Ep 100 - "Know Thy Customer"

0:07 Welcome back to the Head, Heart, and 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. Good morning. How you doing, man? All right, here we go. Welcome. Wait, are you trying to pretend that I haven't just started the show already? Like we're going, bro. Well, okay. Well, I guess we're going. Joel is going to have to figure out where in that mess was the start. There's no mess. I was introducing the show. I said, hey, how are you doing? That's kind of my role to open the show, right? Apparently now. It's an adopted role. I just want you to know that you have, in a very sneaky way, I feel like taken over. Fortune favors the bold.

0:47 You ask not because you ask not. I'm getting ready to ask my boss for a raise. So I got to demonstrate my value here and show initiative and all the things. I may need to coach them on some cleaner career path. I'll see you now. Okay. Dude, we got kind of a fun, I think a fun topic. This has come up a lot. You think? Yeah. We'll let people judge whether or not it was worth a while or not. You and I, you especially in kind of that sales operation, a lot of dialogue comes from you that's focused on we have to learn our client. We have to understand these target markets that we're going after. And I have just been being face blasted by other bigger influencers really getting centered around this topic and being more bold in telling us that this is a priority.

1:37 And so I want to get into that topic today. Of course, we got to recognize some folks that help keep fuel in the tank. But then after that, I want to dive into this idea of how do we get better at training on the prospect as much as we do the product or the service? Because we do as an industry, we over-index on product knowledge. Yeah. We over-index on it. I mean, especially in the sales side of the business, we overestimate the importance of our salespeople being able to talk about our industry and our scope of work. Yeah, I agree. For sure. Yeah. So yeah, that's a great topic, man. All right. Let's start with thanking our loyal and amazing sponsors. I'm going to talk about Liftify today.

2:17 Liftify.com forward slash floodlight. Liftify has been a really great partner. And for us, what signifies a great partnership for us is certainly when our clients overwhelmingly call us and thank us for the introduction. I was just talking with one of our clients in Houston. And he said, Hey, I got to tell you, man, we've had Liftify running for, I think they've had it for three months. First month, they saw some lift immediately. This last month, I think their third full month, they've doubled their number of inbound reviews, five-star reviews. Doubled. Doubled. And he's like, it's already jumped. This particular company is a ServPro, a big ServPro. And ServPro has ratings for their different territory websites.

2:58 They level three, level four, level five. And one of the factors for their website rating is Google reviews and recency and all of that stuff. Yeah. And... And they have two markets that have leaped up to level five, which is their highest standard, with all of these new inbound reviews. And so he directly attributes the leap in their website rating, which is just an indication of what kind of inbound calls it generates and all that kind of stuff. How much business it generates. Yeah, digital presence. How is this moving the needle? So he was just, he's a super fan. And you and I are routinely hearing back from our clients. We now, we recommend it to every single client we work with, period. Because the feedback has been so universally positive.

3:41 And I think the other thing we love about Liftify is their team is engaged. Like they are absolutely client focused. Yep. 100%. You know, when occasionally there is any kind of confusion or an issue with onboarding or something like that, the CEO himself, in spite of having hundreds of customers around the country, he gets engaged. And it just goes to show how little failure rate and issue volume they actually have. Oh, that's true, actually. You know what I mean? Yeah. So we just love that commitment from Zach and Nick and the rest of the team. They're just quality people producing a quality product that continue to put high touch attention on refining the product and serving the client, which you and I are big admirers of.

4:23 So Liftify.com forward slash floodlight. You owe it to yourself, even if you've got some sort of platform like BirdEye or Podium or some other thing that's doing your review management, the chances are very good if you going to get a better result at a lower price. Who the hell doesn't want that for their business, right? And it's a strong chance. Literally. Yeah. Yep. There you go. So Liftify.com. Guys, answer for us. You know, it's interesting, this relationship and this kind of idea of kind of centralized calling or support, third-party support for inbound calling. I think one of the things that we often do is we undervalue how important that initial reaction or connection with our team feels and sounds like.

5:03 And then what does that do to kind of set the stage for the rest of that working relationship? Another thing that we hear often is we almost treat inbound calls like a round robin. Whoever's available to take the call, great. And I think there's all sorts of downsides that we don't have the time to unpack. We've made that mistake. Yeah, we've made that mistake. But I think you lose a ton of efficiency. And I think most importantly, you run the risk of launching that client off on the wrong kind of relationship with us and our team. So anyways, the idea here with AnswerForce is they're a third-party team that will help manage call flow. They'll take it. They'll contribute. They'll collect the information that we need to set the stage, to set the tone for our client and make sure that they get served in the best way possible.

5:46 The benefits with them specifically is there is no contract. You're not locked into a certain spend or a certain fee or a certain seat size. It's like what you need, they can provide. And you can ramp it up and you can ramp it down. Meaning this applies in storm events, everyday business, lulls in business. You have a way to bolt these guys on and adapt that flow and that partnership to meet the exact need of your organization. So answerforce.com forward slash floodlight. take a ride through a demo, get a grip on what they do and how they do it, and see how you could potentially apply them as a partner to your business and really own that initial interaction that a prospect or a client has with you and your team.

6:31 Right on. And then we have CNR Magazine. Man, we just love that team. The product they put out, I mean, there's the content. We talk about this over and over again, and we sound a little bit like a broken record because the value just continues. They're just so consistent, reliable. And I think similar to what I said about Liftify, the team is always innovating. They're always making new connections in the industry. I think that probably is the biggest differentiator is just how well-networked Michelle is in the industry. I mean, it is their competitive edge. I mean, she has so many rich relationships and she knows... She's just an amazing connector in the industry. And I think that produces a really awesome educational product and news product in terms of our industry.

7:12 So the articles are great. She's great at building relationships with content producers. There's a lot of great writers that contribute to their material. And she's amped that up. Oh my gosh. And also educational products that they put out on the website for free. And some of which have CE credits attached to them. She is always innovating with CNR Magazine. And she's also a great advertising partner. We get a lot of new people coming to the website. the Head Heart Boots show and to the Floodlight brand because of the advertising that we do on CNR magazines. So their various properties and their LinkedIn shares and email stuff. So super pro at every level of the game.

7:53 If you are not a subscriber to CNR magazine, go to their website today, candrmagazine.com. Subscribe there. Follow them on LinkedIn. Follow Michelle individually. Yeah. But that's where it's at. If you want your ear to the ground in terms of what's going on in our industry, you better be following CNR. Is that the T? If you want the T, you need to be a subscriber. Have you heard that yet? The T? Oh, look at this. Well, and I'm probably already dated, but not too long ago, my kids used it. And I say not long ago, maybe it was a year and a half ago and I'm already like behind the power curve. But they kept saying, yeah, what's the T? Give me the T. What the hell does that mean? What does it mean? What does the T mean? What does it mean?

8:34 It's basically the details. Like, give me the lowdown. Give me the skinny. Like, bring me up to speed. What's happening? Give me the T. I have no idea what the connection is. I don't really care. The only thing that comes to mind is like an old school phrase that I can't remember if it was my English teacher, Miss Erickson, or my grandmother that said it, but they used to use the term every jot and tittle. Have you ever heard that? No, I haven't. Like every little detail, every jot and tittle. I was like, well, that's the T. Give me the full tittle, bruh. Okay, well, we're going to... That's a new thing. Should we start using that? No, I don't think so. Yeah. You're uncomfortable with the sound of that word? My gut response is hell no. But, you know, I could be wrong. Well, anyway, please write to us if you're familiar with the phrase, every jot and tittle.

9:15 And then, anyway. Yeah. We could start, you know, sort of a new... Yeah, research. Yeah, we could. We could bring to the forefront a saying that clearly has a whole lot of value. Add that to the Urban Dictionary. All right. That's right. All right. Hey, so I have, before we dive in, because, yeah, you know, we talk a lot about self-leadership. Yeah. And sort of managing our internal thoughts, the stories in our head and so forth. I just had kind of an interesting story from last night I wanted to share with you. Oh, yeah. Actually, no, it was Tuesday night. It's Thursday. We record in the studio. So Tuesday, my wife is taking my son. He's a varsity soccer player, high school kid. And so he had a game about an hour and a half Yeah, about an hour and a half away. And I couldn't make it just because of pre-commitments and whatnot.

9:57 But as I'm leaving the office, I'm like, okay, well, I'll handle dinner. So I text my wife, I'll handle dinner. I'll have dinner ready when you guys get home. No text response. Nothing. The best part, if you're not watching the video of this, Chris has a low brimmed hat on right now and his eyes shot sideways to me when he made that comment just to give some weight to what he's about. You know, it's funny. I think most people know I'm a pretty, I'm a fairly low key, like it shows up in my language. I'm a pretty laid back sort of guy in the sense of just how most people experience me. I think. I don't know if that's true. But... I think of myself as a pretty low-key person most of the time or some of the time.

10:38 Anyway, one of my pet peeves is when I don't get text responses. Oh, yeah. I know it is. And you know, from you, and I've asked you to turn on your read receipts so I can tell if you even freaking read it. And still, after all these years of working together, you will not turn in your read receipts. I will not do it. Nonetheless, so this is the thing for me. And it's mostly with the people that I'm closest to, you know, and I care about the most. I don't know if it's an ego thing. I feel like they're not giving me the... They're not esteeming me enough, you know, that it means something that they don't immediately reply to my text. I don't know. It's character flaw, no doubt. But so I'm getting bothered. I'm especially bothered by my wife when she doesn't reply to my text, especially when all I want to do is help her out.

11:20 Right. It's like, hey, I'll take over dinner. I wanted a little bit of credit for me offering to just take on the dinner piece. Oh, God. How'd that turn? Maybe I should have passed over this story. But anyway, so the moral of the story... All right, here we go. So I text her about dinner, no response. 30 minutes goes by. And again, the timeliness of it is I'm driving home and I'm like, do I need to stop by the grocery store, grab some stuff? Or the big question mark was, is the whole team going to stop and have dinner? And I can just do dinner for my younger son and myself and whatever, which means I'll just do beef and rice. You know, keep it simple. So... No reply, no reply, no reply. I finally text my boy. I realized the game's over. I text my son who has a phone. And I'm like, hey, can you tell mom to check her phone?

12:01 Which is really low-key, passive-aggressive. Like, go tell your mom to get her shit together. You know, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So long story short, I don't really get a reply until like an hour and a half later when they come home. And so that whole thing, I'm feeling really irritated. And I finally just calm myself down. I go home, make dinner for myself, my younger son. And my wife comes home. And I'm so... I'm so glad I didn't say anything. Because like the horrid mom story that my wife told me about what transpired over the previous three hours... And I'm not going to go into the details because it's not fair to my wife. But just suffice it to say all the moms listening and dudes that pay attention, you know what I mean.

12:44 My wife had just kind of had a wild and horrendous, in many ways, day, which easily explains why she didn't respond to my texts. And I was so thankful that I kept my attitude to myself. In the mouth. instead of calling my wife out for not responding to the text. So this is more, I guess in some ways, this is more of a public service announcement to other people that it drives them nuts when their spouse doesn't reply to their text messages on a timely basis. Give them some grace. You know what? Give them the benefit of the doubt, right? There may be something going on that they're not just insulting whatever. This is great. So there you go. It's a little bit of a PSA to kick off our conversation. All right. So anyway. I love that it was a public service announcement.

13:26 I get it. All right, I want to get off the subject and move on. We're moving. We're moving here. I feel like I told a lot about myself in a very short period of time there. We're going to talk about becoming a student of our clients. I'm tempted to say rather than a student of our business. But of course, that's not the message. I think... Just a second though. I want to add something to that. Okay. I think I want to stay high enough level where we as leaders can understand how this relationship shift applies actually to every audience we have. Oh, I... Right? If I'm a leader and employer, it's not necessarily my client that's the audience. It's my prospects. It's my employees.

14:06 What do I know about them? Right? What am I selling to them? And is it packaged in such a way that it's respecting the fact that I understand my target market? Okay. right? Just like in sales. I think the opportunity here is to raise some awareness or point towards things that we often are acting out of from our gut response, but we're not necessarily consciously thinking about. Well, you know what? So here's how I think we should play it. You represent that aspect. I'll represent, I'll sort of bring, present things from the sales end of things. And I agree with you. And that way we can make sure we cover every jot and tittle. Oh, you did it. You brought that bad boy back. We get all the tea out of it.

14:46 Hey, you were... Am I learning, bro? You were a natural born. I'll start by just sharing my own experience in the industry. I came from insurance. So I was a State Farm agent, owned an agency for several years, worked for corporate for a period of time, am still a State Farm customer. And I've been in that world. But I had no exposure to actual field mitigation construction apart from being a real lackey on the construction side as a high school kid. And I've got some funny stories to illustrate that, but we won't get into that today. But I think the thing that was actually surprising to me coming into the industry and starting selling is that how little I actually needed to know about our scope of work in order to start making progress and making sales in our business.

15:34 Because what I learned... in the insurance industry was how to ask my clients great questions, how to do discovery. In my prior role and others that follow our stuff, they've heard me talk a little bit about my sales background with CentOS and learning requirements-based selling. And that really turning me on before my State Farm days to the power of pain solution selling. That cutting through the fact that most of the people we're selling to don't give a rip about our industry and our scope of work until they have to. I dealt with the same thing when I was selling uniform and laundry services. It was a huge eye-opener because it's like, God, this is so unsexy. It's so boring. It's a cost line item on their P&L that nobody really likes to pay, but you kind of got to have professional uniforms and floor mats.

16:19 I mean, it's the most unsexy stuff. And so I learned through that process that it isn't really about what I'm selling. It's about the problem that I'm able to solve for them. And in a lot of cases, it was problems that that food processing plant manager wasn't even necessarily aware of, or that machine shop owner or whatever. They weren't even aware that this was an issue. And so it was my task to help uncover those issues and then present a concrete solution to it. And so that's where it started for me, just this realization of, I don't need to understand the laundry business. Cintas, big Fortune 100 company, they spent almost... zero time talking to us about fabrics and wear and the process of laundering garments and all that stuff.

17:02 Almost zero time on that. I had no certifications in industrial laundry and stuff. You notice how I'm trying to curb my salty language? Yeah, I did. Are you practicing? I'm practicing. I can't say why, but we've... Anyway. I'm just trying to selectively be able to shut off. Not all audiences are equal. That's right. That's right. Let's put it that way. We're not fundamentally changing. I'm just practicing for different audiences. But so that to me, and then in State Farm too, it's like my clients, apart from what they needed to know, which again was usually problem-based. They had the wrong coverage. It was all about how do I ask good questions to identify needs or problems or pain? And then as I carry that into the industry and restoration, it was that much more important.

17:45 Because again, everybody I was talking to didn't want to talk to me. Chief engineers, plant managers, directors of facilities, VPs of operations, they don't want to hang out with salespeople. You know what I mean? They don't want to hear about my business. They just want to make theirs better. Yeah. They want to get more fame inside their business. They want the next promotion. They want the next pay raise. They want to be their division, their properties to be more profitable because it makes them look good. It makes them feel good. It makes their team perform. But it's like they care about themselves, their team, their reputation, all that stuff. They do not care about what their vendors are selling until they have to. Yeah, yeah. You know?

18:25 Oh, 100%. And yet, what I noticed immediately when I came in the industry is that most of the industry was doing this promotional selling, smiles and candy approach of look at all the cool stuff, how big our fleet is, the app that we have, you can track your claim, the cool swag we bring in. We're so cool. Look at us. We're the biggest and the best in the area. Give us a try. Okay. Would you give us a shot? Like, let me impress you. And then you're naturally going to want to send work my way. You know? I'm thinking about something kind of really numerically with this, right? So hang in this pocket here with me for a second. All right. So I think when you say that out loud, I think it's fairly easy for somebody listening to go, Okay, I could buy that.

19:08 I buy this idea that we need to do a more concrete job of qualifying and discovering the real need of our clients. Yes. Because that's ultimately what you're saying. Okay, well, let's think about some numbers. Okay, let's go outside of our industry and just think the normal product that most of us at some point this week, this month, we are probably going to experience buying. Call it any kind of service. Okay, outside of disaster restoration, something simple. Well, if you think about if we were trying to sell that service and it required me to understand you to make sure I put the right ad in front of you and then making sure that I qualify you well enough to when you show up to this pitch, to this thing where I'm going to get the product sold to you.

19:53 If we don't do a great job of discovering who we're selling to... the likelihood of there being a high percent of closing drops exponentially. Yeah. Okay. So this morning, I was listening to a story about a product improvement or a company improvement between two time periods in a company's history. And one of the things that they identified is that this team was only getting about 40% of the people that they were putting ads in front of to book a discovery call where we're going to learn about the client. So they obviously had a problem to address there. They clearly were not understanding the target market well enough to know where to spend their energy to ensure at least the eyeballs that they're getting this stuff in front of is the right eyeballs.

20:39 Well, think about our business and disaster restoration. Is there a chance that your team's energy is being shotgun blasted at the wrong people or avatar because we don't understand the target market well enough? Example. So then in this particular scenario, they would have then these people. So let's say we wanted to shoot for about 70% of the eyeballs that we get in front of. We want them to book a discovery call. They were at 49% because they had the wrong avatar. Then you go in another layer. Then when it was time to do discovery, they would do a poor job of discovery and And only of the people that showed up then to a potential sales meeting, only about 26 or 36% of those folks were even viable for us to sell to.

21:26 Even qualified. Even qualified. Yeah. And what they recognized in 60 days, being able to address those two items doubled the top line revenue and increased the EBITDA of this particular institution. Because their energy was going to the correct avatar, meaning they understood their target market well enough that they got the right audience. And then they were able to ask the correct discovery questions because they knew what information they were trying to get to take care of that avatar. So what's interesting to me is that from a data analytics perspective, a company is going to prioritize that information to increase sales. Yeah. Yeah. Yet we don't even prioritize it enough to know what questions to ask our client or our client prospect.

22:14 Yeah. Right. So I just say all of that to be like, look, this is not new. Yeah. Other institutions are using it and leveraging it to have unicorn type growth. Yeah. And we're struggling to even buy into the concept that we should do less telling and do a lot more asking. Yeah. Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's so true. And I think this bias we have in our industry, even still today, although it's changing, it absolutely is changing. It traces back to our early methodology is that smiles and candy route sales approach. And I think the reason why we did it is because it worked. At the time, you think about when the industry came around, it was still very analog, emails, direct mailers, and just office visits with sharp, enthusiastic, energetic, 20-somethings.

23:01 It worked. And it was the era where top of mind awareness, it just made sense. And yet, we've continued to carry that forward. And I think the reason why we carry it forward is this deception. We talk about this a lot. It's the paradox of success. Or it's the... It's the deceptive part of winning. Is it when we're winning, we think we don't really take a close look at why we're winning. And so we assume, we assume we're winning. We're getting referrals from the agent office because we're doing this thing. We're doing the candy and smiles. We're doing the donut drops. We're doing the CE lunches. We're doing the candy jars and all the things. And so if we're still getting significant amount of referral volume from that, we assume it's because we're doing X. And we don't tend to think about what the product or the end result could be if instead of doing X, we started doing Y.

23:48 Like if we're doing $2 million a year through our insurance referral partners with the more route-based candy and smiles, show and tell approach, what could we be doing if we did a more professional? consultative approach. Same group. And this is something we end up teaching a lot on because there's a big question mark. Well, if I'm not going to go in there with my hands full of swag and bellying up to their desks, just chit chatting, doing soccer mom, soccer dad chatter with all these people, then what am I going to talk about? If I'm not going to talk about our scope of work and that whole thing, what am I going to talk about? And I think it's, you're not going to talk about anything. Your goal is to get them to talk, right? It's a mind shift.

24:28 But we're starting to see it amongst our clients and around the country that this shift is starting to happen because it works. And just like the previous route sales approach worked, I think people are finding that that has diminishing returns and they're seeing an increased opportunity with this more professional peer partnership posture. Yeah. rather than kind of the old school New York City streets. Hey, you interested in buying a watch? You know, kind of thing. I'm not going to lie. Every time you go to the trench coat opening, I'm just thinking streaker or flasher. I do not go to a watch sales. I'm not sure. Yeah, everybody knows what I'm talking about. Well, I don't know. That's, you know, that's my mental picture.

25:09 All right, Head, Heart & Boots listeners. Want to stop here just a moment and thank our underwriting sponsor, Bloodlight Consulting Group. As all of you know, right? You know, Brandon and I, this is our passion project, Head Heart and Boots is. But it's also a way more and more that our consulting clients find us. And in effect, they interview us, right? Those of you who've been listening to the show for a while, you get to know who we are, right? What we're about. So if Head Heart and Boots is valuable to you, one of the best things you can do is share it with your friends. And it's been incredible to watch just the audience grow. And we still get text messages from many of you about shows that you really like and impacted you. So that's number one. And please keep doing that.

25:49 Many of you have been huge advocates of the show. We also just want to remind you too, if you're a restoration company owner and you're interested in a partner in your growth, you want some help building out systems, developing your leadership teams, helping set up the infrastructure for you to scale and grow into the company that you're trying to build. That's what we do. That's what we do is we come alongside restoration company leaders and, We help equip them and we help support them in that growth trajectory. So if you're looking for that, go to floodlightgrp.com. Potentially, we could be a great match for each other. Another way that we really do serve our client base and our sphere of influence is through our premier partners. We work really hard to vet those folks that we believe bring a level of value to the industry, that it can really be leveraged in a way to have a sincere, positive impact on your business.

26:38 We take that very seriously. The folks that we create those kind of ongoing partnerships, that's not a check-the-box kind of scenario. It's we really see strategic alignment in the value that they bring. We see value in the way that their leadership teams and their partners are developed. And we've done very sincere work of ensuring that these folks that we introduce our clients and our sphere to can actually create vetted value. So go check out floodlightgrp.com forward slash premier slash partners and see if there's some folks on there that you can connect with and begin developing some other resources to support your growth and your business. Honestly, I think that there's an opportunity here for us to really analyze how this applies across our audience bases.

27:22 Because I think the sales thing is maybe, I don't want to say the easiest, but it can feel easier to connect this dot. This theory of how could you possibly create a message to sell to somebody if you don't understand what their life looks like? And so I think that we can get on board with that. We can begin connecting the dots. But I think there's this wider usage that you and I started to kind of wrestle with. And it's this idea of how well do you know your target market in terms of employee? Like when we think about the different roles and titles within our organization, the... Do you understand what you need from them well enough that you can communicate in such a way that what you need, that particular person is capable of buying or providing?

28:13 And so I'm just thinking about some of our key roles employee-wise. And I'm thinking like how many times, for instance, when we learn about somebody often too late, we find out we have this more analytical type person. And we've asked them to be a think on their feet, fast moving, adapt and overcome type of employee or role. Yeah. And it's like, but had we understood what we were selling, we understood what avatar we were going after, then we can be clearer. in things like our interviewing and onboarding to communicate the way that that audience needs to hear. And then if they can't receive it, we can still be confident that the message we sent would have landed with the correct avatar.

28:56 So if you don't get the buy-in, the communication, the feedback loop, then that's your flag. We probably have the wrong person. But I don't think... And I think what's interesting is actually we'll have a show coming out in the next several weeks with one of our friends in the industry. And we're going to get into the nitty gritty of this kind of recruiting and onboarding and some of this. And my gut says this has the potential to come up again. But it's just this idea of like, I don't know that employers are doing currently a great job of even identifying who they want on their team. Oh, yeah. We're so desperate. We're so caught in the just fill the seat with a breather. And then the challenge is, is that if we don't know the employee type that we want to hire and we don't have messaging going out that affirms that A, we are that company and B, we use it to ask questions in our interviewing process to identify if we have the right prospect.

29:48 then we have no chance of building the team that we know we need in order to succeed. Well, and I think part of how we continually make this mistake is that in some ways, we're applying that same promotional selling, features and benefits selling thing that we do with salespeople in the sense that if I'm hiring for a mitigation manager or a recon manager or a project manager... Oftentimes what we do is we're highlighting the job description that we've come up with. We're asking questions that are framed from the requirements of the job, the technical scope of work that the job requires, all that kind of stuff. And the problem with that is that we're essentially telegraphing to that candidate what they need, how they need to answer in order to get the job.

30:35 So if they're good enough to formulate their answers, to speak to the things that we're asking, then often, and we see this all the time, you can get the wrong person in the job because they knew how to sell to the job description you gave. Just to give another sort of perspective on this. One of the things you and I have learned over time, we use the various personality profiles. And over the years, we've used different ones. Scott, one of our senior consultants, really likes the DISC profile. It's a great thing. We use the Core Values Index, you and I, in the past. There's these different personas. And what we've learned over time is that some personas work really great in some roles and are counterproductive in others. And even on the production side, so a great example is the difference between MIT and RECON.

31:19 With recon managers, one, there's a pretty clearly defined construction timeline that we're dealing with. There's a linear process to construction that is different than our mitigation. Mitigation, as we have new mitigation jobs coming in, there's a lot of adapt and overcome that happens in the MIT department. In terms of timing, deployment of our teams, moving our crews around, there's a lot of flexibility that happens from day to day of how we're allocating resources and team members and stuff like that. Whereas construction, you have a little bit longer duration project, it tends to follow a more deliberate cadence, right? In terms of getting the trades in to do the various things that lead up to our COS. Well, a mitigation manager profile, the person that thrives in that kind of high adaptivity, you know, environment is not going to be the right person to typically run the construction department and vice versa.

32:12 Like what we've learned is that in the construction space, that driver, builder profile. I sometimes refer to as the get shit done person. They can put on their blinders. They can tune everything else out to accomplish the task in front of them to check that box and keep moving through the process. It's very focused and they don't tend to adapt as well. They tend to be hyper-focused and rigid in their task orientation. Whereas some of the best mitigation managers we've found are very flexible. They're problem solvers. In the core values index versus a builder. And innovators, though, one of the reasons why they don't make as good of construction managers is because it's really difficult sometimes for them to take action on a single track.

32:57 They're much more adapt and overcome. They're always shifting gears, moving people around. Mitigation managers are the best ones. They're really good at resource allocation. It's like, okay, I deploy all my teams Monday morning, and then we get seven more jobs that come in mid-morning. Who's going where? Who am I sending out to that job, right? There's just a ton of daily adaptation, but yet that same strength lends itself toward longer project cycle times on the construction side. They tend to over-index on making things just so. Innovators, it's never good enough to finally plant the flag. And so you tend to get a lot of scope creep when you have innovators running construction teams.

33:38 Innovators are the ones that they come up with even more items than the customer does on the punch list walkthrough. Yeah. Because they're so oriented around optimizing and maximizing things. Whereas a builder or a driver, they thrive on the beginning and the finish. They don't get romantic about the process. Whereas a great mitigation manager, they're all about the process and efficiency and flexibility and adapting and making things work together and getting teams moving around efficiently. It's just two totally different skill sets. But again, when we focus on just the job description and scope of work rather than the person in front of us. we often end up with a mitigation manager that should be a construction manager or vice versa.

34:22 And we get really frustrated with them and we're like, what the hell? Or ultimately, what we end up seeing the most of is that people know all the technical jargon. So they're just spitting out these technical jargon pieces and you're like, oh my gosh, this is great. They're dialed in on Dash. Oh, they got a handle on Mika or in Circle. You're like, oh, this person's going to be great. In the interim, we've done nothing to ask questions or isolate out their experience around equipping people, training and observing and holding people accountable, equipping, coaching people up, helping people manage through their personal life when they show up at the job site. Oh man, that's a whole other layer. Yeah, it's like we've done nothing to really address that. And I think it goes back to two things.

35:03 We don't know our audience. We don't know it well enough to understand what we want, meaning we don't understand the target market enough to even know that that is something we want in our system. We don't do enough discovery in our interview process to pull those things out, those softer elements that point towards this ultimate avatar. And we get stuck on using this restoration jargon or call it any service company, plumbing, HVAC, whatever. You're using that jargon and that's telling you that this person's got the juice. And then the reality of it is often they don't. They're not anything more than a glorified call it whatever, whatever job title. It's interesting. I think there's kind of a big overarching theme here.

35:44 And that theme, or at least one of the themes I think at play here is knowledge is power, but knowledge is also deceptive. And I think knowledge sometimes causes us to strike out in a particular direction that isn't necessarily the right direction. And so I see this back to salespeople. It's really common in our industry, especially with some of the really big companies that have the resource to send people off immediately for certifications and trainings and stuff like that. It's really common to see sales reps and BDMs and so forth that are going off and get IICRC certified. See it a lot. And is that good or bad? Well, I would say that over time, it's not bad for our salespeople to have high-level technical understanding in the business.

36:27 Not bad at all. Some of the best come from operations. Absolutely. They do. Absolutely. That field knowledge is valuable. But here's one of the potential drawbacks or the main drawback is that the more we know about the technical side of our business, the more inclined we are to talk about that. It's just simply the way our egos work. And I think it also, it becomes what we're most confident in because we have control over it. It's like what I know is what I know. Versus when we start to get into learning and understanding our customer, that's a black box. Like, I don't know what the customer is going to say when I get curious about this. I don't know what they're going to say about our industry. There's a certain level of discomfort in taking a curious posture, a customer focused approach.

37:10 I think there's a little bit of fear is what holds us back and instead causes us to default into let me tell you what I know. Because there's a certain amount of confidence that we derive from all the things I know. So we're just naturally more inclined to talk about what we know. And so that's one of the things that happens is you get really great technicians who, when they're doing their initial approach and creating and reportability with a customer, they skip all of the curious questions of, Mrs. Jones, before I talk to you about this process, have you ever been through something like this before? We forget to do that. We're solely focused on telling them what we know and educating the customer that we forget to actually meet and get to know our customer and find out what are they thinking right now?

37:54 What are they coming into this interaction with in terms of past experience, fears, concerns, anxieties? Is there anything else going on in their life right now? now? Is their father-in-law dying and in the hospital and they just had this major kitchen water loss? You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, what are we taking the time to learn and understand about our customer? I think as I say that out loud, everyone is like, oh, God, yeah, that's really important. Yeah. But in the moment... When we have all this technical knowledge and confidence in what we do, the inclination is overwhelming. Yeah. To default to telling because we're more confident and we feel more in control of that customer interaction. And you see this in both sides of the business.

38:34 It's where kind of that false sense of security comes from. Yeah. Here's another way to maybe look at this. And I think more about what we're introducing in today's episode. We don't need to go on and on. I think it's more just planting this flag of, hey, explore this a bit on your own. Really think about what you're prioritizing in terms of not just the questions that you're asking for onboarding new prospects or employees, but then on an ongoing basis. So here's one of the ways I was thinking about this is, How often are you seeing and did we educate all the way down to the front line the extent of understanding that client base? Like we do, like for instance, we do a two-day commercial sales course with a team. We're going to spend several hours going over the prospects.

39:18 Yeah. Understanding their decision tree, the roles, how they influence the job, how we earn their... Yeah. The words, the acronyms. That's right. How do we earn their business? Yeah. Because it's not the same. It's not on budget, on time. Yeah. That is... That ain't it, dude. No, it's more understanding too, these decision makers and what we like to call COIs. Yeah. As people. Yep. Like as people. People. And recognizing the fact that this property manager I'm talking to, they have a career. They have a family, presumably, or they have a career. They have rent. They have a mortgage to pay. They have children with music lessons. This is a person that has goals, fears, dreams, anxieties, pressures, stresses, relational difficulties, just like we do.

40:05 And the more I can discover about that, primarily relative to their job and their professional environment, the more I can come in and align with or provide support for or provide relief from some of these stressors and anxieties and things that detract from their success, their personal well-being in that role. So we talk a lot about in discovery, we're really trying to understand all aspects of those things. I want to understand who this person is. primarily relative to their role, their time in the industry. For sure. What's expected of them. Yep. You know, another interesting question that we don't, we assume a lot about what a property manager their life is. Yep. And what their job is.

40:45 But everybody has a different, they have different stressors that bog them down. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. It's like just what you just said. It's interesting to me. Like I think what we would see a lot of people leaning into is, well, I ask questions to learn about their hobbies and their families and their birth dates. And it's like, okay, that's good. But me knowing that one of the engineers on a property likes to go fishing. Okay, does it allow me maybe to buy a guided fishing trip and invite them? Yeah, sure, it does, right? Now, does this individual want to go hang out with you for the weekend? That's probably debatable. But if I understand as a professional with their specific job title, and I understand their specific job duties and where the pain points are for them as it relates to their org chart, their chain of command, their performance, well, now we got something.

41:31 Because here's the reality. Will they buy from you because you take them fishing? Maybe. Will they buy from you because at work you make them look fucking rad? Yeah. 100%. Yeah. 100%. Yes. And in fact, to the extent that they will go through and work around internal programs and systems because it is all about them protecting themselves. Yep. That is a winning combo. So let's go back to our employees. We talk about wanting to have a workforce that's loyal, that will go through walls for us. Well, what do we know about them? What do we know about their effectiveness and their role and how their lifestyle and their commitments and their perspectives play a role in supporting that job and those duties?

42:15 Do we really understand from a frontline tech's perspective what life is like out in the field? said, we all want employees that will go through walls for us. And I think it's pretty rare for us to step back as leaders and say, does our employee know or feel confident that we would go through walls for them? Oh, it's good. Yeah, it's good. It takes me back to that conversation we have with Joey Coleman. Joey's obviously not in the restoration industry per se, but I think it was Joey that talked about this idea of having... Who is it? Was it Joey or was it somebody else we were talking to? I want to give the right person credit. Yeah. This idea of having an employee emergency fund.

42:56 Remember that? A lot of our employees are hand to mouth and there's these... That might have been Joey. They have these personal financial stressors. Okay, well, Joey, props to you. If it was somebody else, please let us know. We'll provide correct recognition. But it was this idea of what if we had just a no questions ask $500 per kind of fund, an emergency perk benefit to employees. And we had a very flexible repayment policy. At any given time, I think you referenced statistics that your average worker in the United States is $500 away from bankruptcy and ruin and not making rent. And you and I, with enough of the experience we've had with employees, we know that to be true.

43:37 And so again, it just speaks to that thing of if we want employees that are wholly committed to... us and the success of the company and bought into the team, are we doing the things that convey that we are similarly committed to them? Yeah. You know? Yeah. And I think the challenge is if you don't know anything about them, I'm not sure that you have the ability to create a message that could land. Yeah. So you guys, here's the thing. I think that there's so many examples for us to wrestle with here. But I think at the end of the day, here's the goal for us to just kind of as an industry, right? As just people in this restoration or let's call it the wider service company community is what would it take for us to begin shifting this perspective of technical is good, but it really is the baseline.

44:27 And what would it look like for us to prioritize really understanding the target audience? And here's the reality. This is true for every level and every role in the organization. Me as a technician, I can understand the client, the person in front of me that I provide this service to. If I'm a sales team, obviously, there's so much opportunity for us to hyper process. What is it that our avatar, these target markets need from us? What is their world and their life look like? And again, it translates over to our employees and other relationships, right? We're kind of leaning into a learning posture. Ask more questions. 100%. I want to... Maybe we close this out. I want to share a golden nugget for my sales tribe.

45:07 Okay. Yeah. So we'll leave you with kind of a cool story here and a little shout out to Restoration Affiliates. I did a little conference call for one of their sales work groups on hotels. And I didn't get a chance to say this. And so I'll drop it in here for them as well. An example of this. So when I was chasing hotels and kind of leading our team, figuring out the hotel customer segment... One of my early customers was a gal named Jennifer Williams, a young, hot shot hotel GM. I mean, 27, 28 years old, running a 300-room hotel and an interim leader for another nearby 200-room airport hotel property. Just an absolute just home run hitter in the industry.

45:50 And it must have been my second or third follow-up with her. I got her on the phone and I was going to schedule a site walk with her of one of her properties. and I forget what day and time of the week it was, but I remember her calling me out. She said, Chris, hold on a second, okay? I saw that you called. I do want to talk to you, but you must not be aware of how this whole hotel thing works. And she said, look, it's the first week of the month. And what's happening the first week of the month for me is probably what's happening with the other 200 hotel GMs in this Portland, Marquez, Portland, Oregon. And she said, let me just coach you on this. Internally, I was like, okay, I don't know what's happening here. Like, am I going to lose this?

46:30 She pissed at me. I can't quite tell. Am I losing my opportunity with her? I don't know what's happening. She just said, hey, Chris, listen, I like you and I'm interested in what you're selling and all the things. But look, my first week of the month, I'm closing out last month. I have three conference calls between my managing partner of the investor group that owns this property, our home office that's rolling out some new HR system, blah, blah, blah. And I've got another closeout thing to go over my P&L from the previous month. Today, yesterday... I was preparing for all that stuff, running around the property, having stand-ups with my different department leaders and all that kind of stuff. And then Thursday, I've got this happening. She's like, first week of the month is terrible for me to meet with vendors, have sales meetings, frankly, even have productive meetings with my own team.

47:14 Oh, okay. And she's like, then at the end of the month, the last week of the month, she went on to just describe the cadence... that happens in the hotel business. And I'm still grateful to this day because I can't tell you how many dozens of times or hundreds of times I subsequently referenced that intel. She also said, look, Mondays, not great. My head's going in these four different directions. Fridays, my head's going in these four different directions. She said, but you know what, Chris, middle of the month, there's about a seven or eight day stretch where it's smooth sailing. That's where I'm working with my team. I'm walking the building. I'm having chit chats in the hallway. I'm meeting with my vendors.

47:56 I'm buying things. I'm buying things, Chris, middle of the month. And she said, so middle of the month, middle of the week, best time. Now, here's the thing. When I tell this to salespeople, they're like, holy shit. So I have like a 20% time window to actually sell to hotel people. Well, no, not necessarily. So what did I do with that intelligence? Well, I immediately started leveraging the language. Yeah. I had a level of personal understanding of hotel leaders that I didn't before Jennifer told me that. And so I was able to approach them in not only a more personal way, accounting for what I knew might be their stressors, but then also with an insider industry knowledge. of their business.

48:36 So now in subsequent outreach calls, cold calls, drop-ins, etc., I would lead with, I'd say, Hey, listen, I know it's first of the month. I'm sure you're probably buried in closing out the previous month's activity and your P&L, all that kind of stuff. I understand if you'd rather I call you back later in the month. And half the time, they'd be like, Yeah, man, middle of the month would be better. And half the time, they'd be like, You know what? I got it all under control. I got time. What's up? Yeah. And the fact that I opened up with an acknowledgement of their world, their personal stressors that they might be encountering, it positioned me in a completely different light. Because I was more of a peer, more of a partner. I had a general understanding.

49:17 And of course, over time, I learned more and more and more about what the life of a hotel GM is and how they relate and the roles around them, all of the different things to the point where I could very deftly just, I could slide into their environment. 100%. And be a part of their world. That's right. You know? Yeah, 100%. They saw me eventually as one of them. Yeah. Right? And I think the challenge here, guys, is if you're hanging in the audience, listening to the show, is how can we take that further? Right? How can we leverage that same concept of having to be a master of learning our target market? How can we translate that into the way we lead, the way we manage our staff, the way we hire, the way we interview?

49:58 Can we index harder on learning the prospect versus the technical component? All right, gang. Thanks for hanging out with us. We'll see you on the next one. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart, and Boots. And if you're enjoying the show, but you love this episode, please hit follow, formerly known as subscribe, write us a review, or share this episode with a friend. Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever. It all helps. Thanks for listening.