Episode 88 Podcast Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Making no part of your skillset and really making no work for you in terms of almost being a competitive advantage if you really understand the benefits of when to say it and how to say it the right way.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hi everyone. Rob Kropp and Dan Stones here from Pravar Group and welcome back to another episode of The Trade Den. Good to have you back you then. How are you?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
I’m very well, Rob. Thank you. Hi everyone. Ready to have a good conversation today about something that probably doesn’t get talked about a lot, a little bit counterintuitive. We like these sort of episodes and today it’s all around saying no to work and that’s sometimes being the smartest move you’ll ever make. Not to mention probably one of the hardest, I think it’s part of setting the scene for today is that every tradie hits that point or hopefully every successful tradie hits that point where demand does outstrip capacity. You’ve got more work than you can handle, there’s more opportunities coming, the business is going well and it’s growing. So the temptation naturally is well, let’s make hay while the sun shines, take it all and just keep moving on with it. But I think that unconsidered version of that, the thing that separates cracking businesses from the struggling ones is really understanding when to say yes, when to say no. And I think starting off today, let’s start by talking around the hidden costs of saying yes to everything because on the surface it’s the most no brainer thing of all time. It works there. Why wouldn’t you say yes and we’ll just grow into it.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
It’s that thing where more is better and it gets to that point in business where more isn’t always better, better is better. And the more you take on especially more of the wrong work and when you’re taking on the wrong work, there’s been plenty of red flags. There’s been plenty of hints in the past, the temptations that is there thinking, well, this will get me to the next level, or Hey, I’ve got a hole in my pipeline, just got to take this on to fill it. The temptation is there, but there’s a trap there.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
There really is. And I think, let’s see if we can help shine a light on some of those traps and things that you can see in this first part before we talk about saying no and how you do that the right way. Obviously I think the biggest thing on the yes trap is that before long, what got you into the position where all this work became available and opportunities is your quality suffers and you’re stretch too thin.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
What happens is here is that you become renowned in the marketplace for good quality service, good communication, getting a job done right the first time. But if your systems and processes don’t keep up with your growth within the business, or if you just keep taking on more and more and more work saying yes going, oh yeah, we’ll just squeeze that in, we will just get it done. What end ups happening is quality does slip, things go pear shape, and what made you successful in the first place starts somewhat unravelling and then that you run the risk of tarnishing your reputation and you may not feel it now, but it may have a domino effect in the future at some stage.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
So that quality side suffers. I think the other one then, if you somehow manage to keep the quality high, it lends into the next thing and rather than impacting the external world or it impacts the internal world and your team starts to suffer.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, the team get burnt out because you are trying to do everything you can to be able to make the customer happy. So outward facing, it’s like we’ve got to keep up, we’ve got to make sure that we don’t let quality slip, but you’re smashing your team and you’re stretching them way too thin, whether it’s pushing the envelope or you’re making them do lots of overtime or you just have unrealistic expectations of what can get done in a day and then you run the risk of burning your team out resignations, whatever it is, because it’s just not sustainable to keep operating that way.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Yeah, it’s not sustainable, it’s not enjoyable, and you get to that point where the mistakes do start to pile up inevitably, and once the mistakes pile up, typically in a trades business, you end up having that choice to make, do I go in and fix it or do we have to live with the lower quality? And a lot of business owners, this is where they find themselves getting sucked back into the weeds and into the operations of the business because they go in and try and manage everything and that’s becoming that bottleneck, right?
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah. They almost, they become that bottleneck. They become that Mr. Fix It guy, and they’re sweeping around their team fixing this problem, fixing that mistake. There’s all these open jobs within the system because things just aren’t closed out. So your work in progress increases, your invoicing doesn’t get out, your cash flow seems to staffer your hours as the owner goes up and it’s your fault in the end of the day because you just keep saying yes and yes and yes. And you think that by saying yes, more is going to get you to the next level and make you more money and be able to afford you to be able to have that more time. But what happens is you become the bottleneck, your hours start piling up, cracks in the business start to appear, and you’re the ones sweeping up everyone else’s mistakes. And so it can become a pretty vicious cycle. So what you thought would get you somewhere is actually taking you in the opposite direction.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
And it’s like, I mean we started with quality suffering a little bit and look where we are now with the bottleneck and everything like that, that then blends into frustration and doing work for the wrong customers and you resent your business and the people that are working in it and even the customers that are paying you. So it’s really, like you just said there, it’s a vicious cycle when it happens. So let’s summarise is there’s signs to recognise, obviously that’s the trap itself and some of the things that come up. What would be some of the signs for a business owner that you’ve seen that they are stuck in this Yes trap.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
The first one is the business owner’s time and their blowout on time where they’re saying yes and yes and yes and yes. And it could be that they’re saying yes to the wrong work or overcommitting, they’re just becoming a bit of a yes man. And what’s ending up happening is that they’re saying yes, they haven’t learned to say no and it’s impacting their hours. So it means that they’re working long days at nights on weekends just to be able to keep up. And it reminds me of a client that that’s just stud with us and he already runs a great business and he does a lot of, he’s an arborist and he does a lot of council work and a lot of that type of work, and he’s outgrown that market to be able to do it in the residential space. But he’s come from there and he doesn’t like saying no, and he is a yes man, but he knows he shouldn’t say it, but he does.
(06:53):
And so he accepts those jobs, then he’s having to reshuffle the schedule, bring in the team, taking the team off the good profitable jobs to drop them onto Mrs. Jones’s job, and then all of a sudden it’s messing with the schedule and all of a sudden his hours are blowing out because he’s having to reshuffle things around. So it’s a real domino effect where his hours are blowing out hours, the team are getting frustrated, the schedule keeps getting messed with, and we’re working really hard with this guy at the moment to be able to go, well, you know what your sweet spot is? You’ve got to learn to say no and we’ll talk about that in this episode, but he’s got to learn to say no, but do it in the right way so that he can still help out that person in the local area and preserve the great business that he’s already got.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And the time element that they lose as well comes into the management side of things because you end up having to manage around the edges of the business that it’s set up to operate as. And I think that’s what you’re describing here, but that idea that people call it firefighting, but what I sort of see is people just having to manage to the exception, it’s like the 80/20 rule in reverse. They just spend all their time on these grey areas and bits and pieces that exist only for the fact that someone said yes to something they shouldn’t have in the first place.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
It comes in the form of two ways with this. It’s a job you’ve said yes to and overcommitted when you know should have said no, or it’s a job that already had red flags already attached to it and you were probably a little bit desperate for work and you said yes to it. And so when you say yes to a job and overcommitted, you firefight because you’re having to reshuffle, reorganise. It’s creating more work unnecessarily. But then when you’re desperate for this job and you say yes, when deep down it’s the wrong type of work, then it just creates more problems than it’s worth and then you’re scrambling to deal with a customer or deal with a job you shouldn’t have taken on in the first place.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
And it’s not just time problems and management problems, it’s also dollars as well. There’s a real impact to the bottom line. I suppose this is one of the more counterintuitive parts of saying yes to work when it’s always there, is that you don’t always end up making more money.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Correct? Because most business owners think, well, if I do more, take on more, grab more work, then my top line will grow and which should naturally drop to my bottom line. But if it’s the wrong job at the wrong margin, then you’re doing unprofitable work which comes at the expense of more profitable stuff. Or if it’s the wrong job for the wrong customers that’s got red flags attached to it, then you’re probably going to erode your margin anyway because you’re going to have to over manage it or you’re going to have problems dealing with the difficult customer, or it just leads to frustration within the business, which might be admin heavy or just the mental angst that you have as an owner dealing with a customer that you really don’t want to deal with that just burns time and energy and money all day long. And so to run a successful business, it comes down to the right job at the right margin, managed well and delivered well. That’s what makes a profitable business, not just saying yes to anything that comes across your plate.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Yeah, as you said at the very top, big is not always better. I think the other thing I see as well as a real trap of this is when people have too many open jobs, and by that I mean there’s jobs that just can’t be finished. We can’t get to it. You look at the backlog or the revisits or whatever you call it in your trade, you look at all the rectifications and the stuff that means a job can’t be closed, we can’t invoice, we’ve got to get back there. We’ve just got to have some time to get back to that job and just finish that one or two things off, but there’s another five on the go. That to me is a real sign that someone said yes to too many things.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah, it really is. And that hurts cashflow on the end of the day, doesn’t it?
Speaker 1 (10:53):
It does. And if you’re wondering why it hurts cashflow, it’s because in a lot of instances, people will either withhold payment because the job’s not done. You said you’d come back and finish that one thing. I’m not going to pay you for everything because until that gets done, it’s the only leverage I’ve got as a customer to be able to get you to come back in some instances. The other thing is you just don’t invoice. Your policy is we can’t invoice the job while it’s open, until it gets shut. We can’t invoice, so you never invoice, therefore you are missing cash in the business and the business can’t breathe. There’s no money coming in. So that’s why it’s a real danger thing, even though it was something that started as, Hey, look at all this work, we can win and let’s just keep saying yes.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
What do you think it does to the morale and culture of the team, do you think?
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I think it comes down to that. It’s almost like that saying about just eating carrot. It’s just like it’s this sweet spot that you never get the donkey that’s chasing the carrot out in front. And I think that’s what happens to a team that’s always on the hook for more and more and more and more. You never reach that point and invariably whoever’s saying yes to, everything’s like, yeah, there’s more jobs. Maybe it won’t always be like that, or we’re going to get through this, or it’s just a busy time, but the people, the ground crews that are working these jobs and having to go with the changes and all the stuff that’s on the edge of what we’re really meant to be doing and everything that comes a little bit harder, there’s a real diminishing return in terms of their morale and their ability to stay effective and to really see long-term to sustain the level of work that you really want. So I think that’s the morale drops because there’s just this relentless, there’s no end to it. It’s it just keeps going and going and going. It’s never addressed. It’s never really rectified. It never really gets better. There’s just more of it every single day and that just wears people down.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And productivity then drops, doesn’t it? Because it’s like morale drops, culture gets a little bit shaded and productivity drops. That example I used before around the arborist, its product naturally does drop every time he says yes to that type of work in the B2C space, which is business to consumer, when his business is really geared for the B2B councils and bigger jobs, every time he pulls some of those guys off to be able to move from that work over to here to do a little job, it disrupts that flow, it impacts the schedule. They get frustrated like, oh, we can’t even finish that because now we’ve got to run over there. They get the shits because they’re getting a move from this job to that one when we’re they’re really not geared up for it. And that just comes down because an owner thinks, well, oh, they feel that obligation to say yes or they just haven’t learned to say no the right way.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Yeah, there’s a real cost to it. I think that’s where you’re getting to is the real cost of saying yes to everything. And that ends up what you just said. For example, you lose reputation as a result of saying yes to everything. All those little customers and all these little odds and ends jobs that the arborist is doing is going to end up, he’s going to let down the customers that are part of his core business if he’s not careful and you end up having work that gets rushed or will squeeze you in and your prime customers, the core of your business doesn’t like being treated that way. And your reputation eventually does erode and suffer.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
People appreciate honesty and I know at Pravar, one thing that we’ve prided ourselves on in the last 15 years is knowing what we’re good at, but also knowing what we’re not good at. And a coaching business can’t be great at everything. There’s things that you are good at, aren’t good at. And I know when I’m meeting a potential client for the first time, if I always ask that question, what’s going on in your world at the moment? What do you really need help with? And there’s sometimes that they need something. And there’s been numerous times a lot of times where I’ve said, actually, I don’t think that we’re the best coaching business for you. You go and talk to these people and they’ll turn around and go, Rob, you don’t think you can help us? And I’m like, no, I don’t think we can. We’re not geared up for that type of thing that you need.
(14:56):
And that person over there who’s inverted comm as a competitor is better for you. And they’re like, Rob, you’re referring work on to a competitor. We want to work with you, but our reputation is more important than just saying yes to anyone because that reputational damage can be a lot in the future if you just say yes to everything rather than knowing your limits, knowing what you are and aren’t good at and what you’re geared up for or not geared up for, and taking on the work that you know can get a great outcome from.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
And that’ll reduce stress in the long term and all those sort of things that start to play into it as you wrestle with this just sort of yes mentality if you like. I think the other thing that happens is every time you’re saying yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. In your client example there, you say yes to enough clients and like we said at the start, there’s only a finite capacity for the business and you’ve got challenges of growing if you want to grow the capacity. If you’re thinking that, sure, but that’s a different conversation, but you miss out on the right opportunities if you keep doing this.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
It’s opportunity cost. And we saw this a lot during COVID when as a plastering business we were doing work for in Central Victoria and he was like, pipeline’s starting to dry up. Everyone’s crunching on where prices and we’re like, mate, don’t drop your prices. Don’t take on them. Don’t get into this pricing war. And because if you say yes to this, don’t understand the, you’ve got to understand the impact on your model around how that works. And if you say yes to all that work and fill your pipeline for the next 12 months with all that shit margin work, then you are booked out and that limits your ability to say yes to some good quality work. And that scares people from a sales and pipeline, especially when your pipeline’s a little bit shaky. It’s like I feel like I have to say yes, but you’ve got to remember if you fill your pipeline with red flag customers and poor margin work and work that you’re not good at, you’ve filled your pipeline with low quality work and you’ve said yes to this at the expense of saying yes to something else. And that’s a real trap. And that’s where vicious cycles start in business.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, it’s easy to be busy at the end of the day, isn’t it? But being busy versus profitable are two very, very different things. If you are listening and you’re thinking then that saying No sounds like a good idea, the next thing that’ll invariably come up is, well, it’s not as easy to say no, I have to say yes to some work and there’s times where I have got gaps and things like that, but there’s a real right time and a real when to say no. And I think that’s probably the next thing is when to say no and how to say it right.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
The first thing to do is understand probably what I was alluding to before is around really understanding your niche or your expertise in your business, and there’s a whole topic we’ll do around knowing your market and your market versus the market. And we’ll talk about skimming versus a depth strategy. So that’s a whole topic that will go on there because when you get to a certain size of business, you can’t be all things to all people. You’ve, you’ve got to make a decision, am I going to skim the surface or am I going to go to depth? And there’s a lot of factors which make that decision for you to some degree, but each business has got their own niche or level of expertise and when you know what that is and have that level of positioning in the marketplace, anything that comes to your plate, not every opportunity is an opportunity. And so that’s a sign that when it falls outside of your niche or layer of expertise, that’s where you’ve got to have the confidence and the awareness around you and your business and your team’s capability. And that can be a deciding factor of when you do say no.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Yeah, and niche and expertise isn’t just necessarily what you’re good at, not your skills where you do great work, it’s also your niche or expertise in the way your business is structured, the team, the ground crew that you’ve got. It’s the margin work that works for your business. So you are growing and your business is profitable versus not. There’s all of these different things that are coming into it. So saying no to this stuff when we talk about niche or expertise isn’t just because you’re not good at it or you haven’t done it before. It’s more around the clients, for instance, they can have unrealistic expectations. That’s a good time to say no, right?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
I think the more you’re in business, you start to start seeing these red flags.
(19:31):
Within a customer or a client, I think you start to pick these up and the more you go through business, you start to get create criteria around who we do and don’t want to work for and becomes apparent. Because the more people you work with, you know that if you take on that type of customer and their behaviours, then you know what the end result’s going to be. It’s going to end in disputed outcomes or late payments or they’re being difficult to deal with or they crunch you on variations or crunch you on the schedule or they start dictating terms to you. Those people stand out. And so I think it’s your ability to somewhat not just say yes to the job, but interview the customer to some degree to be able to go, is this the type of person we want to do work with? And if they are, you say yes, but if there’s red flags against your criteria of your ideal client, then there’s a situation where you might want to start saying no.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, absolutely. The other one for me is understanding your capacity and really knowing where your limit is in terms of what you can not comfortably do, but what you can actually deliver at the levels and standards that you’ve set your business up to deliver. And really understanding capacity gives you another avenue to be able to say no at the right time.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
If your capacity’s a hundred grand a month for example, and you know that you can take on that job and then resource it, whether you can bring in someone into your team and recruit them or if you need to bring in a subcontract team and you can take on that extra 50 grand a month and go and do it. But if you’re in that position where you’re saying yes and yes and yes and yes and yes to work and you’ve got no way of delivering it, then you’re going to piss people off and people are going to get the shits and and there is nothing worse in business than overpromising and underdelivering and you get a reputation for that and it’s not a great way of building your name in the marketplace.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah, I agree. What about then we looked at the cost of saying yes to everything. Let’s look at the payoff if you like of saying no. What does saying no actually do?
Speaker 2 (21:50):
What I think the first one is it creates a bit of scarcity. It’s scarcity in the marketplace.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
So why is that a good thing?
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Well, it makes you, anything scarce is more valuable and when you become more valuable, you become sought after and then people want to work with you and you can then raise your prices and increase your margins because you know what your capacity is. And if you’ve got a good enough reputation, then if you’re in demand, people will want to work with you. And if they want to work with you bad enough, they’ll be willing to pay more of a premium for that.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
So it’s a gateway into premium pricing or a premium business model is to create the scarcity. If you’re yes to everyone and it’s easy to get, then your pricing’s got to be sharp. You can’t go into Bunnings and buy one of, I dunno, 8,000 different of the one thing and expect that it’s going to be premium priced. You’re going to drag in that sort of customer. It just doesn’t work that way.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
What about quality? I think there’s a big one in terms of saying no, that it lends itself to allowing you to focus more on your quality.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah. When you keep saying yes and yes and yes and yes and yes, if you can’t keep developing your operational systems to demand with that growth, then inadvertently your quality is going to slip. So the benefit of saying no is it enables your operations to keep up with the growth curve of your business and you can maintain quality as you do grow. And this is one of the biggest areas that businesses get wrong, is that their growth outstrips their ability to deliver. And so your ability to say no and strategically say no means that you’ve got the ability to keep that pace up and it means you remain a high level of quality as you do grow. And that’s what sustainability is built on.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
And I think that that allows you to, then you can enforce it a bit more. You’ve got stronger boundaries, you’ve got stronger lines to call on when you do this. You’ve got more room to insist that quality remains high versus Hey, we’ve got to get through all these jobs because I keep saying yes to everything. I think the other place this comes into it then becomes in terms of the ability to attract or control the sort of clients that you do work with, quality clients you can chase and you can have a real strategic focus to your business development if you’re willing to say no to some things and do your work.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Definitely when you’ve got no boundaries because you’re a yes man, then you’ll take any job that you can, which means your barrier to entry has to be wide open. But if you know what you’re good at, what your niche and expertise is, you really clear on who you do work for at rock price point and what margins, and you’ve really profiled your ideal customer and you know what those boundaries and limits are. It means you get to work with the very best people at the right price, with the right work that you and your team are going to enjoy and everyone’s happier. But if you keep saying yes to everything, then it’s almost a bit of an open door policy to some degree, isn’t it?
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Yeah, absolutely. You’re walking yourself into all kinds of troubles as we outlined before. Let’s look at the smart way, if you like to say no, now you are definitely the sales engine out of the two of us in terms of how we work together. But the smart way to say no. Before you get into that, I’m going to ask you for your ways of saying this, but how do you feel about saying no? It’s probably a good thing to just have a think about, but saying no is not easy to do even for someone like yourself, but you’ve got to learn to do it.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
In the early stages of business. I didn’t like saying no. I was absolutely a yes man with no boundaries. And I’ll be honest around that, the more I’ve matured in my business journey, I’ve learned to say no. I hate saying no. I used to feel like I was letting people down, I would upset them. I didn’t want to have to have the conversation of that two letter word, which is no. So it didn’t sit well with me, and I think I just sometimes just took things on because I just want to avoid the conversation or is just the easiest path to take. So yeah, I’ve been there and I still do it from time to time, but I think I’ve got a hell of a lot better at it over the years.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
And I think that’s the key is how do you get better at it and the ways that you do say no, and we’ve got these, we coach on these, so we’ve sort of got our stock standards, maybe let’s run through three or four of these and just sort of give an example of the right way to say no as opposed to hate. No, we don’t do that. Not interested, just not getting back to people. I mean, that’s a way to say no is never respond, but that does nothing to help you. It’s not really the way of saying no that we’d advocate.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Yeah, definitely. I think let’s use the example of the solar space at the moment is the whole battery rebates talk to any solar person at the moment and they’re probably not answering their phone and because they can’t get stock and they can’t keep up. And so that’s not a great way because you get that reputation of someone who doesn’t get back to people. So I think your ability to have that honest conversation with you where if you rang, you’d say, Hey, Dan, just letting you know we are booked out solid for the next three to six months with this type of work that you’re inquiring for. We don’t have capacity around this at the moment and we won’t be able to get to any job like that until this date. And so you actually haven’t said no in that situation, but you’ve said no in a really, really, really polite way by just saying, Hey, we are booked solid and we won’t be able to get to that until this time. And that’s that scarcity thing where they’re like, Ooh, they’re booked out, they’re busy, they’ve got lots on, they’re in demand. Well, I’m willing to wait. And that’s when people will.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
That’s a huge difference to someone who’s booked solid but just can’t get back to people. We hear this at the time with clients, it’s like, I can’t get back to everyone. I’ve got so many, I’ve got to pile this big on my desk of inquiries and I just can’t get back to everyone that doesn’t breed up. Oh, they must be in demand. That just breeds a, Hey, these guys aren’t organised. I dunno what happened with them. And they’ll just put a line through you. So being able to say that you are booked solid and have that communication commits you to being on the right side of the fence if you like, in terms of having to say no.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Or you book solid and you just go, yeah, alright, I’ll take that on. Yeah. Anyway, well, we’ll see if we can squeeze you in next week. And then you’re like, geez, what did I say that for?
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Yep, exactly. And then you pay for it and sometimes it’s months down the track, it keeps biting you on the ass over the time that the whole job takes to be done to the time you get paid, et cetera. So it’s a big one. The other one I think is a real honesty one, but there’s a real benefit to, this isn’t an area of our expertise, but being able to recommend or refer on. You touched on that before, again, the smart way or the benefit of being able to refer on in your eyes is what.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
It’s a big one because what you’re doing is you’re saying no, but you’re helping them, the prospect or someone take the next step in getting a solution. And that pays dividends in a long way. And I know when people come to Pravar, and like I said before, they’ll ask the question, what is it that’s important to you and what are you chasing right now? And if they say that they’re looking for a certain thing, I position it upfront and say, if that’s not in our sweet spot, I’ll make sure I refer you out to someone or a colleague in the industry. And there’s been plenty of times where I’m like, sorry Dan, I don’t think we can help you. We’re just not geared up for that, but this person can. And so many times most people say Rob is so refreshing for a business coach, to be honest around that’s outside of their area of expertise. And you’ve referred me on because most people’s experience in the coaching world is, well, if someone needs help, we’ll take you on. And if it doesn’t work out well, that’s their problem. But I think that’s what sets us apart. Now in the trade space, this could be this example around the arborist before is aligning yourself with a smaller arborist business that does do more of that business to consumer work.
(30:10):
And when that call does come in, you might be able to go, sorry, Mrs. Jones, getting that hedge trims out of our area of expertise. But what I can do is put you in touch with Bob, who’s a local gardening guy in the area who will be able to be able to come out there and get those hedges trimmed for you and he’ll be able to give you a great service at the right price and make sure we can get those hedges trimmed for you. What do you think? And then she’ll go, amazing, thanks so much. I really appreciate you being honest with me. So instead of saying, no, I can’t help you out, you’ve given ’em a solution and that’s the best thing you can do. So you’re saying no the right way, and that’s the kicker to this.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Yeah, I think what it does, it allows you to add value along the way, and as long as you’re adding value, you’re going to be seen as a positive part of the market. You’re going to be seen as someone who’s worth going back to. And I think it also then maintains your authority, your position in the market if you’re willing to refer people that you must know people, again, you’re painting yourself in a really favourable light. Most people’s version of saying no, as we just said before, is to ignore it and hope it just goes away and wait for the next opportunity. So these are the smart ways to do this. So as we wind out today, I think that the sort of summary, if you like, is making no part of your skillset and really making no work for you in terms of almost being a competitive advantage if you really understand the benefits of when to say it and how to say it the right way.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Yeah, most tradies are afraid of saying no because they think well work will dry up, or what am I going to do about that hole in my pipeline in the coming weeks? But the opposite actually happens, and this is where a little bit of faith comes into play because when you do become more selective, you actually become more sought after and it creates the space for better quality work at higher margins with the best customers that you can actually find at the time.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
And I think this is part, as we get into the challenge for the week, it is about creating that space and giving yourself the gift of experiencing what it’s like to say no strategically rather than out of pressure. So this week as the challenge, what we want you to do is look at your current workload, look at the upcoming pipeline, really pay attention to the queries you’re getting, and identify one type of job or a client that you know should probably be saying no to or you could say no to and stop taking on that work. Then what we’d like you to do is practise it. Say no, give the right example or the right way of saying no. Pick whichever one works best for you, whether it’s the referral or we’re booked out, whatever it might be, but use it and give yourself that gift. And it doesn’t mean go out and just say no to every one of those types of work and just cut yourself off at the knees in terms of your pipeline. What it means is experience what it’s like and build your skillset to be able to use no as your competitive advantage.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Yeah, what a great challenge. And it’s not only just doing it this week, I think it’s being comfortable with learning how to say no is the key in the weeks and months and years ahead. Now, the bottom line is, is that most businesses that scale are the ones that know their worth and they aren’t afraid of protecting it. You can’t be everything to everyone. It’s about being invaluable to the right people. What a great episode, Dan.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Yeah, really good. As I said, counterintuitive episodes, the things where it’s sort of not quite what you think on the surface. I love doing those. So really good conversation today. Enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Yeah, no is sometimes your superpower. I love it. That’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Looking forward to coming back to you next week with another episode in The Trade Den. Until then, take care.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
See you soon.