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Jon Paramore:
What’s up everyone? This is Jon Paramore and you’re listening to The Liberated Contractor Podcast. I’ve spent the last 17 years growing and scaling contract and companies all across the United States.
Now I’m on a mission to liberate as many contractors as I can by helping them break free from the chaos, by helping them build a company that supports the life they want to live.
Join me, as I explained how some simple shifts that strategies are freeing contractors and helping them make more money than they ever have before. Sit back and relax and welcome to the liberated contractor podcast.
Hey everybody. Welcome to the Liberated Contractor Podcast. I’m Jon Paramore sitting here with Katy Martin and this is episode six and I’m going to preface this episode, right out of the gate it most of you guys can see the title. When you click on the title, there might be some bleeping out stuff in the title of this one, but the title of this particular podcast is UnFuck yourself. Like we’re there. We’re gonna. We’re gonna get into some really, really awesome and deep stuff today.
And the whole purpose behind today’s podcast is going to be all about what contractors and business owners tend to do that accidentally fucked themselves along the way. So today what we’re going to talk about some of these issues, that Katie is going to bring up some issues.
I’m gonna bring up some issues and then we’re just gonna talk through some ways that you can begin or like maybe by the end of this podcast actually stop doing some of these things, to completely unfuck yourself. So how’s it going, Katie? It’s going great. We’re just unfucking people all day.
So not only will this unfuck yourselves, but it’s going to help from putting other people in the same position like you’re making some things you’re doing to intentionally make your job harder.
Everybody else’s job harder. And then other companies in the market.
Yeah. So let’s jump in. Give me a– Gimme one. Let’s rapid fire today. Let’s just pick one and go get one.
Katy Martin:
Well, I’m trying to think of one that we were talking about just a little bit ago. So… sales reps in unmarked vehicles. Okay, cool.
So we see this and hear this a lot. There are a lot of guys that reach out to us, they want to hire sales reps and they– and, listen. So one thing that she’s talking about right out of the gate with the sales reps in unmarked vehicles, we’re not saying that you need to go out and buy a bunch of fleet trucks and put guys in rap cars and things like that.
We are saying that it doesn’t really matter if you use like a window decal or you use some type of magnet on the side of the car… those are little things that you could have, like the nicest shirts that have the prettiest logo, things like that. But you send a sales rep out to knock on a homeowner’s house or to run an appointment with somebody from a lead or whatever the case may be.
And they show up right out of the gate with an unmarked vehicle. And, their basic… their chances of closing that person actually dropped significantly. They’re in a completely young Mark Carr. And the problem with that is it makes the sales rep look rented.
It almost makes the sales guy looked not committed. Like why is he driving around? That’s exactly right. Like why is he driving around in a vehicle that’s unmarked and who is he and where did he come from? And has he always been in contracting sales? And there’s just all these questions and objections that could, that could arise right out of the gate. I think another way you want to elaborate or expand on that, did you have some extra icing on the cake?
Jon Paramore:
Magical insight right there. That’s the biggest thing… like somebody showing up to your door unexpected and we can even talk about other things that you can do to help push that along. But we’re not even talking about large expenses. I think most contractors do it unintentionally to one to save on expenses.
But two, they always… I’ve always heard people say like, they have this mindset of “I want to see if the guy sticks before I invest in maybe lettering, maybe a magnet, maybe shirts, whatever.” But I mean in the grand scheme of things, are you making that person’s job harder or easier when they’re in the field? So while we’re doing something to the sales rep that you’re uninvested…
Katy Martin:
That’s right. That’s exactly right. And so that’s a perfect example of the whole stop, stop effing yourself. Go, go unfuck yourself here on this side of it where it’s like they’re right out of the gate, like, you’re basically saying it without saying it to the sales Rep… like we’re not certain of who you are, right?
We’re not certain of your, your… I mean we chose to hire you. We sat across the table from you. We appropriately allegedly interviewed you well enough to make you an offer to bring you in. But deep down inside we’re not really sure that you’re going to make it.
So just try to run like, I don’t know, like the first six or eight weeks on a trial basis and have you just run out and talk to our homeowners and the people that we’re going to represent–you’re going to represent–in an unmarked vehicle with a handwritten business card or some type of business card template that we’re even too cheap.
Mr. Sales Rep to give you $50 worth of printed business cards right out of the gate. So he wants you to use like a borrowed business card, go out to the house in an unmarked vehicle and do your best to sell a job. Right. And how does that make the homeowner feel? Yeah, exactly. Like, Oh, you’re not invested in the sales rep. so why should I be invested in this person? Right?
I mean you gave them a really neat polo shirt, but… it’s all, it’s all psychological, right? And maybe you didn’t mean to do it. And there’s a legitimate practical logical thought process behind investing money into… maybe you’ve not had great success or maybe you have high turnover, so like we get it, we get the skepticism, but just changing your thought process a little bit and investing a little bit can change the whole experience in the beginning for the sales rep because when they, even when they go out, the way that they communicate with the homeowner isn’t going to be, with certainty, you know, they’re not going to be able to convey, hey, I mean, granted they’re selling themselves, but you can’t sell the company along with yourself if you don’t have that sense of competence for those you guys who maybe this is the first time you’re listening to it.
We’ve done a couple of podcasts before this one that go into the depths of marketing and lead generation and whatever. One of the key ways that I see guys all the time kind of hosing themselves is poor execution inside of the social media game.
Like you and I were just talking about this before… we decided to record this podcast today and we both had exchanges in conversations with people that really, in the last week, that they’re really not even sure like what they’re doing from a social media standpoint.
So they’re out posting and they’re just making random posts and meanwhile they don’t understand really crucial things like ed drinking and you know, the cadence to follow and, you know, things like that. So how do you see, just in your own words, how do you see people totally effing themselves from the social media side of things?
Jon Paramore:
It’s the same content like you can pull… you could pull 12, 20, maybe 30 different contractors, social media pages, and what are you… what’s the first picture you’re going to see? A house. It’s a house, it’s a house being done. It’s a house with some… with some contractors on it that are probably not even Osha compliant. It’s guys, it’s pictures of roofs, it’s talking about roofs, it’s whatever.
Katy Martin:
And so it’s on the forefront of your mind. And, and we’re not expecting every single business owner out there to be a complete marketing genius, but there’s some basics in there, that concept set yourself apart and when facebook has algorithms and things that catch up on that.
So when do you think, not only in your market, if you’re putting the same content, if other people are putting the same content, nobody cares. Nobody cares. So if everyone’s doing it that exact same way, nobody’s getting any type of role and that’s it. That’s it. So, you know, so the whole design to today’s podcast is all about unfucking. Okay.
Yourself. And we can do it in several different areas of the business because it’s little things, right? It’s little things that we see show up with companies that we engage with.
Jon Paramore:
Yeah. So let’s spend some of this front part of the podcast pointing out some of the things that have totally hosed you like that or just the things that we see the most. And we see a lot of them, just so you guys know, we see a lot of them in social media.
We see things that people say on social media that we would like, you know… there’s some guys that we follow and pay attention to on a consistent and regular basis and they’re the same guys that can’t figure out why they can’t hire high quality salespeople.
Yet every comment that they make in social media world is about how crappy salespeople are. Right? And so some of the best salespeople that we find for our clients, for people that reach out to us… guess where they come from…
So social media. So if you’re constantly the guy that’s making comments and posts about the work ethic and, you know, if you’re posting about the work ethic of sales reps, you’re posting about the work ethic of millennials, you’re posting about the worth ethic, the work ethic of old people like whatever the case may be.
You need to know and understand that today’s day and age, that what you put on social media, especially if you’re targeting somebody that you might later need to have conversation with…
That’s a situation and circumstance where you’re unintentionally completely hosing yourself. Right? And it’s the same thing whether you make a direct pop shot at a specific person or a specific thing or a specific type of car or a specific supplier. It doesn’t really matter what it is…that’s unintentional, you know, that’s basically you hosing yourself. Right?
Katy Martin:
So, the thing that I’ve seen that’s consistent, especially doing recruiting and talking to sales professionals in other industries… they’ve… some people are like, ‘no, I’ve seen how some of those guys show up and I have no interest in that industry.’ So you take a high performer who maybe I’ve spent six weeks chasing down to have a conversation with and when I finally start to talk about and they’re like, I know we’ve been talking for six weeks, but I’ve done some research and these guys were a bunch of turds and that’s not the case.
But when you do things like that about making comments that you think are, you know… you’re expressing your frustration, you’re not doing it to be intentionally mean to anybody in particular. But it’s one of those things that when you show up that way, it’s not only making the situation harder for you, it’s making it harder for everybody. And I’ll tell you guys to the other, and not just directly, you know, like specifically targeting your company as a whole.
But Katie and I have also seen–and we get a lot of feedback from a lot of different people–so we’ve also seen and heard where some of you guys will show up and participate at events and the way that you show up and participate in an event… Somebody. It could be your friend. It could also be somebody that’s your competitor… snaps a picture of you acting like an idiot. Puts that stuff on social media. And what happens? You’ve unintentionally hosed yourself again because your clients are like…
You guys don’t understand the power of social media…
Some of you might not. It’s possible for somebody to go in and put your name in and then find you and then search like where other posts that you’ve been mentioned in and and they can see where somebody has posted something negative about you.
Jon Paramore:
Now I get it like just so you guys know, so I’m not perfect either. Right? Like I’ve made mistakes where we shared the majority of the content that we share with you on these podcasts are based on our own experience.
They are based on our own observation, are based on our version of truth and what we see and know to be true and conversations that we have with other powerful people in the industry. Right? So you have to be careful about that stuff too and oh, by the way, so that it doesn’t feel like it’s some kind of attack on business owners today for your sales guys out in the marketplace. The same thing exists, right? What if you’re constantly the guy that’s talking about.
We’ve talked about this before, I think in an earlier podcast. If you’re constantly the guy that’s putting messages in social media that are all about going and picking up checks that are all about how much money you’re gonna make that are all about the toys that you have and all the other stuff. There’s a time and place for all that stuff, but if you’re putting it out there and you’re putting it out where the homeowner can find it and see it, sometimes you have to think a little bit before you engage and put that stuff out because it might not just damage you. Like you said earlier, it could be very damaging to the company.
Katy Martin:
Yup. To the company, to other people in the community, to other sales guys in your company. Right? Other salespeople like… I mean it affects… It’s a ripple effect. Can you talk about… there is a time and a place like… I mean at the end of the day, it is a job. It’s a profession.
It is the vehicle that you use to make money to support your family, but again, you have to think about what the homeowners perception is and so, you know, that’s why there’s industry groups. They’re in social media, you know… create private groups with your own sales team to high five and celebrate about picking up that check and signing that contract because you should celebrate. It’s just you gotta think before you post certain things because it’s just, again, fucking things up for everyone.
Jon Paramore:
That’s it. That’s it. And, and you guys need to understand like I think if there was just a filter, maybe that you ran stuff through, you know, whether it–and again, it doesn’t matter if you’re posting it on social media, it doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, the company or the organization that’s sending guys out in unmarked cars–
If you guys for one second, put yourself in the shoes of the homeowner and before you post it or before you say it or before you do it or whatever the case may be, you run it through that filter and you’re like, ‘if a homeowner was standing here right now… If a homeowner was in our office right now, what would they think about how we’re carrying ourselves? What would they think about the behavior that we’re putting out? What would they think about how my guys interact?
Right? And sometimes it’s great to show that humorous side of who you are because they need to relate to that. It’s also great to tell your war stories about where you came from and the struggles that you went through and the mistakes that you made. That vulnerability is very, very important. I’m not saying hide from them. I’m just saying… just take a second and really think about what it is that you’re about to do and think about the repercussions that could be felt and make sure that the message that you’re putting out is not unintentionally about to hose you, as the case may be. Right.
So think about– what you just touched on was really great. If you can think about every aspect of just how the business operates, the city. It could be the sales department, it could be the internal operations, it could be how wanti claims are handled. Like if you just would stop and say, “If a homeowner walked in here and saw how this operates, would they feel as good about the purchase at the end of the day?”
Because it’s not like they’re small purchases. No, not at all. And if everyone showed up in the market that way, then that’s just, I mean that would fix a lot of the things that we’re talking about. Like the way that certain people show up not only affects how it effects how your company and you personally, it affects other people in the industry.
Katy Martin:
Yeah, I mean we almost called this podcast “taking the con out of contractor.” Right? And, and not that all contractors are con artists. Not that… but you guys really have to sit into this and let it resonate for a minute. Like the majority of the people in the marketplace are so gun shy because of how they’ve been treated. Right? And it’s… And some people say… well, you know, they argue with us. They say, “well a few bad apples spoils the bunch” and I get that. I get that, right?
But when a few bad apples turns to 60 percent, 70 percent and the bunch is 30 percent, that’s a problem, like that… That’s what we’re trying to let you guys know. Like, you know, I don’t necessarily believe–because I’ve been there, you know, I was a contractor for 15 years before I sold my contracting company–
Like I’ve been there and I understand, like, you want to have fun, you want to be silly. You want to have a good time, that’s all great. There’s nothing wrong with that, like, people can relate, but you also need to know and understand there’s a possibility that the way that you show up, the way that you perform, the way that you act, some of the things that you’re doing, that those can very easily push people away.
And one thing that we’re planning to do a podcast in the near future is around positioning and the behavior and how the feel of the company is what creates positioning. Like, that’s how you show up in the market is what creates positioning. You know and the behavior that you put out and how you hold yourself and how you conduct yourself and things like… that’s the positioning side of it.
You know, just from the side of like, you know, you guys doing things that might intentionally be hosing you. These are just some basic, you know, things that I’m sure everybody sees. For those of you are active in social media, that’s primarily where you find these posts and you know, the content that we put out and the podcasts and all of that stuff. You just have to, you just have to be like a little bit conscious sometimes, right? Like the market wants to see you hanging out with your kids.
The market wants to see you interacting as an adult and doing fun things. The market wants to see you making really great posts that give you expert positioning that you actually know what you’re doing. The market wants to see you interacting with your team and your culture and things like that. The market doesn’t need to hear about you hanging out with a girl with some big boobs at a bar like that… that’s great man… Like, like create a personal page for yourself and keep that shit on a different channel.
Jon Paramore:
Yeah. You have to remember these are educated guesses, educated consumers, right?
Katy Martin:
That’s the whole thing. It’s a whole different… which is funny because we talked about this just earlier today. The person that’s like, “I don’t even have social media, like I don’t need it. Like I get business.” Yup. That’s cool. So how do you differentiate when you show up to somebody’s house and you’re like, “well I have this type of shingle” and the homeowners like, “cool dude, I have google. I know all about this frigging shingle.”
Jon Paramore:
“Yeah, I looked it up man. I googled it before you came here.” Right? Like, that’s the whole thing. And just so you guys know too, we’re not just talking about the other side to this whole equation where we’re having this conversation about “stop doing things that unintentionally hose yourself.”
You unfuck yourself here a little bit. I see all this stuff too. Just so you guys are aware.
We see all this stuff to where there’s like these vigilantes starting to show up and try to impact the market and try to get a lot of you guys to change how you show up and how you feel and they, like, wear the Superman Cape and think that they have this special power to manipulate how you guys show up and how you feel and we also know and we are intelligent and understand that people listening to this podcast, you guys pay attention to how people like us show up… like the influencers in the market show up.
You guys pay attention to, like, how some of the bigger companies show up, how they hold themselves. Right? And do you guys also get to choose, as consumers, who you do business with? Right?
And one thing that I would caution you on and the same side, it’s like you’re never going to see Katie and I jump onto social media and start badmouthing people. Like, you’re not going to see it because it’s disrespectful. You can keep that stuff private.
If you have a problem with somebody, you can direct message somebody or you can get to know somebody or you can address that stuff privately. You’re not going to see that from us, right? You’re not gonna see us write some long posts to slander somebody. Even if the business that we did, which we’ve done, the business that we’ve done with somebody in the past didn’t go well.
It’s not going to serve anybody and that’s the kind of stuff that people don’t understand unintentionally actually hoses them. When you go into the market and you’re on your own personal page, you’re in a group or whatever and instantly you begin to–out of fear or out of deflection or out of insecurity or out of maybe possibly what you actually feel inside of yourself–
You begin to make posts and start to talk shit about someone else. I need to tell you guys, like, anytime that you do that, whether you’re a contractor, you’re a service provider, whatever the case may be, you are hosing yourself. You are doing more damage to yourself…
than the person that you are trying to discredit or damage and almost every single time somebody does it to us or I see somebody do it to somebody else, there is a backstory on the other side that’s 30 times as deep as the person that they’re trying to discredit.
Katy Martin:
Yep, and that alone can can damage… badly damage any traction, momentum, positioning that that person could have gotten up until that point. It only takes one comment like that. Imagine this, if for the contractors, for those of you guys listening to this, imagine if you will, every time that you came across the bad homeowner you took to social media to talk shit about that bad homeowner, other homeowners see that? What is the homeowner thing?
Other homeowners that could potentially do work with you? See you talking shit about someone else and they instantly go, “I can’t do business with this person because if I do and it doesn’t go well, what are they gonna do? They’re gonna blast. We’re going to take you out social media, take you out to pasture and shoot you in the field.”
One of my great friends specifically told me, “I never have to fight a fight with a man that shows up with a gun and shoots himself in the face. Like, I never have to worry about that person” and it’s kind of like the old adage goes, “if you walk into a circus and you start arguing with the clowns, nobody can tell who’s the clown.” So you just don’t argue with the clowns, right?
Like you just don’t put yourself in that position to get yourself into the oddity. And that’s just something that we’re never going to intentionally do. We’re not going to engage in that kind of stuff to, to worry about having to F ourselves on the back.
Jon Paramore:
Yup. And funny real time story… just yesterday, we were having a conversation with a client, like they had a, they had a BBB complaint, which a lot of great contractors do know it happens, but it’s all about how you handle it, right? So they were asking about, you know, how do you respond to this with factual data?
And I said, you know, you do have that interaction where it’s sometimes the customer, sometimes it is the homeowner that’s not the greatest, but you have to remove yourself so far from the emotion side of it. And just get down to what happened. This is what happened. I apologize and this is how we attempted to make it right.
And so another thing that homeowners see your BBB profile, even if you have one complaint, let’s say you have one complaint or one bad review or something and everything else is positive, but if they go through and they read because you know that you could have 20 good reviews I’m going to need, they’re going to go read the negative ones and when they read that negative one and you’re condescending to the homeowner or hyper like a defensive, either hyper defensive, but it’s almost like I’ve seen this so many times reading different contractors, BBB profiles where they’ve had something or even a Yelp reviews for contract, like Google reviews or whatever where it’s like, oh, well I’m sorry you took it that way.
Like you can’t…
Katy Martin:
You can tell that the undertone of the response is super snarky.
Jon Paramore:
Right? So. And so that’s, that’s another thing. Like you’ve got to remove the emotion. You may not have even done it intentionally. You could have been so fired up that day having a bad day. Nobody likes to get a BBB complaint, nobody’s perfect. And we’ve all messed something up.
But you have to stop, you have to remove the emotion from it and just put in factual data. But again, that’s another way of one contractor doing that can mess that up for everybody else because now that homeowner is just now delaying making a decision for anybody to get that business.
Katy Martin:
Yeah. And check this out. You don’t hear us talking about the obvious stuff. Like we’re not bringing it up… like, the ultra obvious stuff.
Like, don’t take checks from people and not do the work. Right? I mean that’s common sense. We’re not talking about the guys that show up in the, you know, the mug shots that are doing criminal shit like we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the little things that you guys might be doing that could be wrecking your positioning.
And again, I have to tell you guys we’re bringing you this content, we’re talking to you about these things and it’s not because we’re just trying to lecture. We’re not doing this from a place of ill will or poor integrity. I’m telling you these things because I’ve done everything, everything that I just brought up that I literally just talked about in this podcast.
For the most part, I’ve actually done it. I’ve actually done it. Like somebody said something to me that I didn’t like that I saw on social media and I took to bashing that person and what ends up happening is…this kind of stuff has happened when I was younger. Somebody sends me a message or whatever the case, many email or whatever, and they’re like, let me show you what this actually did.
Like we understand what you were trying to do by defending your position or by calling this person out or whatever the case may be, but let me actually show you the damage that it, that it did. And then I became aware of it and I’m like, oh, okay. So going forward, I can’t handle it this way. And that’s why we’re bringing it to your attention for that awareness part of it.
Like, if you see this and this is how you behave and this is how you respond, you have a choice as to how you show up, right? You have a choice as to how you correct it. So that when it, when it all comes down to it again, or when something like this pops up again, you don’t show up the same. Right? I think even as consumers, if somebody has a pattern of showing up a certain way and they constantly… you do at once, okay, that might’ve been mistake.
You do it the second time. That’s who you are. Third time, that’s who you are for time. That’s who you are. But fifth time if you show up different, you might start to see somebody changed six times. They show up different, okay, now they’re starting to change. I’m no longer going to judge this person for who they were in the past.
Jon Paramore:
They’re actually trying to do something different. Right? And it’s the same thing like for those of you guys that, like we’ve talked about the contractor that sends guys out in the unmarked vehicles… what do I do about that? Well, like we said, put a decal on it, put a set of magnets on it, do something that marks that car so they know what’s going on. You know, the stuff going on inside the inner office, the conversations that we were talking about earlier, the guys posting on social media, post your wins.
There’s nothing wrong with posting your wins, but give the credit to where it’s due. Like I rarely see guys posting things like an after picture of a house where they’re not trying to get business, but instead they’re just like, “hey, thanks to my crew for how hard you guys worked to do right by this homeowner.”
And there’s a pitch. How many times since we’ve been on social media since we started Smash, have you seen a picture where a contractor puts their crew in front of the house and gives all the credit to the actual people who fucking deserve the credit? I never, I don’t, I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen it.
Like, put the people who actually did the work, put those guys in front of the house because the reality is, you know, what you did… you sent a sales rep out who sold the job and you had internal office people who helped get the job to that state. But the dudes that actually did the manual labor, that were sweating their balls off outside?
Where’s the credit that they get it? It doesn’t exist. So at the end of the day, here’s the deal… like the whole purpose of this podcast is so that you guys just begin to consider the things that you might be doing… like look around your social media, look around in your office, look around and how your guys behave with homeowners and each other and the marketplace, and out and about, you know, all that good stuff.
We just want you guys to really think about and consider how you might unintentionally be hosing yourself. And then, you know, if you can’t see it, ask other people in the office to take a look at it and really start to consider some things that you can do to just unfuck yourself, to make your life easier, that resistance path less right.
So here’s the deal we always tell you guys: thanks so much for joining us on these podcasts. Like, we know a 30 minutes of your day is incredibly valuable and we hope you guys get some value out of this. We want you guys to get ahold of us and follow us. You guys can find us on facebook. You can find us on instagram.
You can find us on our new Rhinobranded.com.
If you guys need anything whatsoever, feel free to email us at [email protected]. Let us know what you’re thinking. Send us some topics that you want us to cover that you’re struggling with and we’ll certainly do that for you. But for today, that’s pretty much it from all of us at The Liberated Contractor Podcast. Thanks again for joining us. Goodbye.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode of The Liberated Contractor Podcast. Please remember to subscribe and leave a review. Want us to cover a topic on air and maybe need some help? Send us an email at [email protected], and if we use your topic and question on air, we’ll shoot you some gear. This has been The Liberated Contractor Podcast.
