Merry Christmas!

It’s Christmas day and I’m here with Jon’s Christmas message.

Now, you’re watching this actually on Christmas Day. Get a grip, go and watch ‘Die Hard’ or something. I recorded this about a week and a half ago, and we schedule it cause I’ve got technology. I like to keep my promise of issuing one of these videos every Tuesday at 10:00am, which is this year’s

Christmas Day, so here we go.

Wins of coaching clients

Now, since it’s Christmas, I thought I’d share some wins my clients have had recently and here’s why.

Business coaching costs money, and a very large part of my job is to help my clients make more money, build profitable businesses that bring them more profits – more money, as well as less stress, more fun, more joy, and more pride in those things.

Money is a very important part of making everything work. But it’s not only about money, it’s also about my clients getting better at their businesses, and this is important.

It’s about you getting better at your business, getting more confident in your business decisions, often, realising that you’re much better at this sh*t than you thought you were. That’s a big thing that people leave my coaching program with – they’re better at this than they realised or that they were afraid.

They know more, you know more. You’ve got more inside you that you can use and I can help you bring that out.

Here’s a couple of stories (true stories) about wins people had that were helped by their being confident in joining or something from within.

Story from Nicole

I’ll take a little bit of credit for this, but not all of it. I’m the coach, I did help certainly, but my clients did the heavy lifting.

Nicole finished a job few weeks ago. It was a big job and it went massively over budget – mostly, because the customer kept changing their mind, kept wanting upgrades, kept wanting more fancy stuff.

It was quite a personal project for the customer. It went significantly over budget – $100,000 or so, and the customer started to make noises about not being happy to pay that extra, about wanting to be closer to a budget, and Nicole was feeling the pressure that it puts on you.

And we talked about it, and she said she had a paper trail of all the variations that the customer wanted to place during this project or the paper trail of a customer making these decisions and accepting these quotes, and basically, was confidently able to prove and demonstrate that the cost overruns were all down to the customer and not the fault in Nicole’s company.

So the customer called, came in ready to cause a bit of a fuss but Nicole stood her ground. She was confident. She pointed out what the rules were.

She pointed out that she had the structure because she’d kept the records and the customer backed down, paid the extra money and went away and not only did that, she did it happily.

She was happy with her new lovely toy, and off she went. Everybody won. Nicole was confident, had the systems behind her, was being structured in how she ran a business, and was able to stand up for herself, “I push away this threat”.

Now, many people would have felt that pressure and given some discount to appease the customer. And particularly, if they didn’t have that proof and ability to be confident because you’ve done the work in the first place, that would have been a lot more difficult to resist and they probably would have given some money away and made less profit on the job than they might have deserved.

So be confident, that’s a lesson there. I’m sure it’s about business coaching. I’m sure it’s about structure but it’s Christmas, so let me move on.

Recommended Reading: Know Your Value As A Trades Business Episode 1: Having A Business Structure

Story from Daniel

Daniel works with some very wealthy people. Wealthy people, particularly when they end their engagements with trades businesses can be quite difficult, can’t they?

They can think they’re better than you and they can treat you like they’re better than you because they’ve got money. I know that’s a thing. And they also can be really keen on getting what they want and getting their way. And that can happen.

Daniel had a couple of unfortunate experience with very large projects that he’d been working on where he’d been being treated quite unfairly like that, like “I’m better than you”. Both of them fell over. Both of them got ditched by these uppity, spoiled customers and he was in a bit of a flat place.

But he did remember that there was another potential job that had gone a bit quiet, and he was able to pick up the phone, prompt the potential customer and coax him into, “Hey, maybe we’ll get back on this wagon or get this project started”, and he signed a very large project just before Christmas and in a few weeks after, these two fell over.

He’s pulled a win out of two losses, and he’s back in the game. His business is going well again, and he’s back. And he did it by having the confidence to call this person up and say, “Hey, I’m going to have capacity to build a project, do you want me to? Shall we have our discussions again?”

It’s confidence and being structured. It was confidence in working within his budget for the job and helping the client meet his budget without discounting, without just reducing his profit but by looking for where savings could be made so we can meet somewhere in the middle.

He did a good confident job using his structure, knowing his numbers, and negotiating with his subcontractors.

Confidence and Structure

You should be doing the same. If you run a trade business and you have to deal with customers, your confidence is very important.

You need to use your structure. You need to have your systems in place in the first place because they help you be more confident when you’re having those discussions.

So for now, Merry Christmas!

If you want me to help, you know what to do of course.