Toolbox Talk

The Difference Between a Tradesman and a Gifted Amateur - know it, be proud of it, charge for it.

Swipe my framework for growing your trade business - simple, effective and yours for free.

Sick of customers asking for a discount and feeling pressure to give it? Try Value Engineering instead. It's a real thing!

Are you like Jamie, a bottleneck? See what he did to fix it.

Have you seen this new way of buying steel and concrete?

I’ve continued with my theme of giving people certainty - it makes it easier for them to make a decision (to get you do their job). A guarantee is one way - (last week’s way). Price certainty is another way. If someone knows how much a job is going to cost them, with certainty, they are much more able to make a decision to buy. Are you giving people price certainty? I think you should try.

Are you using a guarantee to de-risk your business?

People are scared of hiring a tradie. Are they scared of hiring yours?

Do you suffer from Magpie Syndrome? It’s not a medically recognised thing but I see it all the time. It’s dangerous and it’s costly for business owners and you need to resist it.  I'll explain it.

Are you a global business? You could be, easily - which means saving money. Cloud services are how.

It’s easy to get frustrated when you’re making slow progress (or even when it feels like no progress at all).  But the temptation to chuck it in and try something else should (usually) be resisted. Sometimes the slow progress is the best way forward.

Growing and scaling your trade business means more money for you and a business that can carry on without you having to be there ALL the time. It also requires you to do things differently. The Tradies Toolbox Coaching Program will help you make those changes and the videos in this YouTube channel will give you an insight into what those changes are and (I hope) help you make some of them right no...

It’s hard to resist the downward price pressure if you’re not sure whether the pressure is fair or not. Maybe you’re too expensive. Maybe there’s something you don’t know or don’t understand and you’re out there in the marketplace charging too much. If you truly understand your costs, you’ve got part of the picture clear - you need to do profitable business, covering your costs and your overheads...

These days, though, outsourcing is your friend. The big guys have been doing it for years but it’s becoming easier for us little guys to do it. I’m doing it and you can too.

How much do your employees really cost you? I’m thinking in particular about the trades whose time you charge for - are you charging enough to cover what they truly cost you? Do you know how much they cost you - not per hour that they work but per hour that you get to charge them out? I'll show you how to calculate it.

You've only got so much marketing money - In this video I'll tell you how to make sure you don't spread it too thinly.

Make sure your customers know what kind of trades business you are - spell it out for them.

How to say NO to mates rates. Negotiate like a pro.

So many tradies kid themselves that they are too busy - too busy to make changes to their business, too busy to do the difficult jobs that will take their business to the next level. They aren’t. They are choosing not to do them and giving themselves an excuse for not doing them. Could this be you? Are you procrastinating but pretending you’re too busy? Procrastination is one of many things that g...

There's two ways of calculating your margin - mark up and gross margin. One of them is wrong, and if you are calculating yours this way, you are elaving money on the table.

Make them the things that are going to take your business further, towards where you wanted to go. They might be marketing, they might be a big quote, they might be hiring somebody new or writing job descriptions. Those kinds of things that you might otherwise defer because there’s so much other shit to get done.

I just wanted to talk quickly today about some “Find Me” marketing. I’ve talked about it before. If you’re a trade, people know what you do, often anyway, and often they know what they want. They know if they want plumber or an electrician, or concreter or builder. So it’s important that your marketing enables you to be found when people go looking.

I want to talk specifically about site-based marketing. I’ve probably banged on about this a little bit in some previous videos. I certainly talk about it in my workshops and I certainly encourage all my coaching clients to consider spending some of their money and some of their energy on this site-based marketing. And what prompted me was...

I don't believe in working when you should be on holiday and I always believe that life is more important than work but, if you get a bit of time to yourself over the holiday, then this is worth doing. It will make next year go a whole lot better. Watch the video or read the transcript and feel free to let me know how you go with it.

As a business owner, you have the responsibility to do the best you can in your business. I think you need to take whatever help you can. Getting a business coach is not a kind of weakness. Let me tell you why.