Transcript: All right, welcome to this week's edition of the 10x business owners mastermind group call John Pyron. Your host, the business doctor, and this is the third Monday of the month. So we're talking about operations and service delivery. And prior to starting call me and the group of people that are on here live, when we're talking about networking groups, specifically the tip, which is very similar to BNI, and specifically about this guy on the East Coast, that really has nailed down a mentoring process. And so it fits right into our topic today, because there's 212 chapters nationwide, almost 5000 members, and this guy has seemed to crack the code in attracting people giving them to a meeting and converting them into new members. And it's a process, it is a system. And so when you look at business processes, usually when you're first starting out in business, you just want to survive, you want to create money, and, and you don't care how much out how many hours it takes to do it, you want to create money and and that is your number one goal is to survive. Once you've gotten your income needs, that could vary to be $60,000 a year, it could be $150,000 a year, it's whatever that business owner has decided this is the income that I need to have to where I never have to go back to work for someone else. That's usually the first milestone. The next step is operations and service delivery. It's okay now that I know how to create money now that I know how to market my business now that I know how to generate leads and convert those leads. I have proven to myself that if I get a lead, I can walk them through a process and get them to give me money no matter what type of business you have. Okay. gratulations if that's you, because you have figured out the number one problem that most business owners have, the number one reason that 85% of all small businesses fail in the first five years is they can't figure that piece out. And they run through their savings. They run through the money. I have a guy that we're closing escrow on the sale of his business this Friday. He started this business in June of last year, took us two mines hired me to help them start the business been working with him ever since. And but he didn't he didn't want to he only wanted me to help him in sales. They want to help me, let me help him in any other area of the business. Which he's now looking back and going that was a huge mistake. Because he invested well over $250,000 and we're finalizing the sale on that business for $150,000 This week, because the wife said I'm retiring. Moving on going now. Now, he's hired me to sell it in some getting into the melon, oh man, you know, this is this right here, this right here, this right here, this right here, this right here really needed to be fixed and done correctly. This is well over $55,000 a month. But by the because of the inefficiencies of his processes of his systems. The net profit on that is extremely low. And so there's some things that you'll want to as you grow your business to remember that some day unless your whole goal and there's and I want to preface what I'm about to say there is nothing wrong with being a sole proprietor, a solo entrepreneur for the rest of your life. Okay, just just so I'm clear, okay. Challenges if something happens to you. The music stops Okay, so I have a very dear friend of mine, I'm not going to get into the name in but he has been in very high level ICT D for many, many years. I personally mentored him and coached him as a salesperson when I used to train salespeople. I turned into him into a badass sales engineer. Okay, he worked for an IT comp it managed service company. He was an engineer. He wanted to learn sales because you can either make money fixing computers or you can not only fix computers, but you can make even more money If you know how to sell, so I taught him how to sell, which ultimately made him number one in the company, which ultimately led Cisco to come and completely recruited his butt away. And then ultimately, Salesforce. But I kept telling him along the way, you need to get all this stuff out of your head, as to what you do when you give a lead, what you do, how you contact them, what you do, when you set the appointment, how you set the appointment, what you say, what the process that prospect goes through, to ultimately say yes, and the easiest way, if you have been in business, is to go back and look at the last 10 to 15 customers that you have, that you would like that you want more of, and reverse engineer from right now all the way to the back to the point where they they discovered who you are. Okay. And it's gonna leave a fingerprint. This is this works. This is like the number one strategy for real estate and mortgage is you have a buyer fingerprint. So an example would be if I got a lead, somebody wants to buy a home, somebody wants to sell a home, somebody wants to get a mortgage. My very first question, if I'm a realtor is tell me about the last home you bought. Tell me about the home that you bought. I mean, you're in a four bedroom, two and a half bath house two stories on a half an acre lot. Tell me about that process? What made you buy this home? What did you like about that home? You know, and I'm going to have them explain to me exactly what the process they went through to buy that home, because they're going to tell me exactly how to sell to them. Okay, how to walk them through the process, because they are have already been through that process, they obviously liked the process because they bought same thing with it. Same thing with the handyman, is you go back and you look at all your clients you've ever had, and reverse engineer the process. And the nice thing is, is if you just take this one little system, this little system will make you a ton of money. Okay, because every single time you get a client, you just reverse engineer that process. And you're gonna find that as you grow as you change over time, your process and your system is going to get tighter and tighter and more converting. The more you do this, is once you have the code once you know what the code is. So okay, how many people can I add to this, I was talking to my counterpart, Nancy, who by the way, is volunteered to be a guest on next week's call. And I'm going, I trained her to go from being real estate attorney to business consulting. And so next week, and in very specific niche, like she is a genius when it comes to operations systems. But more importantly, now that I'm the business owner, now that I actually have money, how do I maximize that money? And how do I keep that money. So she's going to do a whole training on business finance. So you definitely don't want to miss that. Definitely listen to the recording, but it's a process and it's a system. And so every single thing that you do in your business, always be thinking if I get hit by a bus, I get hit by a bus. If I went away for three weeks, if I went to Vacation for three weeks, you know, is it what aspects of my business has to run without me? Otherwise, if you stop the music stops, right? So personal story that I'm opening up for live q&a, as I've been on the hunt, specifically for one or two business partners, not employees, business partners. I've had three very actually 1234 Very successful partnerships. And so I'm like, why am I going to reinvent the wheel I can I can implement this funnel. It's on my wall here by myself, me myself and I with some employees and subcontractors, and at the end of the day own 100% of it. And I've been totally fine. What I found for me personally, is that's been on that wall for two since prior to COVID. Okay, and And I was already going down the road of implementing it COVID Hit and I'm like, I don't need the I really don't need to implement. But I am well, fully were aware of this. If I leave this house, something happens to me, all the music stops. Okay. And to me, that's unacceptable. This is the first business I've ever had in the last 25 years that completely depends on me. And so I'm like, You know what? Preston's back in school kids are back in school, that to foreign exchange students, they're back in school. Now's the time. So when found two business partners, I've been talking to him for a while we're forming a new company this week. And we're gonna build that funnel. By the time that funnel is said and done to me about 25 to 50, coaches, and consultants in all different disciplines where nothing depends on me or any of the other partners. The reason I'm bringing on partners, and here's the system, by the way, I will bust my ass a whole lot more. Okay, and do things that I really don't want to do, if I have a good solid business partner that I have respect for. Okay, the only other flip side is if I go out and hire a W two employee that will put a fire undermined by as well. But I would rather do it with a business partner. Because Adrian has incredible digital marketing skills. Chris is the other partner he's as incredible operational skills and getting things done. The three of us combined the Dream Team, when it comes to this type of consulting business. In the real estate business, right, there's a couple of ways you can do it. There is a you can duplicate yourself through other agents, if you're relatively nice is going to start your own brokerage. And so you can recruit other agents, you can also go and maybe become an exp realtor, build your own group, Kevin and Michael work together. So you can go and find another mortgage person, there's so many different ways that you could partner and, and really leverage each other. Right. And so I'm just one of those systems that I've used for years is divvying up the work responsibility. So that way, a year from now, which alone is going to probably only going to take six months to a year to have the business in such a way where if I am gone for three weeks, one, or both of my business partners who show up to this call, and rocket, like you guys will get a tremendous amount of value out of both of those guys, because they're both serial entrepreneurs, and they're both very successful at what they do. Okay. And so that's my, my two cents for today, as far as operations and systems is look at, okay, what is the next thing that needs to be duplicated in your business that will give you the most leverage and increase in revenue without you actually having to do all the work? Okay. So with that said, Any questions, comments, suggestions about what we've talked about? Or do you have something specific nonrelated? Go ahead, Josiah, do you want to talk about today? Hey, yes, just I have no more handyman of the group here. And I was just thinking about the the ways for myself specifically, to get ahead, in that respect of what you were just talking about. In my mind, I would either need to train someone, like my partner who I can do some like medium sized projects with how to do my quotes, because I have a specific way that I run everything from, you know, what I've found in my district to, you know, the not just the sales tax here, but my overhead and what I need to, you know, accomplish and Loomis and then the discounts that I can offer to my clients for multiple kinds of projects. So there's a lot that kind of goes in, you know, like you would know, like, you know, you know, building any business when you're starting from the beginning, how do I maybe not feel like I'm just kind of starting from scratch trying to get someone else up to date on everything that I've had to learn, so that, you know, I can maybe have them, put in some quotes and schedule them out and maybe I go on vacation for, you know, a week or something like that is there. Yes. Great question. So, if you pull this straight out of McCalla Watts his book called clockwork especially The big one, the one that just got revised. In that as a handyman, I would be investing in like a GoPro. Okay? And part of the agreement that you have a customer sign before you start work is releasing, you know, giving you authorization to use that GoPro when doing your work for them. Okay, now obviously, you want to wipe out any personally identifying parts of that video, right? So getting a good solid video person is gonna be key. But now all of a sudden you you're able to train, you're able to video you doing the actual work and walking people through, you know, walking yourself through the process, you're basically creating a training module, if you will for your company. So that's one thing. The other thing is using an app like otter, right, OTT II are using an app called Brain toss. And then having a Zoom account. Now, unless it's going to be longer than 40 minutes, a free Zoom account will suffice. And so when you're sitting down to do your estimates, you're sharing your screen. And with yourself, you're hitting a record, and you're walking through the process of doing an estimate. You're walking through the process of doing a quote, okay, it'd be a big pain in the beginning. But once you get the process down, you're done. Next process done. Next process done, there's only so many processes or systems that you're going to need. Put it in a Google Drive folder categorized in the four key areas of business marketing, sales, operations, service delivery, admin, and finance, start dropping that content in there. Don't worry about editing that, right. The only thing that you really need to edit is going to be the GoPro video stuff that you do. Okay, so now down the road, when you do want to bring on an apprentice. You already have all that stuff done. Okay. The flip side, okay, and there's there's actually a really solid book out there written by David Ginny's called system ology. So a whole culture that got released last year. Because Michael Gerber is his mentor, and the E Myth is really geared towards an established business. It's been around for a while. system, ology takes it from startup, like brand new. I just started my business just got my business license, to the point of being completely independent of your business, or your business, being completely independent of you is worksheets and all that stuff in there. But really, if I was there, give you a revert night, a lot of everybody on here, except for maybe Jack is old enough to remember, let me give you the Reader's Digest version. Right. And that is, well, maybe Michael is not old enough. Hey, I still had those. I know what those are. Yeah, back in the day, it was the Reader's Digest version of, of the book. And that is document as you go, especially when you're in startup mode. Because one day, you're gonna want to have somebody do that. And the thing that the number one problem that gets in the way of an a solo entrepreneur hiring somebody is there, they usually don't hire until they're completely maxed out. Until they're working 5060 hours a week, and then just the thought of bringing on somebody becomes a few let me get this straight, dude. Do I have a root canal today? Or do I have open heart surgery? I mean, either one sounds good. But I'm kind of stuck now. Right? Don't wait. Right? Do it now. Get your processes and systems done now one of the time. And when you do go to hire somebody, it's not this big pain in the butt. That you think oh my god, I have to take out now how am I going to do all the work and keep the business going and make the money and now I'm responsible for an employee and I gotta take my time to train them. And I already work 65 hours a week, 70 hours a week. I might as well just do it myself because nobody can do it better than me. Right? That's the big trap. So that would be my answer as their seniors. Okay, different things that you want to implement. And before anything else on that one before we want to jack Thank you, Jack. Song along the lines that I did a big project. This is kind of Not this is one I raise my hand for. But that's funny. So I did a project I had probably a dozen people have a mother in law's house yesterday. So my dad owns a property. So I grew up pretty handy. I didn't need to do a lot of housework. So I divvied up people based on their skill level and what they could do. And so I tried to put people unfortunately, what I knew I can fix too. So if I had someone who wasn't skilled enough, they could do most of the way, right, it wasn't so wrong, that I can fix something. So I went and redid the whole basement floor over the day and a half. So, which was a lot of fun to do actually enjoyed that project. And then, you know, I see like some little small things that are missed upstairs. I'm like, You know what, that's what I get, you know, they're good enough. And I could, I tried to not beat him up. Why did you put the dropcloth down? No, I just kind of go the other way and say, Hey, listen, this might help you next time. So I have some of these things. So try not to beat up people on projects. And one thing I was also taught, was never be afraid to teach someone to become better than you at something. And you might show someone something. And they're like, like I like I'm really good with spackle. But there's this one guy I met who was almost a surgeon, and I was doing liquidation. And we had to do, we had to repair the whole building this is in. This is going back 10 years. And I want to say we were in Hamilton or something. And we had to patch every single hole in the wall. And I showed this guy a little bit of what I was doing. He was a machine, he was perfect. He's about four feet tall. So he needed a ladder. But he was absolutely great with everything he did. The other so mad enough, though, and actually thought this is interesting, because I've been listening to this recently to is when you're talking about also the people that you're able to work with, with these processes. What's important is Respect, respect and trust. It's not just that you like someone, when it comes to professional, you don't want to not like someone but respect and trust and to be a much more fundamental and higher on the list of priorities than whether or not you'd like someone, are they able to do the job without it becoming a problem is the system in place, you know, maybe maybe they are too sarcastic for you, but you don't care, they get the job done. But respect and trust is really important when it comes to systems. Do you trust that they can go through this system? And I do actually no, you said E Myth might be a little advanced. But I do think about the E Myth all the time about am I doing something that can be replicated to so if I find something that works really well. Even the other day I do with literally everything, whether it be work personal life, if I'm doing something more than one time, I'm gonna look at can I improve this every single time I put down a floor and I was trying to see is there a better way to get these tiles in place than what I was doing and continue to improve on the process? Even for something I've done before? Is there a new tool? Is there something that makes my life easier? Both ways? I just look at that every way. And I think as I just talked about, I think I actually got this from as a kid playing video games. Because you know, when you couldn't save a video game, you had to figure how to finish it. So you have to figure out which pattern you things you can do. So I do still know readers that I just grew up with a basic Nintendo at least. Not quite Atari. I know what it is. But I didn't have one. It wasn't the newest, newest, greatest thing. But that was my two cents. Trust. Weird transition age, I kind of had a typewriter too, when I was a kid, and then, you know, obviously that went away very quickly. Yeah. Any anybody else have anything they would like to go over today? How's everybody's business plans going? Okay, me actually questions that you can ask yourself is ask yourself this, are you on track with the action items in your plan for this month. Remember, action items in the one page plan or monthly strategies or quarterly objectives or annual mission very rarely changes. It's just what you do. Vision gets updated every year. Because it's a three to five year vision or 10 year vision. Even if it was a 10 year vision, like I have a client that's been able four and a half years together now they've hit every single objective they've ever set. Because every week I hold them accountable to their action items and their plan. Every quarter we adjust their strategies. Every year we adjust your objectives. They've gotten so confident now that they set a tenure objective for 102 employees and multiple locations. So you can see that far out well. Every year. It goes from a tenure plan to an nine year plan to an eight year plan to you know, so forth. Once it gets down to a five year that we reset and we add backup five more years. So the question comes down to I'll ask you guys the same question I asked every single one of my one on one clients is number one, are you still committed to your vision statement? And the answer is yes. or it's no. Now. Most of the time they say yes. So my next question to them is okay. Are you on track with completing your action plans? And your one page plan this month? Well, no, I'm not. Okay. So let me go back and ask the question, when are you 100% committed to your vision statement? Yes, then two things, one or two things has to happen. Either that vision statement has to change and lower itself to match your activity. Or your activity has to rise to a different level to match your vision. But and I tell him this, when I'm in a one on one situation with him, I go, I don't want my job is to prevent you from lying to yourself. Okay, so if you can't get your activity have to match your vision statement that we need to lower the vision statement to match your activity. Okay, so how about this? How about we just draw a line in the sand today and call it a clean slate and between Now in our next meeting next week, you get your activity up to match what you say you want. Okay, and so when in a one on one setting, that's what I do now. The reason I'm sharing this with you is, take a look at each one of you over this next week. Take a look at your one page plans. Next Monday is our final meeting of the month before we go into September. So now's a good time to get your plan updated and come prepared next Tuesday. To ask questions you are more than welcome to ask any question you want on this call about your one page plan and get mastermind you know, information from multiple people on this call about your plan. Right that's the advantage that you guys have over what my own one on one clients don't have. Okay, so go for Jack. So one question while I'm working my plan and continue to find that I was wondering what would you say if you want to if I want to keep reaching for bigger and higher clients, so bigger size clients? What are some ways that you can because I heard an interesting thing recently that a client had a one of his clients made up 50% of his business when he first signed him up that this point that guy same client only makes up 5% So keep searching for for Wales because the situation of ours is hard to reverse engineer or the owner ran into when the craps table decade plus ago. And they had 12 people now that just blew up. So it's hard to replicate that one unless I have a gambling problem. But for other ones trying to find larger clients how do you keep looking and searching and keep trying to jump up to the next level? So I'm going to open up a whiteboard here. And while it's opening I am going to and actually this applies Yeah, this would apply to everybody here. So hold on just a second here. So in your case we're talking now actually probably your level let's just say 10 to 50 users will be considered small business. And this is relative to everybody. Okay. This would be this in your case is going to be we're still sticking to what Microsoft's definition is going to be this right here like this whole whiteboard thing All right, anyways, you get the gist? All right, then we're talking, let's get up here. This is going to be large, which is going to be 250. Plus. The difference here is this small business. That was a quick, fast sale cycle. Okay? So in the real estate business as long as I can get somebody qualified, if I'm bernisa, and I find somebody a mate, that's a renter, my conversation is going to be like, Hey, how would you like to actually own your own home at some point? Oh, yeah, we just don't, most people don't even know how to even do that. Right? Or they don't think they qualify, or, you know, something's happened. It's like, you know, I've only connected with Michael or Kevin, hey, there were friends of mine during the mortgage business, let me just have you meet with them, and have them get you pre qualified, once they get you pre qualified that we can talk about your buying, but it might take a year for you to get pre qualified, I don't know. There might go to guys, right. And, and that can happen like that. Once you get to pre qualifying now I'm going to go and sell them a home. Because there are first time homebuyer and they're probably not going to go after a 500,700 50,000 $1 million home. Okay, the larger the deal, the longer the sales cycle. But in the meantime, I gotta pay bills. Okay, so if I'm trying to pay bills, and I'm in the mortgage industry, or the real estate industry, in the IT industry, I'm going after the smallest client, I can find the smallest job I can find some cash in right now. So the small business owner tend to fit to users, there's a ton of them. I like that space, just simply because they're too big to not have an IT person, they're too small to hire an IT person, they are outsourcing to a competitor. So in your case, Jack, I'm going to leverage all the information you didn't learn about business on this mastermind call or any other call and your whole focus is okay, Mr. Small business owner, what's your biggest problem that you have? How can I solve that problem so I can earn the right to talk to you about your it because I guarantee your current IT company ain't talking to you about how to build your business. Okay. So that's a shorter sales cycle, I could meet somebody today, I could have been on site meeting with them and their office manager tomorrow, I can have them signed up on a managed service agreement by this Friday. Okay, just boom, boom, medium sized company, typically going to have a CFO, typically going to have an office manager, typically going to have maybe a part time person or definitely a long term relationship with an IP company. Between that 51 and 100. user space, definitely going to have an IT company, once it gets 75 users and above, probably going to hire somebody internally that has screwed up their network to a point where it cannot operate without that individual, and he knows it or she knows it. And they think it's job protection. Okay. So those setup sales cycles could take anywhere from two weeks to six months. Okay? The large enterprise space in the payoffs bigger when it happens, right? The large enterprise space could take anywhere from six months to two years. Okay, so when I'm building an IT company, or consulting anybody in the IT space, I'm drawing this pyramid out, and we're setting goals on how we're going to go after all of this at the same time. This thing, I'm gonna send this to Jack, it should be a part of the recording. But I used to have this diagram on my wall. When I owned it companies, I knew exactly how many prospects and clients I had in small business space and medium business space, a large business space. The reason I built this like this jack, is on September 18 2008, Lehman Brothers announced that they're going bankrupt. Okay. One year prior September of 2007. I converted every single client from break fix to a managed service flat rate service agreement. Bunch of people in these different areas so when the economy collapsed the following year, I kicked me Karl politic kicked everybody's ass in this town. Right? And it's not. Now we just did is we converted our businesses to to protect the downside. So if I'm a handyman, right, I I'm going to have a ton of, you know, small jobs. Okay. I'm going to have a ton of small homeowners who give me little small jobs here and there. Okay, my medium size clients. I'm gonna start targeting more professional class homeowners. Okay? husband works. wife works. Both busy. Both make a shit ton of money, right? They don't want to be doing their own lawn on a Saturday. Okay? Because I'm a handyman. Well, well, your handyman, you're not a lawn guy. I know. But I'm a handyman. I'm your property management company. Okay, without you having to hire a property management company. You let me worry about how the lawn gets molded. You let me worry about how the pool gets cleaned up. Let me worry about how the HVAC gets maintained. I'm basically switching my hat from being the handyman doing the actual work to being the project manager and Property Management dude. Having my vendors in there doing all the damn work. Okay. And okay, clarify your grades ticket now. Go ahead. So, how do I get paid to organize that? I am charging a fee for that. So what I'm doing with a medium sized client like that, and then what then again, in your space, medium sized client, husband and wife work? Both professionals both make a boatload of money. Okay, both can pay me. Okay. So I'm going to come up with a package that basically says, Hey, any one or to our job, aside from materials cost, okay. Any one to two hour job? At least twice a month. I will just come in and do. Okay? Because you're going to be on my quarterly bi annual yearly subscription. Okay, now, this is advanced ship because no handyman does this stuff. Okay. But I'm going to create a package that says, Hey, pay me 250 bucks a month. And I'm, I'm your property manager. Okay, any little minor jobs that are one to two hours, I'll just take care of right now. Any blonde stuff, any things like that? I'm not doing the work. But I'm going to coordinate the vendor to do the work and make sure they do the good job. Now, I'm just throwing out numbers here. This is not this is something you're going to want to look at and go okay, is it 250 bucks a month is a tuner $95 a month. You know, if I have a husband and wife, and they're both combined total income, probably $150,000 a year, divide that by 2000. At each hour of their time is were $72 An hour 72 point 12 times four hours a month is $288. Okay, $280 is how much time they're gonna spend trying to find somebody to do something that you already have a network of people that know how to do it. You see, I'm saying? So I'm gonna get myself into a reoccurring revenue model. And, I mean, I did this with a carpet cleaning did, I did this with scrap monkey, I did this with who was that client? Epic, he has a handyman, and he does pressure washing. Okay. And so we created these packages, that once somebody does a job with you once, all you got to do is have a conversation with them and go, Hey, you're probably going to have other stuff that breaks or other stuff that needs to be done. Do you really want to take your time and go and find the right person and vet them and make sure they're licensed? No, I liked the plan. I just it sounds also like, it has a lot more steps that may include doing something like you know, trying to build a plan like that or trying to you know, sell a package like that to someone like I work with, you know, property management companies, and I'm thinking they might be a particular side of the medium size type projects, especially since I get paid, at least like two weeks out from them usually. So now I think that's a great plan now but just someone thinking that I'm doing all of this by myself. Like when I mean, I guess I imagine you with these plans, you have to just build a plan that works to do it step by step, you know, to eat that elephant one bite at a time, right? Yeah. So, you know, once you do the math on this, it's like, let's just say that, let's just say it's 295 bucks, right? States $295, you know, a month, or if you pay the whole year in advance, I'll give you two months for free. So 2950, okay. And depending on the homeowner, not, it's not going to be a problem. Okay, but let's just say it's 295. And you get 10 of those people, that's 29 $150 a month, I can realistically hire a subcontract stay at home mom to coordinate everything, for a third of that cost. And so I'm no longer even having to do that shit. So it's back to operations and service delivery in my business, right? When I'm beginning, I'm the guy wearing all the hats on the guy doing all the work. My goal is to max is to create enough of that work, where I can hire a contractor or an employee to do the work. Then you build it one at a time. So my client, engineering client, a client of mine, than the other four and a half years of hiring their 11th employee, now, hey, we've averaged 1.5 to two employees per year, like clockwork, is every time we hire an employee, the owner goes back to work in that position and maxes himself out again. And then we hire the next one, then we max out again, then we hire next one. Now we've gotten to a point where we max out this employee we hired the next. Right, but each employee along the way is profit. So if we just hired the employee, he wouldn't play golf. Yeah. So, but it's how can I create leverage with my time, if I'm Kevin, if I'm Michael, if I'm Lisa, if any of you, I want to look at that for list exercise is shared with you guys. I think last month, go back and listen, go back and look at it. It's labeled for list exercise. Okay, under the recorded calls, I want to keep track of that. Because once I have a certain task, or a combination of tasks added, added more than 10 hours a week of my time, I'm gonna go hire somebody to do that shit. I'm gonna have to hire an employee. Now, I'm gonna go hire somebody to do that. Because now I've got 10 hours a week for my time back, etc. Now, if you're in mortgage real estate, I just had a conversation with Nancy, she's like, oh, man, nothing's happening here on the East Coast. And we, you know, we're not gonna we're not having, you know, the market is slowing down. Right, the market is slowing down. Alex has ever heard that my life and the market slowing now. I'm like, freaking badass man. What do you mean, I know, when the market slows down, all the non professionals retreat to the hills. Okay, they they they retreat. The ones that make the money are the ones that face that storm and drive right into it and go, Okay, I'm going to up my game from a sales from a content standpoint, I'm going to reach out to more people on the call more people on connect with more people, because your competitor is going back and getting a job somewhere. Because the easy mortgage or the easy refinance is gone. Or the easy house sale or listing or buyer is gone. Right? But go back and talk to anybody that was in real estate in 1980 81 and 82. When mortgage rates were 21% and ask them how many homes got sold that year, and I guarantee a bunch of homes got sold. Right? Why? Because all the people that were amateurs went back and got a job somewhere. That professional said, Okay, this is a huge opportunity for me. I'm just gonna go and plow, right? It's like, oh, it's upstairs in chapter I think chapter seven of the 10x rule book it talks about four levels of four degrees of action. Okay, and the third degree is the most dangerous which is normal levels of action. Yeah, comfort, love comfort zone. Comfort level. Need to be at a massive action level at all times is especially when the markets getting ready to switch Which in the real estate market is getting ready to switch in a big way? From everybody I've talked to, and everybody I know. And so most of your competition is going to head to the hills. They're going to reach. Press in. You're like, man, well, I know you'll get a job now. And so yeah, go go make your ends meet. But I'd be freaking taken every waking hour, sharpening my axe, sharpening my skills contacting more people, because nobody else is going to be doing it. Everybody else is gone. Yeah. So same thing as a handyman. No digital AI robot is going to come in and replace a bathroom showerhead. Okay, I've got a frickin you know, up in my, in my house here, all you have to do is pick up the phone and hack harass my wife. Okay. And because I already let you know, already said, Hey, man, I got work to do around here. Right? But I'm not gonna follow up with you. Because I'm busy. Right? And how many more people out there like me. They have a lot of crap to get done. But it's like, okay, well, shit. Yeah, the only reason I took apart that I'm looking out my window here, the only reason I took apart that damn bed is because I waited till the very last damn minute before that, check, check. Exchange Student Well, right here the other night. Now, I should have what I should have done. If you would have been harassing my wife, I wish and I just have to cycle over do the shit. I don't want to do this took me two hours to do that damn thing. Because the bolts were strapped and all this other crap. And I'm like, I'm like, I can go down to my garage and get my grinder and go to town. But I'm like, I just, I was gonna resell the thing. I'm screwed. I destroyed the thing. Because I got pissed when I could have sold the thing for a couple of 180 300 bucks and paid you 100 bucks to take it apart. You know? But, and then I wasted two hours of my time. Okay, so the point is, is in each one of your businesses talk to prospective prospects and ask them how can I help you? Okay, how, how often would you check back with people after you give them a quote? or speak with them initially? If I give you a quote, If I if you give somebody a quote? Yeah. Jack, let me ask you answer that question. So when somebody you give somebody a quote, what's your process Jack I start with trying to find the mute button, which is quite elusive at that point. So when I give someone a quote, If I don't leave with a signature, I'm leaving with a follow up step of when I'm doing the next step of talking to them. So and if it's needed to do a second presentation. So like, for some clients, I'll do a presentation put a quote in front of that, I know that there's more people involved in the decision making process, and I don't trust the telephone game. And I give them a story of how it's okay, you know, so and so client, I actually present the to each one of them. So instead of you trying to remember the whole thing I just went through, I'll just do it again, for them. You don't have to sit there and two, when's a good time for them to sit down. So if there's not this decision maker, I scheduled that same same thing scheduled appointment, don't wait for them to hear back from you. Always leave scheduling the next step. Because if you don't, it'll fall by this this undefined wait time, which you might not catch back up on. And again, like sales cycles are all gonna be different per person, per industry per every variable. It could be something simple, but if you I also start off before I get to the contract part, one of the first things I do my presentation is tell them to walk me through their buying process, whether they're buying a car or buying it services, they usually have well, you know, I kind of like to sit on a quote for a little bit, see how I feel about it, whether someone's like, Hey, this looks great. I'm firing away on it, because I know it solves a problem for me. So start in the beginning how they buy a product, whatever your product is, if you were to buy a new shower for a year, well, what do you would think, what's your process of buying a shower, they don't have one. You can give them examples. And you can see if one feels closer to them, you're trying to see if the you know, putting the right size shoe on their foot there. But so it starts in the beginning at the entry level. That's another step of what are you doing next. And I also took this thing from someone else that because I know a lot of times and I'm quoting and they're gonna go and get several quotes like everyone else. You're gonna shop up and they say, Hey, listen to your site. Can you just do me one favor? I know you're gonna look at a couple other companies here. So can we just say either way have a conversation at the end just so we can see where we stand on things to, even if we aren't your favorite war fits there? Or can be, hey, that we love what you put in front of us. What are next steps, we could start right away most of the time, it's what are next steps. I had a client who actually came back gave me my competitors quotes, which I hold on to because now I know more of my competitors in the industry near me. And we were we were actually the most expensive one. So they weren't shopping our price. They're shopping on the value and everything else I gave them. But I found that out by what they gave me. So I just told them that either way, have another conversation them because I told them how to read my clients contracts and look for the fine print and where they're going to lose their money. And appreciate that. Only you send them a quote. I mean, if you're sitting next to him, the best way to close deals presented, right? So hey, can I go over this with you? Right? If you can't do that, then send them a quote, I send them a text going, Hey, I just sent you a quote. Hey, got a couple of spots open this afternoon. Let's talk about it. If I don't hear from him, and you know, text always gets read. If I don't hear from him with it, by the end of the day, I'm picking up the phone and I'm calling him he gets a quote. Any questions? Are you ready to roll on this? Okay. Well, let me think about it. Okay. What do you need to think about? Okay, how about today is Monday? What do you think about it between now and 5pm? Tomorrow? And let me know what you think. Okay. Now the thing that works is put a put a expiration date on the quote, squats, Smith, told Friday. Like some guy booked a strategy session with me last week, he happens to be an old client of mine was scheduled for tomorrow. I told him I said, Hey, you got by Friday to pay that bill? And if you don't pay it, then it's gonna get rescheduled? Well, he didn't pay it. So I'm gonna send an email, basically canceling the appointment. Okay, and saying, Hey, if you want to reschedule, here's the link to my calendar to go to reschedule. And if you don't reschedule by the end of today, the price is going up if you do want to reschedule because I don't really care. Now, the reason you could do that is when you have a big old pipeline business. Right? A big pipeline. You can say stuff like that, because you don't need one person. Right, Kevin, you got a question? Or just gonna comment on kind of what y'all are talking about. For me, I'm a little softer than that most of my business is referred. And so I can pretty, I can stay on people pretty tight with the excuse that he listened. Steve referred me to you. I want to make sure I get back to Steve about how we're doing. Because the biggest problem people have is the job they want to get done. Doesn't ring. Friday night, they go back, I'm back on it. Should I need to do that? That pipe out in the back? Yeah. Okay. I'll call somebody on Monday. And they go on with their, their day, right? So he doesn't ring. And that's what I tell them. I say, Listen, I know that doesn't ring. So I'm going to bring your phone to make sure that you get done what you want to get done. And to I'm going to have I want to get back to Steve and tell him how I did. Because it's important to me that he knows I'm doing a great job following up with you. Otherwise, you won't be continuing for a business. Absolutely. So I want to go at the same pace you want to go. Like I want to follow up with you as fast as you want me to. But at the same time, I want to make sure I can report back to Steve, because I want to make sure that relationship is more importantly, honestly than me doing business with you today. I mean way but I say the way they understand. And the other thing I'm trying to do is see them for referring the business. Yeah, absolutely. Keep them informed and so forth. So very, very important. Very, very good stuff. So that's a great way to close out our call is solely refers you business. The most important thing I got from this and Thanks for the reminder, Kevin is the most important person in the referral process. Is the person referring you the business, not the referral itself? I liked that. That's a great quote. I'm gonna steal it. So there you go. All right, guys. Have a blessed day, man. Call me or text me if you need anything. I'll be going
