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

So if this is your first time that you’ve heard this podcast, you probably won’t know what the bloody hell I’m talking about or what is the purpose of this podcast.

The purpose of this podcast is to share with established builders and I guess new builders if you’re just getting started, you might as well do it the right way.

But our primary focus is to help established builders eliminate the common and costly problems that plague the big majority of builders through out the industry.

And the good news is most of the problems are simply caused by the business model and common industry practices.

And what we do in Builders Business Blackbelt is look at those issues, discuss them on an absolute daily basis with builders all around Australia and New Zealand, and come up with ways to overcome them, to change them. And so everything that we talked about in this podcast is tested.

I mean, it’s not just theory. I’m not just making stuff up to share with you. This is the stuff that our guys implement, refine and get back to us with the results.

So listening to this podcast can be very, very powerful for you because this is a size. It’s not just my opinion. It’s not just theory.

It is stuff that’s been implemented, tested, trialed, refined. Stuff that doesn’t work, we’ve figured out how to work it or make it work or change how we do things, so it does work.

So that’s what we’re gonna be doing today is the summary of our program from start to finish.

We’re also gonna do a Q and A.

And of course, we’re gonna do an idea of the week as well.

*Transcription of the show*

So let’s get into the summary of what we’ve been talking about for the last few months.

And the whole idea is to have you understand how each part connects with the next part and so it all makes sense.

The one thing that I want you to understand though, is that there is a right next thing.

Just because I’m going to show you what needs to be done in the order that it happens, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what should be worked on first.

So we’re gonna talk about that toward the end once I’ve sort of painted the picture of how all of this works.

So the very first part or the beginning of the business is what we call the attract area and the whole idea of attract. And obviously, if this is your first or you’ve only just joined us with the podcast, you can go back to previous episodes and it outlines in detail each of the things that I’m about to talk about.

That first part is the attract. And the key with attract is knowing who you’re trying to attract. And there’s a difference between the client’s mindset and the prospect’s mindset.

So with the attract strategy, you need to get into the prospect’s mindset, not the client’s mindset. And that’s a very, very subtle but powerful difference between deciding what you put out as far as content in your messaging.

You need to get very, very clear on the type of projects that you specialize in, but also you need to get super clear on the people that you’re trying to attract, in fact, the person you’re trying to attract.

And we talked about that a lot in detail that you should be thinking of one person and creating content for one person, not a group group of people. Makes a massive difference.

You need to understand with massive clarity, your ideal prospects, fears, frustrations wants and aspirations, because the key with creating content for your ideal prospect is not to talk about yourself, not to talk about what you do, not to talk about how good you are, how long you’ve been around, all of them, not interesting.

What is interesting to your prospect is having them feel that you completely understand their problem from their perspective. That’s the secret to this.

Understanding their problem from their perspective. If you can tick that box, they will assume that you have the solution and want it from you. So it makes that job much, much easier.

You don’t have to boast about how good you are and how long you’ve been in business and how much you care about customers and all that sort of stuff.

It doesn’t land with your prospects. What lands with your prospects is having them feel that you understand their fears, their frustrations, their wants, and their aspirations.

So that’s super important for the attract. And if you can think about these parts of the business in four quadrants if you like, or four silos almost. So we’ve just talked about attract, and then the purpose of attract is to generate quality leads, generate quality inquiry.

Once that happens, the attracts job has been done. It is finished. But from the prospect’s point of view, their experience needs to be a frictionless journey that completely makes sense.

And so the next part of the process is what we call the quality client pathway. And so this is what we might call the qualify process. So the four parts are attract, qualify, deliver plus, and then scale.

So I’m gonna unpack all of those in this episode. But now we’re into that second area and it’s called the quality client pathway.

And the whole idea of the quality client pathway is from the very, very first contact to establish that you have a process, to establish that your primary focus is the quality of the customer experience and delivering maximum value for the money.

That needs to be established right at the start. And the quality client pathway, it is a qualification process, but that is secondary.

It’s primary function is to educate the mindset of your prospects on how to become a great quality client work with you as a team to be able to get that fantastic experience and the best possible value for their money.

That is the purpose of the steps in the quality client pathway. When you go into the detail of it, we start to talk about creating behavioral hurdles.

So again, the secret sauce to this quality client pathway is not for you to be saying, yes, we will let you through, or no, we will not let you through the process and start to work together.

You create behavioral hurdles. So you ask your prospect to take certain actions and based on whether they take that action or not determines whether they go to the next step.

So by doing that, what you’re doing is creating a pathway for reasonable people. People who are prepared to change the way they do things, become a great quality client for you. You’re creating a pathway for them.
You’re creating a pathway for unreasonable people. So part of the creating the quality client pathway is knowing what’s called your anti-avatar, and that is the person you don’t want anywhere near your business. You need to know about them. You need to know what drives them. You need to know what their priorities and preferences are.

And the behavioral hurdles in this process are designed, so that type of person won’t jump over them, therefore, they exit out of the process. And the cool thing about this, folks, is it saves a ton of time and frustration.

So the quality client pathway will save you a ton of time, eliminate a tire kickers, price shoppers, time-wasters, but it won’t let the good quality people slip through the net.

And in fact, it can take what seems to be an average quality prospect. And through this process done properly, it will turn them into a really high quality customer. And so this quality client pathway is super critical to your business, absolutely pivotal to the success of your business.

So a lot of effort, a lot of time needs to be put into developing the skills, the processes, the tools and the bits and pieces you need to implement this into your business.

So that’s the second part. So we’ve got attract, the attract strategy that generates a good quality lead, but lead then goes into the quality client pathway and they have hurdles put in front of them and at the end of that, they pay for a proposal.

They’re prepared. They love the idea of paying for a proposal. They become really good quality client at that point. They pay for the proposal. They give you the go ahead, off we go. Now we’re into the build process.

And instead of calling it the build process, we call it deliver plus, because it’s all about the delivery now.

We’ve set up the expectations through the attract and the quality client pathway. Now we need to deliver on that, and the key with that is understanding what their expectations are. So the first thing we need to do in deliver plus is deliver on their expectations.

To do that, we need to know what their expectations are, and that’s all starts in the quality client pathway, but it also continues throughout the build process. And so deliver plus has a plus on it. The plus is the thing that’s where the magic happens, because they are the things that just blow your client’s minds.

They wonder how you remembered those things and you create little mini experiences for them that they can’t help but remark upon to their friends and their colleagues and their family and their connections, their circle of influence.

And so having systems and processes for all of your build process is absolutely critical, but making sure you’ve got systems and processes to remind you, it’s now time to deliver a little surprise. Getting the team involved in this. Part of the deliver plus process is sharing this focus with your team.

Having your team understand that the house on the hill that you’re building isn’t the product. It’s not the product. You’ve got to have all of your team understanding that the quality of the client’s experience is your product.

And when your team understand this and when you implement the things like the daily direction meetings that we’ve talked about, the weekly team meetings, the monthly one-on-ones, it gets your team focused on contributing to the constant never-ending improvement of the delivery of the client experience.

And so your client experience, the quality of that is continually improving.

Your team really get into it. This improves the loyalty, the productivity, the quality of the experience for your team members. And when I talk about team, I’m not just talking about your direct employees. If you go back and listen to that episode, I’m talking about your subbies. I’m talking about your suppliers.

Everybody who is remotely involved in contributing to the quality of the client experience is your team, and they need to be involved in discussions, understand that is our purpose, and be able to contribute to that constant never ending improvement of how you do things to continually improve the quality of your customer’s experience.

So this is all about sharing the focus and the purpose with your team. And as I said, you’ve got to schedule those little surprises.

So that needs to be part of the procedures and systems that you build into your experience. So that’s the delivery plus. So attract is attracting the quality lead.

The quality client pathway is setting up the expectations for great communication and for your client to play their part in being able to work together, to deliver the quality of this customer experience, eliminate a massive amount of the problems that create additional unnecessary costs, so they end up getting far more value for their investment.

And then you’ve got to deliver it, and you’ve got to get your team involved in this delivery. It’s not just you, they need to be understanding this. And so once you’ve got those three things in place, now we can start to scale and grow.

And there was an episode when we talk about scaling is most builders, when we talk about scale, they go running and screaming into the bushes because they just don’t wanna know about it.

Maybe you’ve done it before or they’ve got lots of problems now and if they get bigger, they’re gonna have more problems. Well, not a true word has been spoken, but that is because of the idea, the thought process, the model that people use for scaling their business.

Now think about this. If you’ve got a great lead generation process, if you’ve got a great quality client pathway, if you’ve got a constantly never-ending improving a way to deliver this and improving the experience for your team and your customers, that is something that you can expand on.

But when there are problems with the attract, when there are problems with the quality client pathway, and when there are problems with the whole delivery process and you try and make that bigger.

And let’s say, for instance, you’ve got four problems and I’m sure you are gonna have a hell of a lot more than that, but when you double your business and you’ve got four problems, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna have eight problems.

It’ll probably mean you’ll have 16 or more like as you start to scale a broken model, the problems just exponentially increase.

But if you’ve got a solid model that absolutely works, that eliminates the big majority of these common and costly problems that most builders experience, then you can start to scale it.

And in scaling, we talked about a ratchet system, which means that you’ve got a very clear purpose on the one thing that you’re currently working on to improve your business, to grow your business, and once you’ve reach that target, you then change your focus to reduce your required effort and time to maintain this, back to zero.

And then you can do it again, and you bring your required time and effort back to zero.

And then you can do it again with different things. And by using this ratchet system to scale up your business, it allows you to make your business more financially rewarding for you, but also maintaining your time freedom.

And this is so important because these are the three things that people start their business for more financial freedom, more time freedom, and meaning.

So it needs to be fun. It needs to be enjoyable. It needs to be exciting.

You need to have enthusiasm about it. And for most builders that I speak to, if they’ve been around a while, neither of those three things are true.

Get this built business model in place, and you can have all three of those things. And the very last thing that needs to happen, but it’s not the last thing you do, in fact, it’s the first thing you do.

I know it sounds a little bit weird, but this is the first thing you do is that you look after yourself, you put your own oxygen mask on first, and we do that with a little thing we called the personal success ritual. And there’s a whole episode on that. Oh, one thing that I did forget, which is kind of important.

In between this whole scaling thing, you need to have implemented the profit first system, because like that is the thing that gives you the financial freedom. Like that is just the most amazing game changer financially.

And I’ve always said that if you’ve got financial challenges, it amplifies the consequences of every other problem you’ve got.

If you can eliminate that financial stress that you’re always, you know, where do we find the money to pay for the best, and where do we find the money to pay for this and that and the other.

If that is all taken care of and you’ve got money in the bank, that’s a war chest for laying times, it gives you this confidence and yeah, you’ll still have problems, but a lot of problems will disappear when that’s established and the intensity of a lot of other problems will reduce.

So life is a lot better when you’ve introduced the profit first system, you’ve been living it for a while, and that level of stress has been taken away. To be able to do all of that stuff, that’s when we need the personal success ritual, because the most important person that contributes to the success of a building business is the owner.

I asked this question all the time, who’s the most important, is it the owner, is it the team, is it the customer? Most people say, it’s the customer. It’s not the bloody customer, and it’s not even the team, although they are important.

The most important person is the owner. Therefore, the owner must put their oxygen mask on first, must. And how we do that? Is with our personal success ritual. It’s a four step process. It is super powerful.

And then that fourth step is called the prioritized daily action list. And this is a five step process that gives you far more productivity and control over your day. It is a massive, massive personal game changer.

And again, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can go back and you can listen to previous episodes where you can get into the absolute detail of all of these things that I’m talking about. And so that is it, that’s pretty much this simple model from soup to nuts.

It’s attract all the way through the quality client pathway, all the way through delivery plus, all the way through scale, which includes profit first, but scaling your thinking and your ability to control things and your ability to get more and more and more done, but by doing less yourself, that is the key to all of this.

And all of this is taken care of in this business model. And as I said at the start, the thing that we’ve got to think about is don’t start the start of this process. This is where it all comes and done, and this is why we’ve unpacked it in this way.

It should make sense. That’s the kind of the quality, sorry, that’s the journey of the client that goes through. But how you do this is it needs to start with you.

It needs to start with the personal success ritual and the prioritized daily action list. That is the absolute first thing one must do. Second thing, believe it or not is the quality client pathway.

A lot of builders say, you know, how do we generate more leads? Don’t even bother with that until you have established the quality client pathway and you have refined your skills to be able to run a quality client pathway. And so to be able to do that, you need to have the right mindset.

So that comes back to this personal success ritual. And then the third thing that needs to happen is the profit first, because if you’ve got a leaky boat, it’s always going to be creating an additional level of distress that is completely unnecessary and can be fixed very, very simply.

And so those three things are the things that we help you master in a program that we’ve got called Blueprint to Blackbelt.

How that came about was my coach. Yes, I do have a coach. His name is Taki Moore. He is the best business coach for business coaches I’ve ever seen. He is an amazing, amazing person.

He’s built an incredible team and incredible program. And I went to him many, many moons ago and asked him or showed him a program that I created. And he said, “that’s rubbish.”

He said it was too long, and it had too much in it. And it was too complicated and all that sort of thing.

And he asked me this question, he said, “if you could only teach your members three things ever in your life, like forget about everything you teach, what are the top three things that you could only ever teach?” And that’s how this blueprint, the blackbelt program came about.

And so we teach the three pillars, the three cornerstones. We give you all of the tools, all of the training, all of the support you need in just 12 weeks to establish those three things.

Once those three things are established, you can then start to go out and work on the sexy things like the attract strategy and the deliver plus and those sorts of things. But you must get those three pillars established first. How do I know this? Because I’ve been doing this for a long time.

Years and years and years ago, I was just a general business coach. We then created Builders Business Blackbelt. People who are appropriate to join Blackbelt, joined Blackbelt. People who weren’t appropriate, didn’t join.

Like if they couldn’t afford it or if they weren’t quite ready, they didn’t join. And we wanted to create something for those people who they couldn’t either afford it or just weren’t quite ready.

That’s how the blueprint thing started. But here’s what I noticed.

The first thing I noticed is when we went from one-on-one to a group model, our members increased their improvement performance by around about a multiple of four, so 400%.

That means that they were getting things done in a quarter of the time than what they used to with my one-on-one coaching model.

I was blown away. But then we introduced this blueprint to Blackbelt, and now everyone goes through blueprint before they are allowed to apply for the Blackbelt program.

And now what we’ve noticed is the people that go through this program, so they don’t get distracted by all of the shiny bubbles, all of the bright, shiny objects that are in Blackbelt, such as the attract and the deliver plus, and all of that sort of stuff.

They only focus on those three things, the PSR and prioritize daily action list, the quality client pathway and the profit first. Those three things, they understand them, they build them, they implement them.

Once those things are established and then they move into Blackbelt. They are moving at such a rapid rate that I’ve never seen before. That’s why I’m excited about this.

That’s why I decided to share the whole thing with you. And what I’d love for you to do if this makes any sense to you is jump on a call with us to see if this would be the right fit for your building business. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter.

It’s just a call, it’s just a phone call and you have gone, no, that’s not for me. You’re not for me. I don’t like the way you operate, whatever it is. It doesn’t matter. At least you’ve explored the possibility, but if it is right for you, it could be an absolute game changer.

In 12 weeks, you could have the PSR and the prioritized daily action list established, your quality client pathway established, profit first implemented, that’s now established. Now you can start to move on to the rest of the thing. So all you need to do is book a call and we can see if this is going to work for you. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter.

You’ve made the call. But if it does, in 12 weeks time, your business could be completely, completely different. So there is a link in the comment section. If you’re watching this on Facebook, just click it and follow the forms.

Do the, you know. Do what it takes for you to do, and we’ll end up on a call and away we go. If you’re watching it now a blog, there’s a button underneath to do the same thing. If you’re listening to the audio only version, you can just go to Builders Business. And now I’m pointing at the TV screen. It’ll be up there later. bnuildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au.

There’s schedule a call buttons all over the place. Please, please explore the possibility. We’re not gonna sell you anything. We don’t have the power to hypnotize you and open your credit card wallet and take your numbers.

You are in control, but at least explore the possibility and we will help you eliminate the big raft of unnecessary problems you’re currently experience. I hope that makes sense.

Q & A

The Q and A is how much should I charge for a proposal?

But the question got asked again this week. I want you to understand that just charging for a proposal isn’t just the purpose.

The purpose isn’t even to be paid for all of the time and effort that goes into it.

If you figured out how much time and effort it takes to put a proposal together, it’s a lot of money and you probably wouldn’t get that, but that needs to be taken care of in the proposal as far as project management, I can’t tell you how many people, how many builders we’ve put through the profit first health check and they don’t even charge for things like this in their proposal.

They don’t charge for the project management stuff. It’s crazy stuff. So ideally, you wanna be a trusted advisor and you’re the only choice, and then all of your project management time gets taken care of in the whole cost of the project.

But if they’re smaller projects, and even if they’re not smaller projects, you need to put some sort of a fee in front of somebody, because it’s all about just getting skin in the game for them.

And if you’re not sure how to do that, again, you can go back to previous episodes of this podcast and it shows you how to implement the quality client pathway, which will give you all of the tools to be able to get paid for your proposals.

The answer to that question of how much is, I think you need to decide what you think it’s worth. Look at that figure. If you’re slightly uncomfortable with that figure.

That’s probably the right figure. If you’re comfortable with it, it’s too cheap, but if you’re slightly uncomfortable with it, it’s probably about the right figure. So I hope that answers the question.

Idea of the Week

Now I do wanna do the idea of the week because I’ve got a levitating light bulb and we’ve got to give you a shot of it. So the idea of the week, because most builders I talk to are super, super busy. The reason that they’re super busy is they’ve got lots of stuff on their list of things to do, and they repeat, these things reoccur, reoccur, reoccur.

So here’s the idea of the week. I want you to put together or put aside one time block. I’ve got my clock, it’s my clock. You can put together say a 10 or a 15 minutes. It’s important that it ticks. A time block every single day.

Put together time block every single day even if it’s just for 10 minutes, and work on activity that will eliminate or get rid of one thing that keeps reoccurring on your list forever. So just invest a few minutes each day to invest in activity that will get rid of something that reoccurs on your list every day.

If you think about this mathematically, over time, you will end up eliminating a lot of reoccurring things off your list. There is even a episode, a past episode that will show you how to do that. So you can scroll back on the episodes and learn how to do that.

But that is the idea of the week, instead of just going blindly into your week, stop every single day, just for a small amount of time and do some work and ask yourself the question, what are the things that I wanna take off my list and how can I do it and do a little bit of work each day. Just it’s lock this one seat, you know, doubled every day for 31 days, ended up being less, just under $11 million.

The results can be enormous. If you just do one little discipline every day, you know, in a month or two, you won’t know yourself how much more freedom that you’ve got. So that is the idea of the week.

Jump On A Call

I believe the next right thing for you is to have a conversation with us to figure out whether this is something that will help you. If it’s not the right fit, it doesn’t matter. Just reach out. Let’s have a conversation.

Let’s see if we can help you eliminate these problems that you’ve probably had in your building business for some time and take your building business to a whole new level.

So we’ll be back next week. Same back time, same back channel. Yeah, but we won’t be talking about the content of the book. We’ll be changing gears.

We’ll be talking about some more fun stuff, some more interesting stuff, some more guiding stuff to help you with your business, but I’m glad that we’ve done this now. We’ve got everything that we need to put in a book. So you’ve got something that will show you how all of this works from end to end.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed it, particularly, if you’ve listened to us from the start of when we’re doing the content from the book. But again, we’ll be back next week.

I’m Mike Hawes from Builders Business Blackbelt. This has been the Builders Business Success Podcast. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Bye for now.