Keynote Speech- Your mouth makes you Your Money #3 4 k video

your mouth is now making you money when you're saying these words right you can lose a customer really fast you're like walking a tightrope when you're asking them to tell you how much money they want to spend so if you don't nail that part of it it can be misconceived and come off like you are just a money hungry contractor so the very next thing I need to know from you Dan is what's your budget because of a visionary when I see something like that I'm going to design something that not only fits your needs but fits your budget and I'm going to give you options and once we've established a budget we can start to paint a picture together we can come up with solutions solutions together and then that gives you the ability to pick which solution you're the most comfortable with all right you guys we're back with part three of our mouth your mouth makes you your money series and again this is part of our listen while you work so you guys can pop on your headphones and just listen along and you don't necessarily have to watch what's happening let me know what you think of this concept in the comments down below and without wasting any more time let's get into today's video oh one beat one thing before we do it please comment or hit the like button if you think this is a cool concept and I'll continue to try to do other stuff like this and now let's get into today's video yeah hey an entertaining wall built all right so where you located in Houston Houston okay oh did you live in Texas right now tell me tell me a little bit about your project well I've got a wall it's failing it's old timber wall and I need to get a rebuild want to go back with a block wall okay how big is that wall oh it's uh I don't really know you know I have a measure it's roughly I would say 100 feet long about three feet long okay so one hundred by three how bad is what kind of shape is you all in right now damn it's failing okay it's failing what I'm doing right now you guys is I'm trying to get Dan to communicate he's a little nervous because he's up here in front of you but if we were on the phone he would probably start to open up a little bit and that's what I'm attempting to do is get him to open up all right Dan so if you've got a wall that's a hundred feet by three foot we've got three square feet of wall it sounds like a pretty small wall so we've got a couple options though I haven't been out to your site but a couple of things that I think while I'm thinking about retaining walls is do I absolutely need to replace your wall or can we shrink the wall can we change the wall design can we move the wall one way or another way and make it better for you so the very next thing I need to know from you Dan is what's your budget because I'm a visionary when I see something like that I'm going to design something that not only fits your needs but fits your budget and I'm going to give you options and once we've established a budget we can start to paint a picture together we can come up with solutions solutions together and then that gives you the ability to pick which solution you're the most comfortable with how does that sound to you that sounds awesome okay then you just give me a budget and now I know how much money you got and I do what I said I'm going to do and I'm like yeah I'm not doing this again I've got to figure out a way that I can pull the budget from them because I need to be realistic before I head out on the road are you able to come up with a budget in your head what that just from what he said all right that's gonna be two thousand ten thousand I can I can tell you guys an estimate for that job in five minutes because we're inside my niche and I didn't ask you to tell me about a furnace installation or yeah I know I mean I can I can diagnose any retaining wall any size over the phone and then what I can assess diagnose and so I stay with inside my niche that I am like literally super good at and then that gives me the ability to then give numbers before I ever get out to a site and so that allows me to hone everything down so when I'm there the customer all I got to do is then they've already know how much money they're gonna spend like do is make a connection with them talk about their dog people talking about their dogs talk about their family I walked outta one meeting I spent four hours with them okay so that's a beautiful question you say well I can I can build you a job that'll cost anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 what I need to know from you is where are you comfortable so that I can build something to match your comfortable okay because they're not you don't want thing to do the estimate for you really what you're trying to do is get comfortable so that you can provide estimates that fall within their comfort zone all right and this is where your mouth is now making you money when you're saying these words right you can lose a customer really fast you're like walking a tightrope when you're asking them to tell you how much money they want to spend so if you don't nail that part of it it can be misconceived and come off like you are just a money-hungry contractor what it doesn't have you saw fireworks seasonally fourth of July New Year's and within 30 seconds I get to budget and I'm just now recognizing that this can be done with what you talked about what we do every and I'm everything that was a top salesman for a particular corporation for that time so go for arcades we're talking actual customers on the phone and qualify them better ended but what would it what is your process for qualifying through all of the garbage leads so you can skip your cherry pick the cream off the top and so Titans to be talking all these people at home believe you do to get rid of the maybe seven out of ten that you don't want before they even get to you how do you I actually ask the customer you say how did you get my number and so that's a great question Keith you get good at knowing and identifying your own strengths and so are jobs that you can't quote over the phone may not be ideal for you to run out to give a quote but what you want to find out is what's the scale of the project and where the customer at so would you be willing to drive an hour and a half to go look at a three hundred dollar landscaping job or would you be willing to drive an hour and a half to look at a thirty thousand dollar landscaping job so once you start to to qualify them you want to get this the sense of scale of what's going on on their project into the queue and I've got a two hundred fifty thousand dollar job I'm bidding right now and $100,000 government bidding right now and I may not have time to get to you guys this year if you wait and you signed one day after those two jobs potentially sign and you so this is one of those offices car salesman techniques but really what you're trying to do you trying to get them to to take the crap or get off the dumper as my dad would say but you wouldn't say it quite that nice okay right your skin you're giving them a sense of urgency because if they'll get complacent if they think they have a lot of time to think about this thing so what you've got to do is you've got to say it's a busy time of the year and we need to make a decision right away so yeah I don't care and I even say to them like I don't care if I do your job or I do the next guy's job because I will can be continuing to work on and on and on and on and I just know that your job and then I'll paint the picture you know your job your retaining wall is about to fail it's holding up your driveway and it's going to go right into the neighbor's yard might want to decide sooner than later but you don't have to for me because I'll still be busy but I'll say it a little nicer than that I'm just like my red shell alright for the city of makes yesterday bowling up a bridge depends on access so now you're getting pretty specific so you've got those are trickier because you gotta invent the footing more and then also the hill itself is gonna place a surcharge on that retaining wall because the smoke dehydrating wall places a surcharge on it so you're gonna end up doubling your geo grid links on that so you just got to be careful another really super tricky one is building a retaining wall underwater we've done a lot of those those are good moneymakers but awesome then you're starting to get more ninja fight so you literally extend the drainage zone on a retaining wall that's built under water and go wrap the whole thing it'll go seven foot behind it because now it goes the entire drainage zone is the backfill zone and it'll go up to the high water table the hill the hill that slope that surcharge that's going to place the surcharge so you got to be aware of that so you can design it but what you did now how I learned all of this stuff was asking questions you guys but first a lot gave on a little engineering manual it's about that thick right and it has these diagrams that it shows you how to build engineered retaining walls you guess who memorized every single one of those 20-some years ago this I did this guy did this guy did I built my house you know how I built my house I didn't know how to I didn't know how to frame nothing I took all of the specs they memorize all of the specs so when the inspectors came out I just went yeah I got that we did that I built the house according to their spec bill didn't mention something like this so if you guys have a chance to talk to him about overhead I want to hit this this is a business killer all right your overhead will kill you they kill you okay this will kill you you guys if you don't know what your overhead is this is that magic mystery number where you go where did all my money go all year long I know how much I paid my guys I know how much my materials cost me and I hold the government how much money I don't even have that much in my bank account that happens to guys and it's all because of that one thing called overhead there's a number of different ways to calculate your overhead and you need to dive deep on it but one of the simplest things that I found consistently time and time again no matter what I'm doing is lines it's a blue-collar trade I found that my overhead is $100 per man per day okay just overhead so if I run a 10-man crew all right I'm gonna paint you a picture what that actually looks like if I'm running ten men I know that my overhead not my wages my overhead is gonna cost me about a thousand dollars per day really a rough number okay you guys need to actually calculate your overhead for yourselves but I want to start to just put what this means into your business that means if you work five days your business lost $5,000 if you didn't allocate enough overhead into your jobs to cover that extra $5,000 this is the business killer and it's tough because nobody likes doing it but the easiest way to start to understand overhead it's the - take how much money you did last year okay take out how many hours you worked how much you paid your guys how much you paid for materials take that as a second separate category and then the remaining balance can be then started to allocate towards overhead and you divide by the number of days you work then there's a number of different ways to really come up with those good numbers but if you haven't done anything with overhead to this point please just do that it's gonna take you 30 minutes tonight it's gonna take you 30 minutes and that's gonna start to put in perspective like when you work one extra day on a job why that job costs you money instead of you making money okay go for it Keith no let's walk through it though you guys write down the formula you take what you made last year and fill will you clarify this for these guys so you can separate out you can pull up profit and loss statement and you can separate out your that's a good soul from your overhead expenses do you raise your hand if you are currently separating out your cost of goods sold from your overhead expenses I want you to go through this and make a list of all of your teeth some of you will readily be to rip this out some of you will have to look these are your indirect costs these are the bills that you have signed up to pay in the exception whether or not you have a single jump your direct costs are bills that you're gonna pay because you sold the job you're in my materials we're gonna send our crew do that your indirect cost your insurance your rent your truck payments your advertising expenses your computer peripherals paying your attorney these are all indirect costs so you must pay these bills you want to target this number to be roughly ideally somewhere maybe around 25% of your business if you're pushing higher numbers I'm going to encourage you strongly to look at ways to go over if you're pushing lower numbers you could say oh that's great I'm rocking some lower numbers I would encourage you to raise those dongers let's race that over it people don't want you to spend more marketing none of their ideal clientele you gonna be spending enough on advertising to the right people so that is the formula or over it you're going to look at your total revenue subtract out your cost of goods sold subtract out your overhead expenses and you'll be left with a net profit No so there are just two places in which is in your constitutes yes so that's one way to do it but this is something you guys this is a business killer I don't I don't want to leave this floor without you guys getting a grasp on how to calculate your overhead or at least a determination that you will go on calculate your over edge because it is one of the biggest factors to your yearly success we all in agreement on that one you guys all right we're there what what's up here yeah there's this killer for me has been purchasing old equipment all showed up except they've just got so much money and because sometimes the best truck they've got you weigh more than the new one yeah but it takes a lot of abilities for me it could be years just to figured out that I was just all done fighting buying someone else then you know it's just in my opinion so your body you're buying newer equipment yes now I'm getting rid of all my old stuff okay by leasing is a great option at least in a sv this year love it it's all part of it so the lease means that I get to have the best of this machine and not the worst of it it broke down the other day was it EGR valve you know what I did I called up the dealer and fix your machine I'm leasing it I gotta get back to work I had no worries about been using it for seven to eight months so there's a beautiful part and the leasing is 100% tax deductable 100% that means you deduct all of it right out of your taxes when you own something you've got a you've got to strategically purchase it to either take advantage of the tax if there's a tax advantage that year or not just don't go buy a machine without understanding is that's thirty three percent of the price alright this concludes part three of our listen while you work series we still got one last part and then we wrap this whole thing up so make sure you guys stick around and do me a favor check out the two videos I'm gonna put up here one here one here hit the like button subscribe hit the share button and make sure you guys come back god bless go get him you guys and we will see you on the next one