Hey there, and welcome to episode 98. We’re this close to episode 100. Not sure what we’re going to do for episode 100 yet, but we’ll work on it. It might be a massive anti climax and we’ll just do episode 100 and go, this is episode 100, yeehaw. But we’ll work on it. We’ll see if we can make it a bit exciting. So this is Builder’s Business Success Podcast. If you’ve never listened to it before, if it’s your first time, Builder’s Business Success Podcast is really the construction business podcast, building podcast. I’m Mick Hawes, and I’d like to be your construction business coach or your builders coach. On today’s episode, what we’re gonna be doing is unpacking how rituals are linked to success. And you’ll learn how potentially just a minute of ritual can make many other minutes in your day far, far more valuable. And you’ll probably see that ritual could be one of the most or one of the best investments particularly of time that you can make in your day. We’re also going to hear from our resident now, from today on, resident expert on Tradies marketing, online marketing. Steph Campanella, she’s got tradiesgoonline.com.au. It’s actually tradiesgo.com.au, but the Tradies G-O, the G-O, the GO bit, that means go online. So in essence, it’s all about marketing, online marketing, effective marketing for Tradies. She’s an absolute legend at it, and she’ll be telling us her version of ritual and how valuable it is to us. So looking forward to that. Katie Crismale-Marshall, who wrote “Profit First For Tradies” was also going to be on the show as well. Unfortunately, she’s been struck down by the dreaded COVID 19, not feeling 100%, so she’ll be back with us hopefully next week. And we hope that she gets better soon.

The New Book!

Also, before we get stuck into the main show, just wanna remind you about the successful builders toolkit. It’s a book and it contains everything. Absolutely everything, from soup to nuts that we talk about in Builders Business Blackbelt with our builders. So this is all stuff that has been tested in all sorts of areas and been proven to work. And if you want a copy of it, what you can do is there is a QR code on your screen right now, which is gonna be a bit difficult.

I’ve just realized if you are on a phone, very hard to use a QR code on the phone when it’s, if you’re watching a podcast on the phone, but if you are doing that, all you you can do is in the description for the a podcast there’ll be a link there also to be able to go and get yourself copy of the book, it’s only 29.95. That includes your postage and handling and all of that sort of stuff. And normally, if you wanna free copy of this, normally I say at the end of the show, I’ll tell you where you can get one, but I’m gonna tell you up front, is if you don’t wanna pay, if you wanna free copy, we’ll give you a free copy if you jump on a telephone call with us so we can learn from you what your current issues and challenges are. And you can simply do that by jumping in the chat, there’s also in the ToolShed, there’s a section called Get Personal Help, you can click that and you can actually book a time. Tell us a little bit about your business but you can book a time to have this conversation with us so we can learn from you what your current challenges are. And the reason that we wanna do that is we wanna keep the ToolShed current. We wanna make sure that we are talking about and focusing on the things that are pressing on you right now. And we know for sure and certain that there are different things that are pressing on builders at the moment compared to two years ago, for instance, since the advent of COVID, all sorts of things have happened. Job timelines are blowing out because it’s hard to get labor, it’s hard to get materials. Material costs are going up. There’s all of these additional challenges that we didn’t have two years ago. And we wanna make sure that with what we’re putting into the ToolShed and what we even cover, for instance, on the podcast are relevant topics, and we need to talk to you and find out where you are with your business, where you wanna go, what’s in the way, and so we can be current and be able to find solutions and find tools and templates and checklists and resources to be able to help you with your current issues. So if you reach out to us through chat or through that button that I just showed you, and we have a conversation and you say, can I have me free book? Give us your address and we’ll send you out a free copy of that book just for helping us out stay current and clear on what the current problems are. So hope that makes sense. Look forward to speaking with you.

Transcription of the show!

What we’re talking about today is the power of ritual. And there’s been so many experiences that I’ve had over the years that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, that ritual is so important and can change your results in any area. And a couple of examples, I wanna give you a couple of examples, and they come from the sporting arena. My own experiences. So many, many moons ago before we were Builders Business Blackbelt, we were kinda generalized business coaches. And for whatever reason, I had a little bit of a left hand turn and got distracted with performance coaching with elite athletes. And so where that all started was through teaching time management. I got to know the coach of the Tasmanian Cricket side, the Tassie Tigers, and at that time. And he was interested in the ideas that I had for mental and emotional management and how that relates to performance. And so long story short, I ended up working with some of the individual players. One of the reasons that I didn’t stay with, working with team sports is that until and unless you have got that connection with the leadership group of a team it’s very, very difficult to be able to help the whole team. And so I did my best and I was just working with a few individuals within that team that saw what I was doing was valuable for them. One of them was a medium fast bowler, and he came to me just to ask some questions and we ended up getting together for a bit over a month. It was about five weeks or something like that. And he was averaging two wickets per game or match. And back then, I think it was called Sheffield Shield was called the Pura Cup. And it was a four day game, not a five day game, four day game. So he was averaging two wickets over a four day match. That was his average for the year up until this point. And there were three matches left in the series in the season. And I work with him for those three matches, which as I said was over a period of about five weeks. He was averaging two wickets per match. And so what we started off with was unpacking his ritual and we created a new ritual. What I know now is rituals need to be much more simple than what we created for this guy, ’cause that was a seven step ritual. Like it was a challenge just to remember all of the steps, but each step had a purpose and the upshot of this ritual and most of it was visualization and clearing the conscious mind. In fact, one of the parts of the ritual, one of the last parts of the ritual was, once he’d done all of the mental preparation for this next delivery. So we designed it from the time you pick up the ball, walk back to your marker and start to run in to deliver the ball, getting back to the marker was you do six steps, picking up the ball, getting back to here, six steps in the process. And then once it was at his marker and he would start the seventh process, seventh step in the process was to just visualize a blank A4 piece of paper because we had to get the conscious mind out of the way and allow what had been programmed into the body just to happen. Anyway, the upshot of that was he went from averaging two wickets for each match of the series or season up until that point, the very next match he got five wickets, which was pretty good. What was even pretty gooder was the match after that, he got 11, that put them into the final, which they lost by the way, but he got another 11. 11 for in the final. And apparently so I’m told, got into the record books as being the first player in the history of Sheffield Shield Cricket to get into double figure wickets in a final. So to me, that was one of my early experiences of how important ritual was, but also how important the quality of the ritual was. And that brings me to my second story, which again is a sports story. Didn’t wanna work with sports teams anymore after that, so started to work with individual sports people. I was working with Tennis Tasmania and then eventually Tennis Australia, and then all of the rest of the tennis, Tennis West and Tennis New South Wales and all of that. And through that eventually worked with a number of professional tennis players. Got a phone call one day from Sam Stosur. You know, can you come over to Florida and work, and that blew me away getting that phone call. That was amazing work with her for a number of months. She’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. And I’m not suggesting for one moment that the coaching that we did helped her win the U.S. Open but she was about 60 in the world and kind of stuck there for a while, and we did the coaching and she quite quickly went into the top 20. And then after that, and we’d parted ways by that stage, after that she won the U.S. Open, and has been an amazing tennis player for Australia. But I digress, I was actually working with some kids initially, just in Tennis Tasmania, and I was at their training session one evening with the coach, Mr. Jule, and I kind of butted in which he was really cool with. He was such a great guy. Simon Jule is a legend. He’s an amazing guy. And he invited me in and said, whatever you wanna say, you just say, you get involved with this. And I noticed doing an exercise where he would hit, they’d stand in line up the other end of the court and he would hit them a ball and they then had to hit it back to the back corner of wherever he would put this hula hoop. He would have this hula hoop and so the idea was that he’d say, okay, backhand. And I had to hit a backhand and land in the hula hoop, and now forehand and land in the hula hoop. And what I was noticing was that they were getting close. Like they were peppering the outside of this hula hoop. Sometimes they’d hit the edge of the hula hoop and every so often they’d get one into the hula hoop. And I thought the quality of this ritual, this practice ritual isn’t as good as it should be, in my belief. So I interrupted and I said, here’s what we’re gonna do folks. And I rattled around, and this is what inspired. I had a couple of $2 coins in my pocket and I pulled out a $2 coin and I put it in the middle of the hula hoop and said, whoever hits the two bucks gets to keep the two bucks and I just stand here and I could just keep putting money in, and whenever you hit it, I’ll just put another one in. And so, like not the $2 was a massive inspiration but it was a challenge for them, you know? And they’re competitive by nature anyway. So right, let’s go. And the amazing thing was, and what we learned through this process was, is if you’ve got this big target like a hula hoop, you kinda hit somewhere around it. If you’ve got a small target, like a $2 coin, you sort of hit somewhere around it. But because the target was so refined and small, and I’m not saying have small goals people, I’m just saying that the target was very, very refined, let’s say. And the amazing thing that happened as soon as we did that, the big majority of the shots are now going inside the hula hoop. The minority of the shots are outside the hula hoop, which was the case before, it was the majority were outside, the minority was inside. Now we’ve changed the focus trying to hit a $2 coin. The majority were inside the hoop, the minority were outside. No one hit the $2. So I get to keep my $2, but what a lesson, because of the quality of that ritual, the results became better. So what are your rituals, you know? What’s the quality of your rituals like, if they’re not giving you what you want in your business? And by the way everyone’s got rituals. You might think, well, I don’t have rituals. An example of a ritual in a building business might be, how do you talk to your team? How do you speak with your clients? And if you’re not getting the results that you want with the conversations with your team or with your clients, I suggest to you, it’s the way that you speak to them. It’s your communication skills. It’s how you prepare to have that conversation. In Blackbelt, we coach our guys how to prepare for a conversation with their team, how to prepare with a conversation with a prospect, how to prepare for a conversation with a client. And guess what? When that preparation ritual gets better and gets more refined, the quality of those conversations goes up and the results that you get from those conversations go up, because of the quality of the ritual. You already have a ritual but your ritual to speak to a team member or a prospect or a client might be, you don’t think of anything, you just go and do it. And that’s fine if you are getting the results that you want, but don’t be pointing the finger and saying, you know, my team don’t listen, my team’s hopeless. They won’t do this, they won’t do that. Or the prospects are bloody hopeless and all they want to do is get free quotes and get everything for nothing, and they don’t tell the truth and all that sort of stuff. And then clients don’t, they’d the same. They hold their cards, held. You can’t complain. You’ve gotta change your approach to get different results. And if you have a recipe which is a ritual, you can refine that recipe over time and make it better and better and better, which means your results will get better and better and better. Now, the next thing and I want to tell you about your rituals is how often you should use them every time, every time, every time, every time. And there is this law called the law of the farm. It’s one of the four laws of success that we used to teach all of the time. There were four laws and we just used to repeat them over and over and over. And one of them was the law of the farm. And the law of the farm is best explained by saying, if you get one cent and you double it every day for 31 days in a row, do you know how much you end up with? Well, the answer is $10,737,418.24. Get one cent, double it over 31 days, that’s how much you end up with. Which blows me away to this day. Like that is amazing. And the reason I tell you about that is that, if you continue, if you discipline yourself to implement, learn and refine your rituals, over time you’ll get better and better results like the curve, which is gonna be hard to look at if you’re just listening to the audio of the podcast. If you’re watching the video, I’m using my finger to show you an exponential curve, it sort of goes along flat. You’re doing it, you’re doing it, you’re doing it, you’re doing it. Not really getting many results, but after a little while, it starts to go skywood, like it goes. Rips up really quickly. It’s called an exponential curve. It’s compound interest. That’s what happened. And so if you’ve got a ritual, the more often that you do it with a focus of refining it, measuring it and refining it, it gets better and better and better results. And that’s the law of the farm. Now here’s the thing, and this is why we teach the law of the farm, is if you miss out on one day in your 31 days, turning one cent into $10,737,518.24. If you miss out on one day, do you know how much you get on day 31? You get half of that. You get 5,300,000. I didn’t memorize that other number, half of 10,737,000. But you get half of it. If you didn’t turn up on day 31, you only turned up and missed out on day 31, only turned up on day 30, you get your 5,300,000, right? But the same thing happens if you didn’t turn up on day four. You turned up on day one and I gave you a scent and you turned up on day two, and I doubled that for you. I think I may have forgotten to tell you about this analogy that if I said, come and see me every day for 31 days, and I’ll give you a scent on day one and I’ll double it every day you show up, that’s probably a critical bit of information that I left out before I started telling you this. But assume that that’s the case, on day 31 I’d give you $10,737,418.24, if you turned up every day. If you didn’t turn up on day 31, I’d only give you 5,300,000. But if you didn’t turn up on day four, the same thing happens. If you do the math, the same thing happens. You turn up day one, I give you a cent. You turn up day two, you walk away with two cents. You turn up on day three, you walk away with four cents, but you don’t turn up on day four, where you would’ve walked away with eight cents but you didn’t turn up, so you still only got four cents. So it doesn’t matter which day you miss out, it has the same impact down the track. And I want you to think about that when you are either choosing to, or choosing to ignore doing your ritual. One of the rituals that we have in, that we teach in our blueprint program is called the personal success ritual. It’s got four parts. It changes your day and every single person who’s done it sings its praises. And every single person who has stopped doing it after a while goes, “Shit that thing works because my days have turned to shit since I stopped doing it.” And it’s like, well, why’d you stop? It’s a weird thing. It happens. But you know, they soon get back onto it when they realize that. And so having this ritual and doing it every day makes a big difference to your day. And then it makes a bigger difference to your week ’cause it compounds. Then it makes a bigger difference to your month ’cause it compounds. But when you stop doing it stops the compounding. It stops giving you the value. And so I want you to remember that you need to turn up every day to get the compounding. You need to do your ritual every time, every time you’re about to have a conversation with a team member. Every time you’re about to have a conversation with a prospect or a customer or a supplier or whatever, you know? What is your ritual for success in these areas? What’s your ritual for managing profit first? If you don’t have a ritual, I have a ritual for managing profit first. I do everything in bloody order every time and it works, and it makes it fast and it makes it easy but it makes it successful. You’ve gotta have a ritual. And I just wanna share with you one last thing that I learned from Tony Robbins many, many years ago. He called it The Niagara Syndrome. And what he’s basically talking about is, he uses the analogy of we’re all floating down the river in our boats, and we’re all being propelled by the current. This current is the current events, the current trends, the current affairs whatever’s current, right? We’re all getting pushed along by that. And along the way, there are opportunities to get outta the current and do things differently because you know, Wal Disney would say, if you wanna be successful, look around and see what the world is doing and don’t do it, because if we do what the majority of people do, we get what the majority of people get. And generally, if you look around and see the results of our population just even here in the country. Financial success is not very good for the majority, relationship success is not very good for the majority, health success is not very good for the majority. So if we do what the majority does, we get what the majority gets. So if we are floating along the river and there is an opportunity to go in a different direction so we can be successful in a particular area, we need to take it. But to take it, it takes effort because the current is taking us straight down the river, and we need to go sideways to get out of that current and get into a different direction. But Tony Robbins says most people don’t do that. They’re getting pushed along by the current and the current affairs and the current trends and the current beliefs, until one day. They get woken up out of their slumber by this horrible noise. This incredible noise, this rumbling. And so they sit up with a start and go, holy shit, what’s going on? And they look outta their boat and they realize they’re about to go over Niagara Falls. And so at that point, what people tend to do is panic. You know, let’s start paddling. Paddling in a different direction. There are probably no exits at that point. The only exit is over the thing, so you’ve gotta paddle fully against the current. And most often the current is way too strong and it just takes you over the falls. And that fall, going over the falls could be, it could be a health fall. It could be a relationship fall. It could be a financial fall. It could be a business fall. But the opportunity to have avoided that fall happened many, every day as you were traveling down the river there were exits where you could have gotten out of the current and done things differently and got different results. So I want you to be aware that we are all in that analogy. We’re all floating along that river. And if you do what everybody else does, the majority does bang over the falls you go. But remember it takes effort. So I hope this was thought provoking. I hope this makes sense. I hope it’s starting some discussions within your own mind as to what you could do. What are your rituals? How could you improve your rituals? And if you want help, we’re here to help. As I said at the start of the show, more than happy to get into a conversation with you, find out where you are, what’s in the way, where you want to go so we can point you to the right resources. Those resources might be a paid resource or it might be a free resource, but we dunno until we’ve had the discussion. Plus we can find out what your current problems are. And we can give you a copy of this. We can send you a copy of that out just for having that conversation with us and helping us out to understand what your current problems are. See this whole current vibe in this conversation. So you can do that by just jumping in the chat and saying, “Hey, can we chat?” And we’ll go back and forth and we’ll figure out how to get onto the phone and when’s the best time. Or you can go to here in the ToolShed where it says Get Personal Help. That is an opportunity to get on a conversation as well. So again, we can assist you personally. So jump on and do that. Steph CampanellaNow, as I said, also at the top of the show and my page isn’t working because it froze. I’ve got one of these things. It’s called a reMarkable 2. It’s like writing on paper, but it’s digital and it’s wonderful, except it freezes or it goes into sleep mode, and I can’t turn the pages sometimes. So I’m onto it. As I said, we’ve got our resident marketing expert. And today, Steph, I asked her to about ritual. So she’s gonna talk to you about her ritual and her thoughts on ritual. And obviously in future episodes, Steph’s gonna be there and she’s gonna be talking about marketing and the mistakes and the challenges that most builders and trades based businesses have with online marketing, the mistakes they make, the way that they lose money, waste money, and don’t get the results that they want. So she’s gonna be an awesome, awesome help to us all in the ToolShed. But ask asked Steph about her thoughts on ritual. This is what she said.- Hey, Steph Campanella here. And today, mixed question to me is why successful people have rituals? And I guess my only measuring stick for this is that if I didn’t have my rituals and I didn’t have my structure in my life, I couldn’t get anything done. I mean, down to a tee, like we get groceries delivered on a certain day at a certain time and everyone’s gotta fill up the cart before that day. Otherwise your things don’t come like everything in my life is structured and every time we go away, there’s a spreadsheet. And if we’re going away, I know that I’m gonna get getting up and going for a swim or like I’m gonna know the whole plan because I wanna be able to attack the day and win the day, because I know everything about what I’m about to do, whether it’s a project for like work or if it’s my project, my life, which I like to, life is a project, right? Like you’re either coasting and things are just being thrown at you or you’re actually making choices and moving forward. So rituals 100%. You definitely need a ritual.

Wrapping Up

Thanks, Steph. So that’s her thoughts on ritual? I know you might be sitting there saying, you know, holy crap, you’re going away. I dunno whether she was talking about going away on a business trip, but it sounded to me like even a holiday she’s organized and you go, you know, I don’t want to have a spreadsheet for my holidays. I just wanna be flexible. I wanna be impulsive, you know? I just wanna be able to do what I want when I want. And that always reminds me of what Steven Covey would say. He’s the author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. And he would say, you know, if you wanna be impulsive, if you wanna have flexibility and in choice in what you’re doing at any given time, he said, “You’d better plan for it.” You know, which blows people’s minds. It’s like, that’s the opposite of what I wanna do. But I know for sure and certain that the people who don’t plan have far, far less flexibility in their choices of what they can do and what they can’t than people who do plan. I remember years and years and years ago, when we moved back to Tassie, we were living in Sydney, we moved back to Tassie, we bought a house by the water. We had a boat out the front and I was on the boat every day for nine months straight, go out and have a beer on it to go for a sale or we’d take the kids out and have dinner on it in the bay or whatever and it was great. And when there were really good days, I’d ring some friends up, who I knew owned their own businesses. They were business owners. And I’d say, hey, it’s a great day. Let’s go catch a fish, have some beers, whatever’s. You know, let’s take advantage of the weather. And I couldn’t find anybody to play with because these owners of businesses would say, “I’m made, I can’t get away, you know. I’ve got so much on and this and the other.” I’d say, but you are the owner of the business. You can decide when you do whatever, you’re the owner. No, man, I’m snowing under. I can’t get away, you know? And you know, I know these people and they just don’t plan. They don’t have a plan. They don’t have priorities. They don’t use Steph’s spreadsheet or whatever. They don’t have rituals. They just take it as it comes. They want to be spontaneous and deal with things. And as Stephen Covey says, “If you wanna be spontaneous, you better plan for it.” And so you need to have rituals. You need to have prioritizing, you need to have plans. All of those quadrant, two things. Things that are super important, but to have no sense of urgency, that’s where your time needs to be invested as a priority. So I hope this made sense. I hope it gets you thinking about your rituals and learning how to plan and prioritize and all of that sort of stuff because it will give you far more flexibility, far more time, far more choice, far more options, but it is a discipline. So you do need to invest some discipline into doing this, but the juice is absolutely worth the squeeze when it comes to rituals and so forth. So I hope that made sense. As I mentioned at the start, you know, please help us to help you. Let’s jump on a call and do that through the chat. You can do it through that link on the ToolShed. Love to be getting into a conversation with you. And we will be back, same time next Tuesday, 10:00 AM, live inside the Builder’s ToolShed. Hope to see you there. Please jump on live, make some comments, make some noises, tell us whether you’re liking what we are doing, whether it’s making a difference and how we can improve it. That would be really, really cool and would appreciate it. So I’m Mick Hawes from Builders Business Blackbelt. This has been the builders, what has it been? The Builders Business Success Podcast is the name of this podcast. And look forward to seeing you again next week. Bye for now have a great week.