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

Now this episode is all about stopping being a business owner. So we’re gonna get into the mindset of the difference between a business owner’s mindset and an entrepreneur’s mindset. And you might think, well, I’m a business owner. I own a building business. I’m not, you know, you don’t see yourself as an entrepreneur.

Maybe not, but you may need to be able to understand the entrepreneurial mindset, to borrow some of their mindsets to really get that time freedom that you’re constantly searching for.

Now, if this is the first time you’ve ever listened to the Builders Business Success podcast, it’s really focused on eliminating the common and costly problems that are experienced by most builders and sub-trades for that matter.

So, one thing that I do want to share with you, first thing with this podcast is for the last, I don’t know how many episodes, maybe 20 episodes, we’ve been going live to Facebook and live to YouTube. And one of the things that sort of was a bit of a light bulb moment was the lives in Facebook are really, really difficult to find.

You’ve got to go in and search them. And because they’re weekly, there’s a lot of other posts in between. And going to YouTube, is going to get you to go to one place where every episode is all in one spot.

So what I’ve done is put a link in the chat. If you’re watching it on Facebook, if you are already watching it or watching the replay on YouTube, what I’d ask you to do is hit the subscribe button, subscribe to the channel. Also there’s a little bell symbol. You can click on that. And what that does is alert you when we’re going live.

And the cool thing about being on the podcast live is you can ask questions live, it’ll come up on a screen in front of me here. And if you’re asking questions, I can address those questions or address your comments as we’re going live, which is really, really cool.

So the other thing you can do is that link that’s in the chat, I’d love you to share that with perhaps other builders you think would get value from this podcast or your sub-trades.

One of the things that we noticed in Builders Business Blackbelt is that our builders share the ideas that we talk about in Builders Business Blackbelt every day with their sub-trades. And the upshot of that is it starts to improve the sub-trades business practices, their mindset, and that’s better for everyone.

So they work better together with the builder. They give the customer a better experience because there’s better communication between the sub-trades and the builder and the sub-tribes and other sub-trades. And it really has a profoundly positive effect on the efficiency and just the whole vibe and morale on a job site.

So really encourage you to grab that link, send it out to all of your sub-trades. Even though we’re specifically talking about builders and builders practices, there’s a lot of sub-trades that comment and send questions and comments to me that really enjoy what we talk about in the podcast.

We’re gonna be talking about shifting that mindset from builders, from the owner of a building business, to more of an entrepreneurial mindset.

Also got Q and A, and based on last week, we talked about the effective hourly rate. And so someone’s asked a question, how do I improve my effective hourly rate? They sort of sounded like a good thing, but was sort of at a loss as to how do they improve their effective hourly rate.

And also we’ve got an idea of the week.

*Transcription of the show”

So what is the difference between a business owner’s mindset and an entrepreneurial mindset?

Traditionally, when you are a business owner, unfortunately, you’ve been hypnotized by this thought process that no one cares as much as you and no one can do the job with as much detail or attention to detail as you.

So what tends to happen is you have this motion, this I’ll take this on, I’ll take this on, I’ll take this on motion. The buck stops with me. We start to hypnotize ourselves with these bizarre sayings. Like, if you want something done properly, do it yourself. How will you ever get any sort of freedom?

If you keep saying, I’ll take that on, I’ll take that on, I’ll take that on. And no one can do it as good as me. And if I want something done properly, I do it myself. Those thought processes are never ever going to give you any form of freedom. So you’ve got to be able to develop trust, and you’ve got to be able to develop systems and processes and reporting for those systems and processes.

So you can be confident that somebody else can do it. One thing I’ve said plenty of times, and I absolutely believe it is that you’re absolutely kidding yourself, if you think you are the best at anything, pretty much not everything. Most business owners think that they’re the best at everything in their business. I’m gonna challenge that thought process.

And I say that there are people around that can do everything better than you and a really successful business owner, and I’m using the term loosely is someone who can trust and build processes and systems and reporting to be able to give the responsibility for pretty much everything to somebody else.

And their only role is to support their team and help grow and nurture their team. So the business owner’s mindset is this, I’ll take that on. If I want it done properly, I’ll do it myself. That sort of thing.

An entrepreneurial mindset is one that their number one focus each day is to do something that will eliminate a recurring activity off their to-do list.

So things that recur on their list every day, or perhaps every week, their number one objective every single day is to get something or not to get something off their list, but to perform an action that will contribute to the eliminating of something off their list permanently.

So it might take a of days or even weeks to be able to eliminate something off your list permanently.

But if you break it down and do something every single day to make that happen, you’ll get closer and closer to eliminating something off your list. And so I, you’ve got to start to think leverage, as I said, you know, I know you think that no one cares as much as you or is as good as you. And it’s just not true.

So you’ve got to think that, is my time, do I get better leverage from my time by doing an activity myself or by investing time in figuring out how I can get some thing or someone else to do that activity.

And I suggest to you that there is a lot more leverage if you can teach five people how to become 8%, 5%, 1% more efficient each day. The leverage of that time that you’ve invested in teaching can be profound. I’m gonna skip ahead here.

I’ve written a note for myself here. Where is it? Maybe I haven’t written my note, but I remember writing it. How bizarre is that, I’ve written it. And I can’t, I can’t find it. Oh, there it is. It’s right at the end. I’ll repeat it right at the end. But talking about this leverage thing is if you can improve your output, your productivity by 0.0. So 0.0019% every day.

If you can do that every day, you will be 100% more productive, twice as productive. However you wanna put it in one year’s time by just improving your efficiency or productivity by 0.0019%. You’ll be twice as productive in one year just by that little fraction of an improvement every day.

So understand that small things that you can do every day that improve your leverage by nurturing your team by increasing your communication skills, your systems, your processes, getting things off your list to give you the opportunity to do more of that is really the key here.

Now in the past few episodes, you, if you’ve listened to them, you would have heard me talking about priority. And every Monday we ask our Builders Business Blackbelt members, what is your priority? And I’m very, very particular about the word priority.

I don’t ask, what are your priorities? I ask what is your priority? Because if I can get that thought process going and have people think about, well, what is the most important thing that I wanna accomplish each week? It can be very, very profound. And in fact, yesterday having a conversation, I was talking to one of our sort of new-ish Builders Business Blackbelt members.

And he was saying, this is so profound because there are things that I know that are massively, massively important. Yet I continue to give priority to the onsite work and the in the office administration work and thinking that I will do these really super important things and high leverage things later in the evening.

And so that thought process is teaching your subconscious that, that thing that you’re saying is really important, isn’t all that important because your subconscious plays or pays a rather particular attention to what you do, not what you say.

If every morning you say, you know, it’s important for me to get up and go and do my exercise. So I’m gonna set the alarm for five o’clock and I’m gonna get up and do my exercise or whatever.

And morning after morning, you hit the snooze button and you go back to sleep and you wake up and it’s too late to do your exercise. It doesn’t take very many repetitions of that before you convince your subconscious mind that this exercise deal really isn’t that important.

And then all of a sudden your subconscious isn’t on your side anymore. It’s on the side of making excuses and not getting it done and hitting the snooze button and all of those sorts of things that have been delivering you with pleasure, because it’s easier to do.

So we’ve talked about priority and what I would like you to do, or what I encourage you to do is create a priority every single day of even if it’s just a small block of time, 10 minutes, block out 10 minutes, turn off your phone, turn off your computer, put yourself in an environment.

And if you’re on site, go sit in the car and go around the block or whatever for just 10 minutes and put some effort into activity that is going to get rid of something off your daily action list permanently, right? As I said, you won’t be able to get rid of something every day off your list permanently, but you’ll be able to put some effort, some action into moving towards getting something off your list permanently.

And even if you’ve got something off your list, once every two weeks, even if it was once a month, you would get 12 things a year off your list permanently. And if those things happen every day or every week, what sort of an advantage of that for you? If they never ever turn up again, wouldn’t it be worthwhile?

And I’m like, I’m being super, super conservative here saying that if you did it and what I’m saying, and you put 10 minutes aside every day, and that accumulated something off your list, once a month, equating to 12 things off your list a year, would that 10 minutes every day be worth it to get 12 things that reoccur on your list every day or every week off your list permanently.

And then if you did it for two years and two years go in a blink of an eye folks, 24 things off your list, permanently. Look at your list now. Build a list that is reoccurring stuff. Stuff that you need to do every day or every week. You know, doing the invoicing or whatever the things are and build that list.

And imagine that list being 12 or 24 items less particularly if it’s shit you don’t like doing, imagine that how better you would feel, with how much more time you would have to work on other more high leverage things. If you got two dozen things off your list.

So my suggestion is is if you really want things to be different, if you genuinely want things to be different, you’ve got to make that this activity a priority, right? And go back and find the previous episodes where we’ve talked about that. A great place to do that would be on the YouTube channel. So I’ve put a link in the comments. You can go to the YouTube channel and there’s a whole bunch of episodes there.

You can just find the episode you want and go straight to it and learn about priority and the thought process behind priority. And it’s not about it’s, priority isn’t about importance. Well, it is, but the, what I’m talking about here and why I keep using the word priority is because I encourage you to find what your priority is and do it first.

That’s the real secret. It doesn’t matter a stuff if you know what your priority is, and you know that it’s important and you know the value of it, but you don’t do it because you keep leaving it ’till after you’ve finished all of your other stuff.

But when you do it first and you create the priority into small bite sized, digestible chunks, and you do it first, not only do you get a lot of shit done, you feel really terrific for the rest of the day.

If you do that priority first, you’ve got the sense of accomplishment instead of this sense of overwhelm and dread and frustration, because you don’t seem to be making forward progress. Just follow this one idea, and it can make a profound difference in your business. So here’s what I’m suggesting that you do.

Here’s the how to, for this idea. List everything that repeats on your to-do list. And if you don’t have a to-do list, bloody start a to-do list. You’ve got to have this written down. That’s the reason we have plans folks, right? You don’t build a house without a plan.

So have a to-do list for your day and start to identify what are the things that reoccur every day or every week on that to-do list. And then start by highlighting the things that you don’t like. Okay? Then when you’ve got a list of things that you don’t like on your list, I want you to ask this question and you start this process off by asking, can I firstly, dump?

So the four things are dump, automate, outsource, delegate, and they’re in that order because that’s the cheapest way to do things. Just not doing it at all is very much the cheapest way to fix it.

Then the next cheapest way is to automate something. ‘Cause once you’ve got the software, you don’t need to keep paying a person to do it. The next cheapest way is to outsource it. We’ll unpack each of these as we go. And then the last one is to delegate it to somebody who is in your employ.

So the first question you need to ask yourself is, can I dump this thing? And you might not be able to. It might not be able to be gotten rid of, but ask the question folks, because I know for sure and certain that there are many things, many, many things that you do every day or every week that you have convinced yourself are essential.

That if you never ever did them ever again, it would make zero difference. It’s just that we’ve habituated ourselves into thinking that they’re important. And we must do them because we’ve done them and done them and done them. And we’ve sometimes forgotten why we do them.

So at least go into the process of asking what would happen if I never did this again? Would it make a big difference in a bad way, or would it make a little difference in a bad way because you’re better off replacing something that will make a fantastic difference in a positive way with something that would make a little negative difference.

Like you’re better off taking on the little negative challenge and enjoy the benefits of the really positive, valuable thing, swapping them over if you had to choose between the two. So can I dump it? Next one is, can I automate it? There is a ton of things you can automate. You can use a CRM.

The one that we use is ActiveCampaign, and it allows you to set up all sorts of automatic reminders and emails that can go out with the touch of a button, to your prospects and your client, to nurture them and to have them really feel like that you’re communicating in an outstanding way.

You can set up reminders for yourself when this happens, it can send you an email reminder or a reminder on a computer, all sorts of amazing things you can do with a CRM. We get lots of great feedback with some of the builders or most of the builders in Blackbelt who use some sort of software.

So jump on Google and Google building estimating software Australia, and you’ll see a whole bunch of opportunities to be able to find some building estimating software in Australia. There’s some American ones that like they just don’t quite suit. So, you know, Google that building estimating software Australia, and see what you can find.

One of the Builders Business Blackbelt members again, communicated to me just the other day. They delivered that, they hadn’t been using any sort of software. They started using software. He said it was an absolute game changer on the amount of time it saved, but the customer absolutely raved about the detail and the quality of the proposal.

And it was a paid proposal by the way, he was paid to put it together. And so you can be paid to put your quotes together if you follow our system. But then if you’ve got some sort of software, you do a much better job in about a quarter of the time. You’re still being paid for it.

So you can do a better job in a shorter amount of time. When you start to use these sorts of ideas. The third one, so first one was dump. Second one was automate. Third one is outsourcing. Now we talked about this with our group a lot over the last little while. And there’s a bunch of Blackbelt members who are using virtual assistants to do all sorts of amazing things.

In fact, we had a, one of our daily momentum calls the other day, where one of the guys is now outsourcing his food. Okay? Joel is outsourcing his food. He’s found someone who will buy quality food and prepare food. So he doesn’t even have to worry about buying, going shopping, and cooking and all that sort of stuff.

And he’s getting really, really high quality nutritious meals. And that is one thing he’s outsourced. And he said that it’s significantly cheaper, not mentioning the time that it takes, but it’s significantly cheaper for him to get this done than dicking around doing it himself.

And guess what folks, when you do it yourself, do you buy the good stuff or do you just go for the cheap option or not the cheap option, but the fast option, which is takeaway and all that sort of stuff.

If you wanna really perform at the highest level, you’ve got to put the good fuel in. Get yourself somebody who can take care of that. And you might think, well, I can’t afford that. I don’t think you can afford not to do it because it can make a massive difference. So dump, automate, outsource.

There’s so many things you can outsource. And then delegate is the last one, because that’s the most expensive one, is delegating to somebody in your business to do this activity.

So that is the how to get the list, figure out the ones that you don’t like doing. And then ask these questions and then put a little time block each day into your prioritize daily action list to work on getting one of these things you don’t like doing off your list by either dumping it, automating it, outsourcing it or delegating it.

After you’ve done this with all of the things you don’t like doing, I believe that it will have so much proof and evidence and have received so much value by doing this and gotten so much more free time.

You’ll start to look at the other stuff that you’re doing, that you’ve convinced yourself that you need to do and start to outsource that or delegate that, or automate that as well, because with your new found free time, you can start to really work on some super high leverage stuff that will make you so much more profitable, you know, a profit-based business.

And you will become that entrepreneur where you are constantly looking to grow other people, help other people become more successful, and you’ll have a hell of a lot more time to enjoy all of the efforts and sacrifice that you’ve put in.

Q & A

Q and A! Somebody else asked the question, how do I improve my effective hourly rate? I’m working as hard as I can, they said, which is like totally relevant. So the key to this is everything that I just said. So that’s one of the things, is everything that I just talked about is the key to increasing your effective hourly rate.

Because the two things that make a difference to your effective hourly rate is how much you get paid, how much you get paid is based on your profitability. You can’t, if you’re already working hard, like the person who asked the question, I’m working as hard as I can, so you can’t put any more hours in.

You just need to be paid more for what you do, and you do that by charging more, but you also do it by becoming more profitable. How do you become more profitable? Two things, charge more, but become more efficient and effective as well.

So by working less and working more on the things that are, have the high leavers, the big long leavers, you become more efficient, you become more effective, you become more profitable. And that profit dividend goes to your pocket. Particularly if you learn ways through Profit First, to keep that money and make sure that you’re getting the profit out of your projects as you’re going along.

So the key to it is not working more, but working more in the high leverage areas and charge more. You do that by adding value. You don’t do it by just charging more. People who have tried to do that have lost work because they’re charging more but not adding value.

But when you understand the secret sauce on how to add more value from the prospect’s perspective, you can charge a premium and they don’t even blink. And when I say a premium it’s like, what is appropriate and not even, you know, charging too much, you are charging what is appropriate to cover your costs, to cover your intellectual property, your experience, all of that sort of stuff.

So charge more work less, but the real secret is to do both. And the last thing I would say on this is measure it because what gets measured gets managed. And when you can see that effective hourly rate just creeping up, creeping up, creeping up, guess what you wanna do?

And you’re driven by this subconscious that you wanna do more of it. You wanna expand it. You wanna increase it. And you start to learn about how these little tweaks can start to affect your effective hourly rate.

And you, it will become a focus of yours and you will start to become focused on efficiencies and making sure you’re adding significant more, significantly more value. So you can increase prices.

Idea Of The Week

The idea of the week is always look for opportunities to under promise and over deliver. Always look for opportunities to under promise and over deliver.

It is a problem in the building industry that the prospects and the customers biggest complaint is this over promise and under deliver experience that they all experience. And you need to flip that on its head.

You need to have a commitment and a focus on under promising and over delivering because your product is how you make your customers feel. It’s not the house at the end of the driveway.

It’s not the work you do. It is how you make your prospects and customers feel that is your product. And one of the things that you can do to make them feel really good is consistently under promise and over deliver. It creates confidence.

It creates certainty. It creates all of the emotions that they want and is memorable. All of those that’s the product, is how you make them feel. And that’s what they remember long-term is how you made them feel. They don’t remember the quality of your work. They remember how you made them feel.

So practice this daily, have a system, a measurable procedure that reminds you to put in your prioritized daily action list. Something that you can do to over deliver on something you’ve under promised with. Every single day, make it part of your business practice.

Takeaway & Jump On A Call

So what’s the takeaway.

The takeaway from this podcast episode is stop believing how it is, is how it is. You can change it. If you dedicate a small amount of focus and effort on the small improvements every day. As I mentioned earlier on that 0 0 1 9, or 0.0019% repeated every day of the year will make you a hundred percent better in a year’s time.

So it’s these small improvements, but you’ve got to have that commitment to do this every single day. So if you’ve been watching this live, love you to put in the comments hashtag live. If you’ve been watching it on the replay, please put in hashtag replay. And again, I’d love you to share that link.

So we’ve put a link in the comments, it’ll be in the YouTube description as well. And it is a link to the B-B-S-P that’s Builders Business Success podcast, YouTube channel, okay? And that’s where all of the episodes are, and will be in the future. And if you go there yourself, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell.

That way you’ll be notified when we’re going live. You can jump in, ask some questions live. It’ll be like a personal coaching session for you. Always and remember to share that link with your tradies and other builders who you feel would get value from that. And just remember we’re a construction coaching company.

And that is a very specific focus. And the reason I say that is because we used to be general business coaches. And since we became a construction coaching company, we’ve increased the pace at which people improve their businesses between four and six times, that’s 400 to 600% they are moving.

So what used to take with the traditional business coaching approach used to take a year, our members are now doing it in between two and three months, because it is very, very specific because we’re a construction coaching company focused in very specifically in that area.

You can make progress so much faster, and I encourage you to make that call book that call. There’s a link in the comment section below in YouTube. There’s a link in the description on the website. There’s a schedule a call button.

You should know by now how to get ahold of us, jump on it, have a conversation with us so we can figure out what the best pathway is for you to start to change your business, start to improve your effective hourly rate. All of the good things that we talk about it. You gotta know how to make it happen. In the first cab off the rank is identifying what is the barrier.

What’s the thing that is in your way, specifically have the conversation so we can figure out what it is and point you in the right direction that will suit you for where you are and where you wanna go. So I hope that’s been helpful. I hope you’ve enjoyed the podcast. Unusually, I’ve gone about six or seven minutes over the 30 minute allotted, but who cares? It’s our podcast.

We can go as long as we bloody like, but I wanted to make sure I get everything across to you in the episode, rather than sticking to a time. So, so be it, please jump on, have a chat with us. Let us help you move forward. Jump into the YouTube channel, subscribe to the YouTube channel, hit the notifications, give us a thumbs up.

All of that sort of stuff is helpful to spread this word so we can all together, make the building industry significantly better and get rid of the ugly bits that are no good for anybody.

And it’s not that difficult to do if we all start to do it and we’re here to help. So I hope that’s been helpful. I’m Mick Hawes from Builders Business Blackbelt. That is it. Bye for now.