Welcome And What We’re About

Dave 0:10

So whether you need help with operations, capability, internationality, maybe just getting your mindset right. We're here and waiting. So grab your favorite cup of Joe. Let's jump into the show. Hey, hey, hey, good morning, everybody. And as that fancy guy said on that little voiceover, getting in here, grab your favorite cup of Joe. Let's jump into the show. If you are a business owner, again, it's the Business Unscripted Podcast. It's me, it's Duan, it's some guests. We got we had my son here the last couple of weeks. We have other business owners that join us from time to time. So if you're an aspiring business owner, maybe you are a business owner right now, and you're looking for a spot, something fun to listen to, enjoy, and get some advice, learn from our struggles, what we have gone through in our business and our journeys, and also what we've kind of advised some of our clients on. You're in the right spot. So let's get started. I hope uh I know you uh you had a client issue last week, so you had to take care of that. But welcome back. It's good to see your smiling face again as always. Let me clean off these glasses.

Duarne 1:21

How was your week?

Dave 1:22

Did you survive with the out of the box week? Uh we did, you know, I think JJ and I had a a good conversation, and we kind of chatted about uh like you know, he's he's a baseball player, so he has hopes and dreams of potentially making it to the MLB. And so we had a good conversation on like the chances and how he without even like I didn't even know this, but he has on the back of like his background of his phone, I think it's like 0.6% of all people, or maybe it's 0.06% of all you know baseball players that start out make it to the MLB. And so he has that on his phone, and then we kind of dove into like what does that mean for business owners too, and how can you kind of use that to motivate you to just make that next level, right? Make that next step and continue to work. So it was a very good conversation. So it was really, really interesting. Now we noticed afterwards, so this is the mistakes you make, you know, as you're a small business, right? We're not a multi-million dollar you know enterprise. We noticed that the way that we had set up the cameras, so I would be looking at him, but I think my camera was mirrored, but I would we were both looking the same direction on the on the vertical view.

Duarne 2:32

I didn't say that on the replay, I wasn't sure if that was in unintentional or not.

Dave 2:37

No, it was definitely not intentional. It was not realizing that my camera was mirrored, and so afterwards we're like, oh well, you know, it's okay. It catches the eye, right? It's like, wait a minute, who's he talking to? And yeah, they're both looking the same way. Is there somebody else there? Where's the other person in the room? The other person who watching this video, right? Listening to the podcast. That's the other person we were chatting with. But I love it.

Duarne 3:05

So yeah, it is real. I mean, this is an unfiltered, it's real, shit happens, you know. Sometimes, you know, the the when we first did the first three people in the video session while you were both in the same room, we realized that there was a whole nother camera needed to make that happen. And that first time the week before that, and it was a whole drama trying to get that set up technically, and it was something we hadn't even considered because we'd done three people before, but then we were like, Oh, yeah, they're all on their in their own places, on their own, they're all virtual, yeah.

Daily Goals And Clear Targets

Dave 3:39

They all just kind of log into the web, and we're like, Oh crap, how do we do this? How's this gonna work? And I guess that's that's the importance of sometimes pre-planning, you know. But my son, it was like a last-minute sort of addition, and you just gotta go with the flow sometimes, you know. And especially in business and in life in general, things are not gonna go exactly as you planned it. The best plan, and we say this about budgets in the financial world, right? Your budget is only as good as the moment you hit print and save. Because after that, something's gonna change, something's not gonna hit the time frame that you expected. Uh you're always gonna have a variance. You still got to do it because it puts you in the right direction, right? And it heads you in a path for you to create your KPIs, create your you know, understanding of where you need to be, your goals, daily, weekly, all of that. Uh and so uh I guess that's a good thing to start because that was something that was impactful for me this week. And it was Grant Cardone, and I saw his short video of Grant Cardone. In the video, he says, I bet you a million dollars that you can't walk outside your office and talk to your leadership team, and they are not going to be able to tell you what's the daily goal, the weekly goal, the monthly goal, the quarterly goal, and the annual goal of what they're trying to hit. And it hit me because I was like, man, I don't even I haven't even broken it down that far. But it but it is important, you know, and he's like, and if you don't know that, uh you you probably drove into work today without a director. You know, you feel like you go into work and you and you try to do your to-do list. But in reality, like there's all these other things that you should be doing that you need to do in order to reach that next level of your business, whether it's hiring the next employee or signing the next number of clients that are gonna get you to your revenue goal. And so that really kind of stuck out to me. And wanted to get your kind of opinion on that as well. Like, have you done that in your business? And then I'll kind of come back and kind of say like how it's kind of redirected me and what my focus is now.

Duarne 5:55

Yeah, look, best intentions. We've we've tried setting these expectations with our team and then let it flow down. But honestly, it's not something which we do very well. It's something we could do a lot better on, and it's something that we probably should make a focus. One thing we're working on at the moment is a source of all truth dashboard knowledge based system for our entire team. And as part of that, I was just thinking a part of the dashboard for all stuff should be what are our targets and what how are we progressing with that target? I think that would be something where everyone logging in every day can see it, see how we're progressing, see if we're getting close to that. Because you're right, I mean, everybody needs to know that information because a lot of people just clock in, do what they think is right, and then clock out without realizing that they're not doing any, they're not running the right direction, you know, or maybe they should they need to grow a little bit faster to help get us in that direction we need to be going, or slight course corrections. But if you don't tell them, how are they meant to know?

Dave 7:02

If you haven't got the documents, and I know we we I know we chatted pre briefly about how we didn't want to kind of go right into AI, and I'm not gonna go into it, but just a mention of AI. There is no reason right now why every business should not have a dashboard for themselves, and you don't even necessarily have to pay for a subscription to something, you essentially can almost build it for yourself, customize for your business specifically. And I think that's where the interesting piece is, is you have this opportunity to develop these dashboards like you're doing, and you feed it, you have control over it instead of it being a third party that you kind of have to rely on them to do the updates or for it to kind of give you the exact thing that you want it to have. You have the functionality now and the ability to make these for yourself and your business. So I won't speak on anything AI yet, and that that's kind of my my my first thing, my first mention of it. Yeah, it that should be one thing I would be interesting if somebody like did a counter of how many times we said AI or talked about AI on a podcast.

Duarne 8:12

Well, how many times do we have a meeting and AI comes into the conversation now? It is part of the conversation. I I did my next series of newsletter articles this afternoon, and they're all about the speed of AI implementation into business and how a leadership actually handling that. Are they are they handling it in a way that it's in line with their business, or are they dealing with it in a way that it's probably a security vulnerability for their business? Do they even know why or what they're implementing? So there's a whole series there. So I mean that's a whole nother conversation, but I find myself talking about it way too much. So hence why when we got into this, we were like talking about what sort of topics we talk about. One of the things we agreed was let's try and tone down the AI a little bit on this episode so we don't come across as the the business AI podcast.

Dave 9:11

And I think so. Going back to kind of the Grant Cardone kind of piece, and I think for me, it's really on my list to think about over the weekend, but going into every day of doing my own sort of follow-up, like who's that personal outreach that I need to touch this week in order to keep things moving forward? And and what are those goals? Again, I'm gonna say it again. But here's the thing, and I had this conversation with a client, it's the only reason I'm bringing it up, so don't hold it against me in terms of AI. But so you can tell whoever it is, whatever platform you're using, like what are your goals? Like, what's your quarterly goal, what's your yearly goal? Help it one, break it down into your milestones that you need to reach over that period. And then you the next level to that is helping you schedule your day to stay in line with that goal and that direction towards that destination. And when at the end of a day, when you build it into your end-of-day session, which is what I did, I have it analyze what did I do that kept me in line with where I want to go? And then what did I do that might have strayed that I want to just kind of pay attention to? And it's now your virtual custom coach. You know, we talked about having a virtual custom tutor for all these kids. You can now have your personal customized coach that is just yours, right? That you can build out, that's trained on your goals, your destination, everything, everywhere you want to go. And then it can help you stay in line and help you point in that right direction. And then when you do your own sort of custom system, you it can ping you. You know, you know, went to your own web platform, you can ping you. Hey, what are you focusing on right now? And then it can help keep you in that right direction, which I think a lot of people, including myself, need to have that because sometimes you can go down a rabbit hole in some of these things, whether it's researching, whether it's some people end up doom scrolling during the day when when you know they're in their most impactful hours. And I think that's where that opportunity comes into lie with that video in that kind of direction of you have so many opportunities right now. You have to have that daily goal, you have to have that weekly goal. And then if you don't meet them, it's fine. Why didn't you meet it? Learn from it and then correct it moving forward. Don't beat yourself up, don't call yourself right a failure for not meeting that goal. And it's the biggest thing that I believe in that's helped me and that I see constantly is never talk negatively to yourself. And it's a hard thing to do because, as I've said multiple times on this podcast, I used to do that. But you cannot talk negatively, don't say, oh, I'm so stupid, or I'm so dumb, I can't believe I did that, or I'm a failure. Stop that kind of speak. Because if you keep telling yourself that, eventually all you're gonna see are those things happening in your life. But if you tell yourself, oh, that's okay, like you know, I made a mistake, great, I'll learn from it and I'll go forward because I'm gonna be successful. Turn everything that you want to say negative about yourself into a positive statement, and you in six, 12 months, you look back, you won't even recognize yourself anymore.

Duarne 13:03

Some good points there, absolutely. And you're right. I mean, when you start using the tools that we have available to us, and if you don't want to play with that, you can just use a regular calendar system and set yourself up a bunch of alerts like we used to do back in the day. And when I say back in the day, I mean like a couple of years ago, we would just have little reminders telling us, hey, stay on track, you're doing well. You should be are you focused on this at the moment? But there's all sorts of different things, or set up a buddy system with a friend and check in on each other throughout the day see if you're working the same shifts and stuff. There's lots of different ways to do that. But one of the things that we were talking about earlier was what's the uh what's the situation when it comes to business and how long do you wait before you actually take action on some things? And this is one of those things I think you need to take a little bit of action on straight away. You need to be willing to take action on what your plan looks like for growth. You need to take action on accountability for your time during the day. Because we've all seen it, those times where you look back and go, I was at my desk for 16 hours today. What did I achieve? And you didn't achieve anywhere near as much as you thought you did because you started working on something which was a cool project, but then you realize, hold on, that wasn't on the plan. I just spent a whole bunch of time working on something that I could have delegated out to someone else, or could have put aside and reviewed it and then came back to it in a few weeks when I had some and made some time in my schedule for it. Did it have to happen today? Did I have to do it? Or was it just a distraction to get me away from what I needed to do today? I had the situation happen this week where a client's messaging me saying, Hey, it'd be cool to do this. And I'm like, Oh yeah, that is cool. And then at the time, she's an accountant and she's telling me, Oh, so I'm actually meant to be doing a payroll at the moment, but this is more interesting, so I'm gonna carry on with this for a while. And I'm like, you know what? I'm doing other things too, so yeah, I'll just do this for a little while too. So we ended up distracting each other and become sure it was productive, something might come of it, but it's something that probably could have got rescheduled and done at a later time and not interrupted the productivity we're having at the time.

Dave 15:27

So it comes down to accountability on that, right? And it it's literally you noticed it now. So what your correction action would be is to ensure that it doesn't happen the next time and recognize when it is happening the next time and say, hey, you know what? I I would love to have this conversation with you. However, I have this other thing that I really got to get done. Let's let's look at our calendars right now and book something. This isn't important, you are important to me. However, right, I have this other thing that I've already promised to have completed by XYZ, whatever it ends up being. And now you're you're they recognize I if that were to happen to me, I'd be like, oh yeah, absolutely. I get it. Like I got things I gotta get done too. And and so I appreciate it. Put you both in check, right?

Duarne 16:17

It gives you a it puts you both in check at that point. Yeah, we both, oh yeah, you know what? Actually, I should be doing something else too, right now. And yeah, let's just schedule it and let's and that way it gives you both a bit more time to think about it as well.

Dave 16:29

But and and here's where, and this kind of goes into the pre-show thing that we were kind of chatting about, and where it is important for you as a business owner to pay attention, and now these are the the clients that they want to stay engaged, right? They want to talk to you and keep setting up meetings, but they're they're hesitating to take that next step and actually like finalize an agreement or get started with their investment and their programming, right? And so this kind of plays along right into that. And you know, Dwarne, you had mentioned that you've kind of had some of these recently where clients are kind of dragging their feet, and then what do you do in that situation? So, what are you doing right now? And then we can kind of go a little bit back and forth because I'm sure there's some of you that are watching this or you know, live or even on the replay. And if that's you and you have a question specifically that we're not talking about, drop it down below in the comments. We will we read every one of the comments, every one of the questions. We will try to answer it either live if you're watching the live and we see it, or we will answer it afterwards. So don't hesitate to ask a question because if you have the question, I'm sure there's a hundred other people that have that same question. So, Duarn, what are you doing right now with those clients when they like to drag their feet and not move forward?

Duarne 17:48

Well, again, there's a few different varieties of those clients that we've been dealing with. So we had one probably about six months ago that I was started working with, had a business idea, wanted to do a website, wanted to build out a marketing plan and a strategy, sat down, did a few meetings, worked it all out, put a strategy forward, signed off on it, did an agreement, got started on the project. A week later, let's put a pause on that, I'm gonna change direction. Well, that pause after many, many follow-ups became about four months, and then randomly about four months down the track after we started that project, we get a message saying, Hey, look, we're gonna start a different project doing a different thing. And it was at that point, I'm like, Well, I don't want to waste all my time and effort again because you know you took so long to get to this point the first time, and then you've changed it. So, in that instance, what I've done is I held back responding straight away. And I wasn't sure if I was going to respond. A week later, I responded, advised I was busy and I was doing other things. They came back, and then the second and said, Yeah, look, there definitely it's a deal we want to do, this is something we want to happen. My second question was, Well, what's the budget? Wanted to make sure it was a real budget on the table this time. And when I got told the budget, I was like, Okay, we can work with that. Let's set up an in-person meeting. So that forced them to show more effort on their side, and you tell me when you're available for that meeting. And then again, we've had nothing for about a month and a half. Now I followed it up a couple of times, and then in the first week, and then I just left it because I recognize that it's it's not necessarily top of mind for them right now, because if it was, they would have taken action. And it's that's a kind of example of a hot and cold lead that you know I've had recently. Other examples that I've had recently, ones that I've did a significant amount of work for over a period of ones like over two years now that I've been working on with the promise of investment coming soon. And now we're just at a complete standstill, we're not doing anything, and we've taken a very occasional meeting just to see if we just to get an update, and we've come to the realization that we probably should have come to the realization of a long time ago that there's a very high likelihood that this may not move forward, and if it does move forward, it's not on the timeline that we originally thought it was. So therefore, get it away from front of mind for us so that it's not something that pulls us down thinking, what if, what if, what if.

Dave 21:11

Yeah, and I think there's a couple things there to kind of digest from, you know, just for somebody that's that's listening. One is the importance that you have to follow up. Think of it as the fact of everybody's busy, they have their own business they're running. Essentially, if you're B2B or B2C, they have their own jobs, right? They have their own families. So the follow-up is the important piece. And first step that I always try to do, and sometimes it doesn't work, but when you're giving a proposal, try to set up that meeting right away to go over it. Yeah, that's getting it ready to go. And then you can chat with them about it. Sometimes I I try not to even like send it to them until like maybe the day of, only because there's gonna be way more questions, and it's gonna be better if you are there in person to kind of walk them through it together.

Duarne 22:06

Yep.

Dave 22:06

And then it does come down to you know, how often is too much following up with the client. And I would say, you know, it really depends on on that introductory exploratory call, like how big was the pain? And was it something that it's gonna cost them a lot of money if they wait? You know, and then we've talked about NEPQ on this podcast, and you know, Dwarne, you and I have talked about it significantly off out off the podcast.

Duarne 22:33

Yeah.

Following Up Without Being Pushy

Dave 22:34

But this is the importance where, like, if you've asked the right questions, they should have already persuaded themselves that it's something that's important, and they've told you that it's important and why it's important now, and what's the consequence if they don't do it now? Maybe they fall behind their competition or they're not going to be prepared for a large trajectory of growth that the industry that they're in is projecting in the next six to nine months. Those are the things that you then use in your follow ups. Hey, John. Want to just keep this top of mind was checking my notes. I know I remember you had said you wanted to get ahead of the pack. You know, you're expecting a significant growth in the next six to nine months. We have a runway for this project of about three months, but our schedule's filling up. Is this still something that's top of mind for you? And again, you put their pain first in the in the question. And then you just, again, is this still top of mind? You're not trying to sail. You're not trying, you're putting it back balls in their court. And so I would do that maybe once every other week if they're not pinging you back. And then after about like 60 days of that, and especially if you if they have a short runway and they've kind of moved on, I would do it like every 60 to 90 days, just shoot back because businesses change, right? They're all in a different situation every three to four months. You just kind of pay, hey, I was you know, looking back at our notes, I noticed we had this conversation. Was this still was this something you got a solution on, or is it still something that needs to be solved? And then let them answer it. And so that would be a way to handle a client that's kind of dragging their feet in that in that aspect, right? Where's where they're not responding at all? So what would I mean I'm sure you're probably already doing some of that right now, right, Jerome?

Duarne 24:23

Pretty much, yeah. I'm doing most of that. The one thing I find I find most interesting is the ones where the larger the company, the slower it is to come to a decision. Or the ones where you're getting the larger the company is where they're saying, We're ready, we're ready, we're ready. We just have to get our ducks in a row internally. And we're shifting things around internally. So you're sitting there and you're twiddling your thumbs, you're waiting, you've put a lot of work in, you've put a lot of time, you've got a lot of things that need to happen very quickly after the sign-off. So you're lining, you got to line all that up nicely. And then there's that delay in getting the contract signed. And every time you talk, it whether it's weekly to every bi-weekly, it's yep, this is happening, this is going to happen. We want this. Everybody wants this. It's just waiting on a sign-off. And those are the ones that I think are the most stressful for business owners. They're the ones that we sit back and we're banking, that we bank on and go, we need that one to happen. That one's gonna happen. It's a sure thing. We're just waiting for it to happen. And one thing I found over the time is you've got to be careful with those because those can put you in a mindset that you turn down other work, that you push back on other projects because you have this, you know that that's gonna happen at some point, or you have you're just planning that that's gonna happen and you want to be ready for it.

Dave 25:50

And so those are detrimental two for twofold in that one as well, right? Where one you have to understand kind of what that buying process is, it is easier, the bigger the company, the longer the buying journey is gonna be. Whether that it pushes a typical 30-day buying cycle to nine months or 12 months, it can do it that long just because of how things are going. Everybody's got bigger teams, etc. So you really have to understand that. And then, as you mentioned, a mindset, you have to go into that type of agreement knowing, okay, this is gonna be a six months out. I'm not planning on it for the next two to three months. Yeah, the other part of that is you're also gonna run into those clients that continually want to have conversations with you, ask you a bunch of questions, value, get all this work out of you, but then, yeah, well, you know, I I still haven't signed the agreement yet. I I'll get to that, I promise. Or I'll I'll pay your you know, I'll get to your, you know, that that that payment in the invoice. And ultimately, when you start seeing somebody like that, and typically you can you can understand if it's three three meetings and you've sent the agreement and they keep saying, Oh, I'll get to that, I'll get to that. When especially it's electronic signature. For me, uh, I have stopped essentially saying, Let's have a meeting, right? To kind of see where things are at and keep moving things forward. Uh what I do in that situation is just try to keep it email related and focused. And in that situation, when it's something where everybody's hey, yeah, we're moving forward, move forward, we just got to get our ducks in a row. Great. I'll touch base with you in in you know a week or two. And then in a week or two, you follow up, just say, Hey, I know you guys said the deadline was X, Y, and Z. Timeline for the project is is X. You know, if we need if we want to hit that, and you guys really want to hit that, we got to get started here in the next like 30 or 60 days. Is that something that's top of mind? And again, it's you not wasting your time in a meeting, not wasting your time, you know, having this back and forth, and it's a simple email, it's direct, but it's hitting their situation that they said that they're in. And that's the one thing for me that was a big thing to kind of get over, right? Is is I keep seeing myself in their business, but ultimately it's not my problem that or my obstacle to take on, it's their obstacle. I'm the one that's going to help them create a solution to that obstacle. And when you take yes, when you take that viewpoint, you realize, hey, if they don't want to get it, that's fine. Like, let them struggle. Or maybe they found somebody else. Perfect. I want you to succeed whether it's with me or not. And so ultimately, when I had that view and I changed that mindset, it turned all these no's into like, okay, maybe it's just not the right time. Let's let's touch base, you know, I'll respond. You know, and so it I had a good call yesterday with somebody that in January we had our first meeting, but they had just signed on another, you know, sort of advisory firm, and they wanted to kind of give them an opportunity. So in that moment, we set it for three months out. We had the meeting yesterday, and and they're not getting what they thought that they would get. And so it turned into a great conversation of well, what what's working? What is something that you're getting? What are you looking for that you would need in order to make you feel better supported? Great. Here's some questions to mull over because we're not gonna be as inexpensive as that firm is. We are gonna be expensive depending on what you're looking for. So answer these questions, send it back to me, and I'll get you a proposal over. And then you know that you're gonna get support. And so that's ultimately what I would say there, too, is be willing to protect your time. We've talked about it on productivity, we've talked about it on you know just getting things done. You have to protect your time, you have to protect your calendar, and so you have to identify those clients that are they're not investing in your in your service, in your program, but they still want to get all your advice and pick your brain all the time and just mull and pull you along, hoping that you're you know, so you got you do you gotta cut them off at some point.

Duarne 30:16

Yeah, absolutely. And and like those guys, they tend to be the ones that feel like they I think the best way to describe like they try to befriend you. And when they befriend you, it's like it's like it's almost like hey, I'm just helping a friend out get some information. I'm gonna help you know I'm gonna help them out because they're a friend, and that's fine if you've got unlimited resources, unlimited time, and you don't really care if you make money or not, but that's pretty much not anyone in business.

Dave 30:48

Or it's somebody that you know you gotta have lunch anyways, right? So you're you go out to lunch and you guys have some chit chats over lunch. Okay, great. Like that's a little bit different, or you you like the golf and you go out and you're on the golf course, so you're doing something additional that makes that time at least, as you mentioned, a little bit productive, or absolutely something else. But if it's you sitting at your desk or in a conference room for you know an hour and a half every every other week to hopefully get this client to finally move forward, it's gonna it it's gonna time suck you and you're gonna feel drained. And by the time that person then does finally invest, you're you're gonna feel like, man, I'm I've I've just been servicing them for so long. Like, is this worth it anymore? And you're just gonna feel drained.

Duarne 31:34

Yeah. We I used to get that as a sales, I used to be an account manager, and we I used to have a couple of clients who would just call all the time and had very small purchases, and they would call all the time to the point where my manager pulled me aside one day and said, What is it that they actually have with us? What services? And I went through and I checked it, and it was a realization moment where I'm like, Holy crap, they don't have very much services with us at all. Why are they calling every single day? They were trying to get quotes for all these different people and always calling just to talk about an opportunity and just get some opinions on how they could go out and get win that opportunity. And I realized, you know what, I think they're just lonely. I want someone to talk to. And this traveling between job sites when they list.

Dave 32:22

Right, is that your client who is willing to invest the least amount of money will take the most amount of time of yours.

Duarne 32:33

Yeah.

Dave 32:33

On average. Like there's some clients right now that I, you know, they're not my highest paying, but they understand what they're getting. But the majority, and I've I've have experienced this in multiple levels of business, the majority of those that want to be their budget friendly, they're cut, they're they they just want right the min service, they're also gonna be the people that want you to scope creep and do a lot more than what they're paying for. And so this is where it's really important, and I've started looking at this as well, where 80% of your net profit, your gross profit, and your net profit are gonna come from 20% of your clients. So what you need to do every so often, whether it's quarterly, whether it's semi-annually or annually, is really look at those clients that are taking up 80% of your time, but they're they're contributing to 20% of your revenue. And so cut those out to then focus on the 20% that are making up the 80% and then grow that. And then that's how you begin to continue to scale. And then you continue this process, you know, every every year. Okay, who's making up what services, what support are we doing that are making up 80% of our our revenue or sorry, 80% of our gross profit? And then let's double down on that because it's probably only gonna be about 20% of the work that you're doing. And then you start scaling out some of these other services or outsourcing them, right, or bringing in people to do that service for you so that you can focus on the next level that's gonna level you up and kind of grow that 80%. And then five years from now, you're gonna look back, and if you do this process for five years, you're gonna be like, you're not gonna be the same company, hopefully, and you won't be the same person, but you'll also be at a very different revenue spot than you ever would if you were to just stay where you're at and let that 20% of your business take up 80% of your time.

Duarne 34:26

Absolutely, and like it's interesting if you start looking at like super professional uh individuals in business, how many of them allow you to book an entire hour on their calendar? Almost none. You generally get a 10 to 20 minute slot, you know, 30 at most, and you've got to book it well in advance, and there's this expectation that you have to make the most of that slot.

Dave 34:55

And I think this is the key, right? Like a board meeting or something, yeah. But yeah, if it's like a one-on-one, or maybe it's like a you know, executive rate, yeah, absolutely. The chances of you getting an hour meeting for somebody, it's like 10 to 15 minutes.

Duarne 35:06

And it's interesting, like when you start thinking about that, it's because you understand it because you value their time. What you need to consider is are your clients valuing your time as well? Or do they get on a call and think they can get on a call for an hour and a half with you, you know, shoot the shit, just have you know, get a few problems solved, talk things through. And then at the end of the of that call, when you send them that invoice for the hour and a half, do they pay the invoice or do they question it? You go, oh, I thought we were just having a conversation.

Scope Creep And Protecting Your Time

Dave 35:38

Well, consultation is here's um here here's a here's a good piece of that. And I got you, everybody knows I'm profit per first certified firm. And so we do like these things called pods, where there's smaller groups of the professionals and we kind of focus on topic. And something actually was kind of interesting, and and Mike McAllowitz actually does it. And so the concept kind of plays into what you were just talking about right there. So, what you do is the first time that somebody scope creeps or asks for something extra, you do what what a zero balance invoice. Okay, so you send them the invoice with a one-time credit to zero that out, and you say, by the way, like here's an invoice for this. It was outside of your scope, but because it's the first time, I went ahead and I just issued you a credit for you know one time. And what that does, it just puts them on notice. Okay. And so now they they now know, oh wait, maybe I shouldn't, like, unless I really need it, I it's outside of what I'm already invested. Great. And it puts them on notice. And you're not just immediately sending it to them, which which could have sort of that negative connotation as well. If you just invoice them for something you didn't tell them you're gonna invoice them for, and so it helps, it works on both sides. And so now the next time, if they do it, they're they're already aware, they saw the invoice, they they acknowledged it. Now it's it's fair game when you go and invoice them for that extra work that's being done.

Duarne 36:59

It's an interesting point though. We had a client because I do a lot of white label services with partnerships back to Australia, and one of my partners back there brought on a client, and I could he's putting a lot of work in for this client. And I'm like, Are you getting good paid well for this or is it a long-term relationship play? What is this? It was a referral from an existing client who's been with me for 10 years, right? Okay, great, great, cool. Now, what I failed to ask was a question at that point, which I should have, which was what service does this client who's been with you for 10 years have? Turns out it was web hosting, which is of about $250 a year, right? So this is a two and uh this is a two and a half, three grand client, right? That's what they're worth for their entire tenure. They've been with him. Great client, continuous, loyal, all that wonderful stuff. So this bit they've recommended a friend of theirs or someone they know to come and get uh their website work done. And there was it was a mess. They'd had a big problem with another develop, another developer designer. They needed to get away quickly. So he's dropped everything, he's done all the work, everything's great, no problems. Because he'd gone so far beyond, when it was time for me to get introduced, I spent my one hour with them doing my consult to see what they wanted, put a plan and a strategy together, and then get a response back saying, because normally what would happen is if I'm gonna quote out like work on a website, which we haven't done the work yet, I'll quote a minimum maximum, you know, and it'll be in an hourly rate. So it'll be like, well, it's gonna be around about six to seven hours to do this, or six to eight hours to do this. The response I get back from the client is we accept this and pick the bottom number on each one of them. Like that's not how it works, but okay. Then proceeds to start sending me like four emails a day asking questions and asking for what do you recommend for this? What do you recommend for that? Apparently, I showed a lot of value in my very first call with them. I've gotten onto my partner, I said, like, I don't think this is a good customer fit. This is this is a very needy customer. And in my first call with them, they I already identified they don't have a very good budget for the project because their business has been struggling for a bit. So in you know, 12 months, maybe they'll have the budget. So we probably just should go back and say, look, this is what we can do in your budget right now. In when you get the budget, come back and talk to us and we'll help you with the rest.

Dave 39:36

Right.

Duarne 39:37

And the response I got was no, no, no, no, look, I don't want to upset the referral partner. And it was at that time I started asking all questions about the referral partner and found out that they were a $250 a year customer. And it was at that point when he realized why I was asking him, he goes, Oh, yeah, okay, I get what you mean. It's I that's not a very substantial customer, even if I did upset them because they got the word got back to them that the customer that they referred you know had a higher expectation were able to meet. And I said, Well, no, we we've still you've still gone well and truly above and beyond, but we need to set an expectation that there's cost involved now. So we did it pretty, we did something a little bit different to what you're suggesting. I said, Well, look, here's how's this? Let's send out if I can get on next call I get on, I have an hourly rate of X. And he goes, Okay, so he sent an email off to them saying, Hey, look, I've got an hourly rate of X. If you want to get Dewan on a call, it's gonna cost you X per hour. Would you like him to get on a call with you and talk you about this still? Oh, okay, can we just focus that hour on this topic? Suddenly they they re-evaluated what was important to them, decided it was willing to pay for the time, but to talk about what was important to them and what the their biggest pain point was to resolve. So that was a scenario where it was either they were gonna say, No, I don't want to pay for the call, and we say, Okay, part ways now, or they agreed to pay for the call and we jump in and we do the work. But the value was obviously sharing at that point.

Dave 41:15

A great example of you have to respect your time and not minimize your value to meet every client's budget or funding that they have available. And I like to use the word funding instead of budget. Budget sounds restrictive, funding sounds more applicable. Myself included, when I got started, I was always like, oh, well, you know, you can only do this. Sure, you know, maybe we could do that, you know, maybe we just cut X, Y, and Z off, but yeah, let's go ahead. We we we well, let's just do it, you know, trying to close every deal by by minimizing my value to meet their budget or their funding.

Duarne 41:59

And you'd always manage to sneak some of the extra stuff that you cut out back in again in there.

Dave 42:05

They expect you to ask for it. Yeah, and it's twofold, right? It's one, it's not fair to you as the business owner, as the individual, or your team, it's not fair to you. But then two, it's not fair to all your other customers that are paying you the regular rate for the same service. So why does customer A have to pay you know regular while customer B and C, because you felt like you needed to customize, pays less. And so if it gets back to customer A, that's gonna give them a negative feeling. So you need to, if they do have a limited, and I love what you did, you know, it's like, well, let's see what we could do in your funding right now. And then when that helps you get to the next level, then we can do a phase two or phase three, whatever that looks like. And so you're continuing to add the value. And sometimes that let me add value to you right now when your funding is well, hey, follow my page or listen to my videos, or you know, get some email, you know, the newsletter, because they don't have a funds available right now to get started with you. Great, you're gonna have to go out and do the work. And that leads me to the second piece of this is that so many times people, especially any level, but especially the ones that are investing very little with little funds, they expect the immediate result and they expect you to be the one to provide the result. When in reality, that level of programming is a lot of you have to do it yourself. It's not done for you or done even with you at that point. It's I'm giving you the direction you then need to go out and implement. And if you're not willing to do that, again, you're not going to be a right fit for even that level of service. And you have to recognize that. And for me, when I first got full time, that was a hurdle because I always put their success or their completion of their goal on how much did I help them get to there in terms of what did I do, where did I point them in the right direction? And it was probably detrimental for both sides. When in reality, you it does go onto their shoulders of you have work that you need to do here. It's not just going to be done with you're not hiring me full-time to get this done for you on in your job. It's direction, it's advisory, and then there is some things that we are doing for you, but then you have to take it to the next level and continue to grow. But I think far too many people have the expectation of if I'm bringing this person on, there's nothing I need to do. I'm hands off. And unless you're paying for a completely done for you solution, that's there's always gonna be work that you have to do as a business owner or as the client. And then as the business owner giving the service, you have to set that expectation up front. And I it's one of the first meetings I have with I I let people know what are the like the expectations that are gonna happen in our relationship. And the first one is I you have work that you're gonna do. This isn't, you know, come to these meetings and then that's it, and then listen and then. Go off for the next two weeks or the next month and not do anything. Like you have your goals and you have your tasks that you need to do from our meetings. And if you don't do them, you're not going to reach the success that we've talked about. Or you're not going to reach that next level that we need to talk about. So it's really on you. I'll check in with you. I'll make sure you're doing what you need to do, but I can't do it for you. You know, that would be really expensive.

Trust Beats Secret Sauce

Duarne 45:34

Yeah, exactly. Right. And it's kind of interesting because I mean there's a lot of firms out there who go out, and I remember I was quite impressed with Sabri Subery when he put together from King Kong Marketing back in Australia, he put together a uh sell like crazy book. And he's like, hey, I'm gonna give you the book for free. You know, it's gonna tell you exactly what to do, it's gonna give you every step of the path to get on the my journey that I've had to get where I am. I'm gonna give it to you. Oh, and by the way, if you want an audio copy because the book takes too long to get to you, here you go. You can just pay for it here. Little upgrade. Oh, and if you want some of the blueprints to get to that next step, I've got them here too. Pay a little extra, you can get those. But the book was free. Then we get right to the end, and that's where the real sale happened. That's when he says, So you know how to do it. Most of you who know how to do it won't put the effort in. Most of you probably won't even finish reading it. And the majority of you probably want someone to do it for you. That's okay. We're gonna do we'll be able to do it for you. Click the number down below, give us a call, and we'll talk to you about how we can do it for you. And it was really interesting at that point because you realize, okay, giving away the secret source wasn't really giving away the secret source. Because just because they were giving away how they do it, a lot of people still choose not to do it. Or they've they feel that their time is more valuable doing other things, and it's better to outsource that stuff to get someone else to do it. And whether it's with people in your country or people abroad working outsourced from the Philippines, India, Pakistan, South America, wherever, or if it's an AI agent or an AI system doing that. Oh, we stuck it back in. Maybe, maybe one of those solutions, I have to say it, right? Because it's an option now. One of those options might be better than you doing the work yourself. So this is where it gets really interesting.

Dave 47:45

And here's here's the important and this is why I I've said this too. It's not about, and you you said it, it's not about the secret sauce anymore. Everybody has access. It's all over YouTube, it's all over the internet, it's all in your AI chatbot. Like the secret sauce is not some secret anymore, right? You're not doing anything, and I I bet you any amount of money that you are not doing anything dramatically different than everybody else in your industry, other than focusing on the support and the customer side of your business. Like that's how you differentiate yourself and then make things work. Because the secret sauce, the patterns, the processes, right now are few and far between where things really begin to shift the market. You know, Airbnbs or Ubers, right? Those are things that truly shifted the market. And then, but everything else, like every bookkeeper, every accountant, right, every web designer, every you know, lead generation service, there's no secret sauce in how they're gonna get you leads versus anybody else. It's who do you trust, who has a better process, and who do you feel supported by? That's what's gonna make your company, if you think of those three things, right, and how you do that to service your clients, that's what keeps people coming to your business. And that's the only thing you don't have to worry about being different at. Don't be different by, well, I can't tell them how we do this, or I can't tell them how to set up claud co-work. It's out there. There's million videos of how to do that in their business. They're coming to you because it's still over their head. And they don't have time to sit down and watch. I had a great conversation with a guy locally that runs a successful business, but he doesn't have time to catch up and watch all these videos to start doing things in his business to move things forward, to move the needle. But I have that expertise now because I have invested that time. And so that's where I can support that business by taking that off his plate, understanding what he needs to get done, and then help him do it with the direction of his team as well. And so that's the beauty of giving away the secret sauce. Is that once somebody hears it and they haven't had time to do it, they're gonna be like, yeah, I kind of understand what you're saying, but I still have no time to do that. So can you help? And that's beautiful.

Duarne 50:11

And it comes down to this one thing you said trust. You have to establish the trust. Once you've established the trust and they can trust that you're actually gonna do the right thing for them, that you're there to help them and their business, then that's when you can start adding extra value into what you're doing because they see the value, because they trust you, they trust you in your business. And it was interesting because one of the key aspects that came up recently from SEO is a lot of SEO is shifting from regular search into AI search results. What is AI search results looking for? They're looking for trust metrics. They're looking for trust metrics because they want to be able to put forward something that looks like a trustworthy source. So trust worth.

Dave 51:01

When you say trust metrics, for those are that for those that are listening, what what what are good trust metrics? Because I think that's probably something that a lot of people have a lot of questions on. What have you done?

Duarne 51:11

Are you solving the problems that people have? Do you have information demonstrating you're solving the problems? Do you have social proof? Do you have case studies? Do you have videos? Do you have basically content out there in the world, whether it's on your website or your social media platforms, which shows that you're actually doing and what what you're saying you're doing, and you're actually solving the problems for the people who have those problems that they're looking to solve? And once you can demonstrate that, that's a trust metric. And we talk about this on websites with people where if people say good things about you, put them on your website. Show people that you've got recommendations, show people you have reviews. How many times have you looked at a new restaurant, and before you even go there, you've checked the reviews to see what people say? Right? You're looking for trust metrics, you're looking for something to say, oh, they've got a 3.5 star. Oh, okay. Why is that a 3.5 star? Oh, they've only got three reviews. Two of them are really good and one was bad. Okay, maybe someone had a bad day. So let's read that, let's figure that out.

Dave 52:23

Or maybe and I'll I'll do I'll do AI, right? So this is the beauty of like AI. So I, you know, I just sparked an idea, right? Because what you're saying, and I realized that, oh shit, like I need to do some stuff on my website. So I I went here and literally gave give co-work a little a little instruction for me to work on afterwards related to trust metrics, right? So it looks like there's a Hannah here. Hannah, Hannah Clements. Do you know who that is? Looks like she's on your on your profile. Um talking about that's where I come in. Do you know who that is on your on your LinkedIn? Hannah, I don't I don't I don't know if I think you're you're connected with Dwarren, but feel free to write in the in the comment there what what you do and what sort of I don't think we can have you join right now, but we can definitely pull up your comment so people can see it. Feel free to share there. But and so obviously testimonials, all of that is important. What other what other trust metrics are you seeing right now that are truly important when it comes to AI now, but also even SEO?

Duarne 54:17

Right now, it's about actually demonstrating that you're actually helping your niche. Stop being selfish with your content. Right. Stop talking about stop talking about what you think you need to talk about, stop trying to sell and spruk, just talk about what the problems are and how you're solving them. And I know it sounds ridiculously simple, but that's working, and that's building a lot of trust in the trust metrics, and that's getting good results. And it's interesting because this is the same sort of information we used to put, we've been putting into blog posts for a long time. But what we're now doing is we're saying, look, utilize it on your website. And for me, I use a lot of the NEPQ communication techniques, so lots of questions. So we just did a website for a um a bridal dressmaker back in Australia. She makes dresses, and we just did her website for her. And when I was writing her content up, there's phrases in there like, is this the right bridal experience for you? The perfect bride who, and then we've listed off some things, may not be the right fit if you're looking for same-day purchase, if you prefer a high-volume retail boutique experience that you want to compare dozens of gowns in a single visit. You know, so we went through and we started positioning her to be pre-qualifying as well as asking the right questions to build trust. So that's the key here is going through and asking the right questions on your website that actually target, you know, be sympathetic to what your niche is looking for and actually talk to them about the solution that fits. Don't be so generic. So many people are worried about having either too many pages on their website or talking about having, I need one page to tell everyone exactly what I do. And it's the same as you know, and it's that fine line: like, which one do I go down the path of? Am I too vague or am I super over the top? And social media is the same, right? I mean, you you you're gonna do the same thing on social media, whether it's video content, whether it's imagery content, whether it's wording, whether it's articles, whatever you're putting up there.

Dave 56:45

Be informative, and here's again, let's use AI, talking about what you're just talking about. You can go, whether it's Claude, whether it's whatever you're using, you can say, here's my ICP. And for those of you that don't know, I create an intelligence platform that I can help you create your ICP in there. But you take that and you say, What are the 20 most common questions that this ICP has around my service? And then what are also like the 10 questions that they're probably not thinking about that I should be answering? And then there's three ways that you can answer this. One, you mentioned it, turn it into a blog post blog post. Two, turn it into a newsletter article on LinkedIn and create a newsletter on on LinkedIn around that topic, around your business. And you can do once a week, twice a week, whatever it is. You've got 30 topics right there to just get you started where you're answering that in a way, storytelling, whatever it may be. Three, do video QA, and you can do these twofold. One, it can go up on your YouTube channel, it can be shared as social media content, but then it can also go to your website on your QA page. You know, here's QAs, and then here's your you video answering their that question on your on your landing page or on your homepage, whatever it may be. This is something that is on my agenda to get done. Obviously, I'm only one person on time to do this, but this is also something that I really want to start doing, and I want to start doing more of these lives around like topics and different things, not just the podcast, because that is where the trust is built moving forward. Yeah, it is it is really important, especially in the day, and this is the detrimental side of AI. Anybody can take anything from an AI script, turn it into an AI avatar, and it posts out. And so you really don't know are they are they actually that real, right? Or is it just that polished because it came from AI and then it's the AI voice, the AI video, L of that. And then when you go to work with them, they're a dumb box of rocks. I could see that happening. I think that's going to happen. And it probably already has happened. Or do you do things like this where it's live, right? Or there's some sort of, and one of the gentlemen from the office that I that we work in kind of mentioned, or some aspect that you know proves that it was live. Like, hey, this was clipped from this long video, you know, and and so what I would say is in that when you're answering those 20 or 30 questions, go live with it and give your answers live on a live video that you can then can clip up into each individual question and answer. Because again, now you can easily show that that was not an AI because AI can't really do live yet. I don't think AI is maybe ever gonna be able to do live, but who knows? Maybe it will. But at least then you can put on there, hey, this was live during this live stream, and this is where I answered this question. And then they can go to the full-length video if they want to prove it. That's where you're gonna prove your expertise, that's where you're going to truly grow and grow your network and grow that trust and and relatability from your cold network.

Duarne 1:00:03

Yeah, and like I think when you look at this, just break it down really, really simple, right? You know, what is your ideal client looking for? In most cases, they're looking for some clarity around what the services, the product is, they're looking that you've got the expertise, they're looking that you can give them the results, and that you're going to be able to give them that ongoing support long term. You know, that pretty much is most services and products that we've got out there. That's what most people are going out looking for. And how do you show them that? Give them some sort of authoritative guidance or backup, the sort of back up what you've done, and they talk about how you do it and why you do it that way. Show them the results, and you know, then talk about how you can tailor that to suit them if you've got a service like ours where it may not be a cookie cutter fit. If it is a cookie cutter fit, then obviously that's not gonna work. And you know, just be strategic in your approach with them when you're actually talking to them. Be strategic about it. You know, you don't need to. The idea is this is where people tend to make the mistake. You're not Amazon. You're not trying to get people to make a purchase from your website in most cases. You're trying to get them to take an action, which is book a call, send an email, fill out a form, start the conversation. Yes, you might be selling something, but it's not, it's generally not what the lot of websites are out there for these days. Far more websites are out there about getting the you know, a little bit of awareness out about yourself and your service and your products. And the way that ties in is your call to actions should be some sort of lead generation where you're encouraging them to make contact, get some information, download something of use.

Dave 1:01:57

And this is where it goes to the customer journey. And I've educated a lot of people on this. When somebody lands on your website, no more than approximately 5% of people on your website are ready to buy from you right then and there. However, I would guesstimate 80% or more of websites are trying to direct towards that 5%. They have free estimate. Call us now, set up a consultation. Okay. All of those websites are missing the other 95% who are earlier on in the buying journey. They're either one, they have no idea what solution they need because they they just now realize that they potentially have a problem and they're looking for something, or they're looking for some sort of guidance, or they've identified that and now they are trying to decide on which business vendor solution is right for them. But even then, they're not ready to buy, they're still just educating themselves on what's out there. And so you miss that other 95% by not having something like that. So in your hero section, it's fine if you have like a you know, schedule a call button up in the top right-hand corner. It's not your main CTA on your website or down at the bottom of the page, you know, have questions, schedule a call, right? Your main section of that hero section, the most important section on your website is that first 10 seconds that somebody lands on your website that's going to grab their attention, there needs to be some sort of truly engaging value-added piece that you can have there that is going to act and turn your website into a lead generating source. Or some sort of pop-up, you know. So if you're a product service and you know, you can do a pop-up that gives them a one-time off discount by joining your mailing list or your text list or whatever it ends up being, those are valuable because you're, again, it's lead generating. But if you're like a service, you should really have some sort of guide or some sort of questions to ask because that's going to put you top of mind. I've said this before, and I've seen a lot of people who do implement it, it becomes successful. The number one, if you're like a B2C and you are a service provider, or you're like a home services or anything in that realm where you're B2C, your number one thing should be what are the top 10 questions you should ask XYZ service provider before you make your next purchase? Right? Get our list, you know, get the questions here. Uh because the beauty of that is now they give you their email, their phone, you know, optional phone number, and then their first name, last name if you want. But now you have their information. But the second beauty of that is that you're gonna give them all the questions that you need them to know when they go out to your competition, uh, right, to make the best choice. But then, two, in that document, you're putting your exact answers in there. So now every time they go to one of your competitors with those questions, whose questions and answers are they gonna see that they're comparing it to? Yours. And so now every single person you're being compared to, and if you know you're the best in the industry in your area, what are you afraid of? They're then you're gonna help them make that choice that you are the best choice for them by by probably competitor two. They're not gonna want to continue to waste their time. If they go to competitor A and B and they realize that the answers they're getting are nothing like what's in your document, they're gonna come back to you and say, Hey Jane, I loved your answers in this document. I went to your competition, they were nowhere near you. Let's schedule a call. Here's what I got going on. If you don't have your website, you're missing out.

Duarne 1:05:54

If you if this is what this is a scenario that you should play in your head when you're looking about looking at your website, think about when you go to the mall and you and you wander into a store. How quick do you turn around and walk out of that store? If you walk in and you're like, Yeah, this is not where I want to be, you walk out. That's what we call a high bounce rate on a website. But if you walk in and go, well, this is kind of interesting. Oh yeah, let's walk a little deeper into the store and see what's here. Well, this is still quite interesting. And then you find yourself like you know digging through a couple of clothes racks or going looking at a you know a couple of shelves, that's where you start going to other pages on a website. A lot of people don't set up their website in a way that is inviting for people, they set it up to try and just throw as much information as quickly as possible because they've told been told you've got five seconds to get their attention. That's it. If they haven't got you, if you haven't got their attention in five seconds, they're gone. And I love what you were talking about before. The 80% of the people that land on your website, they may not know all the services you offer. They they can find out if they hang on your website long enough because you might have sub pages for it. But how are you gonna keep them there? And that's by giving them something intriguing and interesting to grab their attention initially, so they want to spend more time. It's the same as that store where you they want to go in and spend more time. You know, you go into a supermarket, if you're going in and you make a beeline straight to the fruit and veg section because you've got to pick up some fruit and veg. Do you tend to wander through other aisles? Sometimes, most of the time not. On the way out to the register, you've got impulse aisles, you've got end caps, which are full of products. They may get your attention and make you stop. Oh, maybe I want this as well. And you wander down an aisle, then before you know it, you've got a basket full of stuff when you only went in there to get one or two things.

Dave 1:07:58

Yep. A good one. Well, and that's why in supermarkets they always put the milk in the eggs, which is the most bought items at the back all the way in the back corner. Because they make you walk through the entire store. Now, to go with your other example, and I've noticed this a lot recently, and even not like have it popped out to me, but now that you said that about people walking in and out, I notice it because obviously we we just had Jamie, our baby, and so we go into all these, you know, kind of baby stores, and what grabs our attention is they always up front they put their sale, they put what they got going on, and then they give you a drip of some of that sales items right then and there, but then where are the other items? They're throughout the store to make you walk through the rest of the store to find the rest of the sale items, and so you kind of have to do that a little bit on your website and and turning it into like a journey and a story, like storytell on your website. And I think that's something that is really missing nowadays, you know, because of the fact that so many people are like, oh, just stand up a stand up a website, stand up a website, oh, and you only got five, five seconds, ten seconds, like get their attention. But they're not doing it in the right way. You know, you need to have some sort of CTA piece piece. And I but on the flip side of that, I have a lot of people when I've told them this to do it, they drag their feet and they don't want to do it because they're afraid. They're they they don't want to give away 10 questions, or they don't feel like that's going to do what they need it to do on their website.

Duarne 1:09:29

And great, like oh my competitor might read it, and they might get my ideas and then know what I'm doing. It's like, well, if you feel that if that's your entire value proposition, you probably need to rethink what your value proposition is.

Dave 1:09:43

Yeah, when I when I was a client earlier, I had a big obstacle I had to give him overcome it, and he a little bit started to by the time we ended working together, but he was so focused on the competition. That was it, like that was his driving force. Was anything the competition did, he had to do something different, or anything he did, he wanted to make sure the competition couldn't do. And I'm like, who the fuck? Excuse my French, right? But who cares? Like, yeah, who cares? You know, if you're doing that better service and you know that his quality is not your quality, why are you so worried about it? You're you're you're causing so much stress, you're using so much brain power when you could use all that brain power and all that capacity to focus on growing your own business. Who cares what he's doing? Leave him in the dust.

Stop Obsessing Over Competitors

Duarne 1:10:30

I look at I had a client, exactly the same industry as that one you're talking about back in Australia, and he had a competitor at the other end of his street with the same name, first name as him, and he did the same thing as him, and clients would constantly mix these two up, and he was the one who did really good work. The other one used to do apparently chonky work, according to him, but his shop was always full because he had a cheaper price, and he would drop his price down to compete with him, and then the other guy would drop his price down lower, and it got to the point where I said stop every month. We'd be on a call and he'd be like, What's what should I spend on my what's my budget for my ad spend? What should I be spending? Because I noticed that he was running lots of ads last month and he was really full. And what would happen is this guy would run ads for one month at a really high budget, blow out my my guy. Then my guy wouldn't get as much work that month, except for his regular customers, but then that guy would blow through his entire month to get us to fill up one calendar month, and then he wouldn't have a budget for the next two months. So my guy's regular budget for the next two months filled got his shop full again. But he didn't see that, he just saw that he had a full shop at the end of the street when he didn't, and it played on his mind so much. So when he finally sold that business, I was so thankful. And I'm like, you know, why why would you put yourself through that sort of stress? Like you're worried about what everyone else is doing. Just do a better job, stand by what you do, plenty of plenty of clients and services to be out there.

Dave 1:12:11

I I don't care if I run into somebody else in my same industry. Hey man, great. Like, what are you doing? How are things going? Like, what's been working for you? Because ultimately, there's plenty of people to service, and there's a lot of people that may not like me. They might not like that I wear a hat all the time, they may not like that I don't like to dress in a suit or I don't like to wear a sport coat. I mean, I will every once in a while, but I that's not me, right? Yeah, and there's gonna be people that if that person is that type that don't, they feel maybe overwhelmed by that, and so they prefer somebody like myself who's more relatable. Yeah, 100%. There's plenty of plenty out there for everybody to do. It's you have to stop using it as an excuse. And it was actually, I told JJ, you know, when we were I mentioned last week, JJ on we talked about like, do you give yourself excuses when you shouldn't? Are you finding excuses just to kind of uh make yourself feel better? Or do you come up with the excuse to the excuse? Like, oh, I should not be feeling this way, or you know, I need to do this because I'm trying to make an excuse. And now, you know, it's that that flip side to it. And so, yeah, it's you have to get out of the mindset. Who cares if if somebody else is doing what you're doing? Don't try to wish ill. Like, I want to see everybody succeed. And ultimately, when everybody succeeds, that means what they're doing is helping other people, which means, well, they're succeeding, which means everybody's starting to grow, and that's how you level up. You know, it's that whole ripple effect for everybody around you. You know, how can I make an impact on and everybody? And and so I don't try to hold something back, or I don't try to not tell people to kind of circle back on the secret sauce. There is no secret sauce nowadays.

Duarne 1:14:04

No, and my and and it's funny, right? Because if you look at it, most businesses are not a monopoly or a duopoly. Then you're not a supermarket, you're not a department store, you're not a Walmart out there trying to compete with you know, with you're not competing with them. Find your own customer base and just compete with them. One of the things that's really interesting is if you look at everyone keeps talking, every time I get into a taxi here, and it's always like, oh, how's your how's your shift being? You know, there's too many taxis on the road, it's too hard, it's too competitive. And my first thought is, then why is it so hard for me to get a taxi during peak hour? No, it's just that if you guys were smart about it, you'd take a break during non-peak hours and or work together and just not have as many taxis saturating at a certain point in time, and then everyone be out at peak hour to get all the traffic, to get all the transport traffic.

Dave 1:15:03

But it but I'd be interested because if it's like here, right, the peak hours are probably not the exact time when uh people actually want to work, right? You know, peak hours probably for taxis are probably from like four to eight, which is when people are like, Oh, I need to be off to go home and spend time with the family. Well, you're in an industry where your peak is not normal peak, it's just like say you work in third shift. Exactly.

Duarne 1:15:29

They have random time. The other thing is like whenever it rains, they get really busy because people would normally use alternative transport. So I sit back and I go, look, that you've got markets where people your market is probably nowhere near as saturated as a traffic or an Uber or you know, here we call it Grab, where you've got transport, and these guys can still make pick up plenty of customer base. You know, the average city that you live in probably have if you're doing like let's say car detailing, right? For just a random selection. Now, if we've got car detailing, let's say that how many cars can you detail in your business every day?

Dave 1:16:13

You know, maybe three to eight, depending on how I mean I mean it depends if it's just you, you're you're probably one to two, if that, because you know, typically sometimes they're two to four hour jobs. So exactly.

Duarne 1:16:24

So let's let's just say let's say let's say three to four just to be safe, because maybe they're only quick details with the occasional big one. So over a period of what let's say 20 working days a month, right? 15 to 15 to 20 a week. Do you really think that there's more there's and not enough customers out there to support all the different car detailers out there currently? Just walk out on the street and count how many cars are on the out on the road in a five-minute period in front of your business, unless you're on some back street, maybe drive to a main road. Those are all your potential customers right there. There's a big underestimation on how many customers you can actually service. I mean, if you can think about that, and then and then a month, right?

Dave 1:17:11

And with that means you think like what's the what's that what's the frequency, right? So exactly, and yeah, it's a recurring revenue. Maybe maybe one if it's one per year or two per year, okay. How many do you need? So if it's you let's say it's you know four per day, 20, that's 80 clients per month, and then times six months. So what do you got? 320 is your is your clients out of the probably hundreds of thousands of cars that are out there on the road?

Duarne 1:17:41

Well, how many how many houses are roughly on a city block in Ohio?

Dave 1:17:45

I mean, it depends on the size of the block, but even still, there's probably you know a good 30, 40.

Duarne 1:17:51

Okay, so 30. Let's say that 50 percent of them own a own a car, probably a lot more of a lot. I'd probably say 90. So 90% of them, and probably another 20 to 30 percent own a second vehicle. So we're talking at least 30 vehicles available in one city block. So if you just focus on a 10 block radius, there's your 300 cars, right?

Awareness And Old School Marketing

Dave 1:18:17

All right, yeah, I granted. Obviously, this is an example, but you know, you can service people are willing to drive, you know, especially you know, you have cities that are right next to each other. You know, people are willing to drive 15, 20, 25 minutes, depending on how close it is, to your job. So, like you literally have unlimited clients. It's it's not a client issue, it's an awareness issue, and that's the problem. Excuse me. And I know actually, we're I can't believe we're already at an hour and 17 minutes, which is pretty one of our longer sessions, and we'll kind of wrap it up with this, but it's an awareness issue. And so, what are you doing to increase your awareness? That's the important piece, whether it's a lot of things we talked about here today, SEO, AI, right, trustworthiness. Are you getting your your testimonials? Are you then using those testimonials once you get them? Right, use them in other places. You get a Google review, great, copy the Google review, take the screenshot of the Google review, put it onto your website, link back to your Google reviews from your website, put it on your social media profiles, highlight your, you know, highlight good job, before and afters. All these things that you can and should be doing increases your awareness. Right. Put blog post on your on your your website for every city that you service to help, you know, kind of increase the reach. There's also a lot of things you can be doing in terms of, you know, if you are on a main road, think of the the wind feather signs that you could put up, which is a big kind of signs that you know kind of flap in the wind, right? As people are driving by, they they now can see that you're there. Car detailing, put special signs up, run specials, whatever it ends up being, where they get an add-on, don't discount, run add-ons, right? Bonuses for your specials, not discounts. There's so many things that you could be doing. It's it really comes down to if you're making an excuse of why you're not successful, you will not be successful. That's what it comes down to. Stop allowing excuses of why you didn't get something done. Figure out what didn't happen, and then tomorrow correct it and make it happen. That's the only thing you need to focus on. And then don't talk negatively about yourself.

Duarne 1:20:29

But 100%, you know, you know, here in the Philippines, right? We do gas bottles for gas doves and stuff like that. Yeah nine kilo gas bottles. Now, they still every every single one of these guys in your area will go around with a little bit of masking tape and a little cutout, black and white cutout of their business details with phone numbers, tape it to your gate on the front of your house. They go around and they do that in this in these subdivisions still. And it's no different to when you used to go out to your car and then you'd find there'd be like a little handout or a pamphlet sitting under your windshield, right? These techniques work because the idea is the same principle. You fish where your customers are. Go and find your own. Go for a walk. Yeah. I mean, this is this is one thing that's really interesting is if you talk to a business owner and you walk around, and I have this, I have a friend who owns a business here, and it's in the tourism industry. And one thing I ask him, I always ask people when I meet them, hey, did you hear about this place? And even people who've lived here their whole life, no, I never heard about it. It's been open 13 years.

Dave 1:21:55

Right.

Duarne 1:21:55

And I'm like, you have an he when he complains to me about not getting enough visitors coming through, I'm like, and then he says, tourism is down, and I said, forget about tourism. That's people coming in. Try and talk to try and reach the people that are here, build an awareness campaign around the people that are here. There's enough people here who are looking for entertainment locally who would probably love to come and visit you, but they don't know about you. So you're the best kept secret that no one knows about. So get out there, and that could be something as simple as dropping out handouts, go and visit your, you know, he does educational tours, so go visit the schools, drop off a letter, personally drop in and introduce yourself to the principals.

Dave 1:22:40

And this is a different way you can do it. It literally comes down to making an excuse or not. Because if you don't have time, great, uh bring somebody in that's going to do it.

Duarne 1:22:55

That's it.

Dave 1:22:56

There's a way for you to get that done. You're just making an excuse why you can't get it done. And then it won't get done. If there's something that you need to have happen, you need to figure out a way to make it happen. That's how you're going to be successful, right? Think about in this case, no awareness, no ability, okay, to do it right now, to build awareness himself. Maybe he's too busy. Okay, great. Can you bring in an intern or can you bring in a lower-level staff that's going to go around and maybe pass out some flyers where locals hang out at the gyms, at the recs, at the playgrounds, go post up some you know, flyers of things that are going on? Yeah, think about that. You pay somebody, whatever the rate may be. Here, if you pay somebody you know 10, 10, 15 bucks an hour, you you have them do 10 hours a week, that's 150 bucks a week. All right. And if that brings in three, four, five thousand dollars extra, you paid for the next six months. If way more than that, you pay for the next year and a half. Okay. Yeah. With you know, and then depending on what your gross profit is, but you have the ability to do everything that you need to do. The question is, are you willing to think outside the box to get it done?

Duarne 1:24:12

Absolutely. I mean, do you think roofers sit, you know, guys who go and do roofing and gutters and stuff, do you think they're driving around in their vans when they don't have work, looking at houses that have damage and then knocking on the doors, leaving their details? Or do you think that they're sitting in an office going, Oh, wish the phone would ring? How do you think we're gonna get that phone to ring? They're gonna be out there, they're gonna be knocking on doors. The ones who are out there knocking on doors, they're gonna be the ones who are getting notice. For every 10 doors they knock on, they might get one. Or they might get a referral for someone else. Or someone might call them and say, Hey, look, you knocked on my door a couple of months ago. We've raised enough money to kind of get some of this done. What could can you come back and talk to me about this? You're front of mind, you're the first one there.

Dave 1:24:57

And here is here is the the giveaway I'm gonna give you right now, and then we'll wrap up. But if you already have clients, your best opportunity, if it's just you and you're doing home services or whatever, you need to like either cut work off a little like half hour early or something like that, or stay a half hour later. But you go five to six houses down on either side and then across the street and just introduce yourself. Hey, I'm John. I'm doing some work over at your neighbor's house over there. Just wanted to kind of pass my information. If you ever think of anything, feel free to talk to her. Let in in she'll let you know how my services are. I'd love to have a chat with you if there's any project you got coming up. Great. That that is your see that that's what the most successful roofers are doing. Their crews are doing the jobs, and then their salespeople are going to the houses on that whole block to because if one house probably has damage, all the other ones probably have damage. And so they're talking to all those other people while they're seeing Jane, their neighbor that they talk with twice a week, getting her work done with you. What do you think is gonna happen when all the neighbors trust Jane? And Jane says, Oh, yeah, they were great, their price was good, and they they came in and they got it done in a day or two. They're gonna call you too. That's what those successful businesses are doing. And same thing, it could be us if you're B2B, same thing. And you got a client that you're doing some work for. Hey, by the way, do you know anybody else right now that you know you're talking to in your network that you know would be a good sort of connection that I can support? And then also think of who's in your connection that could help your client make introductions there too. I've done that plenty of times where a client of mine is needed something, or or somebody in my network could use the service from my client and I connect them as well. That's the connectors and people know the connector, you become known as the connector, and so that's kind of the last piece that I think in the because we're at an hour and a half, but love this conversation. We could go on forever, and we didn't even really bring AI into it a lot today.

Duarne 1:27:03

Not a lot. We touched on it a couple of times. We tried to keep it out of it intentionally, and I think we did a good job, right? Right, so I mean, yeah, for a normal business conversation. Getting out of the office and going out and talking to people. We're not talking about posting online, we're not talking about generating stuff with AI. I mean, I love this. I think this is back to the roots of marketing and sales, and it's something that anyone listening, regardless of what their budget is right now, could go out and do. This is, you know, you could start with this tomorrow. You don't need technical skills to do this, you just need a willingness to get off your get out and go and try something different. Maybe it's something you did previously and it worked for you and you forgot about it because you know, everyone's telling you like that's old. You don't do pamphlets and handouts and put them on, you know, put them under doors and you know, give them to people in their businesses anymore. That no one does that, you know.

Dave 1:27:59

You want to know the people that are telling people that, and again, I I I probably was victim to this listening to that, but the people that are telling other people that are the ones that tried it, gave up after like 10 or or 15 no's, and then say, Oh, this is dead, it's not gonna work. Yeah, and and so now they're going around telling everybody that it's it's dead when in reality, you know, you have to you literally have to try everything for yourself and determine what works for you. You can't everything people are doing webinars still, people are doing door-to-door, people are doing ads on Facebook, on Google, whatever. You have to determine for yourself, for your business, what works by trying the things. You don't just take somebody else's word for it. Actually, say, you know what, I'm gonna try something for a little bit, test it out. That's the beauty of having a business, is that you can test A and B, different options, do different things at the same time. Don't assume something because somebody told you, because unless they have the results, right? They can say, hey, hey, here's the here's the 15,000 doors I knocked on and got zero no's. Don't believe it. Because there's other people out there that got 15,000 doors that are doing you know 5 million a month. Are they dead? No, it's it really you have to figure out what works for you, what works for your business to generate more and more of that referral.

Duarne 1:29:20

Here's something here's some food for thought on that too. I mean, you go to a coffee shop and they hand you a loyalty card, ask the question how many people bring their loyalty card back and get a free coffee? Ask the person behind the counter who's giving it to you, and they're gonna tell you because they they're the one receiving them. And you can sit back and go, okay, this actually works. The guy at the when the guy delivers your pizza and there's a menu taped to the top of your pizza box and You're like, how many people reorder directly with you rather than going through Uber Eats? Well, actually, probably about half the customers do. That's a good stat, right? So ask the people that you're seeing doing these things, how is this working for you? If you call somebody who's left a pamphlet on your car, ask them when you're getting the job done and going, how does this work for you? I mean, are you getting a good business out of this? Is this something that you you know, how many, how many of these are you actually putting out? Are you getting a bit of work from this?

Dave 1:30:22

Well, especially because that's the local, like you're getting the actual results from the somebody that that's doing it. Now, get it exactly from somebody that tried to do the pamphlet thing. I understand it. Like, I got plenty of car calls. I can't believe you put this on my car. Like, sorry, I'm trying to grow a business. Like, I don't know like whose car I can't or cannot. Like, but if it doesn't work for you, okay, throw it away. Like, I paid for it, it didn't hurt you any. You throw it in your garbage. Like, so I I guess as we kind of wrap up the session, because everybody's got some fun stuff they got to do on a Friday.

Duarne 1:30:54

They're gonna complain. You know what you could do is you could actually do what I seen on Facebook the other day. There's a there's a page where they were putting on shit parking, and they were saying these people are really bad parkers. So these this group got together and made these really hard to remove stickers and then start putting them on the windows of the cars, going, You're a really shitty parker. Put them on the car because they're sitting there trying to peel them off for an hour.

Dave 1:31:23

Yeah, I could see that in the United States getting good.

Duarne 1:31:28

It's like, come on.

Dave 1:31:30

Yeah, or a business card or something like that. It's crazy, but exactly, right? So, Dwight, what's what's that one thing I know we we chatted about a lot, you know? Yes, people will definitely complain. What's that one thing you hope somebody who's who's watching a replay or made it this far in the live episode? What's one thing you hope they they kind of walk away with?

Duarne 1:31:50

Be willing to try different things and make sure you're focusing on the revenue, the 80% revenue customers, not the customers that take a lot of your time. If they're taking up 80% of your time but only account for a small amount of your revenue, move find a way to move them on to become the customer you need them to be, or find another customer to replace them with that's going to be better fitted for you to grow. And from a marketing perspective, look around you, see what's working from other for other people, and then find out, and then try and find a way to adapt it to yourself because you'd be surprised how easy it is to do some of these very successful marketing techniques that are not high-tech. And for a local business, especially who's trying to sell local, a lot of these techniques we've talked about still work. They're tried and tested, they're proven, they do work. I mean, even as something as simple as just having your sign writing on the side of your vehicle and leaving it parked in front of a job site or taking it out to buy to the grocery store to buy groceries, that's a walking billboard right there. It's free marketing right there. So, you know, think outside the box a little bit. Marketing is not about giving Google and Facebook all of your money for ads. That's one technique, but there's a lot of other grassroots marketing you can do for your business that isn't super expensive. And if you need some suggestions or help with that, reach out to us. We're happy to give you some suggestions and tips on what might work for you and your business.

Takeaways And How To Engage

Dave 1:33:29

Yeah, drop it down below. I mean, if there's anything, a scenario that you're going through right now, drop it down below. You know, we'll we'll respond, let you, and give you some give you some insights. And I think kind of for me, one, thank you for being here if you're here. And we hope that you got something from today's episode. Again, we're on a mission to serve and impact a thousand business owners by the end of 2028. So I would say the takeaway that I would hope, besides everything that Darwin said, right, with the 8020, you know, kind of reviewing on a regular basis your clientele and who's servicing what, the biggest takeaway I would say, is just practice identifying when you're making excuses for things not happening in your business, in your week, in your life. That one change of stopping and saying, wait, that's an excuse. What do I have to do to correct it? Is going to change the trajectory of your next uh future, your entire rest of your life, if you can do that on a regular basis. So identify when you're making excuses for things and turn it into learning moments for yourself. That is the biggest takeaway I think you can do from this episode. And besides everything else, which is awesome, but that's the biggest one that I think you you should learn from today and take with you as you go. So, with that, if you like it, do all that fun algorithm stuff. Again, we go live every Friday morning between 8.15 and 8.30 on all the fun networks. And then afterwards, we do post it. So this is always on all the the typical podcasts as well. So on you know, Apple and Spotify and all those. So if you listen to if you're listening to us in an audio version, we appreciate you as well, just as much. And with that, feel free to share it. If there's anything that you know you got out of the episode that was impactful, share this. We appreciate it. So until then, we'll see you in the next one. And we hope you guys have a wonderful and amazing week. See you later. Take care.