Episode 136 Podcast Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

The goal isn’t just more customers, it’s the right customers. It’s the customers that pay properly. It’s the customers that respect your team. It’s the customers that let you build your business that you’re ultimately proud of in the end of the day. G’day everyone. Rob Kropp and Dan Stones here from Pravar Group, and welcome back to another episode of The Trade Den. Welcome back, Dan. How are you?

Speaker 2 (00:26):

Going very well. Thank you, Rob. Looking forward to getting into today. Hello, everyone. This one is interesting. The customer is not always right. I reckon this is one of the scariest things in business to do when you start really looking at people who are paying you money, but then sort of turning that away. And I think the thing is, we all get why people keep customers on probably longer than they should sometimes. It’s the revenue, it’s the whole marketplace. Why would I turn away business? It goes against every instinct of someone that’s worked hard to get a sale. You know that. And I think it’s a real mental barrier, but it’s one of the best things you can do.

Speaker 1 (01:03):

Yeah, it is, especially when you’re trying to get a business up and out of the ground and grow it, or if we’re in challenging market conditions like we are at the moment. Our job is better than no jobs. And sometimes you just put up with shit that you shouldn’t have to in business. And what I like about being in business is in the end of the day, you get to choose who you do and don’t work for. But for the reality, a lot of business owners don’t make that choice. They just keep putting up with rubbish for whilst they’re in business and they wonder why they feel like their business is grinding the gears and they feel stuck and trapped more than ever.

Speaker 2 (01:36):

Yeah. And I think that one of the things we love coaching trades and working in this industry or with this industry is the loyalty factor. Guys, they’re no bullshit. There’s a loyalty factor that runs deep with doing the right thing by people. But at some point, these customers that have been around since day dot, you’ve got to have a look at, because every customer really, there is a scale, a spectrum, a ledger, whatever you want to call it, every customer is on that and price is only one line. The money you’re taking from those customers is only one part of the equation, but we’ve really got to move past that at some point.

Speaker 1 (02:10):

Yeah. There’s a real cost to every customer. The customer who doesn’t value price, the customer who is constantly nagging over the phone, the million phone calls you get, the rework, the unhappiness, the complaints, the morale of your team on site as they’re having to deal with work and do that job for that customer again. There’s a real cost associated with doing certain work for certain people, isn’t there?

Speaker 2 (02:40):

There really is. We hear it all the time from clients is once this job’s finished never again, or this job’s really kicking our ass, this is a real slog. It’s real. These things do come with a cost. Even that one you just mentioned, we’ll talk about it later, but just the idea of the morale for the rest of the team in hanging onto customers too long, it’s pretty significant.

Speaker 1 (03:01):

Yeah, it is. And there’s not only a cost to your current work and sometimes the mindset is, well, some work is better than no work, but there’s also that thing called opportunity cost. We’re going to talk a lot today is when you take on work that’s skinny margins and rework and complaints and having to chase invoices and getting paid late, there’s an opportunity cost associated with that because every time you say yes to something, you’re inadvertently saying no to something else. And I get it. It feels scary because it’s like, well, some work is better than no work, but I’ve been there before where you let customers go because you just know you’re not the right fit. And sometimes it’s the most liberating thing you do because it’s like, oh, we’re not putting our energy and efforts into our lowest performing customers. We get the ability to free us up to put our energy into our great customers who do value who we are and what we do and don’t complain about price and all those types of things.

Speaker 2 (04:00):

Yeah. So the benefits are real as are the costs. And what we’re going to do today is cover off these sort of areas. The first thing we’re going to do is really look at what is it actually costing you? See if you can recognise some of that in your world. Second’s going to be how do you identify these customers without kidding yourself or not even kidding yourself, but hurting your own, chopping your nose off to spite your face almost and that sort of thing. How do you avoid doing that? And then third is when you make this decision and you start to do this, what’s the best way to do it? How do you fire your customers properly? How do you do it like a professional? How do you do it without it being an emotional fuck you to the customer and really burning a bridge?

(04:39):

There’s a right way to do this and there’s a way that it comes across well. You’ve just got to know how to do it. So those are our three things today. First one being the real cost of having and keeping bad customers too long.

Speaker 1 (04:51):

Yeah, there is a real cost. And I think the first one is the real cost of taking on work where you’re either dropping your pants to get that job across the line or it’s a low margin job. And I think where a lot of business owners make the mistake of not really doing the maths is that they just look at the dollar value or the revenue associated with that job. So they look at it and go, “Oh, heck was that? That’s a $100,000 job, a $200,000 job.” But there’s a difference between a $200,000 job at 20% margin and a $200,000 job at a 30% margin. It can be a high revenue, low margin job and it looks good because it hits your P&L, you have a great month. But the problem is so many business owners purely just look at the top line and they’re focused on revenue, not the most important number in your business, which is gross margin or the margin left over at the end of that job.

(05:48):

And I know in coaching, we’re big advocates of pricing for margin targets and the importance of margin management hitting that margin. But so many business owners get it wrong where they’re just looking at the dollar value of the job without understanding the real implications of taking on a shitty lower margin job and what the real implications and the cost of that is.

Speaker 2 (06:10):

Yeah. In a real sense, people get carried away with what they’ve quoted the job at, what the customer’s agreed for, the contract value of the job. That figure you are talking about is the delivery and you can only know gross margin after the job’s done as you said. So it’s the after delivery, what is it actually at a margin then? You’ve priced it at a certain margin as a quote, but what does it come in at? And this is where these costs start to add up, the real costs of the job, things like having to chase payments, rework, all those sort of things. So maybe just break down, Rob, that gap between what you quoted at, what it gets delivered at, and what eats that when you start accepting customers at that level where they start costing you more than they’re making you.

Speaker 1 (06:52):

Yeah. The first one is there’s no direct cost to the job, but it’s chasing payment. It’s rework where you may not get paid for it, but you’ve got a nightmare client who has unrealistic expectations. It’s site visits that you haven’t allowed for, which just deteriorate your margin because you’re spending a lot of time. And often that’s you, the owner, and you treat your time as free so it actually doesn’t hit the job because you treat yourself as a free person or it’s the discounts you keep them just you put into place just to keep them happy or the variations you don’t push through because it’s just easier to get it done. So these are all the costs associated with a nightmare client or worse yet, just really shitty payment terms where you are funding the job for them because you got really bad payment terms and they’re stringing you out.

(07:43):

So it’s not always about just what’s the sales price and what’s the margin associated with that job. It’s all the outside things of all the costs associated with taking on that customer and that job that a lot of people don’t consider because they’re just too desperate, I suppose, to be able to get that job in, get it out of the ground and keep their boys busy.

Speaker 2 (08:04):

Yeah. And I think most people think about this. There’s two sort of types of jobs. There’s the B2C, the moms and dads jobs, which are almost like the traditionally pain in the ass sort of things, that rework or, “Hey, can you come out? Hey, I’m going to change the goalposts. Hey, we want this instead.” All those extras and things like that that happen. Then in a B2B sense, it’s more the administrative overhead, like you were saying, it’s playing the accounts payable receivable game forever. It’s those sort of things. It’s being taken on the site visits and meetings and the administrative function. So there’s different elements to this depending on what business you’re running.

Speaker 1 (08:41):

Yeah, there is. And I think in the end of the day, what happens is that your bad customers distract you from delivering even better service to your good customers. And what it means is your poor customers take up your attention, your head space, everything that’s going on in the business. And you put all your energy into your bad customers because you’re just trying to limp those jobs along and keep people happy. And it’s often the expense of your good customers who don’t question your price and do pay on time. Really, in the end of the day, business should be about giving more love to your great customers rather than giving most of your time to your poor customers. And unfortunately, that’s the equation that happens in most business.

Speaker 2 (09:25):

Yeah. And even as you said that then, just thinking it through, you’ve got a margin leak even with your good customers because they are subsidising with the margin of their jobs to make up for the loss of margin from the other ones. So it’s a real knock on, even with your good customers suffer because of it or you suffer as a result of not getting the benefit from your good customers in that sense. There’s also probably a couple of things that are worth talking about, the costs in terms of not so much financial, but things like what happens to your team. I think this is a big one that you can’t underestimate. We see guys lose good staff because of hanging onto bad customers. It’s a real thing and team morale should be considered when you think about what is the real cost of taking on this work or continuing to support these sort of customers.

Speaker 1 (10:10):

Yeah, your team want to be happy and do good work and do good work for good customers, but they go to job sites and they got to put up with a nightmare PM or a customer that always complains or constantly changing their mind or whinging and bitching about this or whatever it is. And it’s just your team don’t want to be on those job sites and you’ll no doubt get feedback from that around, I don’t want to go to that job site, work on the sites for that bloke anymore. Or your team leave because they’re stuck on just shitty jobs with poor conditions and bad culture and all those types of things. So it really rubs off on your team as well and they don’t love it. And in the end of the day, our biggest asset in our business is our team and we can’t always keep them happy, but we can ensure that we do the right work for the right customers to ensure that we have a happy workplace where our team love to work rather than dread turning up every day.

Speaker 2 (11:03):

Yeah, really, really important. The other one then obviously is yourself. As a business owner, as dealing with this, as the person who’s often in the line of fire with customers and having that relationship management, to be able to do that, the impact on your own head space, and again, this is one that people underestimate. I think they just suck it up. Like we said in the intro, it’s sort of like you just get on with it. It’s part of doing business. It sucks, but I’ve got to deal with it. But your own head space really can suffer in poor ways and then it starts to knock on into all sorts of areas in the business.

Speaker 1 (11:35):

Yeah, it’s when you see a text from that person or you get a phone call from them or an email drops on your inbox or it’s like, oh, here we go again. What’s this one going to be about? Or it’s constantly just chasing people or you bend over backwards for someone and they still pay their invoice late or challenge every invoice or whatever it is. You know the impact that that’s having on your head space. And that often does more damage than good anyway because it affects your morale, your mood, your motivation, your presence at home.

Speaker 2 (12:04):

Yeah, your relationships. That’s what I was thinking. The relationships with people, your team as well, but also at home, your family, your spouse, your partner, they feel it and they’re the ones that end up paying. There’s a cost to that as well that’s real.

Speaker 1 (12:17):

Correct. So there’s a real cost there and I think that’s why you got to look below the surface of what’s the revenue that this job or customer’s going to bring in. You got to look below the service and there’s going to be points in times where you do outgrow people. You got to make the decision going, I’m not going to do work for this person anymore. It’s just not the right fit. And it’s a big decision to make in business because yeah, some works better than no work, but there’s got to be a point in time where you’re in control of your business. The best thing about being in business is you get to pick and choose who you do and don’t work for and you’re probably in more control than you probably realise.

Speaker 2 (12:54):

Yeah, definitely. And I think this is the next part. Let’s move into part two. How do you identify them? How do you keep control of the situation and not get overtaken by emotion? Some of these clients are very, very challenging. We get that. And in your gut, you probably know, you’ve probably got your hit list of, geez, if I could get rid of these guys, it’d be great. You sort of know roughly who fits into the categories, but there’s a way to identify this and do it right. And there’s a couple of things we need to raise here before we get into, well, how do you get rid of them?

Speaker 1 (13:22):

I think the big thing to remember, especially if you’re in the earlier stages of business is that principle that the customer that got you here isn’t necessarily the customer that is going to get you to where you want to go. We can talk about the real estates, for example. A lot of tradies get in and do real estate work and that’s what gets them out of the ground. But there’s a point in time you will outgrow real estates because your costs increase and you become too expensive so you move into more commercial or strata or the B2C space or whatever it is. Or maybe in the builder space, just because they were the first couple of builders you did work for doesn’t mean you do work for them forever. And there’s an example I can remember with Jack, one of our plumbing clients, he was young in business, he worked with a couple of good commercial builders.

(14:11):

And the first 18 months of coaching for him was washing out those builders because he realised that it was lower margin work. They were bad payers. They kept challenging him on prices. They pushed back on variations all the time and it was a lot of out of town work that he wasn’t being paid for correctly. And through coaching, we helped him realise that these builders were good to this point, but something had to give. And you and I both helped him through that process, but it was a real transition to be able to help him realise that he had to probably break up with them because they serve their purpose. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:53):

And even if it can internally, this can happen as well. I’ve seen it with other clients where when you start working in bigger jobs, you start to break through with a builder like Jack was, you get given the challenging jobs, you get given the harder work, the really plum sort of work is sitting with an incumbent, something like that. Over time though, you’ve got to graduate from being the guy that is the go-to because no one else wants it. The guy who’s taking it because it is a bit lower margin and they’re tied on budget. You need to know where you’re sitting and be honest about, well, I’ve earned my stripes. I’m worth more than this and it’s time to make some of these decisions. I think Jack over time did that, but again, it’s easier said than done because you can’t just walk away from money.

(15:39):

It’s very hard to do, but you will outgrow clients and I think that’s okay. That the message. It’s okay to outgrow a client base at some point.

Speaker 1 (15:48):

Yeah. And it happens in every single business. It happens. But it’s about looking past the loyalty, past the convenience factor or the trap that you can fall into in business where it’s like, oh, I need that next job to keep things moving. That just becomes the hamster wheel that you’re on. At some point in the pipeline cycle, you’ve got to step off the hamster wheel and make some big decisions in business to be able to go, you know what? We’re no longer going to push ahead with this customer or this work no longer serves us. We’ve got to strategically move in a different direction with a different service offering or a different customer base to get us to where we want to go. And that takes some big decisions and some big balls to do that, but you’re never going to get to where you want to go if you keep doing the same shitty work for the same shitty customers which grind your gears all day long.

Speaker 2 (16:43):

Yeah, absolutely. Now, how do we do this in a way that you have got some rigour to it? How can you do this and make the call in a way that’s not like that gut reaction and you’re fed up and it’s emotional? And this is where we come up with four questions that we’re going to ask. We’ll call it our four question test. And we want you to think of this about every customer you’ve got. You can’t do this just as a justification for what your gut tells you. This is a way of methodically and strategically approaching this. So the four customers we’ve got, I might rattle them off, Rob, or if you want to jump in on each one, go for it. But first thing is, do they pay on time without you having to chase them? Are you able to get payment without having to get sucked into a big long drawn out administrative going backwards and forwards to get paid for the work you’ve done?

(17:29):

That’s the first question. Second one is do they respect your price or do they fight every single invoice? Are they the ones that are chipping away for a discount at every single turn? It’s always take, take, take. It’s almost like I’m never going to pay the invoice that you send me. I’m always going to play this game of trying to get something off you every single time. That’s another sort of question you can test your client base on. Third one, we’ve got two left. Do they respect your team and your time when you’re on site? Are they able to let you get on with the job, do the job without encroaching and having a real impact on your team or having to tell them how to do it? Are they just blowing time by coming out and wanting to talk about every little thing that goes on?

(18:15):

All of those sort of things. Are they asking you to attend meetings after meetings after meetings? We can never get to the work because we’re always having to explain and go into meetings on the job. So that’s the third one. And then the last one, which I think is a real honesty question. So it’s not so much the behaviour, but would you take them on again knowing what you know now? And that’s almost the capstone of that four question test because if in your heart of hearts you wouldn’t, you’ve got to pay attention to that. That’s where you can overcome the sense of, is it worth the dollars that we’re being able to bring in for this? And those dollars that we said might be costing you at the end of the day once you deliver the job. But if you knew that and you know what you know now, even just after listening to this, would you do it again?

(19:01):

And if you’re not, then that’s a signal that you must look at and then you’re looking at these other questions as we go. So Rob, I think that four question test serves us well. We do it with clients when they come up against this and it becomes more of a, I’d say not scientific, but you know what I mean. It’s more of trying to qualify it in a way that goes beyond just gut feel and raw emotion of I’m done with this client.

Speaker 1 (19:23):

Yeah. It’s about looking at what you’re starting to do is classify clients into your good quality clients or clients that need replacing. And I think the principle around this is you’ve got to remember is every time you say yes to something, you’re inadvertently saying no. And so when you’re saying yes to a customer that you know that it’s just not a good job and then they’re not the right fit, you’re subconsciously saying and physically saying no to other people because there’s only so much work that you can put in your pipeline that you can deliver. And so this process helps you get strategic. You’re strategically choosing the right customers with the right work at the right margin at the right payment times and the right enjoyment factor for you and your team. And so that’s what I really love about those four questions.

Speaker 2 (20:07):

Yeah. So hopefully that helps you think about it, that second part of how do you identify as opposed to just how do you react? Now the third thing we’re going to talk about is then let’s move into, well, how do you make this shift? How do you, I’ll say transition. I think I’ve said kicked out. How do you get rid of, I’ve said everything under the sun, but how do you fire a customer like a professional? And this is where most guys get it wrong. They either don’t do it or they blow the whole thing up and neither of those are helpful. So I’ve heard you teach this so well before, but let’s talk about how do you have what we’d probably call a graceful exit?

Speaker 1 (20:42):

Yeah. The one that I like to think of is if you do have a customer that you know isn’t a great customer, you can definitely price the work accordingly where you put extra fat into it, just an extra tax into it. And then you know that if they don’t want to go ahead with it, they say no because the price is too expensive. Or if they still say yes, at least you’ve got enough margin into it to almost put up with the shit, I suppose.

Speaker 2 (21:10):

Still make money, still make profit at the end of the day and be paid for it.

Speaker 1 (21:14):

Correct. So the extra profit almost pays for all the shit you got to put up with. But yeah, if there’s an extra bit of fat into it, then they’ve inadvertently subfied themselves. So there’s a way around that you can do that. The next thing you can do is really reset the terms. And this is about having an honest conversation with them around really being clear on inclusions, exclusions, scope, payment terms, like payment upfront, deposits, all these types of things. So you can really start to sit down, have honest conversation with them and tilt things in your favour so that you don’t have to put up with a mess. And I think in the end of the day, that helps de-risk it and almost negate some of the problems that you know you’re going to come up against, doesn’t it?

Speaker 2 (22:04):

Yeah. This one that I think people, you can set yourself up for this even in the beginning and protect yourself a little bit, but it still surprises me how many guys don’t have, or they don’t rely on the terms they’ve got. They don’t use that as the vehicle, that filter to go, well, here’s how this is going to work. These are the rules of the game. I will rely on this even down to the clause. We do insist on this. If this doesn’t happen, I want to make you aware of this going into it. If people reset or set their terms up front better, I think you would have this self-selection, this filtering going on a lot earlier than months down the track where you’ve just let it ride and now you’re dealing with all the shit.

Speaker 1 (22:44):

Yeah. One of my favourite sayings around this is good fences make good neighbours. Yes. And what that means is good boundaries put in place early, make great neighbours. And same thing as businesses, when you’re really clear on terms and conditions and how this job is going to run from a job and expectations and payments and scope and inclusions and exclusions, and this is just how the job’s going to operate. If you set that expectations in the term conditions upfront, it always works better. And if people don’t like that, then they, again, self-elect out. And this is just part of the sales process. If you don’t agree on that, then don’t move forward. You can choose not to move forward. It is okay.

Speaker 2 (23:23):

Yeah, exactly right. And I think this is the next thing. That choice can be made upfront. You can actually gracefully have just an exit, even if it’s an existing customer that you’ve done stuff before and you’re going, well, no more, or it’s a new customer and you can see the writing on the wall. You’ve seen this often enough, you know what it’s been like and you want to gracefully opt out. This is what we’d sort of call just a straight up conversation and exit. There’s a way to do that as well.

Speaker 1 (23:46):

Yeah. It’s about sitting down, having the conversation and just letting them know that, “Hey, thanks very much, but just letting you know we won’t be pricing any more of your work going forward.” You don’t have to give them reasons why. Or you can just say you’re taking the business in a different direction, different type of work, and we’re just not doing that work anymore. And sometimes that’s good for them as well because it puts a full stop to them and it puts a full stop to you. So you’ve just got to do that in the right way, which we’ll talk about in a second, but you don’t have to overshare, but sometimes not playing games where you overprice it and hope they fire themselves. Sometimes just having the conversation is a better thing rather than playing silly buggers around it.

Speaker 2 (24:29):

Yeah, definitely. And I think this is, like you said then, the conversation. I want to stress this because there’s a bit of probably some rules of engagement for this. We don’t want people to. If you are reaching for your phone now thinking, I’ll just fire off a couple of texts, this will be job done, don’t do it. Never go through this as a text. You never want to sort of have it as a text message exchange because you’ll lose all the nuance, all the care. Like you said, we’re going in another direction sounds okay and we can have a conversation, but you put that in a text, it’ll be taken a very different way. So I think that’s one of them. The other one is don’t walk off the job mid job. Get the job done. If you are in this situation, you either need to adjust or complete.

(25:10):

You don’t get to just fire and step off midway. There’s always got to be some sense of what you’ve committed to and making it a clean exit rather than a messy midpoint exit.

Speaker 1 (25:22):

Yeah. The reason why those couple of points you made there are super important is because you never want to burn bridges in business. That’s really important to remember. And finishing right with a customer is important because the industry is small and there’s always six degrees of separation. And if you go about something the wrong way, it’ll come back and bite you in the ass at some point down the line. And someone will remember you’ll be doing work for a PM, you’ll exit the wrong way, you’re working for another builder, that PM goes and works for that builder. Correct. And then all of a sudden they’re like, “We’re not giving work to you anymore because I remember five years ago the way you were being a dick about things.” So it’s no burning bridges. The industry is small and word does travel fast around certain places.

(26:12):

So it’s always important to remember to operate in a professional manner, to do things the right way to ensure that you can keep your reputation intact.

Speaker 2 (26:21):

Yeah. And in that B2C sense, or even where we’ve got customers that are in regional markets and things like that, that burning bridges is a really big no-no because that word will travel fast. So-and-so’s neighbour who’s a cousin of so-and-so will say they’ll pay more attention to that than any five-star review they see on Google. So be wary of that and just do it the right way. And I think this is the next point, Rob, that we want to land on, probably the last one. There’s a big warning around this. The right way to do this is a transition and explain to us what we mean by that. Really don’t do this to kill yourself. You can really chop your nose off if you’re not careful.

Speaker 1 (27:00):

Yeah. There’s two examples where we’ve done this. I remember working with some Sparkys in Sydney and they were in high end residential and they wanted to make a move into the commercial space. We kept saying to them, we’re like, “Guys, you’ve got to do this strategically. There’s got to be a transition. You’ve got to wash out customers and take time to do business development and move into new markets and price new work and wait for that to come online.” And they just went chop move. And fortunate enough for them, it did land in their favour, but it could have been a real risk where they moved too quickly, they chopped that market, moved to that market, and they didn’t make that transition work. It could have been diabolical for them, but luckily enough, the stars lined up and it just happened to work out for them.

(27:49):

But that’s, in my opinion, the worst way about doing things. I prefer the method that Jack did that we spoke around earlier. He started moving away from certain builders, but he knew strategically he was going to move away from them. He kept his powder dry, didn’t have the conversation. He kept pricing work for them. But what he was doing in the backend was chasing different builders in that market, pricing work off to the side. And as he started winning more work for the new builders, he just washed out the old builders. And sure, over an 18 month period, the business actually didn’t grow from a revenue point of view, but what he did is washed out that customer base, replaced the old builders with the poor work, lots of travel, low margin with good builders, better price, better margin, better working conditions. The bottom line improved, revenue didn’t, but then he set that foundation to be able to grow from.

(28:47):

So when you’re in this process, you don’t just chop and run because that can be diabolical and you may not have enough work to go to. You’ve got to transition this process and I’m going to stress that. You’ve got to transition it, otherwise you can find yourself in a lot of mess and a lot of problems and it can actually be more stressful than not having work at all.

Speaker 2 (29:07):

Oh, absolutely. The cash flow problems we see with guys that do it too soon, it then becomes not a customer problem. You’ve got a business-wide emergency on your hands. You’re a gardener. You like this. I like the idea. You think in gardening when I think about this and we’re talking to clients and you don’t go and chop a tree down to make it stay healthy, you prune it, right? That idea of pruning and not purging, I think I heard you say that once before, but that idea out of gardening, you prune the tree to keep it healthy and make sure that the tree stays healthy rather than just let’s chop it down and make sure it grows back stronger than ever and we’ll just do something different.

Speaker 1 (29:43):

Yeah. Funny story around that. It actually doesn’t work with our analogy around pruning, not purging. I remember when I was a real young fella, my mom went away and my dad’s an avid gardener as well. And my mum came back and the whole place had just been hacked to pieces because my dad purged, not purged.

Speaker 2 (30:00):

No.

Speaker 1 (30:01):

And I still remember that today. And the look on my mom’s face was like, what the hell had happened? But that just hacked the shit out of that and it did grow back. But I think regular pruning and maintenance goes a lot further in the process of just maintaining and pruning to be able to keep the garden staying healthy and moving along and evolving over time is way better than just hacking the shit out of everything. So yeah, same thing goes for customers. You’re better off pruning your customer base and letting it evolve over a period of time rather than just purging and hoping for the best. That’s a hope and wish strategy, not the best one in business.

Speaker 2 (30:45):

Yeah, definitely. No, I like it. And I think that’s the thing. I mean, you can be busy in business and be bringing in a lot of cash, but you can be losing a lot of money at the back end. And that’s what today’s been about is really just trying to get you to have an awareness of what is it costing you to have the customer base you’ve got and how can you optimise that in a way that it happens professionally rather than just blowups and big dramas in the business that topple your team upside down, throw your cash flow into disarray. There’s a way to do this that works really, really well and will benefit you, but you’ve got to have the discipline to do it.

Speaker 1 (31:21):

Yeah. A lot of this comes down to strategy, like strategically knowing where you’re taking your business moving forward. And hopefully that’s the message that’s run through this whole session is you’ve got to strategically think around where you’re going and what customers and markets are going to serve you best to be able to get there. And so if you’re in that position right now where you are busy but you’re not making the money that you want and you’re doing work for customers you really don’t want to be doing work for, then maybe that’s your opportunity to take a step back, be objective, get some support from us from a coaching space to be able to go, well, where are you at? Where are you trying to go? What work are you doing? What work could you be doing? What markets are you in? What markets do you need to move on to?

(32:05):

And how do you strategically do that in the right manner? And that’s the best part about coaching is it brings that strategic element, it’s that decision making, it’s that critical thinking to be able to make the right strategy at the right time to move in the right direction. So if that’s something that’s of interest to you and you know that you need to be able to make some important decisions moving forward, then jump across to strategysession.com.au, fill out the application form, book at a time that suits. Let’s have a conversation around where you’re trying to go and see if coaching’s the right fit for you. Because you got to remember at the end of the day, building a business, the goal isn’t just more customers, it’s the right customers. It’s the customers that pay properly. It’s the customers that respect your team. It’s the customers that let you build your business that you’re ultimately proud of in the end of the day.

(32:51):

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed today’s episode and we’re looking forward to coming back to you with another episode here on The Trade Den shortly. Until then, take care.

Speaker 2 (32:58):

See you soon.