This is my journey as a customer of tradies. I’m looking at how it is to be on the receiving end of your service and see if there’s anything I can learn or I can teach you about how to do your business better or even how to do my business better.

I’ve shown you before my s***t skills with tools and how I’m not good at work around the house. I think that’s quite funny and I think the point was that I don’t care that I’m not good at that and I can happily get someone who is good at that to help me.

I’m good at other things and I want you to understand that you don’t need to be good at everything in your business. You can recruit, hire and outsource people to do the things you are s***t at so you can focus on the stuff that you’re good at and that’s going to grow your business. So I hired someone to come and help me do work around the house, put on a screen door, build me a lovely raised flower bed in the garden, put a new door handle on the front door, and few other useful things.

I wanted to think through what happened. The process I went through when Michelle and I decided we’re going to get a handyman was I jumped on the phone and searched ‘property maintenance Brunswick Heads’, which is where I live, and called somebody. He has retired actually, so I was going to call somebody else. And then I remembered I know somebody. I know a ‘Hire A Hubby’ up the coast named Dean, so I called him and he did a great job. He sent one of his staff down which was great and they did a good job. He built my stuff, I’m feeling pretty happy, it all went pretty well. (Well done Dean!) One for doing a good job and for having a staff member, Brent. He does a good job. And one for growing, you’ve got a staff member now. Because the last time I spoke to him, it was just him.

I want to take a couple of things away from this experience

Even though I know a handyman in a franchise called ‘Hire A Hubby’ and I know him personally, I don’t know him that well. I still automatically went to my phone and searched ‘Property Maintenance’ in my tab even though I know somebody. That’s one thing.

I talked about this flow of what people do with a trade business. We know what trade we want, handyman property maintenance. We know what town we live in, and our first instinct is to hit the phone. And I call the marketing that you do to get found when someone goes searching is ‘Find Me Marketing’.

I think a lot of you need to focus all your energy there or even most of your energy if you’re a sparky, plumber or a handyman, particularly.

That’s what is going on in people’s minds. The same for many other trades businesses too, pools and plasters and things like that. A lot of your work is coming from there. Do not neglect being found on the internet.

Recommended Reading: Search Marketing (Generating Enquiries For Your Trades Business) Are You Being Found?

The second lesson I wanted to take from this was that trust triumphs everything. Once I remembered that I know Dean, that was it. He’s getting the job. I knew I liked him. I knew I trusted him. I just called him asking what the price was. He told me and I said, “That’s great, come and do the job.” All done.

So trust wins everything. I’ve talked about trust before. You guys need to be trustworthy and then you need to go and prove to people that your business is trustworthy. And you do this by:

• Word-of-mouth
• Referral marketing
• Educating people
• Website
• The language you use
• The testimonials and the proofs

If you want to do that stuff properly, you’re going to need to spend a bit more time other than on a little short video.

So remember the flow about customers hiring a tradesman:

1. People go and hit their phone or their computer.
2. Trust beats everything else.

And trades don’t like being called handymen, do they? That really upsets tradesmen. He’s a carpenter, he’s not a handyman. That apparently is a bit insulting.

See you later.