins at handover, and what he means by that is there so much that you can do to stay connected and have people still feeling the remarkable experience of being connected to you, even though they’re not your current customers.

And they will continue to talk to people.

There are plenty of people in their lives that are going to build, or know people who are going to build and you are going to get recommended.

So all of these things need to be built in to your business as part of your attract strategy. And I hope this makes sense as to why we don’t talk about marketing.

Because every time I talk about marketing, people just think about advertising.

What do we do on Facebook? What do we do in the magazines, on TV, on radio, in the newspaper, on social media, on LinkedIn, all of this sort of stuff.

It is just about advertising, but when you start to think attract it can make a whole big difference. So I hope that makes sense, that’s gonna be part of the new book and introducing the whole attract strategy.

Q & A

Q and A, “What is the best platform for me to put my message on?”

Well, what a great question. We get that question all of the time.

Here’s what I know or what I’ve learned about, and I’m gonna go back to using the incorrect word, so you know what I’m talking about.

What I learned about marketing, I don’t want to say it anymore, so I’m gonna use the word attract strategy. In relation to your attract strategy, what you need to know is there is nothing, zero that will guarantee success as far as an attract strategy. And what I mean by that is nobody can tell you that this is what you need to say, this is the platform that you need to put your messaging on, and bang you know, you put a few bucks behind it and it just works.

What I’ve learned over the many, many years of doing this is that you’ve gotta give it your best guess. And one of the things that I learned from Leigh Matthews of Aussie rules fame, amazing footballer and amazing coach.

Now, I think he’s in the media, but one of the quotes that I heard him talk about one time was there is nothing that will guarantee success, but there are many things that will guarantee failure.

I find that’s the same with your attract strategy as well, that there are things that if you do, it pretty much guarantees that it won’t work.

Some of those things are what I just spoke about in the previous area of the podcast, talking about yourself, talking about how good you are, what your, how good your skills are, and how long you’ve been around and what your experience is, and blah, blah, blah.

Talking about those sorts of things will pretty much guarantee, not much happens ’cause people don’t care about you or your business, they care about solving their problem.

So there are a few things that will guarantee that your efforts in putting messaging out there on your social media platforms and so forth aren’t really going to make much difference, but what will work?

Well, we’ve got to give it our best guess. And the things that we do know is that if we can find the right message for the right person.

So what we can do is identify who the right person is, we spoke about that already. What are their interests? What are their priorities? What are their concerns? What are their frustrations?

And if we can talk about that, that is a good place to start. But what you need to know about an effective attract strategy, it is all about test and measure.

So, number one, you need to have a marketing, I’ve used that horrible word again, a marketing budget, because if you don’t have a marketing budget what you’re going to do is be really hesitant in, “Should I do this?” And “Should I do that? You know, cause I don’t wanna waste my money.”

Unfortunately, you need to have a budget that can be wasted in inverted commas.

And what I mean by that, that if, if you don’t get a result it’s not gonna hurt you too much, because the only way to find out what works is, do things that are, you use an educated guess and then measure and test them.

One of the things that I’ve found through this process is more often what I think will work, doesn’t, that’s what I’ve learned.

I am wrong more than I am right, and so what that tells me is forget about my opinions and just test things, put things out there and see what sort of response to you that you get to them.

So obviously you need to have a budget where you invest small amounts of money to test things. And when you start to find things that work then you can start to increase your budget and always be testing new things against the old things.

So I’m not sure that that really answers the question other than I think it really answers the question in as much as this is what you need to do and stop listening to anybody who says, “We know exactly what to do to generate quality leads for you”, because they don’t, they don’t, they need to get information from you and they need to test and they need to measure.

And that sometimes is expensive in both time and money.

But if you, if you want to have a reliable source of quality leads, this is the investment that you need to make.

Personal Productivity Hack

Now it’s time for the personal productivity hack.

So what is the personal productivity hack?

This is very, very simple, and you might think you’re just saying this because you’re old.

You’re right, I am old and I am probably saying this because I am old, but my experience because I am old tells me that something magic happens, if you are planning your day and you have no plan, well I know that the day is not gonna be very effective.

But if you wanna take the time to create a plan and write down the activities, the events, the outcomes you want to accomplish by the end of the day, write it down.

Now, a lot of the younger people listening to this, they love to use their phones and things like that and so they go for the electronic version.

The electronic version is far, far better than nothing but the one thing that I’ve found over the years whether you’re young or whether you’re old, something magic happens when you get a pen and a piece of paper or a note pad, or some sort of diary system and you write down your goals, you write down your prioritized daily action list and it comes out of your brain, down your arm, through the pen onto a piece of paper, something magic happens.

It seems to be, it gives you much more focusing. It somehow improves your memory.

More things seem to get done when you write things down the right way.

Now, perhaps on another personal productivity hack, is what I’m struggling to say, on another personal productivity hack, I’m going to help you understand how to apply priorities.

And that’s one thing why I believe the written tool works so much better than the electronic tool, because quite often, they, all you can do is kind of put them in order. And that’s not the best way of doing it.

There is a process that you need to go through, where you can identify what really is going to make the biggest difference and not get hypnotized by urgent, maybe that’s another personal productivity hack, we will talk about in the future as well, is the difference between urgent and important.

Pretty much everyone gets pushed around by urgent, but you need to make decisions based on what’s important.

That’s a whole, another discussion, but what I’m suggesting for this hack is get something to write with and something to write on, and use that as your tool for planning your day.

Something magic happens when you get in there and write it down rather than typing and thumbing and whatever you do with your electronic tools.

I love technology, don’t get me wrong, I’m an a, you know, it’s gonna be on my tombstone, you know, “He had lots of gadgets”, but, you know I prefer to use gadgets, but I know that writing stuff down makes a big difference.

Takeaway & Jump On A Call

What’s the takeaway from today?

I think that the takeaway from today is that having an effective attract strategy is very very challenging. But here is the takeaway, that because it is challenging, because no one can give you the shortcut to an effective attract strategy.

If you are prepared to put the effort in, figure out who your ideal prospects are and figure out a lot of them about them, what moves them? What makes them get stuck? You know, what freezes them?

If you learn about their fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations, and you base your messaging and your positioning around that and that alone, and then you test and measure different ways of saying it to see what works.

You will have a very robust attract strategy, a reliable attract strategy.

The trouble is with most builders is it’s feast or famine. We’ve got that much work, you know, we don’t want any more work, so they stop their marketing efforts. And then when they run out of work, they get into desperation marketing and price competition and all of this stuff, trying to buy jobs, and it’s a fundamentally flawed way of doing things.

What you need is a reliable attract strategy that you’ve basically got your hand on the tap and you know how long it takes that when you open up the tap, things start to happen.

It might be a two or a three month lead time. So you can see that in two or three months, the work is going to get skinny.

Today we need to open up the tap and start to do more of the messaging and positioning.

So in three months time, the leads are coming through. So we don’t have this wall up and down. It is a great way of managing the stress levels in your business.

By knowing that you can open up the tap in enough time to get the leads flowing through in the future.

So that is my takeaway. Because I didn’t have my notes, all the way through. There are a couple of things I forgot to mention. So here I am at the bloody end, mentioning it.

One was, if you’re watching this live, I really would appreciate you putting in the comments #live. It late now, we’re just about finished. If you’re watching the replay, though I would appreciate you putting in the comments, #replay.

The other thing that I was going to mention through the process or through the show is, I would like you to reach out to us and have a chat to us so we can point you in the right direction.

There are many things that we can help you with, as far as directing you to free resources in the Facebook group, outside of the Facebook group all sorts of things, depending on what you want, what’s in your way and where you wanna go. There is a pathway for you, and we can help get you on that pathway.

We just need to have a real quick conversation. I don’t know, it’s probably seven to ten minutes. And what I did at the start of the show, was I put a link in the comment section.

So it still should be there. So all you need to do is click that link and, it’ll take you to a questionnaire. That’ll just tell us a little bit about you. Then it’ll take you to a calendar where you can pick a time and a date for this conversation.

Now, folks, it’s a seven to ten minute conversation. I know some people do this and they book it a week out or 10 days out. “I’m just that busy, I couldn’t get on the phone.” Like if that is you, you need to talk to us sooner than you think.

If you cannot organize a seven to ten minute conversation that will no matter what happens, make a difference to your business one way or the other, then you’ve got bigger problems and we can help you.

So I would suggest you jump on that, fill out the form, go to the calendar and get the earliest possible time and date to get on that conversation so we can help you particularly if you’re struggling for time, that’s one of the first things we can help you with big time.

That’s fairly easy, we’ve been doing that for about 30 years. That’s like falling off a log for us.

So jump on a call and let us point you in the right direction. If you’re watching this on the blog, so if you’re watching it on buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au/blog I think it might be, there’s a button underneath the video.

You can just press that follow the same process. If you’re listening to this on iTunes or Spotify or one of those audio only platforms, all you need to do is navigate to buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au and there are scheduled call buttons all over the top of the page.

You just hit one of those and away you go, we’ll be chatting before you know it. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this show. I hope it’s been helpful. I hope you’ve got questions. If you’re watching the replay, don’t forget to put the hashtag replay.

And if you’ve got questions also in the comments, if you’re watching this in Facebook don’t be worried about, “Oh, it’s not live anymore.” Ask the questions anyway, get in the comments of the replay and ask the questions and we will get back to you with the answers, no trouble at all.

So we’ll be seeing you next week, in Builders Business Success Forum live with the Builders Business Success Podcast at 10:00 AM. Every Tuesday it’s going live and we’d love to have you there.

So that is it for this episode. I’ll make calls from Builders Business Black Belt. That is it. Bye for now.