Simplifying Services and Product Lines for Profitability Conquer Contractor Chaos

Lee Miller: What we want to do is we want to build systems and communication channels and standards and quality control measures that is going to keep us away from the actual production line. Our job right now is to sell, sell, sell, to constantly be evaluating that ideal client and that ideal product so that we can keep selling more. That's your role as the owner, at least until the point where you're selling enough and you're getting yourself into a position where you can't spend more time in the areas where you're needed until you hire a salesperson. scalability part. Get enough leads, the right leads, the right project, right client and I'm telling you the business will become way less dependent on you as the owner. This is Conquer Contractor Chaos. Built for the contractor that's ready to run a business that works for them and creates the life they've been fighting for. Tune in to get the tools, systems, and the strategies that are battle proven to set you free. One move each episode, straight talk, things you can use today. Take your time back. Be home for dinner. Do the work. Lead your crew. Love your family. Conquer the chaos. Hey guys, welcome back to the Conquer Contractor Kiosk show. I am in my new office today, so we've got the studio set up. We're back to using the big fancy camera now, so hopefully the quality is coming in a bit better for you than prior shows. Thanks for hanging with me. It's been a little while since I got this place kind of painted and set up and renovated and ready to go. So we're finally here. We're in the new studio and it's just going to get better from here. Today we're going to be talking about a simple trap. that most contractors fall into in their formative years. I'm talking when they just start their business, they start getting traction, they start working with some clients. Typically what happens is, is we fall into the habit of becoming everything to everyone. And I can see it now. I can see the first vehicle, you you get your decals and on the side of your van, it's got a laundry list of all of the possible things that your customer could buy from you. You know, it's, General contracting, siding, roofing, landscaping, right? Bread, milk, cheese, like it literally turns into a big shopping list. And that's fine because what you're doing early on is you're trying to find where to add belong. What are the services that I can offer to these clients that, you know, I'm going to do a good job of and I'll probably make money, right? We seem to think that if we threw all these little things out to our clients, that we're going to get more business coming in. And that is true in a sense. You're going to get big volume for different services. But here's the thing, that doesn't mean that every service that you do is going to be profitable or scalable. And we're going to talk about that today. So, you know, we adopt this yes to all philosophy. We're chasing every single lead. We're trying to come up with estimates that we've never done before. We're trying to price things that we've never done before. And then ultimately what that does is it keeps us as the business owner, absolutely tethered to the production or the service of the business. You know, you might be feeling this as if you, if you Taking on a project is a bit more bespoke or a bit more custom for a client. And your team are constantly calling you saying, hey, can you come in and show us what you meant by this in your drawing? Or can you come and actually do this for us? Because we've never done it before. And that's a big challenge for a lot, especially cabinet makers, because they brought back into production every single day because they have to be the brain of the operation. and you get stranded in the production department as well as trying to sell the projects and produce the projects. Nine times out of 10, you're also doing the admin stuff as well. So we want to try and take steps back from that. We want to start ditching departments and be focused on the department that really makes a difference, right? I want to get out of the production department and only be in the needle moving department, making the decisions that moves the business forward, that grow the business, that scale the business, make it better and ultimately make it more profitable. That's where we want to So first thing we need to do is we need to get away from this everything to everyone philosophy, this mindset, or we'll do whatever the customer wants. And there's a couple of things that we need to do and we're going to get into that today, but let me paint a bit of a clearer picture. If you wing every single project, you'll be winging the profitability of every single project, right? Sometimes you're going to have big peaks where you make a ton of money on something you're going to have other jobs where you don't make so much money on it. We need to stop that from being such peaks and valleys and turn it into more rolling hills, right? Testing a little bit, maybe something new, something quirky, but the foundational product line that we're offering to these clients has to stabilize. And I want you to think about McDonald's in this example, right? McDonald's doesn't sell burritos. McDonald's doesn't sell, you know, nachos. They sell burgers and fries. They sell chicken. They sell fries, right? But when they started out, all they sold was burgers and fries and soda. That was it. That's all you could get. The reason that they went so deep on one product was because they had figured out what they could do, what they could build a system around. And then they figured out their profit margin. So they know exactly which products make money, which ones lose money. And then also what is the customer actually want? We don't want to sell to every single person. We want people who only want fries and burgers, right? They know their product, they know what they're offering to their client, and they're ultimately capitalizing on that, building systems around it so that it's super repeatable and then selling those office franchises to aspiring entrepreneurs. So we really need to walk in on what are our core products? What are we trying to sell? Who can we do a really good job for? And who is our ideal client? And if we can figure out those, we can figure out what are the most profitable products that we have as well. If productivity is a constant battle for you where you're constantly having to, you know, lead the charge and go and motivate the team and getting them doing, you know, pushing themselves, then it's telling me that you don't have a consistent product line. See, we're not here to reinvent the wheel with every, every project. Sure. You can do that in the beginning when you're trying to find yourself and where you belong and what your core product is, but ultimately at some point, we're going to have to pick the products and we're to have to systemize the product, productivity of those projects. so that we can always be profitable. That's how we get infinite scale. It's not by doing more, it's by doing less and doing it really well. The other thing that this does as well is it forces the business owner to be in more of that reactive mindset, right? That, well, what problem's going to come up today? And there's no point in doing something because my team's just going to call me, right? It forces you to be reactive. And as we all know, reactivity, instability and unscalability. So we want to make sure that you as an owner, your mindset is in the right place because you have the right products that you're selling. You have the right team to put those products together and they're not constantly calling you and messing with your mindset and pulling you out of the needle moving department and pulling you right back into product to production. The sad thing is here is that when you're winging your projects, your customers are looking at you and wondering, is this guy even know what he's doing? Doesn't seem like he's giving me a straight answer when he's communicating with me on the progress of the project. Or things may be showing up damaged or things aren't showing up and that's not the way that we kind of wanted it to be. Right? When you go to McDonald's and you order a burger, that burger is made the same way every single time with the same bread and the same meat and the same salad that's going on it. every single time. They're not given the customer the options of eight different salads or eight different kinds of bread to put it on or 25 different sauces. No, you order from a menu of proven items that are profitable and that's what you get, right? That way you have an expectation. McDonald's has an expectation and that expectation is met across the board. So think of your customer here. Do they really want a thousand different options for color or material or hardware? No, they don't. They want some level of choice, but not to a point where it is so overwhelming. So if you're a cabinet maker, for example, do you really need to offer the client 18 different finishes? Maybe they only want 10, maybe they only want five. In fact, the less you have, the easier it will be to sell to a certain group of people. So that's how we need to conquer scalability, right? When you get over that scalability wall by refining our product line, building processes and systems for our team. and ultimately pricing them to make profit. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about how to aggressively refine that product line. Okay. We need to aggressively refine product line. First thing we're going to do is we're going to identify which projects have we done in the past that are profitable, not just the ones that you like to do. It's not about what you like making, right? If that's the case, if you want to be someone who is the craftsman, and you always as an art project every single time understand there's not much money in that right look at all of those aspiring artists and musicians who are out there who are pouring their soul into creating something extremely beautiful how many of them actually make money not a lot right or at least not until they've been in it for a long time you know that they actually start making money when they get picked up by a record label same for you here right yeah people appreciate that you're the craftsman and you're making beautiful products but understand that the level of input brain wise to make those products is nine times out of 10 not gonna be the most profitable thing that you can create. So, wanna look at our ideal projects from a place of where have we been? What do we kinda like doing? It's really simple, it's really repeatable, it's really consistent. And then how do we capitalize on that? How do we move that to our main product line? On the flip side, we also wanna, well, who was the person that bought product, who are my ideal customers that I can repeatably pick out in a crowd and say, that's my guy, that's my guy, that's my guy. I always can sell to those people because they always need this product. And we figured out what the process is to make them happy. So we want to make sure that you're looking back to say, what should my product line be? You should be picking your most profitable and easiest projects to produce and then trying to do those in a high volume. hear this from cabinet makers all the time. They go, holy, we just did a bunch of white melamine projects and there was no finishing and it was easy and it was standard. And yeah, the job size was a little bit smaller, but we made a lot of money on that project. That might be your product. So what I encourage you to do is to look back at the last projects that you've done. And if you're not running any kind of like back cost in And if you're not running any kind of back cost and software, or you don't have a process for back cost, and maybe now is the time that you adopt that you can actually get that process for free in our school course, which is online. can get the link in the bio to get into our online community that has a classroom with the tools to do this. But you have to start tracking your projects. You know, did I go over or was that under on ours? Did I overspend on materials? Is there any opportunities for me to become more efficient by training my team? buying new equipment, negotiating my material price down. There's always an opportunity to become more profitable when you're back costing and actually spending time reviewing your numbers. That's where this starts. The second thing we need to do is we need to really look at the client and build out that ideal profile. And I'm not just talking 25 to 30 year age gap, right? Our ideal client is 40 to 75 years old. Try and niche it down, try and find that customer profile that really works, you know. Try and get within five to 10 years. What are their hobbies? Where do they hang out? What neighborhoods do they live in? What kind of vehicles do they drive? Do they have kids? Do they not have kids? Do they go to church? Do they not go to church? You really want to look at building out almost like a rap sheet for your ideal client and saying, who is the customer that is tied to this product? And how do I charge enough where that customer can afford it? So once you've identified your ideal offering, right. And you've niched down, you've got an ideal niche. then it's time to really dive in and start looking at the systems that you have to create those products for that client. I'm talking not just the build process, but also what's our client acquisition process that always works? What is my sales process that always guarantees a close? What is my system for always being able to build this project consistently and easily? And if you can figure that out, you're gonna be way closer to building. great market and plans to pick out a specific person and sell that product specifically to a certain group of people who will always be happy with the product. They will always pay top dollar for it. So don't just look at the product itself and how you actually build it. But what is my system for obtaining those clients for selling those products? And then ultimately, how do we build and then produce the job? So that's how you get to the point where you're able to untether yourself. And that's the next point. is taking that away from you as the business owner, from being tethered product and the production team. What we want to do is we want to build systems and communication channels and standards and quality control measures that is going to keep us away from the actual production line. Our job right now is to sell, sell, sell, to constantly be evaluating that ideal client and that ideal product so that we can keep selling more. That's your role as the owner, at least until the point where you're selling enough and you're getting, you know, you're getting yourself into a position where you can't spend more time in the areas where you're needed until you hire a salesperson. This is the scalability part. Get enough leads, the right leads, the right project, right client. And I'm telling you, you will become way less, the business will become way less dependent on you as the owner. So we need to untether you. So systemizing what you guys do best and then putting people in place in your business to run and take ownership of those departments for you. If that sounds like something that you are struggling with, are you feeling like you're scattered across all these different product lines and you're not finding that consistent rhythm, I highly recommend you either jump into our school course or you get in contact with us and book a call. We can walk you through a couple of simple systems that you can use to identify that client and that product line. And ultimately, We need to turn this into a process in the business of constant analysis. And that is one of the most powerful things that you can do as a business owner is constantly to be evaluating who the ideal customer is and the ideal product, but also capturing that ideal profit margin. If that sounds like something that you'd like to do and get a handle on, jump into our school course. It's completely free. Link will be in the bio of the show. If not, you want to give us a call and you want to actually get help to figure these things out. What is my ideal client? What is my ideal profit? What is my ideal project? We've got tools to help you do that. So feel free to jump on our website and book a call with me direct in the chat. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Short one, but there are more big ones coming. Looking forward to seeing you on the other side. Peace. you