Welcome To Business Unscripted

Dave 0:01

Welcome to the Business Crypto Podcast. We're here to share real life insights, practical strategies, and the added lessons that we have learned from our own estate and we have been in your students. So whether you need help with operations, accountability, financial knowledge, sales, or maybe just getting your mindset right, we are here and it's the right spot for no fluff conversations. So grab your favorite cup of go. Let's jump into the show. Let's jump into the show, ladies and gentlemen. It's another Friday morning. Hope you guys are having a wonderful and fantastic week. And that means it's the Business Unscripted podcast with your two favorite, beautiful, not so much, men, Juan and Dave here.

Duarne 0:39

And hopefully we make up for the lack of beauty with other things like dental.

Dave 0:44

Yeah, yeah. I hope I hope that's true. I know that's true. That part's true. So if you're a business owner, aspiring business owner, and you are looking for a place that you can learn from experiences or get some new advice, you're in the right spot. We do this every single Friday morning. Anytime between you know, well, eight and nine, we get started. And we love being here, and we hope that you enjoy being here as well. So we got some good topics coming up, I think, for you today. So stay tuned about mindset, strategy, some other stuff. I'm sure we'll go unscripted like we normally do. But uh, Darn, sir, welcome, welcome to another episode.

Duarne 1:16

Thank you, Dave. What a win.

Dave 1:18

How's things on the other side of the world?

Duarne 1:21

It's been a busy week. Very, very busy week. Lots of great opportunities on the go. Very creative week from my side. Good. Yeah. It's it's one of those weeks where some big decisions were made. But if I'd big decisions in the sense that if I went back two years ago, I would have probably sat on it a lot longer than I did. But in this day and age, it's I don't feel like it's as big a decision for me anyway.

Dave 1:54

So so when you say are you saying because you have more knowledge, you have more

Rebranding With Confidence

Dave 2:00

experience, or you just are willing to take a little bit more risk. Like, I guess help us understand what that means.

Duarne 2:08

I might guess. I mean, okay, it's like here's what's happened. The last week I decided that we needed a new website for uh one of our brands, the web design devour brand. And we did a website about a year and a half ago, and it was pretty flashy. Lots of put a lot of work into all the different styles that we could achieve to showcase our work because we always always had a very simple website before that, which was nice, but it was just simple, it was designed purposefully to be simple for people visiting. This time around, it was like, well, we need to do something different. I don't want it to be as big and flashy as the last one, but I still want it to be impactful and have a similar messaging. Now, with all the AI advancements, I can certainly produce content a lot quicker than I could a year and a half, four years ago. Right. Right? And even back then, a year and a half ago, like it took me two months to get all my content prepared because AI wasn't quite where it is today. And we haven't trained up our agents.

Dave 3:16

We know that too.

Duarne 3:18

So as part of this exercise, I decided you know what? Back then we changed our logo, we modernized it, and we still kept our legacy logo, which is like uh this okay, like the eagle or whatever.

Dave 3:34

Yeah, yeah.

Duarne 3:34

Yeah, with like a digital billboard underneath, which was kind of fun back in the day, 10 years ago when we created it. But it's just a bit dated now, it's hard to work with. We created a fresher version, it was only two colors black and orange, and it was the wording with the little arrow off to the corner. Everything was great, except for when I did the redesign. I thought I want to keep a subtle change. And we in between this, we'd launched a really cool brand called Discover Devour, which had some really cool colors. We loved the colors in that logo, so I decided to borrow the concept of that since it's part of our group anyway, and we introduced five new colors to the word of Devour, and the logo just popped. It was crazy, which forced me to decide after my team had already put in a week's worth of work on building our new website to halt all that work and start fresh with a fresh new design. Okay, and if I'd gone back a year and a half ago, I wouldn't have done that. Like, no, no, I've remade up my mind. It's too much work, rebranding logos, all that sort of stuff. That's a lot of weird. I don't want to go down that path. It's one of my brands, it's recognizable, and we're still showing heritage to our old logos. It's a subtle change, it's an upgrade. And I think it was a decision that I made which I didn't make lightly, but I made a lot more confidently because I'd gone through this before. Right. And I didn't feel like we were losing our identity by doing it. So yeah, I think it's something there were a little bit of a.

Dave 5:13

But I guess so, so, but what I guess when when I think about that, but what uh on your end, like what frees up your uh hesitation or your your fear of making a change? Is it knowing that you could always go back easier than before because of all the things that you've experienced and you and you have the ability and the or is it just like something else? Like I guess I mean what do you feel it is that that gives you that of like you know, hey, I'm willing to make it I'm willing to make a decision much quicker than I used to. And what do you feel that that is?

Duarne 5:48

I think a lot of people are I think with I've got a lot of experience with branding, right? Branding and marketing is my bread and butter. That's what I do. And I think for me, realizing that rebranding or changing your logo up, changing a website up, it's not something that should be a scary thing for you. It's something you can actually embrace and have some fun with. And it's not gonna people are not gonna suddenly go, oh, who are you anymore?

Dave 6:16

That because you're still carrying the same name. I mean, you're not Nike, yeah, you're not like you know, a cracker barrel, right? When they when A did theirs.

Duarne 6:22

Like, I mean, but even their logo a few times, and they got around it, right? I mean, these companies will do it, and some of them are successful at it, some of them spend way too much money doing it. But the other thing is like 90% of what we do is digital, so it's not like we have to go and replace a ton of uniforms, it's not like we have to go and replace a whole pile of billboards, we don't have to go and replace a bunch of printed cards and things like that. So it was a lot less risk from that point of view. We digitalized a lot of stuff, which helped, but also it's it's a bit of fun and it's something to embrace.

Dave 7:03

And that's yeah, I think it's always good to kind of give a refresh. Like, you know, I'm sure, like you said, the Eagle was was in 10 years ago, but now you know it's a whole different company than it was 10 years ago. Like you just think of the differences in just the last couple years versus 10 years, it's a wholly different company. So I'm sure you have completely made a brand new logo and a feel that fits today. And I think that's part of what uh a rebranding is about. You know, for me, it's always been about a lion, right? But when rebranded and you know, I was able to kind of turn it into like a personal type of favor con, you know, in a logo, people love it more because it's like, oh my god, that looks like you. It's like, yeah, that's how I created it, you know, and and it's so yeah, you're right. It should be fun, it should be something that uh explains kind of who you are and and who the business is now for yourself. So I you know that's awesome. So and and I guess you get the ability with experience to you know have the freedom to make those decisions and be quicker with those decisions, I think is the lesson that I'm hearing from you right now.

Duarne 8:10

Absolutely, and I think don't don't be afraid to embrace some change. We talk about change all the time. Normally, we're not talking about change in the form of a rebrand and logo change and all of that, but sometimes you have to realize that you know what, I think we can do better. And initially, my logo change went through stages, like it was over a period of one day that I went through this logo change, and I was just trying a few things out initially. It was like, well, what if we made a subtle change just to make this a little nicer? And that first thing was just rounding the edges of our logo, and it just looked a little softer. It's like, oh, that's nice, right? What if we push the words together a little bit, and then we had an overlap with a bit of you know, a bit of space, and that looked really cool too? Like, well, that's even nicer. What if we switched up the colors a little bit? We went through three variations of colors, and then I'm like, well, hang on, what's this really cool logo over here that we did? Got really well received. What and it's part of our group, people know it's us, so why don't we embrace that and use that on this logo as well and just see what happens? And the color palette was incredible, like it gave us an awesome color palette. So, I mean, talk if we talk colors, we'll go up black, orange, purple, blue, red, orange, another shade, and green. So it's pretty out there, but it's not overwhelming, it's just fun, and that's what we are. Like we want to we want to portray that, that we're fun, and we are a marketing agency, so it's okay to be fun. So we're not defense contractors, that'd be a different story, yeah.

Dave 9:53

We would be very more stringent,

Make Decisions And Adjust

Dave 9:55

very more you know, regulated, that's for sure. But exactly. Maybe the well, I mean that's a good lesson for I think a lot of people, I think you know, there is a lot of fear around making decisions and what if I'm wrong. And you know, one of the biggest things that I've learned, not only in in business but in corporate, was you know you're gonna make a mistake. So why why try not by trying not to make a mistake? There's two things. One, you're either gonna hold yourself back and you're never gonna make a decision, or you're you're gonna end up forcing yourself into a mistake because you know you had that you know analysis paralysis that people talk about, or you overthink things. I think as long as you're open and you talk through if you have a team and say, okay, we're gonna make this decision based on the information we have now. And in 60 days, when more information comes out, you may have to make another decision or an adjustment. And I think you can't penalize yourself for that because you can't say, Oh my god, 60 days ago I made the wrong decision. No, you made 60 days ago, you made the decision on the information you had at your fingertips or in the palm of your hands at that moment and you made the best decision possible. You know, if you always wait, like just like they always say, you know, if you wait uh for the perfect time to have a baby, you'll never have a baby, right? In terms of like money situation. Like same thing. You know, if you always wait, if you wait for the perfect time to switch jobs, you wait for the perfect time for anything, it's never there. But diving's never perfect, you know, and you're always gonna kick yourself in the butt. Like you may think, you know, for example, you may sign on a new contract, like you know, for or a new uh support staff or a new VA. And then uh two weeks later, your biggest client may call you up and say, Hey, you know what, we we have to adjust services or something, maybe they're going on something that you had no idea about when you made your decision. You can't penalize yourself for that, but now embrace it. Look at that opportunity, right? And think, okay, now I've made the decision to bring on a support staff. I now have more time myself to go out and replace that income now. And maybe you can replace the income with something bigger than what the person's left or the or the reduction that they want. So look at the positives of situations. I think is something that you can you can also turn this into, which I wanted to talk about anyway. So, you know, a good transition.

Build Tools That Solve Real Problems

Duarne 12:12

It's interesting, right? I mean, and and this and this is it. Like, this all started with wanting to kick start a new marketing campaign. And we're like, well, okay, if we're gonna kickstart the new marketing campaign, let's do something a little bit splashy, let's do something a bit different. And just so happens that it forced me to kickstart a marketing campaign on one of our other brands as well. So all of that led to me building more tools, which is awesome because I love building new tools and definitely possible and plausible now with AI.

Dave 12:48

Um we've talked about that too, right? You know, it's it's it's easy to make them, but as long as they're productive and they're increasing your productivity, it makes sense. Don't waste your time making something that might be a one-off solution or something like that, right? If it's productive, long-term serving, it's gonna help you save time long term, absolutely it's worth the investment of the time right now.

Duarne 13:41

And that's the thing, it's about knowing whether it is productive use of time or not. So many people they don't spend the time doing asking the right questions internally. If you've got a team, right um or you've got clients, ask them what their pain points are with dealing with you and your business, and that'll probably tell you what you should focus your attention on as far as software development goes and making things. I wrote a couple of LinkedIn articles just recently, which are due to go out over the next month, and some of them are talking about is the is the wrong software stack costing you money? Should you just build something internally to solve your problems? You know, is your competitor is is the best software for you something different to what all your competitors are using? Because it's tailored to you, it's to suit your environment and your solution. In a lot of cases, I feel that's the case, because not one size fits all. But again, that's a scary thing, that's change. You know, are you gonna go against the grain? What happens when you know you want to make a change to that, you want to make an addition to that? You've got to have you know all these considerations in mind. But I see a lot more businesses taking that risk and going down that path of saying, hey, let's do this, let's try something different. And I think it's great.

Dave 15:08

Yeah, I mean, and and again, that's where I think you don't necessarily have to be the one to dive into it. Like find somebody like that that wants to or that can help you. There, there's a lot of opportunities. You know, I have a lot of conversations lately about just what's a process that's taking up a lot of your time or your team's time, and what does that look like, whether it's a full-on you know, application build end-to-end to help the workflow, which is something we're working on right now for a client, or is it, you know, is it a one-off sort of like automation that you build inside your go-ai level or whatever CRM you're using? Like there's there's different ways to look at how do I save time in my business? And it's not always AI, right? You know, it it's one, how do you just make it a more efficient system end to end, and that's where you always want to start because you don't want to build something automated on a broken system, where it's just gonna compound basically the all the all the issues that you have. So you got to think through it.

Duarne 16:11

Exactly. And yeah, there's something I saw the other day, which was I've got the AI tools. Why isn't my business running better? And it's a common, common thing that I'm seeing. You got people, they're buying all these AI tools, getting the latest tools for their industry, only to find that they weren't, they don't know how to use it, or their team hasn't been trained how to use it, or they haven't given the tool to their team. They're like, well, no, it's a little expensive, or I'll just give this to the to certain team members at the moment. What you'll probably find is the people you're holding it back from are the ones who are going to do the most benefit with it. They're gonna be able to utilize that and turn it in, you know, turn that into gold for you. Um and you know, you and I shared some conversations there last week where you know you've got a team member there using AI tools to answer questions they would normally have come to you with. And same with me, I've got the same scenario going on. I mean it's huge. I had a conversation

Train Your Team To Use The Tools

Duarne 17:14

with another client this week, and they want us to build out an AI team for them as well to go with their virtual assistant team. And one of the things that we were talking about, they were saying is like we're too busy, we can't put the time in, we can't plan it, we can't train this. And it's like, well, we have ways around that, we can help with that.

Dave 17:34

You have history, like that's the biggest thing. You have history. I think the biggest thing if you're looking to train is you have to bring all your past information into some sort of repository brain system vault that I that I suggest for everybody using, like Obsidian to start. That's the easiest thing you can do if you're like, I can't train it. Well, okay, let's grab all your emails, all your transcripts from any videos you've done. We can take your meeting notes and scrub out any any sort of relevant information and pull all that in, and now you have it's automatic. You know, you think of the I guess the biggest AI one that I think of that a lot of people talked about is like the Alex Ramosy AI. Do you think when when he was starting five, six years ago with his meetings or or or before, if he's like, Oh, eventually I'm gonna take all of this stuff and I'm gonna put it into an AI? Like, no, he probably had no idea at that point, but he kept them, he kept the PDFs or whatever he did, and he scanned them all in, he put them all into a PDF, and he did that was the easy thing he could do to train. So, like, he didn't have to go and like talk to the AI for hours. He took everything that he's already already done and turned it into a system that it can learn from, and now it teaches itself.

Duarne 18:45

And and here's the other crazy part about Iraq. Let's say you're an accountant and you're dealing with taxes and all sorts of things. A lot of that stuff that's gonna help you and your team already exists out on the public internet. You can pull that data in from your local state tax registries, websites, and you know, the IR and you don't have to even do it. No, you can just tell it to train on that. You can say in this, look for updated information, make notes of any outdated information that may affect anything we're dealing with within our client base on a regular basis, and send alerts out to the team to make them aware of such notes. All of this stuff can be built in, it's just about understanding what the premise is. And it was interesting to hear that we don't want to move forward yet because we're too under the pump. We're a bit concerned about bringing on more business right now because we can't handle what we've got. And then on the flip side of that, I was having a conversation with a client today who said one of

Make Time To Work On The Business

Duarne 19:48

my clients is lost one of my clients today. And I was like, Oh, what happened? He goes, Well, he's an electrician at an electrical company, and he's had to downsize. He's gone basically down to himself as a single operator now with one offsider from the team. And I said, Oh, I remember that guy. That was a guy who didn't have enough time to finish working with me to build his website a few years ago. He goes, Yep, always full of don't have enough time, too busy, too busy, too busy, but didn't put the time into his business. He kept trying to work in the on the client's problems instead of putting in a business to grow his business. He didn't work on himself, and in the end, it ended up being the thing that forced him to you know scale right back to a small operation, and now he's got himself a nine till five. He's got himself that nine till five job, right? Right which now he just happens to sign his own checks and have all that stress and responsibility of running a business, but he's basically just replaced his job with a job.

Dave 20:50

Well, he he yeah, he becomes a he becomes uh he commits a job owner instead of a business owner, right? You have that's that's I guess the the biggest. I don't remember where I heard it from, but it it's it's just yep, you you basically just own a job instead of a business. And I think well it kind of brings about like so there's there's two things that I wanted to kind of cover. They kind of correlate together. And I wanted to kind of get your opinion on a couple of first, I guess we'll we'll go to the we'll go the unpopular opinion route.

Business Owner Or Job Owner?

Dave 21:19

And I think this is definitely unpopular potentially, but you know, for me, nails on a chalkboard are when I hear from a business owner that or I guess it's a general, just as a human, like you want to advance or you want to do anything, but most often than not now business owners that I talk to. And they're like, I want I want to grow, I want to, uh you know, I have I want to accomplish you know X, Y, and Z, whatever their goals are. Like and it's just requires work. You know, it's not just something that's just like within grasp. But so they're explaining all this, they're telling me how they want to you know do all these different things. And when I either check in, whether they're clients or they're they're just other individuals that I meet at networking events, ask how things are going, they just say, Oh man, I just had a great long weekend away, you know, all these different things that it's like, okay, wait a minute, like that doesn't make sense. Like you're telling me you want to grow and you're struggling with that, and you don't know how you're gonna get there, but yet you're telling me how you take uh Thursdays off early to go, you know, to whatever event, and and it's a constant recurring theme, it's not a one off. It's like nails on a chalkboard to me, brother. Like I'm Like, yeah, I don't get it, you know. Because it it's like you're talking out of both sides of your mouth, right? It's like I want to grow, I want to get more money, but I don't want to like do all the work that it takes to get there.

unknown 22:44

Yeah.

Dave 22:44

I don't know. Like, do you have that saying like maybe your opposite? Maybe you're like Dave's like, yeah, I that's I don't know, I don't agree with you, but I don't know.

Duarne 22:51

I don't know what you're on, man. That's that's a people go into business all the time so they can work three days a week. What are you talking about?

Dave 22:57

I get it, like long term, sure, when you've done the work, but it's just like, man, there's so many people that are that are just like I I don't I don't get it. I I can't I can't find more clients. Okay, well tell me how many hours a day you work in. I don't know. I you know, I get off every day at five. You know, what time do you start? Nine? What when the hell do you expect to find people and service your clients? Like, you know, I I I can think of another six hours during your day that you're not utilizing appropriately right now, and guaranteeing you're probably not working on a weekend.

Duarne 23:28

Well, here's the question like, what do they want to achieve from their business and why are they doing it? It's probably half a question. And what do they feel they need to do to achieve that? Right. You know, like we talked about before, some people are just transferring their nine to five jobs to something with a lot more stress by running a business. Well, they can pick up a little extra revenue, which they probably have to pay to the tax man or for other operational expenses they never factored in in the first place.

Dave 23:58

Right. And and I think this is the biggest that's the biggest shift first. Any person that if you're if you're a business owner, or maybe you're aspiring and you're thinking, and this is you right now, and you came from a nine to five job, that is the first thing you have to lose when you go into business. It is no longer nine to five. It it is you're you're 24-7. Like it is your it's it's your baby, like, and you're always gonna be thinking about it, you're always gonna be stressed about it. And here's the other thing that sucks about this nobody around you that's not a business owner is gonna give any shit about it. They're not gonna, they're not gonna understand it, they're never going to see it the way that you do. And it's the biggest mindset shift that you're gonna have to make to get started. If you cannot make that shift, do not get into business because it is only gonna cause you more stress than any nine to five job could ever cause you. And if you're not willing to make that mindset shift, don't even get started. I'm warning you now, like, do not get started if you cannot make that initial mindset shift. And know that to get started, you are going to have to put in 12, 13, 14 hours, days, five, six days a week. It is no longer I'm a business owner, I can go do whatever I want when I want. You don't have a guaranteed paycheck, you don't have the ability to just cut off early or get out of work 15 minutes early on a Friday. You don't have that anymore. So it's if you need to go do something because it's for family or whatever, when are you making up those hours? You don't get PTO as a business owner, and it's one of the biggest nails on a chalkboard that I hear from people all the time is they're complaining that they can't grow, they they don't know how to do outreach, or not not how to do it, but they don't know how to get more outreach done. And then I those same people are the ones that are telling me, well, yeah, I I I was off at five, or I put like, you know, I work four hours a day in my business. Stop complaining then. You you can't do both, and that's the thing. Like, you cannot do both.

Duarne 26:02

These are the same people that will sit there and get super excited when their boss gives them 10 minutes off early for the day. Yet they'll sit there and criticize you for running a business. I don't know why you do that. You're spending all your time. Hang on, you just got excited about 10 minutes early out because your boss is feeling gyros. When you're the boss, when you get when I get asked, like, how many hours did you work this week? I no idea. I just did as much as I needed to. You know, some nights I finished at 11, some nights I finished at 10, some nights I finished at 6. You know, that was just how it was. And you know, when did you start? Some mornings I started at 7, some mornings I started at 11. You know, some mornings started at 8 and ended up doing three hours of errands outside related to the work that I'm doing.

Dave 26:55

But there and and and and with you, at least from our conversations, there's no complaining, and that's the difference. Like, if that in your case, you can do that because you're comfortable where you're at, you know what you need to do, and you're getting it done. You're not complaining and still doing all those different things. The the nails on a chalkboard for me is a is is the ones that are like they're complaining, but then they're also doing all these things that are just like like you got to change your your actual like habits, brother or sister. Yeah, like yeah, and so you know it's you know, Monday was the holiday. I came in. I was like pro I I think out of the entire office buildings here, there was you know, me and maybe like four of the cars, like on Labor Day. Like you don't get holidays as a business owner until you've earned it. I I what's that?

Duarne 27:48

What's a holiday?

Dave 27:49

Yeah, what's a holiday? Exactly. It's like yeah, I mean, now granted, like you could you figure something out, but

Outreach Is A Repeatable System

Dave 27:58

you know, I don't know. That was that was the one thing you know, it kind of came up to mindset is a big thing that I guess was the theme of the week. You know, so we had our alignable alliance event Thursday, yesterday, and you know, we've turned them into you know kind of mastermind roundtable discussions, and a lot of people have like the the feedback on that has been great instead of just having one person stand up there and teach or give an education. Now everybody gets a chance to ask questions, talk about obstacles, but I think it's been really good. But mindset, I guess, kind of was a a theme from this past conversation, and it came around what was it, outreach. Somebody had brought up how you know they could do all this outreach, they can, you know, have all these conversations, but people don't respond. And everybody's like, Yeah, you know, you know, I call or I do this or send messages, and and nobody responds.

Duarne 28:52

We had a call this week I spoke to, and he said he reached out to 42 agents. I went, wow, that's impressive. The question came. He was complaining his ads weren't working as well as they used to. And I said, Well, what are you doing other than ads? I said, pretty sure I gave you a list about a year ago of all the agents in your city. Have you called through any of them? Have you recalled any of them? And maybe their circumstances have changed. I get a and I get a message back a couple of days later. I reached out to 42 of them. I've heard back from none. So I followed it up with, oh, okay. How did you reach out? Oh, I sent a video. Okay. Where's the video? Send it to me. And it was it started with, hey guys.

Dave 29:39

Not personal, not anything, yeah, yeah.

Duarne 29:41

And I said, So here's the thing. I said, try that again. But next time you try it, what you want to try and do is hey, I was sitting here, I was just thinking about you. I said, still look casual, still very general, but it feels personal. They're gonna sit there and go, is he talking about me? Did he really just think about me, or is he done it's gonna catch their attention for a minute? And then they might listen to the rest of your thing. But if you say, hey guys, they know it's a broadcast. People are less likely to listen to a broadcast. It's also when someone says they've reached out to 42 people, I expect to pick up the phone and call them.

Dave 30:55

Not for some personal, yeah, yeah, for some personal type of outreach for sure.

Duarne 30:59

So we're talking about outreach. So that's the only reason I mentioned it, but yeah, not to criticize them as a great effort, but just to say that outreach is not outreach. What we consider outreach is not necessarily what someone else is going to call outreach, nor is the same amount of effort put into outreach as other people's effort.

unknown 31:16

Right.

Dave 31:16

Well, and and so I piggybacking on that kind of idea, right? Is that one outreach is not a one-time thing, as you said. Outreach is a system. And so this is where I kind of you kind of dove a little deeper and and asked some follow-up questions with them. It's like, okay, well, well, what was your what was your way of communication? A lot of it is email, sometimes it's phone, sometimes it's in person. Okay, and then and what's your actual like system look like for a contact? So, and when I mean that is uh do you do six emails, two phone calls, and if you're an in-person type and one visit? And you're like, well, we know we don't have anything set up like this. Okay, so that's your that's your follow-up outreach system where is at least three types of mediums, whether it's it could be email, LinkedIn, or text, right? It could be uh email, phone, LinkedIn, whatever you want to build it as, right? That's your follow-up system. But you want to have at least three mediums and you want it to go for at least like six weeks after the initial contact. Because again, and I said, let's take a moment by a show of hands, who here over the last let's just say two weeks, have uh missed a contact, missed an email, forgot an email that they wanted to respond to or knew they were supposed to follow up with somebody and didn't, right? In terms of like they saw an email from them and then forgot to send a response. Every single person's hand in the room went up. I said, So everybody is just like us. Like just because you send one email to somebody and they don't respond, or one DM to somebody and they don't respond, it doesn't mean they don't want to talk to you. It just means they're busy, or your email might have gone to spam, which is why you need to have other mediums as part of the communication to have them run through the system.

SPEAKER_01 33:09

Yeah.

Dave 33:10

And I said, the other thing that you guys need to overall change is the idea of outreach doesn't work because I didn't get a response for my first message. Because all that does is you're gonna think, man, I'm gonna send all these messages and nothing's gonna get responded to. Instead of thinking high level and looking at your entire system and saying, in general, if I put a hundred people into my outreach, my follow-up system, 30% of them will turn into something. You now start thinking, how do I get more people into the system and into the pipeline? Not nobody's responding to my first messages, I'm not ever gonna get started. And that mindset shift is the biggest thing that you can make when you're thinking of how do I start doing outreach. Instead of thinking, man, nobody's gonna respond to me. I don't really want to do this today, you don't do it. It's human nature. You you already told yourself the negative before you can get started. Instead of thinking it as, man, I need to get 50 people into my pipeline because I know based on historic, I'm gonna get 15 of those to do a call, and then five of those might turn into a client because you know I get a 33% close rate. Yeah, that's I mean, now you're not gonna stop because you're gonna you're gonna be every 50. Man, let's go, let's get them in. Now, granted, it's probably more like I need 200 people into a pipeline, but still, if you get 200 to get five clients, is it worth it for you? Oh, yeah, like you just gotta look at the positive side of things instead of the negative and to motivate yourself.

Duarne 34:36

And that was like I got a uh request for quote this week from an old contact

Win Quotes With Speed And Process

Duarne 34:42

that I've known for probably 14 years. Okay, and I've sold to him as a vendor before, worked with him as a vendor, never really done anything in my current capacity with him, but we stayed in contact. When I say stayed in contact, we chat every other year, right? So it's nothing significant, and then this request for a quote comes through, and I was like, hey, I was sending this out to other people, and then I thought, hey, this is what you do. Why don't I send it to you? If you want to quote on it, go ahead. Sure, all right. I could have sat there and went, you know what? I'm one of a few people. What's my chances of getting this? I'll put in a minimal effort, throw a number in there and just see what happens.

Dave 35:26

Or you're breaking up.

Duarne 35:30

Sorry, I'm am I here? You go.

Dave 35:33

I think you're you might be back now. Go ahead.

Duarne 35:36

All right. So I decided different approach. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna throw in a whole bunch of effort, put a big interactive proposal together, took the time to send a couple of emails initially with a bunch of questions and you know, outlining some options, and he responded to all of them really promptly. So in turn, I put together a really great proposal, and I shared it with you earlier before this call. And you know, it's a very unique approach, and it took quite a bit of time, like we're talking half a day to a day to put this together in whole after all the emails and questions and planning. But the response was, oh my god, this is impressive. And once I followed that up afterwards with my actual quotation, because you'd already seen what I'd already put forward. We did a little bit of negotiation back and forth in the quotation, and we settled on that's great, I can manage that. Look, give me a few days. I've sent this out to a few people. I should wait to get their response back for due diligence, right? But you let me just uh right now, you were the promptest to get back to me and blown away by your presentation. Now I mean you've got to respect somebody who's gonna you know do their due diligence. You can't get upset with that. And the other part of it is I could have treated it as oh, you know what, didn't pick me up, put all that work in. No, because what I did is I proved a proof of concept that I'll now use again on my next big proposal and see how it goes then.

Dave 37:19

See, that's that's the piece, right? Once you figure out something that works, turn it into a process, turn it into a system, and then it's repeatable every single time. And and you you did say something there that I actually haven't like it just reminded me that man, what was it? I think it was two two years ago now, maybe three years ago now. But an old college buddy of mine worked for a bank, invited me to like a luncheon where the guy, the the speaker, man, I wish I could remember his name. I'll have to find it and link it down below. But he talked about that specific aspect about time and how being prompt is one of the number one factors right now in determining if you will get a quote or not. Because think about it, everybody wants something in the moment, like they need it right now. You know, that's why we have our mobile phone, that's why we have all this stuff. Like everybody wants stuff now. Our attention spans are zero, literally, in some cases. And what happens is a lot of people now, and you I'm still hearing this now today, which it's funny, you just it's funny how one word can just prompt a thought, you know, or uh a memory, right? And but but thinking back, a lot of people now say, you know, hey, uh how's that quote quote? You know, I'm pulling it together, you know, or it typically takes me seven days to pull a quote. You've lost them, don't even bother at that point, you know, because one, they've probably already gotten all the other quotes that they've already looked at, or they've gotten a quote, like in your case, right? You've gotten a quote from somebody else, and they're like, Oh yeah, I'm just gonna go with this one, and they're they're fine. Or they lost all the emotion. Like the idea is you want you should in the moment of actually talking to somebody, right? Want to give them a quote right then and there. Hey, here's where we're at. Now, depending on your process, like sometimes it does require, like in your case, right, there are some additional, maybe higher level things, but if you could turn a quote around in 24 hours instead of four days, it's a big difference, you know? Yeah, and so how do you do that? And and that's again, as we're talking through all of this stuff that we say repeatedly on the show, it's a system, it's a process. Figure out what works, figure out what has has worked for you in the past, and then turn it into a repeatable system that can expediently right be done. And and yeah, it's crazy.

Duarne 39:45

That's how I approach a lot of these situations. I look at it as this is not a once-off, and just to prove my point, I went and used the same system on an existing project and got a really positive response from that as well. And I made the suggestion to one of my team who's working with somebody to do the same thing, and they've got a positive response from doing it as well. So I think some of these things you stumble upon can be really, really useful, and you've got to look at it like, yeah, this could take me a half a day to a day to put this together properly, and for what? For something I might not get, or you know what, I'm gonna put the I've got the systems in place, I can do this, I can do it reasonably well and efficiently, and you know what, I'm gonna look pretty damn good doing it, so let's just do it. Because whether they they go with you now or they go with you later on down the track, you're still front of mind. And that person who, you know, you can remarket to them. You may not win this deal, but you're they'll go, oh wow, that guy put in a lot, he was real prompt last time. Next time I got a deal, I'm gonna put it through to see if he's interested in doing it. Because unlike like this is a software system build, so it's not something that someone's gonna come to me along, you know, regularly with the same sort of thing over and over. But for a lot of their listeners out there, they're gonna have businesses which might have you know regular cycles of doing the work. They may have like you know, a car wash service or detailing service or a you know, whatever some sort of building service, contractual service, and they could get a lot of referrals. You know, it's been shown in the service and trades industry, but if you can turn a quote around within hours getting the inquiry, you have a much, much higher rate of getting the business. Additionally, if you can do that, you've got a much higher success of actually, yes, Paige, exactly, of actually getting a referral from that person as well. Even if they didn't choose you, they're gonna remember that you're efficient. So they might mention, hey, this guy was really efficient in quoting me, didn't go with them because the price wasn't quite what I wanted, or they couldn't quite fit me in the time that I needed, or they didn't have the product in stock, so I went somewhere else. But they were really efficient. I'd recommend reaching out to them if you're not in a massive rush.

unknown 42:16

Right.

Duarne 42:17

All that sort of thing. These like there's always flip sides to this, but take the time, build the process so you can do quotes quickly, and it doesn't have to be quotes, it could be anything in your business.

Dave 42:30

But if I mean I think the yeah, the biggest things that so and then I got we got to wrap up because we I we started late today, but sorry, the number one I I the first thing that I say for a lot is you

Systems For Awareness And Client Service

Dave 42:43

have to have a system around awareness, like some sort of awareness type campaign that when somebody comes new into your ecosystem, it is an educational type, whether it's email, comp combined maybe even with text or something like that, that is educational, valuable, informative, not just about like your services and who you are, but like actual educational content. Like, hey, like here's uh, you know, I don't know if you thought about this, like here's uh a strategy that we've seen work for a lot of businesses, or here's an article that we've written that might be informative and helpful to you. Like create that over a 15 to even like a 20-week period where every week that individual gets some sort of educational value from you, and then within there you can throw in some CTA type emails, but that's like the first thing that everybody should build in in terms of an automation process to help, and then it's and then just kind of analyze, yeah. And then I think like you were mentioning, like you have you have your prospect sequence, your prospect system for you know, not only from initial meeting to quoting, that system needs to be built out. Then you have your onboarding system, is the next one to be built out. So when a client does sign a proposal, what happens? What are the first things that you request from them? When do you set off the kickoff meeting? Like, what does that system look like? Because those are two main systems that you need. And if you could automate those instead of trying to manually do them every time, like that think of how much time that saves you. And then the third one would be you know, your actual like client service system. Like some people have different services, different products, but what is the you know, what does it look like for each service? So when you mark a client as XYZ service, what is that, what does that client service model look like? What does that system look like? Is there check-ins you want to do that instead of you having to remember to do every single time, there's either a prompt for you to do it, or in now the age, you can train the system to generate what you would like it to do and say, and then it's only for you to approve to be sent to them. Like you could systematize that. So it's those are the I guess when you say four like four things that I would say every every business owner needs to start thinking about. If they haven't and are doing all those things manually, those are the initial starts that I would suggest to a lot of people. So I'm sort. You said a nurturing outreach, you know, awareness campaign for new contacts, prospect management system, onboarding system, client, client service system.

Duarne 46:03

You just find a way to communicate. And the key about this is don't send them shit that you want to know you want them to know about. Send them information that they actually care about. You should know what questions are the most frequently asked questions you get. You should know what are the most what are the biggest concerns. And just answer those. Think about if you pick up your cell phone and you're flicking through videos on whatever medium, we've all done it, where we just get stuck in that little loop. You pause on the ones that are interesting to you. You keep flicking the ones that are not.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

Yep.

Duarne 46:55

And that's your that's the same as your customers. If they're if they're getting information coming in, like some of these customers, like we talked about before, don't miss emails, don't miss messages. We've got so many mediums that people are communicating with us on these days, it just gets ridiculous. You know how many times I pick up my cell phone and my phone is so full of notifications, and all I want to do is hit clear all.

Dave 47:20

I do that so much. Yeah.

Duarne 47:22

I'm gonna miss everything, right? Because sometimes I have to be aware that one of these abstract messaging apps that I've got, someone's trying to communicate with me.

Dave 47:31

Yeah.

Duarne 47:31

Um, you know, and well I like I like Apple now.

Dave 47:34

Like Apple has like you get have like your like your scheduled notification where it's like in the morning and then at the end of the day where everything gets grouped in there, except for like you know, messages from your favorite people or whatever. So like I it helps you with productivity because then you're not getting all these different notifications throughout the day.

Duarne 47:50

That's helpful.

Dave 47:50

But I struggle, I don't even check it. It's like yeah, I don't even look at it anyways. So it's like just turn them off.

Duarne 47:58

It's really hard. Like, and from a I get so frustrated, like I pick up my phone sometimes in the middle of the day because I have to do something like authenticate, put my authentication code into on the on the screen here on this computer, and then I'm bombarded with all these notifications, and I forget why I was actually picking up my phone in the first place, and it's like, oh my gosh, that's just nuts. Like, I don't want to see all of that. It really can take your focus away, and you've got to remember that this is how everybody's life is right now, for the most part. This is your customers' lives. Add to that, depending on your service, maybe you're working with you know mums, and they're trying to shuffle the kids to and from school, get some groceries done, the laundry done, wash dishes, prepare meals in between all of that. And then on the flip side, you've got you know, you're targeting tradespeople. Well, those tradespeople, well, guess what? They're busy doing the job that the customers are paying them for, not answering their phones. Because every time they answer their phone or check a message, that means they're taking a break from doing what they're doing, and it's less work they can get done in a day. So you've got to find a way to communicate with them that's clear and precise, that works for your audience, but also is a message that they actually care about enough to pay attention. And it doesn't have to be every message, but once you figure out what they do care about and you get good reception from it, rinse and repeat. Try doing the same sort of thing over again. See if you get

Messages People Want To Read

Duarne 49:31

the same results.

SPEAKER_01 49:33

Yeah.

Dave 49:34

And I mean, it's it's obviously there's people out there. It's not our expertise in terms of like, you know, writing the perfect email. Um, but the idea is like you said, uh just get started. Like just having something is better than doing nothing. Because then you're it's you're gonna get you're gonna get feedback on it. If nobody responds, nobody's resonating, then maybe you need to change, you need to change something up. And you're gonna get that data, you're gonna get that ability to feel confident in making decisions. If you never get started, well, you know, you're never gonna get the information, and plus you're never gonna have you're never gonna hit right, you know, what the wing Gretzky, right? You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. That's real. Like you're gonna miss the opportunity of sending an email to somebody that might need your service right now, that has a problem. The biggest thing that I would say is is stop trying to think that you have to sell everybody. Like you don't, like the biggest I use this example over the last couple weeks in in multiple conversations, but the biggest lesson for me over time was realizing one, that I am a salesman as a business owner. I have to sell, right? You have to, you have a product that it's you or your services that you have to sell. So you are a salesman. If you don't have sales training, go find it, go get it. Jeremy Minor, seventh level, talk about them all the time. But when realizing that after the first 12 months and going through a training and and and investing in the training has completely been able to kind of change the trajectory of where my business went, I was struggling for the first 12 months going back into this. And now, you know, I'm able to, you know, have better conversations, you know, build, do, do more things. But the biggest thing for me was taking the pressure off of realizing that every person that has an exploratory call with me, I had to turn them into a client. Right? Even when I was struggling, it was the idea of listen, I can't help somebody that doesn't have a problem, anyways. So why don't I just become a problem, like a problem finder? Like ask questions, get them to see, oh yeah, I do have a problem. Oh, wait, let's talk. Like it's so much easier, and you take that pressure off yourself. And when you do that, it frees you up to just be in the con in the moment, not thinking ahead of the conversation to try to get them to agree to sell with you because they're gonna see it. You can probably think of conversations you had with people like that that you could see right through them, yeah. And how many times did you buy with them?

Duarne 51:48

You know, I used to get frustrated on exploratory calls, and I felt like I had to explain to people you shouldn't be trying to sell me on this call to the point where I don't do that, I don't care enough anymore to teach them that. Yeah, it's like you know what, if you don't know that, then you're gonna be you're gonna do a lot of these calls and waste your time. Someone's gonna tell you at some point. LinkedIn, I accept invites from people, and then the first LinkedIn message is no, hey, how's things going? I saw something on your post that looked good, just wanted to say great work. It's hey, this is what I do. How about we catch up and do something together? Right.

Dave 52:25

Or maybe you need some of my services, so it's or I help people like you to do more. And then, okay, like I you don't even know anything about me. You don't even know if I have somebody that already does that. You you you have no idea about my situation, you didn't care. So I don't give a shit about you. I saw something the other day. It was it was a post from somebody on my Facebook page that I follow, and he said, It's funny because on LinkedIn, same way as you said, I think he got like 20 messages from people that were promising leads, right? Hey, we'll fill your inbox, we'll we'll fill your calendar. And he said, and it's funny because they all go dark as soon as I send a message, uh the reply, and his reply was below, and it basically summarized to I pay when results happen. So I'm willing to bring you on when you book people. If I close them, I'm willing to give you a commission, but I don't do anything other than that, and not one single person ever responded to it. Because if they don't respond to that and they don't want commission, they don't give a shit. They're literally just trying to say, hey, just give me money. I may or it may or may not work.

Duarne 53:29

Yeah, it's like put your money where your mouth is, have at least have a conversation and understand why they're saying that. But yeah, look, I've got I've had plenty of times where I haven't spoken to somebody for a while. Like I had one since over the weekend where I hadn't spoken to someone for a while, I was on a bit of a creative splurge, I was doing some marketing for my brands, and decided to check out one of the one of my clients popped up on LinkedIn. I'm like, oh, let me check out the rest of their posts. And I'm like, I could do better. So I made a couple of replacement posts of what they'd already done from the imagery point of view, sent it back to them in a message and said, Hey, check these out. These are just some concepts I threw together for you while I was doing some other work. No pressure. Let me know if you want to chat. And I get a message with going, these are great. Can I make some suggestions? These things I love, these things I don't love so much. What would it cost to get you to do these things for me on a more regular basis? I was like, okay, now we're having a conversation, and that's all it can take sometimes. I identified a problem which what that person wasn't aware they were having, and pointed it out and gave us an option for a solution or and in the form of a suggestion, and it was very low pressure. And that's my technique. Everybody has to find their own technique. There's some dudes that I've seen, like that's some really cool YouTube channel guys, and they do roofing, they replace people's roots, and they go around do gutters and roofing, and almost every single video they do, they do like a community give back program where they go back and they do a free roof for somebody who's got a really you know who they can see is having a tough time and their roof's really bad, and they make videos on it and they post it, and they're about like one-hour long videos, they're pretty cool. Almost every one of them, a neighbor or two will walk up, see what they're doing, have a conversation with them. In some cases, can you do some gutter work for me? But do you do work over in blah blah blah, a few streets across? Like I've got I got a friend over there looking for some work to be done, right? And passes, you know, they get some extra work out of it. Whatever your marketing is, and I'm not saying go and give away a roof, that's a lot, but there is techniques that you can use to get people talking about you and just find what that is, and it all starts with just doing some outreach that works.

Dave 56:00

But but here here's here's the beauty of that, right? Is that or not the beauty of it, but the caution that I would give a lot of people is you have to realize those those guys probably started doing all of that because they wanted to, like they weren't doing it thinking, okay, we're gonna do this, but we only are gonna do it because we're gonna get leads, right? No, they they're doing it one of one of two ways. Where one, they're they're building awareness, which is great, but two, they wanted to probably give back. And three, they're making they're making videos out of it, which is also kind of helping offset. I'm sure if they have a decent amount of channel, it's offsetting some of that revenue. But so when you get started, just be open-minded and start with something as simple as what can I do? And I've given this advice a couple times again this week. It's funny, all this stuff just a couple times where people are like, Well, I have a new service, or I'm gonna you know, you know, kind of transition. What do I do? Like, how do I get people more awareness? And and the idea is, well, what could you provide, right, as an intro or some sort of report, etc., to uh show them that there's a real problem

Give Value Before You Pitch

Dave 57:02

and then give them uh the high-level steps to solve it. But then when they're like, hey, uh, I need some help with this, I don't have time to do this. Could you help me? Oh, yeah, actually, we do X, Y, and Z. Like, here's how we might be able to help you. Do that. Think of that. You know, for example, one was like, you know, it was like a four-part training series that he wants to start doing for businesses. It's like, well, could you turn part one into more of like, hey, let me come in and and do this first training, which is like a more of like an informational, anyways, I'll do that for free. Let me come in and do that for you. At the end of that training, actually have surveys to get data about their employees' feelings on it and and show and then aggregate the data and then take that back to the HR team and say, Oh, by the way, I just wanted to let you know, here's what your team is actually like, here's how they fill out the survey, and here's what you need to know about it, and then give it to them, and they're like, Well, wait a minute, can you help us solve this? Oh, yeah, actually, we have the rest of our training series that could come in and give. So it's it's really thinking about how I can make awareness but give something away for free that's valued, that's gonna value, that's gonna help you service them in the future. So it's it's that intro level. Like, how do you get started with that? But I gotta we gotta wrap up here, but I'll give you 30 seconds or something. Is there anything you want to say about that stuff before we wrap up?

Duarne 58:22

Look, I think uh it's been a really interesting conversation today. It's uh one of those scenarios where we started off thinking about we're gonna talk about something and came completely different direction again. But change is not a bad thing when taking the when taking the correct route to get there. And something that seems impossible today may not be that impossible with the tools and resources you have around you now. So do a little bit of you know, do a little bit of checking with AI tools, talk to some people, you know, whether it's someone like Dave or I or someone in who's a business contact, and just see what they're doing. And what you tend to do is just like Dave and I do, we bounce ideas off each other so much, and we are able to come up with some great, great advancements on our original concepts and ideas that we have. And that comes with a great little community that you build with within your you know your group, right? And like we're talking about before, if you're dealing with people who are just working a nine to a five, then they're probably not gonna understand you talking about you know the hard slog you're doing for work, right? All right, and they're only and you know, just realize that if you are doing it hard, you're working towards something that you want in the future. That's how you get to your three-day weeks when you've got other people doing the work for you, and maybe that guy or that friend who's sitting there giving you a hard time because they have a job, they might end up working for you. They may be the nine to five working for you in the future. And uh, you know, like give them an opportunity.

Dave 59:57

Yeah, that's that's very true. That's very true. So I I mean, I would say the biggest thing is just your mindset. Try to find a positive, like stop stop telling yourself the negative situations, the negative parts of anything that you're facing right now, and look at it and say, okay, what's the what's the opportunity? And I think that is the single biggest thing that you could do for yourself to be it to give yourself the motivation, but then also continue to push

Match Your Actions To Your Goals

Dave 1:00:24

forward and just man, stop running your nails on a chalkboard. Stop complaining out of one side of your mouth and then saying how you want to grow on the other. If that's you, stop it. Stop complaining or change your actions. But with that, Duarn, thank you for joining us. We love you guys, do all that fun algorithm stuff, like, share, comment, make sure you got that notification bell. And we hope you guys got something out of today's episode. We're here every single Friday morning, anytime around 8:30 to 845, depending on how when Duarn and I stopped talking for pre-show. So love you guys. Hope you have a wonderful and amazing day. Good luck and wonderful success in your business. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them below. And we'll see you guys. We'll see y'all in the next one. Have a good one.

Duarne 1:01:02

Take care, everyone. See ya.

Dave 1:01:03

Bye.