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

I’m Mick Hawes, and I guess I’m your construction business coach if you’re watching this here podcast. The purpose of the podcast if you’ve never heard it before, if this is your first time, it is to address the common and often costly problems that most builders experience and how we do that is we have a group called Builders Business Blackbelt.

It’s a bunch of builders all over the country, and we talk about these sorts of problems on a daily basis, come up with solutions, share our experiences, testings, come back with feedback, and we’re constantly refining them. So the value for you participating in this podcast is you get stuff that has been tested and measured in all sorts of different areas.

It’s not just in the big cities or the regions, it’s all over the place. So we get the feedback from builders, just like you all over the place. And then our solutions are passed on through the podcast.

So the topic of this here podcast is just being aware of who you hang around with and the effect of who you hang around with, not only to your business, but to your life. And so we’re gonna unpack that and give you the opportunity to start to be a lot more consciously aware of who you hang around with and how much time that you spend with those different types of people.

Also, I’ve got a Q and A, and the question is around cashflow. And cashflow problem seems to be a very, very common question. We get asked this all of the time, so I will be answering it yet again, perhaps with a different flavor. We’ll just see how that goes.

And then of course, idea of the week.

But really, the main reason we have idea of the week is just so we can get a shot of the floating light bulb, because it’s fascinating.

If you are watching, as Matt is watching, and Brian is watching, very live. If you can just drop that in the comments.

So put #live if you’re watching live, of course, if you’re watching the replay put #replay in the comments. I am going to begin to recommend that you begin to watch both the live and the replay on YouTube, for the simple fact that in Facebook, it tends to be in amongst all of the different posts.

Whereas if you go to the YouTube channel, so you can go to the Builder’s Business Blackbelt, YouTube channel, all of the episodes are right there and you can pick and choose what you wanna watch and rewatch and go back to previous episodes that have been mentioned in other episodes that you watch. Of course, you can go to buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au, and go to the blog section, and they’re all there as well.

But they tend to be, obviously they’re not live because we upload them a week or two after we’ve gone live. But if you wanna interact, if you want to ask questions, what you can do is jump into the Builder’s Business Black Belt, YouTube channel.

I’d love you to subscribe to it, hit the notification bell so you’ll be notified whenever we go live. And in the link section, at least in Facebook at the moment, it will be in YouTube after we go live, there is a link that I’d love you to start to share, and it is a link to the YouTube channel.

And I’d love you to start to share it to other builders that you know that may get benefit from this, but also you can share it to your sub-trades, because if your sub-trades are starting to consume this sort of information, you’ll both be singing off the same page of the hymnbook.

You’ll have common understandings. I believe that you’ll start to work together better, and there’ll be just a raft of benefits by having your sub-trades listening to and consuming this sort of content.

It’ll just help the sub-trades understand builders better, and help builders understand the sub-trades better, and everything will work out better if we’ve got more people understanding these ideas.

*Transcription of the show”

As I said, the topic of discussion today is all about the benefit, and sometimes the destructive, or the destructive effect, hanging around with the wrong people or the right people can have on you and your business. Jim Rohn, who was one of my mentors, obviously from a distance I used to listen to his cassettes. That’s how long ago it was.

And watched YouTube videos later on in life, and had the opportunity to see him live one time in Sydney, a couple of years before he passed away, which was just an awesome thing. But he would always say that there are people that you can spend a couple of minutes with, but you can’t spend an hour with. And there are people you can spend an hour with, but you can’t spend, or you shouldn’t spend a day with. And there are people you can spend a day with, but you shouldn’t spend a week with and so on. And so the purpose of what he was saying is that you really need to be a lot more consciously aware of who you, and I’m gonna use the word invest, time with.

Because the bottom line is, and it doesn’t matter how resistive you think you can be, if you hang around with people long enough, they will influence you. And you’ve got to be asking yourself, are these people influencing me in the way that is best for me? And I’m not suggesting for a minute that you dump all your friends and the negative Nancy’s in your family or anything like that.

It’s just, we need to be a lot more consciously aware of who we’re hanging around with, for how long. And even when we are hanging around with the people that perhaps don’t help us think better, feel better, think bigger, believe in us. You know, if they’re the people that’s always sort of talking about the negative side of things and the people that can see the cloud in every silver lining.

We can still hang around with those people because they might be our good friends and they might be our relatives, but, as I mentioned, they can influence us. So you just need to be consciously aware of the conversation, something that we used to teach years and years ago and that’s all we used to teach. We used to have a seminar called “Coach Any Dummy To Succeed, Even Yourself”.

And really, the essence of it was your input determines your output, and how important it was to stand guard at the entrance to your mind. And you determine what goes into your mind because that determines your responses, your reaction, your behavior in the future. Because the influence, or the input that has gone into your mind over time is the stuff that you reach for to respond.

And that, you know, your response, and your action, and your behavior determines how things turn out. Another thing that was mentioned to me many, many moons ago, and it seems to have been mentioned many times, I’ve heard it said many times since, is that your net worth will be the average of the top five people that you invest or spend the majority of your time with.

So think about that. I know that back in the day when I was selling life insurance, yes, I did sell life insurance one time. You will wake up one day and think it’s a great idea to sell life insurance. It happens to everybody, and that happened to me. And so I went and sold life insurance for a couple of years, and it got me on this path, so I don’t regret it. I met some amazing people, Ian Segal, one of them, he was a sales trainer then. He’s still a lifelong friend and mentor.

And that’s what got me started on this whole personal development and mindset thing, was the training that I received at that time. But also the agency manager, one of the agency managers I was working for back then would say that he could tell how much a salesman was going to sell by how much they bought. And it’s a very, very similar thing.

So you could tell that if one guy sort of invested a lot in superannuation, he would sell a lot of superannuation. If a guy had a big life insurance policy on himself, he would sell a lot of life insurance. It was all about what you believed in and what you’re congruent, what you prioritized, that’s how you would tend to communicate with others.

And so understanding that who you hang around with more often than not can really, really influence you, I just want you to start to become aware of that. And as I said, it doesn’t mean your desert your friends and family, but it does mean you need to be aware of who is influencing you for the most part. Spending time with people also doesn’t mean that you have to know them, because there’s plenty of ways you can spend time with people. You can spend time with people like you’re doing now, on a podcast.

And there’s plenty of people that watch this podcast that I don’t know. And in fact, you can spend time with people that aren’t even alive, which is pretty cool, you know? Because of YouTube and all of those sorts of things, there’s lots of information out there from people, and you can go and spend time with those people through those platforms. People like Jim Rohn, so I mentioned him at the start of the show.

You know, I super encourage you to jump on to YouTube and watch Jim Rohn’s old videos, like the stuff he talks about is just timeless, and it’s absolutely incredible. Who were others? Zig Ziglar was another one. A big influence for me back in the early 90s, and again, I got to see him live before he passed away. He was in his mid 70s or something at the time when I saw him and he was just…

The enthusiasm and the passion that he had was just incredibly inspiring. Napoleon Hill, you know? “Think And Grow Rich”, he’s the author of that, and he’s the author of other books as well. Obviously not here anymore, but you can spend time with Napoleon Hill by reading his books or listening to some recordings.

And then of course, Wayne Dyer. Dr. Wayne Dyer passed away some years ago. Lots of great books, lots of great videos out there from people like him. There are people who are alive that you can listen to, you know, and you don’t have to know them.

Like, there’s Tony Robbins, or even Richard Branson, people like that who have incredible experience, incredible knowledge, and hanging around with them influences your thinking. If we go back to the coach any dummy days all we used to talk about, what your input determines your output.

And we used to talk about, what is input? Well input is the words that you use in your inner voice, that’s powerful. The words that you use that come out of your mouth when you’re communicating with other people, that’s input. What you read, what you listen to, that’s input. But also we used to talk about who we hang around with is also input. And the quality of your input determines the quality of your output or how things show up.

We do, believe it or not, have the ability to choose who we hang around with. I know that there’s a certain amount of time we perhaps need to hang around with people that don’t contribute to our course if you like, or, you know, the betterment of our course, or the direction you wanna go into.

But what we can do is stand guard at the entrance of our mind and not just be effortlessly influenced by people who are, you know, talking about all of the negative side of things and the pessimistic side of things, and talking about all of the clouds in the silver lining, so to speak.

To make things happen, and I think this is super important, to make things happen obviously you need to do actions, perform certain actions.

It’s all well and good to have aspirations and goals, but if you don’t act nothing happens. So we’ve gotta act. And often our actions and our choices of our actions can be influenced, and some times dictated by external circumstances such as other people.

And so quite often to make sure that we do what we know that we should do, and hands up those who have things that they know that they should do, but don’t, hands up who have things that they know that they shouldn’t do, but do them. And sometimes those things happen because of the influence of the people around us. They say, it’s okay, you know?

Everything in moderation, even if it’s just something I don’t believe in, you know? There are just some things that you shouldn’t do, like you shouldn’t consume mercury. Like you just shouldn’t put that in your body ’cause it’ll kill you.

So I don’t listen to the person who says everything in moderation is just fine, because even a little bit of mercury in moderation, it’s not good for you. And there’s a whole bunch of other things, arsenic perhaps, that you shouldn’t consume. And the same with your mind, there are just some things you shouldn’t put in your mind at all. And then other things you need to stand guard at the entrance to your mind before they go in, so you can make sure they go in with the right perspective so they’re valuable for you in the future. But we need accountability.

I find that we need accountability to make things happen. And there are three types of accountability; There’s self accountability, and then there’s like coach/mentor accountability, and then the third one is group accountability or peer accountability. And all of them have their benefits, I suppose. And all of them have their downfalls as well. So with self accountability, I guess the benefit is that it’s you, you don’t have to talk to anybody else about it.

You’re there all the time, those sorts of things. But the issue, the problems with self accountability, is it’s just you, you’re there all of the time, no one else knows about it. And so it’s easy to step away from a commitment if you’re the only one who knows about it. And so self-accountability is probably the weakest accountability.

Now there are freaks of nature, and I’m not one of them, who are amazing with their self-discipline and their self accountability. If that’s not you, okay, we need to move on to another form of accountability. If you’re not achieving what you need to achieve, it’s more likely than not that it’s all about who you’re hanging around.

If you’re not hanging around with the right peeps, it makes it very, very difficult for you to achieve what you want to achieve, if you’re not one of those freaks of nature that are wonderful at self accountability. The second is coach, or mentor accountability.

And that’s much, much better than self or personal accountability, because there is somebody else involved that can sort of give you a kick in the butt when you need it and remind you of what your commitment was and so on and so forth. And that’s great, depending on the relationship.

And I’ve found because I’ve been coaching for a long, long time now, that you can, as a coach become quite a lot less effective because the relationship goes on and on, and you start to get to know people more deeply and more personally.

And when that happens, liberties can be taken and people will expect you to understand that, you know, they expect you to understand or buy into their excuses as to why it didn’t happen or why they didn’t do what they said they were going to do.

So coach or mentor accountability is great for a while, but then sometimes you might need to get a different coach or a different mentor to make it work and make it worthwhile again. Because it does lose its power over time.

So in my experience, the thing for me being part of a group, and for me, I suppose, managing, coaching, and mentoring a group, which is the Builder’s Business Blackbelt, I can see the difference in people’s behavior when they engage and share with the group their progress, or their objectives and so on. It can make a real big difference. And so group accountability to me is just the best, it’s the best accountability for a number of reasons.

And some of them I can’t really explain, but it seems to be when we say that we’re going to do something to a group of people, even if that group of people don’t really hold us to account, like they’re not ringing us up and saying, you know, are you doing what you’re meant to be doing or anything like that? Just by making that commitment to a group of people, you tend to wanna keep that commitment, even though they’re not holding your feet to the fire, it just has a lot more power.

Plus, when you’re speaking to a group about your objectives, about your goals, about your projects, there’s just a whole lot more brains and experience that you can tap into and get a lot more benefit by talking to a group of like-minded people about your objective.

And it kind of works like a peloton also, being part of a group, it works like a peloton in a bike race, you know? There’ll be the guy at the front who’s pushing the most air and the people behind him use less energy.

And I used to ride bikes many, many moons ago and learned that you would reduce your effort to maintain the same speed by about 30%.

So you can go further as a group when people come around and take their turn at the front. But all of the individuals move faster as a group, so that’s really the power of a group and group accountability.

Quite often in black belt, we talk about this principle of lessons from geese, just Google, lessons from geese, you’ll learn a whole heap.

The reason that geese fly in a V formation is the same sort of principle as the peloton, but it’s a whole lot more efficient than a peloton because scientists tell us that the swans, sorry, the geese flying in a V formation can travel 70% further on the same amount of energy than a single bird flying by itself. And again, what they’ll do is take turns at the front and push most of the air for the group.

But there are other things in lessons from geese that are really valuable as well, which is that the geese behind honk, you know? They honk encouragement for the dudes at the front, you know, come on, let’s go. We’re doing a great job.

And so everybody is contributing, whether they’re in the group or at the front, but we all swap and change. And how that works out in Builders Business Blackbelt is sometimes some people are having a really great run and things are working really well, and it’s inspirational, and they’re encouraging with their inspiration to other people.

And then sometimes they’re not, sometimes they’re not having such a good time and other people will gather around them and encourage them, and they’ll take their turn at the front. And that’s the value of being part of a like-minded group with a similar purpose and similar experiences. The difference that I’ve found with group versus one-on-one has been incredible.

I thought we had a pretty good business back in the day when we were one-on-one general business coaches, we used to get lots of great feedback, but the difference between the one-on-one coaching program we had, and the group that we now have, Builder’s Business Blackbelt is something like in the vicinity, as soon as we went from one-on-one to group, the pace at which people would change their business and improve their business was about four times the pace.

So what it used to take 12 months with the one-on-one was taking about three months with the group scenario. Since then we’ve changed the process again, and we’ve got a very focused initial program that goes for 12 weeks.

Since we have been doing that, that’s kind of doubled the pace again. So it’s amazing what can happen when you are part of a group. So I really encourage you to stand guard at the entrance of your mind and start to determine who you spend time with and who you don’t, you know?

Start to limit the time that you spend with certain people and expand the time you spend with others. A couple of other people have joined us live. So Ruben said, “Mike Church .” I gave Mike a big shout out in the show last week. One of the best known and loved plumbers down in the Kettering, Oyster Cove, Woodbridge area.

He’s obviously picking up what I’m putting down here, because he hangs around with me every Friday morning with a bunch of other guys, and Brian Treston, and we sit around for an hour having a cup of coffee, solving all the world’s problems.

There’s hardly any left, like we do such a good job.

So I hope that made sense to you, be aware of who you spend time with. So Mike, if I don’t answer your calls from now on you’ll understand why. So what I’d love you to do, if this made sense and you want help with this, you know, if you’re looking for a builder’s coach in particular, that’s what we do.

And we’ve got a group of people that are just like you, that are established builders, and there’s potentially a pathway for you to join a group where you can benefit from the speed and rate of change because of the people in that group’s experience and so forth.

So all you need to do to find out a little bit more about that is there’s a link in the description, there’s a link in the comment section in Facebook. You just need to hit that link and organize a quick chat, and we can point you in the right direction based on where you are, where you wanna go, and what’s in the way.

Q & A

Question, or Q and A is, how to overcome cashflow problems. I think the best way to address that is have a mindset shift in relation to cashflow problems.

Because I think if you speak to Mike Michalowicz, and hopefully we will be speaking to Mike with the group within, a group in black-belt in the next few weeks, it’s gonna be a bit exciting. He’s the author of “Profit First”. He basically says you don’t have a cashflow problem, you have a cash management problem. It’s nothing to do with the cashflow.

And the difference between the two is when you keep saying you have a cashflow problem, you’re giving away responsibility, you’re giving away accountability for your financial situation, because it’s a problem external to you. It’s a cash flow problem, it has nothing to do with me. But as soon as you start to think, I have a cash management problem, and who’s the manager of the cash?

Well, I am. Now we have to start to take personal responsibility about the measurement and the management of our finances, and the financial decisions that we make. And I really love “Profit First” because it causes you to make the right decision every time. It’s not the easy way out, but it’s the right way.

And after a little while, it becomes both the right way and the easy way, the decision is the right decision, but it becomes the easy decision if you’ve implemented the “Profit First” process into your business. If you haven’t, get a copy of Mike’s book, “Profit First”.

Or you can get a copy of Katie’s book, she’s been on the show as well. She’s an Australian accountant, and she has been trained by Mike and has modified the “Profit First” system to work in the Australian tax system and for trades based businesses as well.

Because “Profit First” isn’t exactly perfect for a trades based business because of the way that the income comes in sporadically, and sometimes there’s big gaps. But Katie Crismale-Marshall, or Crismale, Marshall, I must pronounce it correctly. “Profit First For Tradies”, get a copy of that and you can learn all about how to implement “Profit first” into your business.

Basically it’s all about what gets measured, gets managed, plus you’ve got rules to follow. Like it’s not about just measuring it because if you measure it and then keep doing the same stuff, nothing changes.

But if you’ve got rules to follow and you’re measuring it, and you’re making those right decisions, based on that process it will make a massive difference. And you’ve got to understand that the common approach isn’t always best, you only need to look at most trades based businesses and most builders, very few are genuinely financially successful, very few.

We’ve got a profit first professional, so when people join Builder’s Business Blackbelt, we personally invest in them and we pay for them to go and have a financial health check. And we’ve been doing that for a number of years now and not one builder has been making profit according to “Profit First”.

They certainly do afterwards, after they’ve seen the process and they’ve implemented the process and a little bit of time has gone by, they start to make profit. They start to manage things differently. They start to make the right decisions automatically, and their life changes.

But you’ve gotta implement this process first. And looking around and copying what everybody else is doing just isn’t working folks, because there are very, very few trades based businesses or building businesses that are profitable at all.

Idea Of The Week

The idea of the week is, I’m wearing them. It’s these things here. One of our past guests on the podcast, James Swanwick and his brother, has a company called Swannies, and they make these here glasses. Now, these ones allow me to see the computer in front of me and all of that sort of stuff.

But the orange in the lenses takes away the white light, or the blue light in fact, from computer screens and these lights in front of me, and all that sort of stuff, and reduces the strain in the eye. So these are good for wearing during the day, but you can also get others if you don’t sleep too well.

And sleep is absolutely critical to the level of your performance, the quality of your decision-making, all of that will contribute in a massive, positive way to the success of your business. You’ve gotta get quality rest. And so you can wear these if you do a lot of computer work and it prevents eye strain and all that sort of stuff, but others you can whack on, and you can use these as well.

You can whack them on a couple of hours before you go to bed, if you’re watching telly or your screen of some way, or even the little white lights in your house, it gets rid of the blue light from the house and the green light, some of them as well from the light spectrum, which changes your biochemistry and puts you in the appropriate biochemistry, ready for sleep.

If you got all of these lights and TVs and everything going just before you go to bed, that’s creating the biochemistry of being awake.

So if you’re not sleeping properly, it could be simply because of the amount of blue and green light that is going into your eyes, just prior to going to bed. So have a look at Swannies. There’s a few other companies that do them as well, and it can really make a difference to the quality of your sleep if you’re finding that tough.

Takeaway & Jump On A Call

So the takeaway, I always like to have a takeaway for the show. And I think the takeaway for me in this show is the majority of our business and our life problems are of our own making. I absolutely am convinced of that, the majority of them.

And if we work to fix or prevent these problems with the glasses, right? With “Profit First”, with dictating, or deciding, or controlling, determining who we hang around with and how we allow the information that we internalize into our mind, it has a preventative process.

And a lot of the problems that people experience over and over and over and over, they disappear because you’re taking a preventative approach Rather than dealing with the problems, what if we prevented them from happening in the first place.

But if we do that, we’ve then got more time and energy for the other problems that aren’t of our doing, and we can manage them a lot better rather than being in this sort of management by crisis mode. And we’ve got a lot more time to help others too, if we’re not dealing with our own self-imposed problem. So think about that. And we’d love to help you do that.

As I said, I’d love to get on a conversation with you to find out where you are, where you wanna go, what’s in the way, so we can point you to the resources or give you some options that are going to help you have the business that you wanna have, have the life that you wanna have, and eliminate many of the common and costly problems that builders experience in their business. We’ve been doing this for a long time.

We’ve got a group of amazing builders that are more than happy to share their experience, their resources, their tools, and what I mean by their tools, not their hammer and nail bag, obviously, but the tools that they use to run their businesses. In fact, that happened just yesterday in a conversation.

I had a wonderful bit of feedback that came to me this morning, where we had one of our daily momentum calls yesterday. Somebody asked a question, somebody else said, I’ve got all of those checklists, I’ll send them over to you right now.

That was done this morning. The dude was just blown away with the benefit that he got from just one comment where somebody else says, I have that, you can have it, sent it over to them. And it just saved them hours and hours and hours per week, just by grabbing something that’s already pre-made by somebody else and implementing into their business.

Again, the value of being part of a group, a like-minded group that work like a flock of geese, or like a peloton in a bike race. So I was just distracted there because Matt just put a comment in, he said, “That dude be me.”

So Matt’s watching live, he’s one of our Builders Business Blackbelt members. He was the guy who asked the question and a lady, Sheree, sent some checklists over to him and he gave some pretty amazing feedback, how beneficial that was.

So the last thing I’d love you to do, is there is a link in the Facebook comments, and it will be in the YouTube description as well. And it’s the YouTube link, and I’d love you to grab that and share it, share it around to your sub-trades, share it around to other builders who would get value from listening to this podcast.

So they can hit that link, they could go to the YouTube channel, they can subscribe, they can hit the notifications, I’d love you to do that as well. Hit the notification button so you get to know when we’re going live and jump on YouTube and participate in the podcast every week, live with us on YouTube.

So I hope this has been valuable, as I said, I’d love you to jump on a call. If you go to buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au, there’s a scheduler, a call link there. There’s links in the comment section, there’s links in the description on YouTube if you’re watching it there. Hit the link, book a call, I’d love to talk to you.

Particularly at this time of year, I know it’s kind of counterintuitive, I don’t wanna know anything right now. I think having a conversation with us right now coming into this Christmas madness will be the best conversation you could have in many a year. So looking forward to having that chat with you.

That is it for this episode of Builders Success… What is it? “Builders Business Success Podcast“, that’s the name of it. I know what I’m doing. I’m a professional. As I said, I’d love to talk to you, we’re a construction coaching company, that’s what we do, that’s what we love to talk to you about, hit the link.

I’ll talk to you again next week in next week’s episode, 10 o’clock Sydney time, Facebook, YouTube, every Tuesday. I’m Mick Hawes, Builder’s Business BlackBelt. That’s it. Bye for now. See you next time.