The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
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turn your windshield time into learning time when you’re not listening to the scaling up h2o podcast listen to the
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favorite tools welcome to scaling up the podcast where
we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems i’m trace blackmore the host of scaling up h2o and folks
what a great industrial water week last week oh my gosh that was number four
that we have celebrated together they get better each and every year more and
more people celebrate each and every year and we include each other more and
more each and every year in that celebration i cannot wait for next year
to celebrate industrial water week and of course industrial water week is always the first full week in october
and next year we’re going to be celebrating industrial water week starting on october 3rd
so now that industrial water week is over you can go and get all of your
industrial water week party supplies they’re all on clearance all the stores are trying to get rid of
them so now’s the time to stock up on that stuff i know we haven’t really reached
that in industrial water week celebration but i’m sure that’s to come and i want to thank so many people out
there that shared how they celebrated by hashtagging
iw21 and scaling up h2o i saw boilers i
saw softeners i saw cooling towers i saw people that made the water cake from
last year and i even saw somebody that dressed up as detective h2o
i love it thank you so much for everybody that did that if you haven’t
checked out all those great pictures go ahead and check out those hashtags you
are going to want to participate next year if you have not and speaking of
detective h2o james mcdonald great job on putting all
those together of course i replayed the ones that we played the previous year
james we know that takes a lot of work but we so badly need
more detective and doctor h2o in our lives so
james reach out to me let me know how i can help and i think the world really
wants trace to be one of your voices so if there’s any way i can help with that
please let me know we are all wanting the next rendition of those
back in episode 204 i spoke about being profitable and i know when i mentioned
that on episode 204 many people thought that they knew
everything they needed to know about being profitable well what i did there
is i made a hamburger and i broke down how we actually get paid if we were to open up
our own hamburger store and through that analogy
so many people have contacted me and said that that really helped them
understand profitability it really helped them understand what they were doing on a day-to-day
basis also how they were pricing things and what questions to ask so they could
do both of those things better the more information we have the better decisions
that we can make and i want to thank everybody that whenever you listen to an episode and you come back to the show
with feedback i love that that helps me thank you for all the people that did that so what i got out of all of your
feedback is when we think we know something do we really know it well
enough or do we only know it one way and there’s multiple ways to know that topic
so the point i think i’m trying to make is if you want to see how well you know
a topic try to explain that to somebody that has absolutely no context about
that topic i know many of us get frustrated when we talk to non-water treaters about things that are going on
in our lives well with profitability when you’re talking with somebody how well are you
able to explain that if they’re not in business einstein said if you can’t
explain it to a six-year-old you don’t understand it yourself and there’s so
much wisdom in that statement so i challenge myself
with that quote all the time i challenge you to do the same thing
to see how well you know something by how well you can explain it and folks
when you know something i urge you to share that knowledge with somebody else
because that’s how we all get better because i receive so many comments about
episode 204 i thought it would be a great idea to
bring someone in today to expand that topic now he’s not in the water
treatment industry but there’s so many similarities among all businesses i know
you’re definitely going to learn something from today’s interview
my lab partner today is russ stevens co-founder of the association of
professional builders russ thank you so much for coming on the podcast thanks so much for inviting me i’m
excited to be here and i can tell right off the bat just from listening to you you are not from
atlanta are you no not quite uh originally from england
and uh moved to australia in 2006 uh with my family and uh been here ever
since i appreciate you making the trip virtually all the way over here to
atlanta georgia where i’m recording from i’m really excited about today’s show we’re going to talk about a subject that
i recently spoke on episode 204 and i think people are scared to ask the
questions that they really need to know to understand their business to understand their sales and really how
what they do on a day-to-day impacts the bottom line so i’m hoping that our
conversation today will allow people to understand things like margin a little
bit better markup a little bit better all the things that allow a business to stay in
business so they can make better decisions absolutely i’m so excited uh i love
talking about this stuff and really looking forward to getting into this with you trace well before we get started do you mind
telling the scaling up nation a bit about yourself certainly i uh started out in business
at 19 years old that was back in the early 80s a long time now
and uh i started a distribution company so i i literally started selling from the back of the van driving around uh
south london selling to discount stores from the back of the van and over the next
25 30 years i i grew that business to the point it employed 50 people
and was turning over 35 million dollars in revenue a year
and really the whole goal of building a business was so that we could put ourselves in a financial position to
emigrate to australia it was always a goal of ours and in 2006 we realized
that goal we we sold our company and emigrated to australia and then it was a
case of what do we do now we had to start again because uh australia wouldn’t allow us to become
investor residents they they wanted us to start a company and employ australians and contribute to the
economy so we had to do something else so it started dabbling in the construction industry because that
looked like a good growth industry compared to what i’d been in previously which was the discount retail industry
which was independently was in decline the whole time and uh ended up doing a few different things in
construction but um around about 2010 i came across an american company that had
developed some very advanced project management software that connected the
consumer to the to the building company and uh it was revolutionary so we
introduced that to the construction industry in australia and new zealand and the uk and um yeah we signed up over
a thousand building companies to uh to that suffer in the in the next few years and it was during that process i realized talking to builders that the
big gap was lead generation they really didn’t have any idea how to generate leads and as a consequence of that we
started a marketing agency for builders around about 2011 that grew
and uh as a consequence of that we are we could we found that we could generate a lot of leads for builders good quality
leads but some of the guys were successful some of the guys still weren’t being successful they you know
they were saying the leads were rubbish and we realized the big difference was the guys that were struggling didn’t have a sales process which is why in
2014 we launched the association of professional builders you know with a goal to improve in the construction
industry for both builders and consumers and i’m betting the water treatment industry is not unique to this
but there’s always somebody that says they can do it cheaper does that happen
in your industry too all the time every every day of the week
um for people outside of the industry and even a lot of people inside the
industry i guess as well builders are very much viewed as a commodity and i
think that’s the one thing that really attracted me to this industry as well because i didn’t see building homes as a
commodity at all i saw it as a very unique um service really that uh could not be
treated as a commodity and um and theoretically you couldn’t lose a job on price because
very rarely are two houses the same but certainly the perception is is very very
different and the worst thing that’s always the the builders buy into this and think of themselves as commodities as well and
end up competing on price so what is the mindset change that you
have to have that it’s not about price it’s about the product that i’m putting out and it is perfectly okay for me to
charge a premium for that product yeah great great question trace because this this is where we start with our
whole coaching process with builders because uh it’s no good just telling a company that you should be charging more
and you should be earning more because uh if it was that simple you know we’d all be doing it we’d just be putting our
prices up but the first thing we have to do with a building company is change the owner’s mindset and the way we do that
is by getting them to understand their financials because when they truly understand their financials and not many
owners of building companies do because there’s a few complexities in construction financials that not many
people understand even their own accountants but once we explain those complexities and give them the tools to truly understand
their financials builders then realize just how little they’re earning out of their companies
and how little they’re actually selling their time for and when that happens they get angry they get really angry and
that triggers the mindset change because once they get angry they then become determined and focused and that is where
we can then guide them on how to charge more money because they not only believe can do it they know they have to
change and uh that’s that’s probably the most powerful thing so then we we take them through the steps which obviously
includes marketing as one of the um the most important things we always say to the companies we work with that margins
are linked to marketing very important because it comes down to supply and demand in the end the more demand you
can create by keeping the supply the same that enables you to increase your margins but yeah before we can get there
we have to change the mindset just recently i was telling the scale and up nation about a book that my
mastermind group just finished reading called procrastinate on purpose by rory vaden and he really stresses what he
calls mvot the money value of time so if i do this thing
how much is this thing actually costing me and can i hire someone else that can do it to allow me to do something of
higher value is that what we’re talking about oh yeah you’ve um you’ve really touched
on something where and i think this isn’t just specific to builders this this happens to us all doesn’t it in
business no one’s as good as us no one no one can do anything as good as we can do and of course they can’t and no one
works as hard and as long as we do in their own business and this is why a lot of companies and specifically building
companies they don’t scale very well when they’re below 10 million because the owner influence the owner is doing
that much work it won’t scale on those margins because as you bring people in to do what you’re
doing they’re not going to work 80 hours a week you know you’re gonna have to pay them a decent wage and uh and realize
that uh they’re not gonna work as hard and as fast and as long as you and uh understanding that is very important and
a good process for that is the stop doing list you know doing a time audit and understanding exactly what you’re
doing in the business and then start working on those low value tasks first getting rid of them
using the dad process delete automate delegate you know a lot of stuff we do we don’t even really need to do so we
can delete it and uh and then we can automate a lot of stuff but we have to be careful yeah just because we can
doesn’t mean we should we can spend a lot of time automating stuff that is simply not viable but then delegate but
sort but systemize create the process and then delegate and then report on that
already several times you and i have both mentioned numbers and i know there are people out there
that are wondering what are the core numbers that we need to be
looking at to know that one we’re selling something at the right price we are actually making money on that how
does a salesperson truly know what profit is and how to sell those things
yeah it’s the the most important thing isn’t it it’s why we do what we do there has to be a net profit left over at the
end and there’s a there’s a couple of big problems that i see and uh i see a
lot in our industry i’ve seen it in other industries as well and a lot of business owners don’t
understand the difference between markup and margin and that’s really dangerous it’s dangerous when you’re on big
margins and it’s probably even more dangerous when you’re on small margins because you could actually be losing
money without realizing it especially if you’re not analyzing your financial reports uh systematically on a monthly
basis so maybe if i just touched on that very quickly markup is the amount you
add to your cost of sales to get your selling price and margin is that gross profit as a
percentage of your revenue and although they they might sound similar and they get the terms even get used
interchangeably which confuses people but specifically builders who work on very low margins you may have a builder
that believes he’s working on a 20 margin so when he sees uh two hundred
thousand dollars come into his business he believes he’s made forty thousand dollars but the truth is he’s adding a
twenty percent markup and that equates to a sixteen point six percent margin
and the danger there is unless he can read his accounts properly by making some um unusual calculations in order to
correct his accounts then when that 200 000 comes into his business instead of making 40 000 profit
he’s only made thirty three thousand dollars now that seven thousand difference you know if you multiply that
up on bigger and bigger numbers the danger is because he doesn’t understand his net profit he then looks at his cash
in the bank and this is why when we analyze companies that have gone into liquidation we see jet skis on the
balance sheet and boats and brand new uts pickup trucks etc because uh they
didn’t understand that they weren’t actually making money but they understood they had cash in the bank and
they they thought they were doing well and they went and spent it it’s very very dangerous so first thing they must understand the the difference between
markup and margin in order to have a healthy margin but in order to work backwards i’d always start at the the
net profit because the net will tell you really what you need to be adding to your customer sales uh ie you know your
your gross profit and in order to get to a decent net you know we we typically advise builders in our industry and all
industries are different so i couldn’t speak across too many different industries here but in terms
of the construction industry the accepted norm tends to be anything is good really any any net profit is good
but yeah builders like to to clear between two and three percent but at the apb the association of professional
builders we believe and we’ve proved this as well that uh 10 plus is the minimum a building company should be
working on it’s dangerous to work on anything less than a 10 net margin and that’s after owner’s drawings as well
which i’ll come back to on that so once you understand your your net margin
then you the next thing to understand are the industry benchmarks for your particular industry this can be
a bit easier in some industries than others but in the construction industry for instance the industry benchmark for
fixed expenses is 15 so when a builder understands that his
net needs to come in at 10 and his fixed expenses including his own drawings are 15
then he understands that he’s got to be adding a 25 gross margin and that means he’s got to
be adding 33.3 markup in order to hit that 25 percent now there’s not many
builders that come to us that uh are on that are adding 33.3 markup to their jobs and i i’ll be
completely honest here when when the association of professional builders started back in 2014 we had builders
falling off their chair laughing events we did when we told them these uh these benchmarks but having been
coaching builders for the last seven years now we now have the proof and we have builders that have taken their
business from one or two percent up to ten percent plus net and in some cases have gone further uh up to fifteen
percent net so we we know this is very very possible and achievable in our industry and and really whatever
industry you’re in then the net can always be improved there’s there’s no doubt about that you just need to make
some key changes everything you’ve said translates perfectly into the water treatment industry so i think the translation is
good as well as what you mentioned the tiny margins and you mentioned that builders
were doing things for two and three percent how are they ever expected to
provide that world-class service at such a tiny profit that’s the problem they simply can’t and
in a lot of cases that two and three percent that ended up being their drawings
because they didn’t put their drawings into the fixed expenses either because they forgot or because their accountant
advised them not to and because he could make it more tax efficient but the danger with that is you simply don’t
value your time enough and it’s very hard to to plan and grow a company when
you’ve omitted one of the major expenses from your your budgeting you’ve got to put that in because again that forms a
big mindset change but to answer your question yes it’s not only very very difficult ordering not impossible to to
scale a company on two or three percent margin it’s also extremely dangerous
simply because of the reasons i mentioned earlier that companies below 10 million especially in the construction industry do not scale like
a like a normal business like an e-commerce business for instance and what we find we use a great example of
builder a builder b where we actually show the timeline of a builder on low margins and a builder b that uses
what we call the pricing for profit method which um prices jobs on a net profit rather than a gross profit so the
builder b as they grow we see builder a in between two and three years he actually starts to lose money whereas
builder b gets more and more profitable and can put more money into his marketing and still be more profitable
and what we hear in our industry a lot i don’t know if you hear this trace in uh
in the water industry but we hear a lot of builders that grew their company over
a two to three year period they then um they might go from five or six homes a year to 25 30 homes a year and we hear
them saying things like i just need a few more and then i’ll be profitable i
just need a few more and then it’s gonna be okay and then we might hear them say another
year’s time where they’ve dropped down i’m earning more money now i’m i’m back doing five or six homes a year than when
i was doing 25 and they believe that scaling
is not profitable it’s not worth it but they simply didn’t use the right metrics
to scale their building company what would you say the most important thing to look at to make sure you can
scale your business properly is there’s a couple of things there’s uh obviously net margin as we’ve we’ve
mentioned is incredibly important to monitor but there’s there’s probably a good 10
to 12 key metrics in every business that have got to be monitored if you’re going
to scale it because you’ve got to be looking at both your lead indicators and your lag indicators now your lead
indicators will cover things like your advertising spend because then you’ll be looking at how many marketing qualified
leads you’re generating so not leads but marketing qualified leads so
we need to know how much those marketing qualified leads are costing us so we divide one by the other and we can
measure our cost per marketing qualified lead and we can we can see our spend as well as a percentage of revenue from the
marketing qualified leads the other lead indicators would be how many of those marketing qualified leads developed into
opportunities how many of those opportunities converted into sales now the process for a building company is
very long and they have a couple of stages in the sales process i’m not sure how that relates to the water treatment
industry but they would have a concept design stage they would then have a prelim stage and then the building
contracts so we have to measure those as well but once we get to the building contract we sort of transition into the
the lag indicators and that’s where we look at our accounts and this is where accountants become very good business
well i’m saying that sarcastically but accountants like to give a lot of business advice but they only focus on
the lag indicators so they’re looking at history which is very very dangerous but we do have to look at the lag indicators
as well we have to look at revenue we have to look at gross margin we have to look at our fixed expenses as a
percentage of revenue and of course our net margin and of course our cash yeah very important to keep a very close eye
on the cash as well so for a builder what should cash flow be how much extra cash should they have
in the the bank to pay their bills yeah we’re going to open up a can of worms here because um
we we have a very misunderstood calculation in the construction industry and it’s called work in progress now
when uh work in progress is a is a complex calculation which identifies the hidden liability in the
building company because what builders tend to do is they front load their contracts to get positive cash flow so they might get
to stage one of a build which is putting the slab down and at that point they might have claimed 20
from the the client and that’s great but they might have only um paid out
seven or eight percent to suppliers and subcontractors and that’s presuming all those invoices have
come in for the slap saves as well so at this point their cash flow is heavily distorted not only their cash flow but
also their accounts as well because they would have on a million dollar build if you can imagine where a builder might be
working on a 20 margin he’s now claimed 200 000 in his revenue in his accounts
but his uh his cost of sales might only be 70 or 80 000 so his gross profit is
now showing 120 000 on the 200 000 revenue is crazy and the builder knows that isn’t correct but he doesn’t know
what’s wrong or how to correct it so he ignores it and looks at the cash and that’s dangerous as well
so very very important that uh builders understand this calculation we call it the work in progress accounting
adjustment because when we started asking builders you know do you calculate your work in progress they’d
all look at us and smile and say yeah i’ve got plenty of work in progress what they were thinking of was workflow
so they’re thinking because they got plenty of jobs in the pipeline they got lots of work in progress so the whole
thing got very very confusing so we we created a term to really
make this clear this is a calculation we call it the work in progress accounting adjustment now that calculates that
hidden liability between the um 70 or 80 000 that may have been invoiced to a
building company and the 160 000 which should be of should have been invoiced in a perfect
world if they were working on 20 margins so we calculate that as a liability that goes into the accounts
and that helps them understand it the reason i’ve explained all that is because when it comes to cash flow the
builders that don’t do this they spend the cash so it becomes a little bit like a giant
ponzi scheme and once um once the revenue stops growing they don’t have enough cash in the business to to pay
this hidden liability so to answer your question how much cash flow they should have that is the first requirement they must
have enough cash to cover this hidden liability which in a building company that’s turning over
just uh five or six million that liability could be as high as seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
that’s seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a building company needs to hold in cash reserve to cover a liability
that’s not even appearing in their accounts crazy again a lot of similarities between our
two industries you mentioned marketing a couple of times is there a magic number for what
we should have in our budget based on our revenue that’s going to marketing
yes as much as you can afford because if your marketing engine is uh
is working and firing then why wouldn’t you spend all of your spare cash on
generating even more leads because it’s the best investment you can you can make i see way too many business owners
they create a profitable company and either because they thought it was a good idea or they’re getting financial
advice they they take 100 200 000 out their business at the end of the year and put it into the stock market and
invest in someone else’s company why not reinvest in your own company you’ve got a proven model here go and buy more
leads that’s all you’re doing you’re buying more sales effectively but you can only do that if you’re watching your
numbers and then you know that okay if i double my uh advertising spend i’m going
to double my marketing qualified leads my opportunities my initial sales and my
contracts and all those um you know i can scale the company because i am paying myself a realistic wage and my
company is working on strong enough margins that it will scale yeah so once you’ve got all your your kpis in place
throw more money at your marketing but obviously watch it because um you know things do not scale linear so
the more money you throw advertising yeah you will see a drop off in performance but that’s why we monitor our kpis you know every day every week
every month well hopefully with all this advertising and monitoring we are getting good new business and the owner
can only do so much so he’s hiring people to help him price new jobs
how do we ensure that those people that are doing the contracts that are speaking
with the customers have all the information that they need so they’re pricing things properly you’ve got to
have very good sops in any business so you can’t leave pricing open to
interpretation a well-run company is a company that’s the backbone is sop
standard operating procedures that everyone is following and the information has all got to be
transparent but as a business owner you can’t go around inspecting everything that everyone’s doing and becoming a
micromanager and that’s why you have to have exception reports i.e you’re looking for the things that aren’t going
well so you’re looking for the gaps in the system and in your specific example here in terms
of pricing what we coach our builders to do is a post project audit where they
would bring the team in post project and that includes the estimator and the project manager two key people here
because we want to understand what happened to this job in terms of both the timeline and the budget and we’ll
we’ll look at obviously the overall budget but we’ll look at the budget in terms of cost centers because that information if
we’ve got a cost center blowing out that’s got to be fed back communication is key here that’s got to be fed back to
the estimator equally if the timeline’s blowing out that’s got to be fed back to the estimator as well because they can
make adjustments when they’re pricing jobs so you’ve got to have these feedback loops in place all the way through the company
well russ let’s stay on marketing a little bit longer you’ve taken us through kpis we’ve got all of those
working perfectly everything is is running properly and all we need is more business
what should we be focusing on well in terms of uh generating more business we obviously we’ve got to ramp
up our advertising but before we can ramp up our advertising our marketing machine has got to be
in place what a lot of people don’t understand is that the internet turned
the entire sales process on its head about 12 13 years ago because 12 13
years ago if you wanted to to buy a new car for instance or an appliance you
would go into the the car dealership or the or the shop and you’d speak to a salesperson and they would educate you
they would drip feed you the information that enabled you to make your decision and they were in control they held the
power and they enjoyed it but when the the internet went mainstream the the
balance of power was just turned on its head all of a sudden consumers became empowered they no longer needed the
salesperson to to feed them the information anymore they did all their research online and they went into the
car dealership knowing a lot more about the vehicle they were intending to buy than the actual sales person and it’s
the same you know for appliances as well people walk into an appliance retailer fully
understanding um a lot more about the different brands and than ever before saying when they go to build a house
consumers are now more educated than at any point in history and we have to
understand that as business owners because um we are dealing with a very different situation when they’re coming
to us we can no longer drip feed the information to them so the way we we tackle this in our marketing is that we
become the provider of information online we have to be the company that is
educating the consumer in the marketplace before they even approach us yeah before we even have that first
conversation so that means we have to get very good at content marketing providing good quality information russ
what are some of the most important things we have to get right when we’re creating this marketing process
well once you’ve got that content strategy in place which is you know a
very very big time-consuming investment etc that is the backbone of your
marketing but another couple of things that are important components are video
and so when you create the information the blog articles go on camera and actually deliver that
in a video because video is so powerful these days with social media it has incredible cut through and uh and it
also shows your personality as the business owner and it allows people to get to know like and trust you so video
is a is a crucial component of marketing these days so you’re creating content
you’re creating videos based on that content the next thing is you’ve got to be very active in your social posting
and that doesn’t have to be too hard because now you can create extracts from your from your content but you need to
be across facebook instagram youtube getting in front of your ideal
client because once you make this marketing engine work in terms of content that’s when you can start putting money
against it and amplifying that content creating more awareness in the marketplace and the awareness leads to
attention and attention leads to opt-ins to your crm system so you get your
marketing qualified leads but probably one final thing that i’d say in terms of a marketing tip is don’t neglect people
once they’ve opted in because when you’re hitting people much earlier in the sales process than maybe you
currently are if you’re currently relying on referrals for instance these are people that are further down to
sales process they’re very hot you’re now going to get people a lot earlier they’re going to be colder they’re going to take longer to get to the the sale
so the timing might not be right when they first enter your crm but don’t be discouraged by that we’re playing the
long game here so don’t neglect your email follow-ups this is probably the
number one mistake i see business owners make is they do a lot of things right in terms of their marketing they create all
these opportunities but then they don’t stay in touch with their their list we
call it and you need to be emailing your list at least every week we email our list three times a week people don’t
want to hear from you they’ll unsubscribe and that’s fine you only want to be emailing people that do want to hear from you but
do not neglect the people on your list make sure you’re emailing them every week because there is so much business
in there if you could only get one point across to our audience today what do you want
that point to be make data driven decisions because when you measure your kpis your key
performance indicators and you look at those every month every quarter every week every day then that
enables you to make data-driven decisions and again it happens to us all we hit our comfort zone we do something
well in business and we want to keep doing more of that but if we look at the data we will clearly see that the
problem has now moved to a different area of our business and we need to get to work on that that is a data-driven
decision so yeah make data-driven decisions well russ thanks for sharing all of that
experience i know there’s several people that can’t wait to start using some of
the tools that you mentioned today or or even using the ones that are already using a little bit better if they want
to find out more about some of the work that you’re doing how can they contact you the association of professional builders
so they could type that into a google search and uh our website will come up
and then they can um they can watch a short video to see behind the scenes as to what we do at the association of
professional builders and uh yeah if they like what they what they see more than welcome to to reach out uh
because if they’re in the building industry we’d love to have them as a member well i’m not quite done with you
yet i do have a few lightning round questions so put your seatbelt on for
these so my first question russ you now have the ability to go back in time and speak
with your former self on your first day as a business person what advice would
you give your former self uh great question i often think about this and and talk about this with an old
friend of mine as well because we both say the same thing if we could start again the best thing
that i could have done was to have worked in a growing industry because i spent 25 30 years
operating and growing a business in an industry that was in decline so it was it was ten times harder than it needed
to be i would have gone into mobile phones to be honest but anything anything that was growing uh ride the
wave would be uh would be my advice what are the last few books that you’ve read well if you’d asked me this any
other any other place i’d be struggling because my memory is not especially my short term memory is not
what it used to be but i’m actually sitting here and i’ve got my last three books on the desk so the first one is
powered by change by a guy called jonathan mcdonald loved this book because uh it gives us permission to
think generically in terms of our why and uh and it’s how we build a company
that will stand the test of time and it’s why companies like kodak have actually failed so that i i would highly
recommend uh for any owner of a of a company that is serious about uh being
around for the long term another book that i’ve just finished reading is the science of selling it’s quite an old
book but i love this because it talks about the sales process but it gives the science behind everything it’s a book
that pre-dated another book that i love called influenced by robert kiardini and i think uh robert coudini got a lot of
his information from this book the science of selling so i’d highly recommend that one as well and um and
one that i’m almost finished on at the moment i’ve got on my desk is psycho cybernetics and again it’s an old book
written in the 50s i believe and again uh reading that it uh reminds me of a
lot of brian tracy’s uh comments in some of his books uh as well so a fascinating
book on mindset psycho cybernetics but three great books there when hollywood decides to make a movie
about your life who plays russ yeah well um
this is going to sound a bit conceited i’ll tell you why when i had my distribution company back in the uk and
it was growing we we wrote a newsletter and part of that i i guess it was um
maybe in the early stages of content marketing i wrote i wrote the story about how the the company came along and
you can imagine we were dealing with market traders all these rogues so they just relentlessly took the mick out of
me for that and uh we’re laughing about the story saying this should be a hollywood blockbuster i know who would
play the part brad pitt so that’s always stuck in my mind so i’d have to say brad pitt
there you go you heard it here first so now you have the ability to talk to anybody throughout history who would you
choose and why i think it would be uh bobby moore who was the the captain of the england
football team in 1966 when they won the world cup because uh yeah he he’s never
struck me as a very outgoing person so i’d love to understand how he led
that team to the ultimate glory really you know his insights as a leader really
um when it’s always the easiest thing when you’re not extroverted and then this is the bonus question so
for an american what’s a phrase that you can teach us from australia
we hear this a lot in australia pull your head in and the proper use of that would be what
well you might have um a staff member you probably wouldn’t say it to a customer to be honest but you might have
a staff member they might be complaining about this about complaining about that and rather than buying into uh the
situation you just tell that pull your head in mate and get on with it so it
just means stop whining yeah stop whinging and whining just get on with it
there you go it’s going to catch on in the states you just watched russ i want to thank you for coming on
scaling up h2o and sharing all your wisdom it’s been awesome trace thanks so
much i’ve really really enjoyed it
nation i’ve always wondered what’s the cooler accent either the british accent
or the australian accent and russ had them both i i wish i could speak that way i just
think that makes somebody sound so intelligent unfortunately you the scaling up listener you’re forced to
listen to this voice but i’m glad you do you know it doesn’t matter if you’re a builder or if you are an industrial
water treater knowing what makes a business profitable is paramount friend
of show colin frayne who was on episodes 101 and 102 he asked professional water
treaters all the time if they know how much they are costing the company and
how much they need to bring in just to break even now most people he
talks to never thought about that before but i think you would agree if we knew that
information we can all do our job better we can all quote things properly we can
all use our time properly and probably most important we can explain our value
to the people we’re working with all of those things go in to play now in
the top half i quoted einstein here i’m quoting g.i joe now you know and knowing
is half the battle well nation we are in quarter four
and what does that mean to you are you finishing the year strong are you just
starting to pick up speed are you so far off because you haven’t
started any of your goals or tried to accomplish anything this year
no matter where you are you have to know where you are your starting point in
order to do anything about it now the last week in august the rising tide
mastermind held our first ever live event nation it was so
awesome now during the event we looked at our goals for this year to try to
make sure that we were going to finish strong and as we spoke about our goals i
did a physics demonstration to illustrate the effort we put in to
something what i did was i dropped a basketball and a tennis ball side by
side and of course you know they fell at the same speed and neither of them
really bounced very high well then i positioned the tennis ball
right over the basketball before i dropped them and when they dropped the
basketball propelled the tennis ball at least 50 feet across the room the point
i was trying to make is i put the same energy in both experiments but the
second experiment resulted in the tennis ball literally getting launched across
the room where the first one just gave a small bounce newton’s third law states that for every
action there’s an equal and opposite reaction in physics if something has
momentum it doesn’t lose it easy and we know momentum is mass times velocity
so what about momentum when it comes to our goals i propose to the rising tide mastermind
at our live event that the mass represented what we knew about something
and all the support we had around that knowledge
the velocity was representative of doing something about it when the group
analyzed why or why not a goal was getting crushed it was because we were
not engaging one of these items so as we come into quarter four
assess yourself and see what you need to work on do you need to know what to do
do you need to know how to do it do you have a group of people that can help you with those items either with
information with motivation whatever it is and by the way this is one of the
reasons that the rising tide mastermind members excel
over so many of their peers because they’re constantly getting that help
from a group of their peers and making sure they’re focusing on the right things now when you’ve done all of that
then ask yourself how often are you doing those things how much activity is really going in
to all the things you know to do to accomplish that goal if we were to talk
about water treatment we could have the best product in the world but it’s not
going to do anybody a bit of good if it just stays capped up in the drum the
same thing is true about our goals we can have all the knowledge skill and
desire but if we don’t continuously act on that we will not accomplish it so as
we enter quarter four think about those items and i know you can finish 2021 strong now i hope one of
your goals is to challenge yourself each and every day to become just a little
bit better to help us with that here’s james mcdonald
[Music]
hello scaling up nation the next james’s challenge as we grow as an industrial water treatment professional drop by
drop is
ask your customer what you can do better oh boy this can be a big one
depending upon your relationship you may be in for an earful or maybe not regardless showing that you’re open for
constructive criticism and then following through on the relevant advice shows that you care about the quality of
work you do and the value you deliver be sure to share your experience on linkedin by tagging it with hashtag jc21
and hashtag scaling up h2o this is james mcdonald and i look forward to seeing what you share
well thank you james and thank you scaling up nation for listening to today’s episode i’ll be back with you
next friday with a brand new episode until next week be safe take care of each other and have a great week folks
[Music] scaling up nation if you keep doing the same things you’re going to get the same
results and that’s why joining a mastermind like the rising tide
mastermind is a game changer in allowing you to achieve different and better
results you have an entire team that combines to help you
get to where you want to go the rising tide mastermind is the catalyst to your
next level of success to find out more about the rising tide mastermind go to
scaling up h2o.com forward slash mastermind