Bonus Episode - "Solution Based Sales" with The Restoration Rundown

0:07 Welcome back to the Head, Heart & Boots podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brennan. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. Man, I love this industry. What is up, everybody? Welcome to the Restoration Rundown Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to you, the restoration and cleaning business owner. My name is Ben, I am your host, and I'm the CEO of Ironclad Restoration Marketing, where I help restoration and cleaning business owners get more sales just by getting their internet marketing right. Speaking of sales, we talk a lot about Digital marketing, right? How are we going to drive the most leads to your business through all the different digital channels?

0:48 And we talk about this quite extensively, but there's another part of this that a lot of people miss. And that's just the boots on the ground, regular old sales, pushing your business out there, growing your brand and building relationships with people. Today's guests, now we have two guests. We've had them on before. Great guys. I love talking to them. They have a business out in the Pacific Northwest called Floodlight Group Consulting. They help restoration business owners with everything related to their business, but specifically these guys are leadership gurus. We talked last time we had them on the podcast a lot about their background and leadership and how important it is to have the proper leadership. in place in your business. But today we're going to talk a little bit about sales and then we're going to dive into some more leadership things that they've been working on and get to know them a little bit better.

1:33 So I want you guys to help me welcome Chris and Brandon from the Floodlight Group. What's up guys? Hey buddy. Hey, how's it going? It's going good. It's going good. You know, it's great. I was texting Brandon like, I love your little video intro, but it gave me butterflies. I felt like I was standing on the side in an auditorium. I was getting ready to go up on stage. I started to feel the butterflies hit. I'm like, oh, man, we're going on TV or something here. This is cool. You are on TV. You're literally going to be in front of tens of people, you guys. I don't know how you're not shaking your whole entire computer monitor right now with the theater like I am. Yeah. But yeah, no, thank you.

2:14 I appreciate that. I've got a lot of good people out there doing podcasts like you guys, your Head Hearts and Boots podcast that I'm sure everybody's heard of by this point. So you guys are putting a lot of great things out there, and that's why we want to bring you on. We want to try to siphon off some of the people that pay attention to you and let our audience get to know you guys a little bit better. You guys are really cool. We had you on. It's been a few months. um nowadays these these years are like months and like days and minutes and just time is flying by as i'm sure you guys know um so what's new uh why don't you know what before we get into everything that we wanted to talk about once you guys both introduce yourselves give me a little bit about your background we'll just touch on the uh the cliff notes of it um just in case so we can uh make sure everybody is familiar with you guys sure yeah go ahead brandon Okay.

3:01 All right. Well, I mean, just briefly, my kind of background leading up to getting exposed to our industry was all military and construction. So I spent about eight years in the infantry, in the army. And then, I mean, that's where kind of the backbone of my leadership development really started. And it's where I, it was practicing ground for me as a young man. That's really where I got exposed to being responsible for people in real live environments and very dangerous environments at times. Did work with different types of construction industries and then finally got exposed to our industry in 2010 and I haven't looked back. It's just been a real powerful industry to be a part of.

3:43 I've loved the journey. I've grown up on the operation side, so I'm really keyed in on operational systems process, leadership development. That's been the track that essentially I've had as we've grown in the industry. Cliff Notes, I guess, speed version. Yeah, that was good. And for anybody that's not watching live on TV, and this is going to be on pay-per-view pretty soon. But that's Brandon Reese, and he is one of the founders of Floodlight Group and one of the hosts of the Head Heart and Boots podcast. And next up, we've got Mr. Chris Nordyke, also from the same two places. Yeah, Brandon Reese, a.k.a. the mustache. Oh, the stache. I am Chris Nordyke, a.k.a.

4:24 the beard. Okay. Yeah, no, it's funny because we, you know, our creative director who came up with our logo for the podcast, right, it's got the kind of caricature of the beard and mustache heads. And I used to be one of those guys that every six or 12 months, I'd shave everything off, I'd kind of change it up. And it's like, well... Now it's on the left. I do the same thing, man. I do the same exact thing. I'll have a rowdy, rowdy beard, and it'll go into a mustache for a little while, and then it's gone, and then the beard's back. I'm never consistent with my... Look, I'm a dude, you can get like the whole Nordic Viking feel. I feel like you guys pull that together, man.

5:07 You know something? I haven't cut my hair. You can a witch in look at that. Three and a half years. Oh, dude. A couple months ago, I had, I had, I've never had hair. I've had shaved head my whole life. So everybody looking, I got a surprise for everybody that's been watching this. That thinks I'm just straight lace, you know, but I got long hair. I'm a, I'm a wild, wild guy. You know what I mean? I caught some glimpses of that in some of your content. I was like, that guy's got a main. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. Yeah. Chris Nordyke. So I, I'm the sales kind of guy of floodlight. There's a lot of other things I'm passionate about, but, but I kind of anchor the sales side of the business for us.

5:47 And my very first, sales experience. I didn't grow up like as an entrepreneur, you know, those classic lemonade stand. I did have a lawn mowing business that, but it wasn't like, but I never had a guide around me. My dad was a school teacher. Mom was a nurse, had to really create upbringing, but I didn't have like a entrepreneur figure in my life. So I was just mowing lawns to make cash, you know, but my first sales gig was Cutco Cutlery. The Cutco Knives gig. In fact, some people listening may have done that in college. I did that thing and I did pretty well with it. I ended up becoming a branch manager with them when I was 19. I moved to Los Angeles.

6:28 I opened up a sales office there, recruited sales reps, trained them how to cut rope and cut a penny with the super shears. Anyway, that kicked off my sales career and it turned me on to, holy cow, you can get paid to talk. Like, this is crazy, you know. And, of course, one thing led to another, and I've owned small businesses. And then prior to coming into the restoration industry, I was in the insurance biz. So I was a state farm agent, owned my own agency for several years. I had a team of people working for me, and I loved the insurance business. But what I didn't love was that I was held at arm's length when it came to claims, you You know what I mean?

7:10 Like agents are not supposed to meddle in claims. And I always just, I was chomping at the bit to deliver on the promise. You know, I felt really passionate about when my clients would have a homeowner's loss or they had an injury car accident or something. I wanted to be there for them and be that hero guy. I think ultimately, I'm sure there's ego all inside there. And so then I came over to the restoration industry. You know, I was behind Brandon a few years, but that was, that's what I brought into the industry is I... I really, I really find it satisfying the whole customer experience chain, right? From the sales conversations, that role of advising clients.

7:52 I love that advisor seat, you know? Yeah. And then curating this customer experience on the back end. So I'm making all these promises as a sales guy. When I got into the restoration biz, I was able to have a role in what kind of experience are we creating for these clients on the back end during these claims scenarios, you know? So I just took to it like a duck in water. And Brandon and I, we took to each other. I think we've got some complimentary personalities. Oh, yeah. And henceforth, here's floodlight. Yeah, that's awesome, man. It's really cool to hear that background, the Cutco stuff. So I had something similar. Remember those old magazines you used to be able to go around and sell stuff and you'd collect points? Yeah, dude. Hotchkis.

8:32 I did that a long time. Actually, I got my first NFL jersey from one of those magazines. It was a Jerry Rice jersey. San Francisco 49ers Jersey, and I worked my tail off in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I was way too young to be knocking on random people's doors. I don't think that would fly. I think my parents would have probably got locked up and I would have been taken away for eight or nine knocking on doors and selling things, but I did it. And I think that was my first step into entrepreneurship. And yeah. Which is, again, why I wanted to bring you guys on today, because a big part of it is, you know, sales. And Chris, your background in sales, Brandon, you know, all your background with the military and your operations, it all ties right in together really well, which is why you guys fit so perfectly together, which is why I want to have you guys on so much.

9:13 And a lot of it is that mentality. But... A lot of things that I notice, and I'm sure you guys see the same thing on your end when we're dealing with restoration contractors or cleaning companies or any company, even with our old generalist agency where we did marketing for anybody, there's a lot of mistakes that are made from the sales side right off the bat. From a branding perspective, people miss the buck on their logo. They kind of stick their head in the sand and just kind of check some boxes. But on a sales-based side, there's a lot of missteps that are taken. And... uh, one of the biggest things that had me reach out to you guys to have you come on as a CNR magazine sent me a link to an article you wrote about a year ago, Chris, uh, called solution solutions based selling.

9:54 Um, and I thought it was awesome because you did talk about your, your cut co experience and a little experience in the industry. Um, Um, but the thing that stuck out to me the most is something I see a huge, uh, we see it the same. I I'm guilty of it. I've had entrepreneur wise, man, I've cut lawns. I used to pick fruit and set it up on the side of the road. My dad'd be hiding in the woods, making sure nobody kidnapped me. I mean, I was always trying something. Yeah. which led me down. So entrepreneurs are wired a little bit differently. And one of the things that we struggle with is the sales part, right? We feel so passionately about our business and our service and what we bring to the table and that we have this hubris about us that we feel like we are the best thing since sliced bread, especially in this industry.

10:37 And a lot of mistakes I made thinking back, you know, on it was taking that approach. The not a solutions base, but creating problems and, and, you know, over talking and overstepping and, and trying to just what you mentioned in the article is just, you know, that bag of swag and just trying to make them remember me, you know? So I wanted you to talk a little bit about the article because you are up for an award with CNR. If anybody's familiar with CNR, the golden quill award. And funny thing is Chris actually writes all his articles with a golden quill and somehow it's. That's right. Wait, hold on. Let me find the golden quill here. Yeah, yeah. Don't show it to anybody yet. That's going to be a secret episode. We'll sign up for our email list and we'll send you a picture of the golden quill.

11:18 But guys, can you – I know I want both your inputs on this because you guys both kind of tag team these companies and you're dealing with this. But I want you to talk about this article a little bit. Give me a little bit more of the background on how that came about. And then let's talk about some problems that you see that this solution-based sales process is just the best way to handle things to help mitigate some missteps that we all have taken as entrepreneurs. Well, yeah, definitely. And I really wanna pull Brandon in this conversation too. What's interesting with the work we do now over the last two years is I've been able to watch I've watched Brandon, who's got this deep operational background, become a very adept salesperson.

12:03 You know, like it's been fun. I mean, we hang out, we spend an inordinate amount of time together, as you might imagine, a borderline more than our own spouses lately. And... And so Brandon's like, he's, he's become a lot more of a sales guy and really has a keen understanding of it. And likewise, I think I've started to through osmosis, really, really develop a deeper understanding of the operational management side of the business as well. But I think, you know, I think what we, we've experienced, it's almost, it's the elephant in the room. Like, look, we're not seeing anything different than what I think the entire industry is seen in restoration.

12:43 We have... a very weird product. It's weird. And of course there's other industry verticals, niches that are probably very similar to us. But it's, it's weird. Um, It's weird how our business moves and it's weird how we have to sell to it because we don't have a defined there's there. There's really no defined sales process. Now, there's little niches of our business, right, that are more of a prescriptive kind of sales process where we have a presentation. Somebody has a problem. We have a presentation. We do a proposal. We close on it like mold, for example. Right. It can be one of those direct sales. But the Mitt Resto component of our business, it's fuzzy. We don't know if we won the sale until we get the call.

13:27 And so the industry has struggled with how to deal with that. And the answer that we've had historically is top of mind awareness. I don't know if you remember this because you're a marketing nerd, but back in the day... The very first wave of digital marketing was all Toma. It was just like, how can I be present everywhere? It's just top of mind awareness. The last person they saw in this product category or service category, and it's just like everywhere. And then we have this proliferation of banner ads You know, so when I'm shopping for that flannel shirt for the fall, I'm seeing this ad for disaster restoration, you know, and all of us who had businesses thought this is so cool. I can put my brand in front of people anywhere I want.

14:09 And I think it fed our egos kind of like billboards. And so we applied that to our industry with the Candy and Smiles program, of course, long before digital marketing. I mean, this is 40 years ago. We started with this whole Candy and Smiles program and it worked at the time. It worked for a while because people weren't so gosh dang distracted. But now, right over the last 10 years, it's like people are just bombarded with these same pitches and messages constantly. And of course, what I know, because I was an insurance agent, I owned an agency. I had these same restoration reps for five and a half years coming into my business now.

14:51 Now, again, using agent speak, interrupting my employees. Yes. And more candidly, like my payroll spend. Yeah, right. People are servicing my clients and they're writing new apps, new business. Keep the old business like as an owner. I'm totally tuned into that. I did not see the value add of these restoration companies popping in and and doing that whole thing. And I think my employees liked it. And I think the model worked because my employees loved a little break. They loved a little interruption in the midst of writing apps and doing calls and all that kind of stuff. And so the model just kind of worked. But of course, that has changed a lot.

15:33 And COVID accelerated that change in many, many ways. And so... We saw this as we were building a restoration company. We're like, okay, we not only saw it, we felt it like, hey, if we try to put ourselves in the agent's shoes, we wouldn't like this model either. Right. So it started there. Then I started having, because I had five sales reps on our team that were working our markets and stuff. And one of my roles was I would meet with our biggest agencies. I'd meet with the owners periodically, quarterly, a couple of times a year. And I remember this one meeting. with this agency owner, multiple sites, big agency, probably 50 employees in our market, three different offices.

16:20 And I met him for lunch. And I said, Hey, how things going? How's the business going? What's your impression of our company? You know, what have you heard from your employees? What are you hearing potentially from your clients? I just want to check in and make sure You know, we're always trying to get better, blah, blah, blah. Kind of gave that whole intro and he just, he stopped and he looked at me for a second. He said, well, can I be honest with you? I said, well, that was kind of the goal. And he said, he said, look, I'm really, pardon the language. I'm really goddamn tired of these restoration reps coming in and distracting my employees. He said, in fact, in fact, he was hot.

17:01 He said, in fact, I had one of these reps come into my office a week ago, take one of my frontline, my producer, licensed employees that writes apps, sells business, take one of my producers out to lunch off site and brought them back 15 minutes late. I give them an hour lunch. Sure. Give them a paid hour lunch. And they came back an hour and 15 later. I watched this whole thing happen. I said, wow. He said, that doesn't make me happy as a business owner. Do you have any idea how much payroll I have rolling per hour in that one office? I said, I can only imagine, sir.

17:42 Thank you. Thank you for the stir. Hey, I'm kidding. Now, what I didn't realize until later, that restoration rep he talked about took his employee out for lunch. It was one of mine. Wow. One of my sales reps. And it was a best intention, right? We were still working on a model of let's build. And in fact, if I was honest, that was a representation of us trying to be more. relational and more partner oriented, taking them out to lunch. And presumably, right, if that sales rep was kind of following our script at the time, they were asking some curious questions about, hey, how are things going at the agency?

18:24 What are you hearing from people on? They were doing a discovery conversation, likely. And yet we missed the forest through the trees, which is this whole interruption thing, interrupting our clients' businesses. We just weren't tuned into it fully. And so from that point on, I came back to the leadership team. I think Brandon and I had a subsequent conversation and we were like, we got to shift gears. Like, we certainly don't want agents and owners thinking about us in this way. This is a problem. And I would challenge the people watching this. to feel that out. You're probably not gonna hear that feedback from office managers and front desk, like front office staff and producers because they like the breakup in the day.

19:08 But talk to a few of your large agency owners, see what their perspective, and some are probably cool with it, no doubt. Maybe I got a real abrasive, you know, dude, that's okay. But I think it was a big learning experience for me because I've owned businesses. When he said, look, do you know how much payroll I'm burning? I thought, actually, I kind of do because I had five. And for me, at my scale, when I had a state farm agency, it was a lot, you know, and I felt that same pain when I'd have rando salespeople walking through my door every 22 minutes, you know? Yeah. So that's that's where that realization began. And then we just started to unpack for ourselves.

19:51 How do we do this differently? We still have to have referral partners. I mean, at the time, I want to say those that our agent referral partners were generating close to three million dollars of business for us. So what do you do? And it was a little bit scary because when we started to pull back on that that route thing, that whole drop in cycle. We had a lot of fear. How's this going to be? You know, what's going to happen? Are we going to lose top of mind awareness? And now the last person in the person that brought in the best chocolate is going to win. Or can we continue to win in a different way? And we ultimately went a different way and probably more of a hybrid model where we really change the conversations we're having.

20:33 We prioritize scheduling our visits. Right. So we put some power back in the agency's hands of us just forcing our way in, which is ultimately what we do, what our industry does generally. And then we started to think about it in terms of what does this mean for how we sell commercial businesses? Right. what does this mean for even just how we sell ourselves and how we're branding and how we're talking about ourselves and networking events? And you know what I mean? Like, yeah. And it just started to cause us to rethink everything, you know, about the business, because when you start changing that, it starts to impact the conversations that your technicians are having with customers when they roll up on site, you know, and, you know, So we can, we can get more into like the actual model, but that, that was kind of the landscape for us where we started to change our thinking.

21:28 Yeah, that makes sense. And Brandon, I want to hear your thoughts on, on this kind of stuff from an operation standpoint, because, you know, the first thing that I thought about was, well, yeah, that applies to agencies, right? They're, they're in a different realm and having a construction business and you guys can relate, you guys, contractors yourselves. Um, yeah. The lunch is like the handshake, take a guy out to lunch, you're going to bro down a little bit, and you keep that top of mind mentality, but you also can get on the same level. So I find it kind of interesting that you guys have come up with a framework because I know there's no one – one magic pill that, that really handles all of this. So the hybrid, you know, model is probably going to be the best bet. So from an operations standpoint, Brandon, how did you guys, you know, really attack this?

22:12 Um, and I know we're going off a little bit from the article, but I really like what we're going here because I think it's going to tie right back in nicely. But Brandon, how do you guys handle that from an operations standpoint within when you kind of had that realization, like, all right, we're pissing people off now. Um, $3 million in work is a lot. You cannot risk that. Top of mind mentality is always going to be prevalent. You know, that's that's what social media is for now. You know, it's it's not a direct response. You know what we're doing or what you guys are doing, actually, you're selling, you know, you're trying to sell a beach clothing in the wintertime in a place that snows. Right. In the summertime, it's probably a lot easier, but you need to maintain that. you know, your fingers on the pulse at that point. So talk to me a little bit about how operations inside of the resto business, how that kind of worked out when you guys had that realization.

22:57 I think the first place is, and part of this was an accident because Chris and I's professional relationship was pretty integrated. So we didn't have as distinct of silos between operations and sales, but that was purely on the back of our friendship, our working relationship and, Over time, we saw the value of it and began to invest in that and actually turn that into process and became intentional. But I think one of the things that Chris talks about when we're teaching solution selling, like solution-based selling is... We have to come up with actual concrete solutions then that our team does differently from everybody else. We can't just talk about sayings on the walls or core values.

23:41 It's got to be something that's concrete, measurable. There's some kind of system or process in place that holds the team accountable to actually doing that functionally. thing. And so I think operationally, there was two things that happened. One is it made us really think about what we're doing and how we do it. And can we actually deliver concrete solutions that are measurable? And then I think the other thing it caused us to learn over time was how much more momentum and power a team can get when the sales and operational staff are actually working together. Yeah. And it sounds funny for some people maybe when we say that, but I cannot tell you how many times a week we have conversations with people and they almost proudly say, oh, we sales doesn't get engaged in that.

24:30 They don't touch operations or like they're saying with pride, like, yeah, we keep them out of that. Yeah, that's crazy. Well, it's crazy, right? It's crazy for residential work. It's crazy for multifamily. It's 10x crazy when we're talking about commercial relationships. So without hogging a bunch of airtime, I think those were the two biggest things that we learned together. Experimenting was we have to break down these silos between our operational and sales teams because they become a powerhouse when they back each other up. And then in conjunction with that, we had to stop talking about what we do and we had to start verifying and validating what and how we do it.

25:11 So that when somebody said, hey, here's a concrete solution that we provide to overcome that challenge or that pain point, we had to make sure it wasn't just lip service. Sure. I think those are the two biggest areas that we ended up kind of hyper focusing on during that transition. Yeah. Let me apply some color to that picture because that was perfect, Brandon. That was what emerged. And so here's how did that change our conversations with agents? How did that change? Because most everybody listening to this is probably going to have, if they're more than just a few people, they probably have a marketing rep. or they have a sales rep out there, you know, that's touching agents, plumbers, et cetera.

25:53 So how did that conversation change? If we're not doing candy and smiles anymore, how does this conversation outside with agents change and what are the implications for operations and how, what did that look like? So here's kind of how our agent conversation shifted the next time we went into their office or when we went into an agent office for the first time, you know, subsequent to us kind of making the shift. We instead started to engage them about the role that we play in retaining their clients. And what I mean by that is, We've recognized, and I coming from the insurance industry, I knew this is fact.

26:34 And I knew it is fact because I've, I've heard the data. I've seen the data directly from state farm. State farm used to have an annual claims review where it was an agent call where agents would call in. They'd hear all the stats in terms of loss ratios and how it's impacting underwriting and different high, you know, high propensity loss areas from the prior year and how storms affected things and average homeowner loss. The, the, um, They would go through like what was the most common cause of loss and all that kind of stuff. And we learned some things. I learned some things from that is that the outcome of claims... dramatically affects an agent in a company's book of business.

27:16 If a claim goes well, right? A customer reports above a certain satisfaction level for their claim, they are a customer for life. Within State Farm, average tenure of a household account within State Farm, people having all their policies with us, was something like 10.1 years. And at the time, I don't know what it is now, it was number one in the industry. We had the longest retention of anybody and agents were really proud of that. But what's interesting is, is once somebody has a major homeowner's claim beyond a certain amount, I can't remember if it was 12,000 bucks or more, but that if their satisfaction reaches above a certain threshold on that claim, their longevity goes almost double to 21 years.

28:00 Oh, wow. Average tenure. which is really interesting data. And of course, State Farm has more data than anybody else in the industry, at least did at the time. And so it was powerful and we knew that, and I took that to heart. And there were things when we heard those reports, my team and I did to try to enhance claim experience, but of course there's very little we could do at arm's length. But fast forward to restoration industry, this is the conversation I'm having with an agent. Look, Mrs. Producer, Mr. Agent, owner, what we've learned over the years, and we know this as restoration companies, if we take enough time to just think about it, reflect about the business we have and the role we have in these claims, the effect we can have on the outcome of the claim.

28:44 We know this to be true. Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Agent, listen, what we've learned over the years as a company is that when one of our agent customers has a claim for one of their policyholders, one of two things is going to happen at the end of that claim. If it goes really well, it almost doesn't matter whose fault it was. You know, if you had them all set up with the right coverage or the adjuster was having a good day or we as the restoration company just hit the ball out of the park. It doesn't matter who is at fault for that great experience. You've got a customer for life. It's very unlikely they're ever going to shop their policies once you've delivered on the promise. Right. Is the feeling in the affirmation they get after a good claim.

29:26 I said, but what we've also learned is the exact opposite is true. If we get to the end of a claim with one of your policyholders, regardless of whose fault it was, from the policyholders perspective, it's all part of that Allstate or State Farm or Barker Erlings Insurance independent agency. It's all under the cloud of that because that's who they've been. That's who they think is their agent and that you're you're the solution to all of it. And so if it goes wrong. You very likely will have a shopper at your next deal with them. And then, and then I add the final sentence and this was, I'm role playing for you. This was our sales reps conversation.

30:07 This was the narrative that we started from. This was the route moving forward. And Mr. Agent, we as a company take that very seriously. So let's talk about how we can partner on these claims. right? To create the best outcome. And a big part of that's going to be communication. Yeah. Right. What level of communication are you and your team interested in from us? What kind of frequency of updates would you like to be included and copied on our communicate with the client? You know, what, what is your desire? Because what we're trying to do is create a great claim outcome. Because if we do that, we've helped your business succeed. We've closed your back door, right? And then, Hopefully you guys are motivated to direct more people our way because you're confident in the kind of experience that we're going to give.

30:56 I want to piggyback on that a little bit because I think that's a perfect example, Ben, of how this translated into the bigger picture sales focus that our teams have been building. And that is it's about the individual on the other side there. Like if you think about what Chris was focused in on there, it was learning about that specific focus. person's business, what's important to their business, what affects their business, what's the value that our team's bringing that's specifically relevant to them versus, again, the top of mind, here's all the swag, here's all the shit, excuse me, that we're throwing at you.

31:38 But it wasn't about our audience, which seems like when we say it out loud, it almost sounds silly. But then that translated into the way that we approach commercial clients, multifamily clients. Like Chris often will beat this drum of in order for us to be successful in selling, we have to be a student of the target markets we're going after. Like it's just mission critical that you like in Chris and I have the commercial master course that we put out. There is a massive chunk of that that literally is focused specifically on developing a better understanding of those target markets. And it's like even when we do live events, there is part of me that gets a little imposter syndrome every time of are people going to really care about this piece?

32:24 But then if we're honest and stay true to why it's so critically important, it's the foundation. You can't sell to somebody if you don't know what their life looks like. Right. Right. So that example with agents translates into the commercial environment where it's just, OK, what do we need to learn so that we can shift our service delivery to marry up with what their needs are? Because in the commercial environment, like we, you know, we bank on IICRC certifications and S500 standards and all the things, which is awesome. It's what protects us and helps us, you know, be risk adverse and deliver a good service. But often our clients needs actually are in conflict with some of those black and white IICRC standards.

33:10 And so we have to bridge that gap. We need to learn how to translate our industry best knowledge and practice and marry that to the clients real experience needs. And so that's really to me, that's that's what we took from those shifts in conversation. It's it's like it's all about the client, stupid. Like, what do they need? You know what I mean? Yeah. And, and, you know, once, so once we got there, it's kind of like we're walking down a road, we're walking down the yellow brick road here, Ben. So that's exactly right. It absolutely translated into our direct commercial approach. But the next the next layer we had to figure out is, okay, so What we're getting on the side of the customer, we're trying to understand them.

33:54 It's more about them. That's where the humility started to enter into our model. It's like, okay, it isn't about us. It's not about us, how big our fleet is, whether we got a cool app to track your claim with us, all that stuff. That stuff's cool. That's not to dismiss that stuff. It's just that that's not what matters until it does. And for most of them, until they actually have a live claim, they don't care about any of the window dressing, you know? So it's all about them. So how did we start to change the conversations into this solutions-based approach? Here's how that shift happened in the conversation. Then, so that's kind of the genesis conversation is, hey, what do we know about claims? And what do we know about the impact on your agency, right?

34:37 And then subsequent conversations started to sound like this. Hey, listen, Mrs. Agent, Mr. Producer, da da da. You don't need to know any more about restoration from me. I mean, we can certainly do a we can certainly do a CE, you know, luncheon for you. That's a value added service we do. But they said, you probably don't need me telling you more about restoration in our business. What is your experience with restoration? What have you heard from your policyholders following claims that? What complaints do you get? And what do you hear that people like when they're dealing with these restoration companies on their claims?

35:17 See, when I, and what I noticed as I started experimenting with these conversations, cause I kind of went out and I started dabbling in this myself. And then of course we started teaching it to our team and they just took to it like a duck in water cause it feels so natural. It's so much more organic. You don't feel like a sales person. You feel like a partner, it's partner language. And so as I started to experiment with this, people started opening up, right? Because I wasn't trying to just find an angle to pitch to. I was trying to find out what their angle is, you know? Like what is their perspective on the restoration industry? And of course, then things started to come out, you know? Like they would tell about a company they really liked and I would ask them, I'd be curious.

36:02 I'd say, well, what was it about their people or their process specifically that keeps you guys referring them? And they would say things. And sometimes what we'd find out is they just really loved the project manager that was assigned to their agency or to their clients. And there's something to be learned there, right? Just how valuable that relational connection is with the PM. Okay, there's a learning item. But then often, too, what we find is it comes back to communication. But then we quickly learned, everybody talks about communication, by the way. I mean, right in service industry, like communication is our number one struggle, but there's aspects of communication. And what we found is it's important for us to know what they mean when they say the communication was terrible.

36:44 Sure. Because sometimes the communication and listen, I, we probably all worked with contractors and had a home remodel or stuff like that. And so We know all the different ways that communication can break down. There's quality of communication. There's professionalism. There's clarity. There's all that kind of stuff. But then there's communication frequency. Yes. And we started to identify communication frequency as the real felt pain point. And it started to come out in conversations with these agents about our policyholders never knew what the hell was going on. You know, they would call us like they said they were going to be here. They're not here, you know, and or we haven't heard from them in three or four days.

37:24 And then, of course, the agent has to get engaged and call out and like what's going on because they don't want their claim going sideways. That makes them look bad. All the things. And so that really started to evolve the entire conversation we're having with all agents and frankly, plumbers. and HVAC and all these other referral partner sources, we start to ask them, what is your experience of our industry? Good and bad. What is it about people and process that makes it better or worse for you as a referral partner? And then we started to, these things started to come up. And so one thing that Brandon came up with and his team, I'm sure it was a joint effort, but with this communication frequency issue that we had to implement on our, it started on our recon side, is 24 hour job updates.

38:15 it's not sexy. This isn't fancy. It's frankly, there's people listening. They're like, Oh, we already do that. Awesome. It's a really good thing to do. But for us, it wasn't necessarily a battle rhythm. It was something that we were doing selectively to service our client. We had those maybe more demanding or higher touch clients, you know, that just needed that our multifamily clients. You know, for example, we did that on some projects based on the property manager, but we hadn't really built it into our process. And so it's just as simple as having a Google email template and creating a process where every single day, our PMs, they bookended their day by sending out this quick update to every single one of their active projects.

38:56 And what we noticed almost immediately, of course, it took some time to get full adoption. But what we noticed almost immediately is that that frequency of communication pain went away. What we also found out, too, is that everybody who does recon on this listening, they'll know what we're talking about. it almost did away or it dramatically reduced the number of projects we'd have where you'd get to the punch list. And all of a sudden, like all this shit comes out. Yeah. Like customers pissed, like it's a little thing. And then it turns into, well, you guys didn't do this either five weeks ago. And we asked for this and nobody ever wrote it down apparently. So where's our, you know, where's our hot, cold hose bib on the back, backside of the garage for our dog that didn't get installed.

39:39 What the hell's going in? And it was pissed in what we learned. Yeah. is that we learn this idea of micro disappointments, right? There's these little irritations, disappointments the customer feels that they feel embarrassed to bring up in the moment. It's like, well, that's not a big deal. But then if we don't have this cadence of communication, calming that part down, then it rears its head at the end We thought we had a four or five star client just based on the interactions. And then all of a sudden we're like, shit, I don't even know if we're going to get a review from this person. And we're putting a ton of energy into saving that deal. And so that's just one example of having a specific system that we put in place that speaks directly to that felt pain point.

40:27 of the agent. So we had that experience. And then like Brandon was talking about, we started to apply that to everything in our business. We started to pull back and say, okay, what are we saying about ourselves out there? And do we have the systems and maybe the roles, the people on our team to actually fulfill that? And in some cases, it was a no. You know, like that 24-hour job update report, we looked at our mitigation process outline, we looked at our recon checklist thing. We're like, no, that step is missing. We need that component. And... That just became kind of part of our culture is as a leadership team, we started to become more sensitive to that stuff.

41:07 And then we started to have more of this interplay. Sales, the sales team would hear these things out in the field. This became a regular conversation. What are you guys hearing out there? What are agents saying? What are property managers saying about their experience? What do they want? What are the specific pain points? They're feeding that back to our leadership team. And then our leadership team is saying, OK, what can we do? What can we tweak in our process? Is there a hire that we need to make in order to solve for that? And we had a series of things that flowed from those curious questions that we ultimately had to implement in our process in the ops side to make sure that our technicians, our PMs, our department leads were delivering on questions. the same promise that our salespeople were selling out in the field.

41:50 And it's ongoing iterations. Yeah. You see this, like it can also almost be a little intimidating to be open to hearing people's input on what you really need to do with your business. Right. We all get that. I mean, I wrestle with that right now with, with floodlight of we want to hear. And there's some anxiety around the fact that once, you know, You can't ignore it anymore either. You got to look in the mirror. Yeah, you got to look in the mirror. So it's just battle patience and be comfortable. You will iterate over time. Yeah. I mean, listen, that's a lot to unpack, but it really isn't, right? So it's not. It's so cool because the whole time you guys were talking about this, all I'm doing is reverting back to something that we talk about in the digital marketing world is you got to understand who your avatar is.

42:37 You got to understand who you are working with. And I'm in that boat, right? I need to understand the restoration industry. I need to understand the cleaning industry to find out what the pain points are when it comes to marketing. And one thing that we shifted is we'll just ask questions and you model your business off of where their pain points are because you guys hit the nail on the head. Part of, you know, upcoming presentations that I do when I'm speaking at trade shows and stuff is a big part of it and has nothing to do with digital marketing. It's understanding who you are selling to. So you hit, you know, you having the information on what the insurance carriers are going to be, pisses them off, what they like, what the plumbers want, their experience with everything. And being able to translate that over to your teams to be able to provide a better service to back up your USP, your unique selling proposition.

43:23 What makes you different? Why should they work with you? You're naturally integrating your business into the top of their mind all the time because not a lot of people ask questions. Right. You know, most people are the candy and smiles model because that's just how contractors are bred. I come from a contracting background, a commercial, and that's kind of what you did. You know, you're a vendor. The vendors are showing up with some hats and saying, hey, guys, let me take you to lunch. And now being an employee on that side, that was awesome. You know, being a foreman on a project, I love going to lunch. I love getting free hats. I've got so many hats. I probably need another house for the hats I have. But as an owner, I don't like going to lunch anymore unless I really – have the time because, you know, we don't have the time anymore.

44:05 We're, we're, I talk about myself like a plate spinner in the circus. I can only do so much. There's a lot of days that, you know, being with what we have going on, we don't have enough time, but, um, it boils down to really, if you're listening to this, no matter who you're going after, if you're going after commercial work, you're going after, you know, if you're a cleaning business and you're looking for a housewife or a house husband to go, you know, do some carpet cleaning, you have to understand who they are. understand their pain points and then understand how to address that. And I can only speak from the terms of marketing wise, um, how to address it. And you usually put it on your website, you know, get your testimonials crafted, you know, and, and learn exactly what you can do to kind of mitigate those pain points for these people and show them how you can fix that for them.

44:46 And you will get work, right? The top of mind mentality is going to stay there when it comes to that. So that's, that's awesome. It's really cool to hear that you guys had that shift. That's big because most people will say, yeah, yeah, I got to do that. And they're, they're still back, you know, they deal with the day to day. They don't really implement. And the other big part of this is it seems like you guys have woven this into your processes and that's, the big part about this and what separates people that are successful from not is you have people that take action and people that don't. Right. The other cool thing I mentioned is I find it fit and I, I guess it's, it makes sense, but people that don't treat their entire company, every employee from office staff to the guys in the field as salespeople, right? From a fundamental perspective, you're all representative of the brand.

45:28 But then from a real perspective, you know, you're all part of sales. Every step in the process of onboarding, offboarding, billing, everything lends to because when a carrier or somebody that you're doing work for, they're not they're not going to be mad at one person. They're mad at your company when you're when you do something that pisses them off. Right. So getting that stuff in order is is probably a little bit important, I would think. Yeah. To make sure that everybody understands that you are a salesperson. You are representing. Like I tell my son, you're representing my family. You're representing our last name when you go to school or you go to Taekwondo. Make sure that you're being a leader and you're sticking up for things. And it really goes the same way for your business. So understanding who you're selling to is great.

46:11 We can't overstate that, right? I mean, it's very important. And you guys had to have that huge shift in business, which is great. Not everybody has the State Farm data, but a lot of this is common sense. I don't have that. I mean, it makes sense. Don't interrupt us. We don't need what you have right now. We get it. Thanks for the hat. Thanks for the pen. you know, big deal. I don't think I've ever looked at a pen and like, oh yeah, I'm going to call this guy up when I'm ready for it. You know, you really just have to understand how these people operate. And I think that, you know, part of what drove me to, you know, getting you guys back on this article, this solutions-based selling, asking the right questions, all boils down to understanding who you're selling to, right? Yeah. 100%. I think that's great. That's part of you guys. Obviously, I have some major training with floodlight with that.

46:52 I mean, that's something I'm sure you guys step in ground zero, and this is what we're going to get in order right now and develop those systems and processes. So real quick, is there anything out there like a quick actionable besides like really getting to know to dive down? Is there any kind of like a quick tip that we can get into that will, um, um, you know, kind of close this out and kind of put a nice bow on this because I think that we could probably have a hundred episodes on this kind of stuff. And I would love to, and everybody out there, if these, if the gentleman will come back on, we are going to dive into this avatar and learning your, your custom avatar a little bit more and maybe some actionable stuff, but you guys have anything else you want to add to the solutions based sales thing before I plug your off. Yeah. Yeah, totally. No, thanks, dude. You are like, you are the friendliest promoter, man.

47:34 Thank you. Yeah. So I want to leave people with this thought, this word picture, because I found it incredibly useful and it just kind of informs the way we sell and this whole solution selling topic. About 12 years ago, a sales mentor of mine, he was a technology entrepreneur, multiple startups, all the things, but he was a sales entrepreneur. And he was given a workshop and I was sitting in on it and he said this one thing. He said, guys and gals, there is there are only ever three things that we sell. There's aspirin pain reliever.

48:15 There's the vitamin bigger, faster, stronger. And there's vaccines, right? If bad stuff happens, it won't be quite as bad if you buy this thing, right? Any of us, whether it's product or service sales, that's what we're selling. And he looked at, he kind of did this long, pregnant, dramatic pause. He looked at everybody and he said, if you ever have the choice, always sell the pain reliever. Always sell the aspirin. And he went on to explain why. And the why that I wanna offer people relative to commercial sales in our industry, because it's such a hot emergent topic. Everybody's trying to figure out how to sell direct to commercial entities, senior living, hotels, schools, all the things.

48:59 The reason why that pain reliever piece is so important is that operational leaders, there's an incredible amount of inertia that we have to overcome for them to change a vendor. We don't think about this enough. Brandon and I in our own little small business here, like we have certain vendors we use and for somebody to take our attention to switch out a vendor that we're not aware of a problem. You know, like, I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but just think of all the vendors you have in place right now. They are working to some degree, unless there's something top of mind that they're failing. But there's an incredible amount of inertia because for me to go from what my day to day job tasking is and my business focus, what grows my business to then swap a vendor out.

49:48 There has to be something to make that worth it. Yeah. And pain is. Pain is that thing. Yes. Business leaders do not change vendors unless there is a significant economic opportunity, which is rare. You have some kind of disruptor vendor who's half the price of everybody else. Okay, whatever. But that doesn't happen very often. It's always the pain. Mm-hmm. It's always the pain. And yet we still tend as an industry to approach our commercial prospects with a promotional sell. We're the biggest, we're the best. Don't you want to be with the biggest and the best? And that chief engineer, that director of facilities is like, hey, I don't know what I got. It's working pretty good.

50:29 Too busy to deal with it. Yeah. It's working. Right. Yeah. You know, it doesn't even make my list. And so to overcome that inertia, it always it nearly always is a pain. It's a pain point. And if we can sell to the pain point, we actually have an opportunity then to win them over as a vendor. If we don't, it's all we're depending on is luck and the general attractiveness of the sales rep with the message. And we don't want to build an industry in a company that way. Right. We don't want to build it on the charisma and appearance of our salespeople. If we can really get dialed in on building it on solving a pain point for those commercial businesses there, there is a never ending supply of opportunity, especially in the verticals we're in, because let's face it, construction, commercial services, restoration, not exactly known for customer experience delivery.

51:19 Right now, if there's any pool builders out there listening to this, we're talking to you specifically because you're all. That's right. No, I mean, that's the mentality. It's a marketing thing. People are motivated by pain and it's psychology. It doesn't matter if it's business or it doesn't matter if it's, you, you broke a bone, if you don't feel it, you don't care. You know? So I love that. And that was in the article to the painkillers adage that you mentioned in there. And that's, that's really cool. And if you're listening out there, you really take this stuff to heart because this is some deep rooted psychological information that just translates across the board to every little thing that you do in your life. And, We're talking about business right now and restoration specifically. And it does. You have to understand who you're selling to and understand what their pain point is and address that pain point.

52:05 We don't need any plans. And Ben, it's fun. Well, it makes your company better too, right? I mean, everything from operations to how you talk to people is going to get better. It is. You're solving your own pain. Yeah. Yeah, dude. It also, I think all of us that are in this industry, at least if we're honest, a little bit of it is we... enjoy the hero role. We like to help people. And it feeds us. There's a lot of satisfaction in that. And this methodology in sales, it just fits perfectly because it's all about the customer and solving their issue. It feels really good. It feels really good.

52:46 So if you want to be the superhero, you have you have to know what you're saving people from. Yeah, that's exactly right. Never just flew in and just emptied out a building full of people for no reason that were, you know, maybe they wanted to be on fire. You got it. Maybe they're OK with that. Like the meme. This is fine. Well, gentlemen, listen, I think. Thank you very much. And back to the article. Listen. Chris, you are up for the Golden Quill Award on CNR. If anybody's not familiar with CNR, come out of the cave. Go check them out, cnrmagazine.com. I'm going to throw up the ticker for the URL for the actual article. I implore you, if you've listened today and you got value out of this, read the article because it really will hammer this stuff home. I can't say enough about what you guys are doing with Floodlight and the Head, Hearts & Boots podcast.

53:28 You guys are really kicking some butt in the industry. Check it out, cnrmagazine.com forward slash solutions hyphen based hyphen selling. Check out Chris and all that. Well, you guys got some new stuff going on at Floodlight. I'm going to let them check it out on their own on the website, floodlightgrp.com. Guys, thank you so much. I can't wait to have you back on and talk about how we can teach people how to get their operations a little bit better. We talk about getting your internet marketing right. Let's work on some operation stuff out there that we know a lot of the... maybe smaller and even the huge guys are dealing with right now. And the name of the game is trying to just systematize everything, have processes that streamline the only finite resource that we deal with, which is our time.

54:09 Thanks for coming on, guys. Make sure you check them out. Floodlight Group. Listen to the Head Hearts and Boots podcast. And we will talk to you guys soon. Thanks again, guys. Thanks, brother. Thanks, Ben. You're so kind. Appreciate it.