172 – Stop Working For Free, Time Is Money

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Stop Working for Free. Time is Money

In the second episode of this series Matt conducts with Farres Elsabbagh, they discuss the importance of time for all tradies and contractors out there.

Every hour of unpaid work, no matter what part of the trades you’re in, will result in wasted time and assets.

“Processes and how you deliver on your job is what really makes a difference”

In this podcast, we talk about how important it is to value your time and how to make sure that your customers are part of a process that ENSURES that they value your business too.

Having the right frameworks and processes in place when it comes to time management ensures that your customers are not wasting your time and you’re not wasting theirs.

Too often we hear about tradies that carry out free, detailed quotes, or work for ‘the love of it’. It’s not the way to grow a sustainable business and as business owners, we all need to start respecting time in every sense.

In the previous episode

We discussed the importance of marketing and how if you want to create a business that has consistency, you need to invest in marketing. Here’s the link.

In the next episode

We wrap this awesome series off on the next episode by taking a step further into real-world scenarios. We discuss what it takes to build a scalable business model that will get you to MILLION DOLLARS.

Stay tuned!

Full Transcription

TRANSCRIPTION PREVIEW

Matt Jones: [00:00:02] Hello Site Shedders and welcome back. This is the second episode of Creating a Million Dollar Design Build Business. I’m here speaking with my co-host Fares Elsabbagh, from Ottawa general contractors and Canadian general contractors. All the way from downtown Ottawa. How are you mate?

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:00:23] Good. How are you, Matt?

Matt Jones: [00:00:24] Very good. Very good. So for the listeners out there this is the second episode the first episode we were talking about how, building won’t make you a million bucks marketing will. There were some really interesting stuff there for listeners out there I suppose Fares’ certainly got some runs on the board when it comes to building a profitable business. His business runs or turns you know 15 to 20 million bucks a year and a lot of that comes down to his dedication to marketing. So I would thoroughly encourage you to go back and listen to that one if you haven’t. Because in this episode we’re talking about, stop working for free time is money. And it certainly will stem on from the previous episode. Feris, thank you for joining us once again. That first episode was fantastic. I know we’re going to get a lot of good feedback from that and hopefully a lot of resistance with people asking questions and wanting wanting to know a little bit more nitty gritty so I warn you you may have to come back on the show to answer some of those. However in this episode we’re talking about stock working for free and this is something that I certainly see relevant with a lot of our builder clients. It’s a lot of a lot of conversations I’ve seen within our group and within other couple communities that I’m in where the elders are trying to now start charging for their bids and charging for quotes and proposals and that kind of stuff. I know you do that you’ve got an excellent framework around it so I’m sure the listeners out there are going to grab this one by the horns so to speak. Are we talking here too. Again I’m guessing this is really directed at the business owner or maybe not the owner but the person certainly that is responsible for the quoting process right.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:02:12] Yes sir. We know the business owner or owner would would would probably find us very insightful to ask the matter the sales person in my company we call them project consultants.

Matt Jones: [00:02:24] Okay. So I guess really the bottom line here is what we’re talking about again ties into what we spoke about in the last episode a little bit but it’s really a qualification process. Well it it’s as much as a disqualification process. In my experience as it is a qualification process because when we’re talking about going down that path of charging for quotes and charging for bids etc. You know the people that are typically the ones that are going to run from that are probably the ones you don’t want to be working for it day.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:02:57] Yeah, exactly.

Matt Jones: [00:02:58] So is that how you look at it is it really like a qualification disqualification step in your sales process.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:03:07] I mean that’s definitely the first part. I mean after the lead comes in of course being able to qualify a lead to make sure that your time’s not being wasted is obviously very important. But you know I think everybody can relate in one of their biggest pain points being putting together these estimates and losing these jobs are not necessarily being guaranteed a job from all this from all his time going into building these estimates. Right. And these estimates and these scopes are work. Some of them can take hours. Right. So like they put in hours of time to potentially not result in business is devastating and this is not how you grow a business right. So so like as an example one of my offices the payrolls 80 90 grand a month. So if if 80 or 90 thousand dollars or my whole staff didn’t generate business or didn’t do anything for a month I just lost 80 or 90 grand.

Matt Jones: [00:03:59] Mhmm

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:03:59] So it’s like we had to find out how we we stop doing the traditional giving a free estimate process and what we realize is instead of trying to change a whole industry or a whole or how consumers really want to approach this industry we we just created processes to almost make them feel like they’re getting the illusion of a free estimate.

Matt Jones: [00:04:33] Right.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:04:34] And the way that works is I’ll give you kind of like a quick example of what a site consultation would look like. So our project consultants would go into the client’s home, they take a few measurements because if you don’t take measurements clients will be wondering why you didn’t take measurements. Although it’s not really relevant at that point they’ll take a few measurements but what they do is they actually go back to the office and put together a four five page project proposal that’s actually templated. So like this project proposals it’s all template it talks about how great of a company we are warranted or sales process and we just have this one small section that gives a brief description of what happens in the project

Matt Jones: [00:05:18] Mhmm

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:05:19] But we give a range. So anybody can literally step away anybody that’s experienced in this industry can step in a room and give somebody a rough range of what they expect to pay.

Matt Jones: [00:05:28] Right.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:05:28] So as an example if I’m going to go in and take a look at a kitchen you know I probably know a case is going to cost somewhere between 20 to 50 thousand dollars. But what I tell them in when they come and visit us in the office that you know we expect your project to come into 20 between 20 and 50 thousand dollars. But our goal is is to get them in design. Right. So with us getting them in design we actually get them now to pay us to organize their project. You get that you get to see how that shift happened so instead of spending three or four hours we are now spending 20 minutes and we are getting one step closer to the big sale.

Matt Jones: [00:06:11] Okay, and so once you’ve got them to the point where okay at any design what if they have design?

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:06:17] So if you’ve got a design then yeah we’ll put together a scope of work. But we

Matt Jones: [00:06:23] Do you charge for that?

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:06:25] Yes. So we do charge for that so we charge depending on the size of the scope of work about a thousand bucks. But if it’s a straightforward scope of work if it’s like a what we call arenaria that can remove and replace. Basically just an update of the finishes like there are no major mechanicals or electrical plumbing moving

Matt Jones: [00:06:41] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:06:41] Then we could probably put together those scopes of work really easily with a design in 10 or 20 minutes. Right. So our kind of objective is don’t spend more than 20 minutes for free.

Matt Jones: [00:06:54] Right. Okay.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:06:55] And if we can do that then we’ll do it if not then we try to get them to spend money in organizing the project right like a few things happen there. So not only are you not working for free but now you can like reasonably put a lot of effort into understanding the project.

Matt Jones: [00:07:10] Of course.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:07:10] You know like I truly don’t think that you know they say contractors have a bad name but I don’t think that it’s the contractors that are at fault for having a bad name in the industry. I really think it’s the misconception of how consumers feel like they should operate their sales process. You know I like a lot of these guys like I mentioned in the last episode they’re they’re spending an hour with the client taking a few measurements to put together the scope of work that typically takes us a few weeks to be able to find all the details

Matt Jones: [00:07:39] Yeah

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:07:39] And then kind of get it passed because and then get pissed because oh well you should have known you were here. But we only spent an hour with you.

Matt Jones: [00:07:47] Exactly.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:07:48] How does he really know if it if if you know how much details can you really capture in an hour

Matt Jones: [00:07:54] Exactly.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:07:54] Right.

Matt Jones: [00:07:55] I know one of our clients one of our mates here in Sydney he’s a builder and he’s been through e went through a similar process where he was. You know they do they do residential building a lot of renovations extensions that kind of thing and they’re really really good at it. Of course when you’re doing renovations extensions you know one of the bottlenecks that you come up against is of course the fact that you haven’t necessarily built the original house so you don’t you don’t you may not know you know things like foundations you know you know the way the things are built. The structural side of things you don’t you typically you mean you don’t go ripping holes in houses to find that stuff out of the quoting process that this kind of thing you find out you know you’re in the middle of a job. So

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:08:39] Yeah

Matt Jones: [00:08:39] He has to be very clever with the way that he communicates that initially and it’s communication like you can call it terms and conditions you can tell what causes it and call it whatever you freakin want but end the day like it’s the way that you communicate. I suppose that process and how you deliver on your job that really makes a difference because if you can say to a customer you know up front and he went through this process you know well look we don’t know what’s behind the walls and the purpose of us providing you this proposal is of course to give you an honest estimate of what we think it’s going to be like but if we run into you know if we if we have to be digging this out or dig in your new drainage in rock or whatever it might be. Then of course that’s going to take a lot more time and that’s going to cost more money and that kind of stuff. They don’t communicate that clearly and they take their time throughout the initial stages which then of course comes back comes back around like a boomerang. Right. You know when things do arise the customer is not surprised because they’ve spent the time they’ve invested that time in communicating. But one of the things that they that they came out that they met resistance with was because they were spending so much time like you know it might take them three four days to put a I won’t even say quote It was really like a project outline together for the client and often the client would just take the project outline and then you know they’ll go to the next contractor and say well you guys came in cheaper. Here’s the project outline from the other builder go and do it and it was like

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:10:11] Yeah.

Matt Jones: [00:10:11] What like. It took us three days to do this. We were getting paid for it. So they started charging for it and it’s been great since they did it because like you said in the previous episode you know if you can get a commitment from you or from your customer or at that point they’re a customer it really makes it puts a vested interest in them even subconsciously like they’re committed you know to commitment and like they found that was a really good turning point for their business because once they started charging for them they really did filter out first of all filtered out the people that weren’t willing to pay. But then it also put them in a position like you just said where you know they’ve got more resource. I’ve got some money in the bank so they can spend the time on doing it properly and they can deliver this amazing proposal and this project outlined which really is a Rumbaugh a play by play on the actual job and the way they sell it. And if you do the same thing they say well listen if you don’t if you decide that you don’t want to use it that’s fine you’ve still got this amazing project outline but if you do want to use this then we’ll just deduct that off the cost of your project. And so it’s kind of like a win win for the client.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:11:19] Yeah that’s funny actually because we do the same exact thing you know but we use our scopes at work. So I guess the project outline that you’re referring to we call scopes of work.

Matt Jones: [00:11:27] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:11:27] They go hand in hand with the architectural plans that we put together. So our architectural plans enable us to produce this fixed cost scope of work. So they kind of get both those there. So the design part we didn’t become a design build company because we thought it’s cool to be designers as well. But we did it because it helped us with our sales. It helped us organize these projects but most importantly it helped us stop just stop doing free work. And just like you mentioned we tell them look after the design process is done like you get the scope of work. Now this we we call the scope of work like Colonel Sanders match you know magic recipe kind of thing like secret recipe. You know it’s like it’s like it’s like we’re very detailed scope of work. You know it’s not like one of those you drop on quick books with like 5 lines like they’re like you know 10 20 30 pages. You literally take that scope of work and it’s broken down by construction divisions by each trade. And you can like literally probably manage it yourself.

Matt Jones: [00:12:27] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:12:27] But but what we do the same thing. So if they decide not to move forward on the build you know they pay for designing a scope work if they decide not to not move forward to build at least they’ve got this now that they can work with and if they do we just credit them what they paid onto their build.

Matt Jones: [00:12:43] Yeah

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:12:43] So yeah a few a few important things happen there and you know. And we call it part committed. I mean like identity when you’re when you’re spending three or four grand you’re not really part committed when you’re considering spending 100 200 300 grand. But but it’s funny because a lot of times we hear clients saying was I just really want to be sure I’m going forward with you guys on design because whoever I’m going with on design I’m actually going to go with on the PILT

Matt Jones: [00:13:08] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:13:09] So they. And we hear that very concerned a lot. So we know that typically these prospects know that if they’re going to be spending a few thousand bucks with us they really intend to move forward on the built

Matt Jones: [00:13:22] Yeah I think as well you know if clients are willing to spend a few grand upfront or a couple grand upfront or whatever it is typically the you know the big investment will come as a result of getting finance all that kind of stuff. I mean not many people you know will sit there having 100 grand on a Grand Bank. So that’s kind of the first step of their commitment that you know that that’s a pretty big chunk. You know like why. I mean that’s the kind three grand. You know that’s the kind of stuff that people would have sitting in their bank. And so you know that kind of that is a big commitment. You know when you when you when you look at it in that perspective I’m curious first how does it look when somebody comes to you and this is this is a really really common objection that we get or always say objection but conversation that we have. You know well you know if somebody is giving away doing free quotes then how do you how do you pitch so that you’re charging for it you know. So they know that you’re not there they’re comparing apples to apples. You mean like because they’re not like typically putting together these project proposals and someone’s giving a free quote. It’s like comparing apples to bananas.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:14:35] Right. Right right. Well I mean you know what I really feel like people respect the company more when they’re saying look we’re doing something of value something of high quality. There there’s a price associated with it

Matt Jones: [00:14:47] Yeah

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:14:48] And I think that they respect us more when we do that and it kind discredits the competitor that’s doing it for free.

Matt Jones: [00:14:53] Yeah

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:14:53] But to be honest with you when we showed them examples scopes of work with what we’re trying to build and when they compare it to their free estimates they usually you know the two products alone.

Matt Jones: [00:15:04] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:15:04] Our work speaks for itself you know in and out we tell clients all the time I mean really what the design does is allows us to put together building ready permit building permit ready drawings and that’s really the first step of your project. You know like oftentimes we have to get building permits so you have to have building ready drawings and

Matt Jones: [00:15:25] Yeah

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:15:27] If that’s the first step why are we going about it backwards. Right. So anybody that’s actually going to spend 100 200 300 grand understands this and if they don’t they’re just time wasters and we run away from them.

Matt Jones: [00:15:39] Yeah yeah yeah. It’s interesting because we just recently put. And this is a conversation that you know that I think happens a lot with a lot of our building clients or people that we project work they’ll get a lot of potential customers that come to them but just aren’t ready at all to have that conversation with them at that point. Like they haven’t got things like you know they haven’t got their. Council approval. They haven’t got you know all this and all these things in order haven’t got any drawings done lobar was good enough for me. They wanted to have a conversation around pricing when they haven’t even got all the stuff in order to do it. And that’s also a qualifier right. So you know one of the things we used recently for a client is we put a like a form on the website which asked them for these questions and they said you know David on this have you got these have you got these have you got these blah blah then. And then once the customer gets that form submitted then they can look at it and they go Oh okay well they’ve obviously got this they got this they haven’t got the. We can help them with this let’s give them oh let’s steer them at least in the right direction. So we’re making it valuable to them in the sense that we’re helping them through the process. So you know we’ve got a better chance of when they already have that will engage us.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:16:47] Yeah. You know what I really feel like having in-house designing in-house architectural technologists or architects goes a long way in a big part of stop doing stop working for free because

Matt Jones: [00:16:58] Yeah

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:16:58] You start controlling the buyer journey from the very beginning.

Matt Jones: [00:17:03] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:17:03] Right. So really the only the only disqualifier if you will is if they didn’t have financing ready as an example. But what we do in that case is we tell them come to the office that way we’re investing a little bit of time but not a lot of time right because if you’re going out on the road that could be ours. But really where we’re the the design comes into play is controlling the buying the clients the prospect of clients buying journey from the beginning because everybody’s got a contractor. Everybody’s got a builder and if these guys are going to do this architecture that architecture this interior designer then you know you’re you’re opening yourself up to potentially having these clients go elsewhere. Right. So for us it’s not necessarily a disqualifier. They don’t have plans or what not but but if they’re not ready to move forward on design then it’s a big red flag for us.

Matt Jones: [00:18:06] Okay cool. So in terms of how you deliver on this are there any specific tools or frameworks or technologies or solutions that you guys use to help streamline that process?

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:18:24] So so we use Salesforce and I don’t really recommend salesforce to anybody. It’s a beast. We pay a lot of money. We paid a lot of money to customize it. And I think we pay something like 30 40 grand a year for it. The problem is it’s like we’re so committed to it.

Matt Jones: [00:18:39] Once you’re invested at

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:18:42] Yes so committed. The reason why we went out Salesforce is because a number years ago we had this big dream about franchising everywhere. And in Salesforce kind of enabled us to do that. However there are some cool tools out there. I don’t use them but I’m sure they do. They work really well from what I hear from other people in the industry like the typical builder trender code construct.

Matt Jones: [00:19:00] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:19:00] But what we use really well and it’s accessible to really anybody is google drive you know like

Matt Jones: [00:19:07] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:19:07] Google Drive Google is amazing. I love Google Google. You know everything to us.

Matt Jones: [00:19:15] (Laughs) Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:19:16] You know just for

Matt Jones: [00:19:16] Collaborate on a google doc across the world together.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:19:19] Yeah that’s right. That’s so true. It’s great yeah for collaborative collaboration for it to be while it being in the cloud. I mean there. Yeah. I highly suggest that it’s very affordable

Matt Jones: [00:19:34] Yep. And so when you’re talking about I suppose you know creating these what do you call them again project? What do you call job outlines wasn’t

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:19:46] Scopes to work.

Matt Jones: [00:19:46] Scopes to work. How is that delivered to the client like is that in a digital format is that an. Is that a Zantop sassed product or is that you know is that like a PDF or how does that look?

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:19:57] So we currently have this like a pretty sophisticated Excel program that’s got like multiple tabs thousands of line items macros all that all that.

Matt Jones: [00:20:05] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:20:06] But we’re actually currently working on building it out into a web application. So it becomes a little bit more automated a little bit more efficient.

Matt Jones: [00:20:15] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:20:16] But yeah. Currently right now it’s in Excel to

Matt Jones: [00:20:18] Like I so we give that to the client you give it to them within like an Excel document order you give it to them in like a spreadsheet printer it all. How does it look.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:20:28] Yeah. So it’s just it’s just printed

Matt Jones: [00:20:30] Yeah

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:20:30] And it’s printed but we’ve recently actually

Matt Jones: [00:20:33] Yeah

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:20:33] Incorporated Docusign so

Matt Jones: [00:20:35] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:20:36] That we’re really trying to eliminate paper and that’s kind of like our new big thing because we’ve been wasting a lot of paper. It’s actually very sad.

Matt Jones: [00:20:42] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:20:42] But but you know we’re moving completely digital with docs I think is the great great thing about it now is like we don’t need to wait two or three days to meet with the client again to sign it but we can just kind of send it over e-mail and they can get it done.

Matt Jones: [00:20:55] So for the listeners out there Docusign is basically a digital document signing program so you can you can send customers a form and they can sign it with their computer or their phone or their iPad or whatever it is it’s brilliant. Interestingly actually only yesterday I saw a comment in the group from from Nathan Cooper and he was saying that some of the local authorities here in Australia are not sure if it’s the same in Canada but they’re going back to physical signatures and then moving away that they don’t accept digital digital signing anymore which I thought was interesting and kind of concerning.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:21:38] I guess that’s unfortunate.

Matt Jones: [00:21:39] I guess fraud maybe or I guess as people it’s not holding up in court. I don’t know why they would be going that way. Maybe I should research that.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:21:49] Yeah I know. That’s interesting.

Matt Jones: [00:21:51] But yeah I know I’m in a way which is we’re certainly entirely paperless Tradie Web Guys and it’s fantastic because I mean realistically as well everything we do is online you know our clients all over the world and it’s not it’s not like we’re going to send them you know a PDF proposal when they’re on the list on the planet like forget it like everything is done through e-mail except that with a digital signature click the button being done I think as a way the world’s going and it’s I think for the better part it certainly it certainly suits a lot of businesses perhaps from what I’ve learnt yesterday. Not all businesses but I was sort of surprised to see it regressing in that in that area.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:22:30] Yeah.

Matt Jones: [00:22:31] Okay cool. So yeah in terms of. Key takeaways like what. What’s a good framework that you could leave with the audience out there in terms of, stop working for free and getting paid for your time

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:22:48] Create a lot of templates you know like a lot of the work that everybody’s doing is is redundant. You know like it’s the same line items. You know the same presentation create templates for yourself. You know reduce inefficiencies by creating the same amount of work. If building a scope of work or you know a project outline in Microsoft Word from scratch every time you’re

Matt Jones: [00:23:11] Right.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:23:11] You’re not being efficient

Matt Jones: [00:23:13] Right right right.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:23:14] You know

Matt Jones: [00:23:15] So when you say when you say create a template I’m guessing you’re talking about like I have a template for kitchen renovations have a template for bathroom renovations have a template for home first floor additions second story extensions all that kind of stuff and then just just customize and modify the minor details right.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:23:30] Yeah exactly. You know what. Like home these prospects they expect you to do. They want to see a lot of value from you.

Matt Jones: [00:23:37] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:23:37] You know they want to see you do all this work. It’s really try to earn their business.

Matt Jones: [00:23:41] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:23:42] So the key is make it look like you’re doing a lot of free work without doing free work.

Matt Jones: [00:23:48] Yeah. Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:23:49] And yet creating these templates is a big part of how you can do that.

Matt Jones: [00:23:54] There’s a lot of I don’t know how relevant it is to in a way it probably is relevant to like to those bigger proposals that we use proposal software and there’s actually tools out there which will do that. So say for example if you get a you know if we get a client comes through that wants a website and we’ve got it within our proposal software there’s a couple of templates that we can use which based off a conversation I had with them like and select that template I can customize a few of the things within it. But the bulk of it’s done things about you know who we are what the job is what it delivers what it entails what the process is what we need from them. Frequently Asked Questions all that kind of stuff like that’s all stuff that’s you know typically generic that doesn’t need to be customized what needs to be customized is the specifics around the conversation we had. So you know how many pages the website might be or you know do they want do any content created all that kind of stuff that’s basically done and that drastically reduces the amount of time you know you’d spend. Typically I would have been spending half a day on a proposal like that maybe more whereas now you can kind of bang it out in half an hour get it all prepared and send it off and it’s exactly the same looked professional I can open it you know in their email. And it’s it’s like wow this is incredible. It’s got videos embedded in there. It’s got all these kind of crazy stuff. So it makes the tools available that can do that kind of stuff. We use one called better proposals but there’s there’s dozens and dozens of them. I know a lot of the building a lot of the building products do have the ability to send out quotes but I don’t know if it’s to the scale that we’re talking about. First I think like some of those are quite generic and they’re like you know like a one page kind of thing.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:25:42] Yeah like you know what a lot of a lot of contractors are still using like a quick books or like a fresh book where they build like you know their own quick little macros

Matt Jones: [00:25:51] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:25:51] And typically don’t like one pagers right. But I haven’t

Matt Jones: [00:25:56] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:25:56] I haven’t been able to see a tool out there yet that that kind of template these proposals. I mean I’m not really sure what builder trend or code constructors some of these ones they’re doing if they have that we’ve never really had to use it but that’s one of the reasons why I’m building out my Excel tool into a web application just to kind of take a job that

Matt Jones: [00:26:15] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:26:15] You don’t want like because we’re marketers first you know like

Matt Jones: [00:26:17] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:26:18] The guys that started like like me my partners were marketers. Right.

Matt Jones: [00:26:21] Yeah.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:26:21] So like like we took a very marketer approach to building this business.

Matt Jones: [00:26:26] Yeah yeah. I think that’s a smart way to look at it too. For any business that is not necessarily like you can be the best builder in the world the best plumber in the world but if you can’t market yourself then you’ll never make any money. So

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:26:40] And nobody will ever know about you. Right.

Matt Jones: [00:26:42] Exactly.

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:26:42] Like you know it’s it’s you can you can generate business and figure out operations but you can’t really figure out operations without generating business because there is nothing to feed it.

Matt Jones: [00:26:55] Exactly. All right cool man well look let’s wrap this one up. That episode was Stop working for less, Time is money. Our support for freedom is money. That was the second episode in Creating a Billion Dollar Design Build Business for the listeners out there I’m talking to Fares Elsabbagh. Fares is from the Ottawa general contractors over in Canada and we’re going to come back with a following and final episode which is going to be called Building a Model that is Scalable. You happy to wrap that one up?

Fares Elsabbagh: [00:27:30] Yeah, all good man. Thanks for having me.

Matt Jones: [00:27:32] Rock and roll.

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The Site Shed is one of the best online communities and podcasts for tradies out there. The free content provided to members is unbelievable - offering invaluable advice to run a successful business, and the community of tradies is truly awesome. Do yourself a favour and check it out.

Peter Cox Business Man

Great work Matt with all the podcasts and the site shed facebook community group. The amount of information that you can learn for free in this space is unbelieveable. It's great to see like minded contractors and trades trying to improve their businesses and also share ideas and help others. Highly recommend. Thanks!

Ben Hern Business Owner

I have been listening to the pod casts for a few months now, I can't get enough of all the awesome content that you guys provide. Especially when you guys deliver it from a trade perspective which helps out a lot. Keep up the good work and hopefully one day I can afford one of the trade training trips.

Ché Henton Customer

I own a construction company,and i love learning how to make my bussiness more competitive,profitable and how to better serve my clients. The site shed is a wonderful place to get invaluable knowledge no matter your trade .

Michael Mullinax Construction Company Owner

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