Contractor Cuts
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Contractor Cuts
Busy vs Booked: Why Contractors Work More and Make Less
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Every contractor is busy. Far fewer are booked.
Busy is running job to job all week putting out fires. Booked is knowing what your next six months look like — and being able to say no, raise your price, and sleep at night. In this episode of Contractor Cuts, Clark and James break down the difference, and how the rut starts before you ever notice it.
They cover:
- Ranking and pacing your leads instead of chasing everything in front of you
- The conversion-rate math that tells you exactly how much to bid each month
- Filling a slow month from a bench you built — not by dropping your price
- Why "I'll get to it next week" is how you go dark on a client without meaning to
- Telling your subs what's coming three weeks out, and why it buys you loyalty and urgency
- Creating an intentional office week instead of panicking through a slow one
- Measuring a good year by booked vs billed, not by how hard it felt
- The one change to start with if you only do one thing
If you had your busiest year ever and somehow made less money, this is the episode that explains why.
🚧 2027 Growth Conference — Austin, TX | Jan 10–12. Two days diving deep into your company — what's working, what's broken — ending with your 2027 blueprint. Day 3: hands-on electives like financial management and estimate writing to make it real. Early Bird (very limited): 30% off + 3 hotel nights covered. Sign up at contractorcuts.com
Contractor Cuts is a weekly podcast for contractors who want to build a better business — covering sales, operations, hiring, finances, and everything in between.
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Opening Banter And Setup
SPEAKER_02Welcome to Contractor Cuts, where we cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of growing a successful contracting company.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to Contractor Cuts. My name is Clark Turner. And I'm James McConnell. Thanks for joining the two of us again for another week of talking contractors.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. Blue-collar boys. Slinging up the belts, getting ready. Got 16 penny nails on my left pocket. I got eight penny nails in my right. I'm ready for anything. Framing, trim, let's do it up. Rink shanks. Those things don't come out of wood very easily. I hope I got a bag of screws because I might want to hold something a little bit tighter. But you know what? They don't have as good shear strength as a nail.
Busy Versus Booked Defined
SPEAKER_02So today we're talking about busy versus booked.
SPEAKER_01James, I love you so much. Thank you. Today we're talking the difference of contractors that are really busy and contractors that are booked up.
SPEAKER_02I don't know any contractors that aren't busy. But I know plenty of them that aren't booked. That's true. Book it TM T-shirt.
SPEAKER_01That's but we'll we'll have it at the retreat. Um when one-man shows come into coaching a lot of the time, and oftentimes partnerships and when you have a couple people with you, this also happens. But being very busy for this week, where when I've got a lot going on, I'm putting out fires, I'm running the job sites, and I'm not looking ahead for the next few weeks, the next few months as to what's coming. And so I you could see this pattern of I'm slammed with jobs. I landed four at the same time and I'm running site-to-site. How many estimates, like how many estimates have you done in the past couple of weeks? Oh man, I've gone to like seven, but I haven't written any of them up yet. Okay. Well, how long have those been sitting? Because those clients are expecting something soon. Have you talked to them? No, no, I just I'll I'll get to them probably this weekend. Oh, you're not getting that. Yeah, you're not gonna land those. And so the the pattern is you're so busy you don't write estimates or think about what's coming next or plan for that, or you're overcommitting to four or five prop more projects than you can handle at once for next month, but you're just saying yes to everybody. Yeah. Stack them, stack them, let's get all the work to make next month even worse. But then you get to next month and we're not able to build estimates for the following month. Right. And so there's this pattern of when I'm busy, I don't have time to look at the future and what's coming until I get too slow. And at that time, it's too late. Like, oh, okay, I'm wrapping these jobs up. Let's come up for air. Let me call that lady from a month ago, see if she wants me to actually write that estimate up. I I'm already working with somebody. Why? I thought you didn't even call me. Uh so how do we get out of that rhythm? Of I'm so slammed with work, I don't have time to write estimates or go to visit uh potential jobs or send all of the chasing down leads and follow-ups from estimates and all like all of that stuff that needs to happen. That when you don't have any jobs going on, you are perfect at that because I am starving and I'm gonna hunt something down. I'm gonna email them every single day. Hey, how about today? Did you talk to your husband yet? Okay, great. Can we start on Monday? Right. And so you're just on top of it because you're desperate. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And they're like, they're really on top of it. I really appreciate the professionalism. You're like, uh-huh. Uh-huh.
unknownUh-huh. Yep.
SPEAKER_01That's why. This is how I do it.
SPEAKER_02On professional.
SPEAKER_01Can I borrow $100? Uh, so trying how do we break that? How do we separate ourselves out from being busy and still stay busy, but also stay booked?
Zoom Out And Set Lead Times
SPEAKER_01Where I don't, I'm not worried about next month. I mean, right now, a lot of our coaching clients, we're planning four, five, six months out. I've got a couple of guys that have some larger jobs that are actually booking up the beginning of next year already. So, how do we start having that mindset of I'm going to zoom out, be a manager of this company to where I can make sure that we have enough jobs going and be looking ahead and giving everyone a really good experience and also telling people, hey, I'm slammed for the next two months. This is something I really want to handle. Is this, can this be a fall project? Can this be a spring project? Can we push this a little bit? If so, would you mind me coming out for an estimate in two weeks? Great. Now make sure you show up in two weeks, but that's all we got to do. You'll probably check in a couple of times. Yeah. But that's that's what that's what we need to do. Or I just I'm booked right now. I don't have a lot of space. Let's have a conversation about your job. Also, when I get that booked up, I can be a little more picky with my clients. I can bump my profitability up a little bit, supply and demand. And so I'm going to maybe I've got the next six months booked. I might have space for one job more at a time. I'm gonna, my next couple estimates are gonna bump up five percent in profitability. I want to make it worth my time to commit to those people.
SPEAKER_02If they are, if they're not willing to wait six months, for sure. Yeah, if they're willing to wait six months, put it at your regular profit percentage and book it. Like that's the that's the beauty of like it's crazy how often you'll have guys that they they have a bunch of work booked, and maybe they have like two months that are like really booked out really heavy. And then there's like month three, month four, month five, there's like a little bit in the coffer and we we we want to build on it, but we're happy there's something in there. Yeah, and then somebody comes in and it it's a sixty thousand dollar project and they're trying to book it for like that month or the next month. It's like kick it, kick it down the road a little bit. Not only give yourself time, like figure out what their needs are, but also if you you're gonna you have these next two months completely booked out. Could you put another $10,000, $20,000 on there? Yeah, and maybe that's the right move. But maybe the better move is to build, start building out those other months and don't just have a windfall in one month because the when you spend more time prepping, they're gonna get a better experience. And sometimes you need to force the client into preparation. Yeah. Because they they don't know. They're like, well, we're ready to go. Just like, what's the next thing? It's like, well, the next thing is about a month-long process of us like going through.
SPEAKER_01Oh, you're downtown Atlanta permitting. Okay, yeah, we're not starting anywhere. So but I can go ahead and get signed contract and be pre-construction and be starting to pull those permits while my other crews are executing these jobs. So we're actually still pushing it two months.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you can you can utilize your processes to help you manage your pipeline, yeah. Just like with the client and conversating with them about like what it's going to take and why I'm pushing you for a month. Yeah. Or why I'm pushing you for two months is because number one, I've got a lot of work going on. I could fit you in, but I think it would be better for us to like do all of the things that we need to do on the front end. Yeah. And that's going to take about a month and a half. And I'd really, honestly, I want some room for margin. So two months from now, I think is a good starting point.
SPEAKER_01We we have a uh I have a client I coach that is up north where it gets very cold. And he's pretty booked right now. Canada? No, not that far north. Uh he's he's really booked. Like calendar is booked for the next six months through the end of the year, like good with jobs. Um, we're looking at January, February right now, talking about, okay, how do we, how do we keep those? How do we, you know, are do we are we hiring right now because we've got so much work that we can train another project manager to come in? Like we're having all those conversations. But what we've started doing is he does a lot of decks. And so what we're doing is calling through the deck leads and saying, hey, I know you want to do decks. Uh I know you have a deck that you need to get done. I'm gonna give you a discount. If we can go ahead and pour the footers by October, then we're gonna build the deck in January because we the pouring footers and digging into the earth when it's frozen is so much harder. Yeah, it's not worth the it's the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Um, but if we can go ahead and get the deck started in October, let's do your footings and then we're gonna come back out in January and get the whole thing constructed. They're like, that's great, that's perfect. That's actually better because we're gonna be gone in the winter. We're gonna, you know, snowbirds, we go down to Florida during the winter time. So that'd be perfect for y'all to do at that time. Yeah. Right. But we're gonna go ahead. If I'm if I'm not looking up till December and be like, okay, let's land that deck job. Well, we can't do footings. We can't, like, there's there's certain things weather-wise that we can't do.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, so it really helps. And you don't know how well you sleep at night until you get a you look at your projections and you got six months of work booked. And you're like, oh, okay. I'm out of desperation mode. I'm out of paycheck to paycheck mode. And now let's stay out of it. Let's keep booked. Every single month, we're booking for the end month that we're that we have space for.
The Busy Versus Booked Checklist
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, all right. So let's let's go through this. We've we've split this out to where it's like what a busy person does versus what a booked person does. And for us, again, we're defining those as busy as I got this week slammed, booked is I've got a couple months booked up and I know what's coming up. I'm very busy this week, but I'm also have capacity to the maturity in running a business to be able to say, hey, I'm carving out three, uh, three different appointments this week, three two-hour appointments that I'm putting on my calendar because I gotta get these estimates done because I gotta be filling up three months from now. And so how do we keep those focused and stay booked instead of just I'm busy this week and I'm slammed this week and we'll figure out next week on Monday. Um, right?
SPEAKER_02Always busy, never booked. That's right. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. All right, so let's run through some of these. Um give a mouse a cookie.
SPEAKER_01Busy knows what he's doing this week. And we just covered this one. Book knows what he's doing in six weeks, right? If I can call you up and say, hey, let's look at your jobs, what do you got for the next six weeks? And you can say, let's talk through them. Okay, this job I'm doing this, and we've got a way that we're if you've got our software, we can pull up the software and look through it. We can look at your calendar and the software. Um, but we can really understand what's coming up. Um, we've got a projections worksheet we do with most of our coaching clients where we're looking at what jobs are landing, what months they're gonna be invoicing and and all that stuff. But can you do you know the difference of now versus six weeks from now and how busy and who's who's gonna be working? Uh that's that's a big difference. Um jump into any of these if you want.
Stop Low-Value Busywork
SPEAKER_02Well, busy honestly, the the whole premise of it in my mind is like busy. You can be busy and not be doing anything. Yeah, you can fill your calendar up with any number of things. Job site visits daily to every job, but to be booked, you need to be busy with the right things. Yeah, you need to be proactively putting the right things on your calendar, and not just putting them on your calendar, but doing them. Yeah. And those things are going to eventually have your calendar booked. But like you you can like, yeah, just like you said, you can go to the you can go to Home Depot five times, six times, eight times a week, and you're gonna be pretty busy because you're spending three, four hours a day doing that. Yeah. But that'll never get you booked because you're no one else is gonna be doing the work to fill the coffers. It's your job.
SPEAKER_01I I've got again another coaching guy that it's been more than six months and he's still running materials and sometimes picking up a hammer. Um, and the conversation keeps going back to how much do you want to pay yourself in this company? He's like, I'd love to be pulling 150 a year in with what I'm doing. I'm like, Do you think material runners make 150 a year? Like, you're you're making you're doing $30 an hour work, you're doing $20 an hour work running materials, but wanting to get paid $120 an hour. And that's doesn't that doesn't work. Like you're gonna have to make up that money somewhere else because you're you're paying you're you can't pay a materials runner $150 a year. Right. And so the the mindset of my time is more valuable because I need to spend it making money for the company, not exchanging my time for money and not just be busy and running around and jump in jumping in the truck whenever I can. But how do we start really being a general manager of this company and looking at it to say, okay, what where do where should I best invest my time so I could be making $250 next year? Um let me go
Rank Leads And Pace Estimates
SPEAKER_01over another one. By and this is one that I love. A busy contractor sells everything in front of them. A booked ranks their opportunities and paces them out. Kind of what we started talking about. Like, what's the most important? I like that one. What's what is the the most important? What is in my wheelhouse? What's you know, I I've got a new construction, I've never done new construction, but I do a ton of additions. I might go after the $200,000 addition a lot harder than I'm going after the $2 million new construction because I'm probably not going to compete with the guys that they're bidding with. Right. And so how do we weigh those opportunities? How do we rank who we're gonna go after and where we want to spend more time? Because if you're busy, you don't have three hours a day to just sit and go through and write a bunch of estimates. This is part of our desk estimate process. This is part of our intake process. We want to be able to be busy enough and have enough leads coming in that each of these phases, I'm I'm I'm disqualifying myself in the in the running to do that work. Hey, that client, they got a $5,000 budget for a $20,000 job. I'm gonna step out of this one. I'm not gonna waste my time writing this up. I'm uh, you know, from the intake call. So I'm gonna let them know, like, hey, honestly, I would love to take your job on, but I am absolutely busy right now and I don't think I've got the capacity and treat my my current clients well to say yes to your project. So it's probably not I don't want to waste your time going through the bidding process with you. I want you to. I understand that. I understand that. I mean, if you want to, it's $180 an hour and we can build some estimates together, but I don't No one else is charging me for that, but I want you to do it. I like you. I like the cut of your gym. I want you to do the job.
SPEAKER_02You're hired.
SPEAKER_01So ranking those and and eliminating them. I think pacing them out also, like I said, of the best thing you can do for a client is say, hey, this week is absolute bonkers. Uh, would you mind? Is it gonna harm the process if we wait till next Thursday to for me to come out on site? No, that's fine. And we're not even gonna make a decision till next month. Cool. No, no problem. Uh let me get that on the schedule. And I'm pushing stuff out, I'm building things out, and I'm pacing out when I'm gonna be doing my estimates and how many I need to be doing.
Use Conversion Rate And Bid Targets
SPEAKER_01What one data point you need to get to? Conversion rate. I land 80% of my jobs. I land 62% of my jobs.
SPEAKER_02I land 80% after desk estimates. And like there's a whole bunch of different numbers that'd be fun to find.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So all of those also will give you a number of how many estimates you got to do a week. If you're an 80% close ratio and I need to land, I've got like one thing that I literally start doing with another coaching client. I keep talking about coaching clients, but we I stopped measuring what he was invoicing each month because he has he like he does he doesn't do our weekly invoicing. He does like large front end, large middle, large end. And so like his his uh data was like this month he invoiced 300 grand, the next month he invoiced 28,000, the next month he did 240. And it was all over the place because it wasn't measuring the amount of work he was doing, it was just measuring when he chunked out these large invoices. So we looked at two things. Number one, we looked at the labor he was paying out weekly, because he was paying his subs weekly. And so I was like the the labor that you're paying out is equivalent to the uh amount of work being completed. So that's that was our first kind of low water mark. Like, let's look at look, let's look at where the money's coming out of. Number two, though, that I I we really changed his his uh what we were our goals were is I you're landing, he lands more than 80%. I was like, let's call it 80%. You need to bid this month whatever we need to be making each month. If I bid that amount every single month, I will have enough of a pipeline of jobs to do it. So, how do we say yes or no to jobs? Well, I need to, number sake, I need to do $100,000 a month. I got an 80% land ratio. Let's round that, round some numbers and say I need to be bidding $120,000 a month to land $100 a month. So his high watermark on that one is how many bids have you done and what's the pipeline equal to those bids? I've done $200,000 worth of bids this month. Cool. Don't do any more this month. You, you, if you land 80%, you're screwed because you don't have the cruise, you don't have the capacity. Right. So, like if we can measure out it's gonna like, yeah, I bid that, but one guy starting next month and another guy starting in three months. Great. Well, next month you're gonna bid the same amount. And so it's it's looking at a larger picture with your estimates. It was that confusing what I just said.
SPEAKER_02I felt like I kind of went to No, but then on top of that, once you have that number, you can then look at your marketing and say, okay, how much money do I need to spend marketing to get 120,000 worth of bids? And that's my marketing spend every month.
SPEAKER_01The the problem is contractors come to us for coaching to understand the stuff. And the hard part for us is like, cool, all this data is great. You've got to run things the right way in your software to get the data to gather the data. So we're gonna fix this stuff, but we gotta have four months of data gathering.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, really, this is just about data farming and trying to figure out how much data. Now, stay with me here. How much data can we get? How much data can we squeeze out of this? Don't you have a podcast called data farming?
SPEAKER_01Yes. With James? You go ahead and do an ad for it if you want. I mean, for people to listen to. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Are you are you guys tired of not growing anything? Well, here are data farmers. We got all the seeds, we got all the irrigation needs that you have. I don't know, I don't know where to go with this.
SPEAKER_01All right, let's go to the next one.
Build A Bench Without Discounting
SPEAKER_01Um, a busy contractor fills the gap by dropping the price because they're a desperation mode sometimes of, oh crap, I got nothing next week. So they're gonna call around, drop some prices, try to try to land. I care more about making the sale than hitting my profit numbers because I got nothing because I'm I haven't been thinking about next month or next week. A booked contractor fills the gap from a bench he builds before he needed it. So I've got all these estimates out there, and I can say, hey, ah, three weeks from now, we got nothing. I'm looking at my projections worksheet next month and three weeks from right now. We we I got a 10 grand worth of jobs sold. Is everybody looking to do vacation this month?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Because it would be a great time. It's a good time to do it. It'd be a great time.
SPEAKER_01But I can look at that and and say, okay, let's call through what are our hottest leads and let's try to sell them and try to have figure out something that we can give them extra if they go ahead and sign for this coming month. And you call them up, say, hey, we're we're slammed right now, we're slammed in two months, but next month is a weird lull. I would love to get your job running. You know, uh, and I will cut deals at that point. And and again, I'm not dropping my price as much as saying, hey, why I know you wanted your bedroom painted. We'll go ahead and paint that for you while we're out there if we can go ahead and do everything else, right? And so I might throw something in, I might, but also that prompting of I got space gives it a little bit more from clients like, okay, cool. Well, I want to get in line for that. I want that space. Yeah, let's plan for that time. So I can call through my clients and start planning ahead of time as opposed to just, hey, I I got nowhere to be next week. Can you can we get started on your project? Can you give me money so we can do your work?
Track Jobs Cash Flow And Terms
SPEAKER_01Uh a busy contractor has jobs in his head. He's managing everything out of his brain. A booked has a tracker, dollar amount, and a month on every one. Like I know what's happening, what jobs when, where, I'm using my software. I've got projections laid out for the next few months.
SPEAKER_02Um The other thing that this what being booked will help you with is the if you have clients with different type of pay structure that you need to be carrying money in the background, you need to map that out. Yep. Because what you have in your bank account is fluctuating based on the projects that you're running. And if you have somebody that requires that they hold 20% of your invoices, or there's it's a lender that will only allow you to invoice things once they're installed, you're gonna be holding a lot more cash than you're used to. Yeah. And so you need to map that out with your other projects and see if it's feasible for you to take on a project like that.
SPEAKER_01I I remember when you were taking on that uh the our first uh veterans one that you were doing. And it was like, we don't know how the money is, but we know they don't want pay till installed, and also they hold back 20%. So it's a double whammy because even when they do pay a month later, it's only 80% of what we did. Um, and so the the plan was cool, we got to set aside X amount of dollars from our cash flow to cover this to break even, and then the final check will be our profit. And so we figured out that number before we said yes, as opposed to saying yes, and then figuring out on the fly and then being screwed and not paying guys, and like knowing those numbers and being planned with that allows you to understand what you can say yes to and what you have to say no to.
Plan Subs Weeks Ahead
SPEAKER_01Um, busy calls subs when he needs them. Book tells subs what's coming two to three weeks out. There's no better way to lose a sub than to not let them know that you need him till the day before. And the hard part is a lot of subs are fine working that way. But the problem is hey, I need you on Wednesday. Sorry, buddy, I'm already booked this week. Oh crap. Okay. Well, when can you get out there? Right. And so you're it works till it doesn't to just kind of let them know day by day where you're going to put them. Um, if I've got two to three weeks out planned and I'm meeting every Monday saying, let's look at the next two weeks of your jobs, they're not out hunting more jobs because they know they got work with you. And so A, they're staying loyal to you. B, they feel comfortable being here. And C, if they know what they're starting next week, they've got a lot more sense of urgency this week to get their stuff done or they're going to lose that next job. And so if I'm showing them what's coming, the A, I can get their buy-in ahead of time. So there's not any Monday morning, oh crap, that guy's not showing up because he's going to another job. And also, I can then give them some motivation to stay on their timeline for every single job because they're like, if you don't get this done by Friday, I'm going to give this Monday job to somebody else. Can you get this done by Friday? Yep. I will have all of it done on Friday. Cool. Great. Then I'll give you this other job that starts on Monday. Guys love that. And also then I get the accountability from them of like, I'm not motivating them to get done this week. They just know if I don't get done, I'm losing dollars. So I'm going to get done. Right. So it's kind of a twofold when you're planning a number of weeks ahead of time with your subs. All right. Also in the software, if you're planning, if you're sending work orders to subs, it builds the Gantt chart for you. So if I say, okay, my cleaner is going to be on this date, it drops it right onto the Gantt chart when I'm sending them a work order. So it really kind of organizes it, builds your Gantt chart by go ahead and planning out who's doing what and sending them work orders.
Create Intentional Office Weeks
SPEAKER_01Uh a busy contractor panics at the first slow weeks. A booked contractor pushes two estimates back on purpose to create it. I'm okay with a slow week if I'm planning for I've got three jobs starting the following week and I need to do a bunch of pre-con. Cool. I'm going to have an office week. I'm going to slow things down because I'm making a plan on part of I can't execute the next three weeks of this month without having a large amount of pre-con done. Um, so I need to, I need an office week. I need four days where I'm not going to be in the field at all, and I can just turn my phone off and plan out these next large projects we're about to start.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. What you need to do is turn your phone off, turn all of your social media off and become unrecognizable in one week.
unknownAll right.
SPEAKER_02There's two wolves inside of you. Whichever one wins is the one you feed the most.
SPEAKER_01It's another podcast you got to promote.
SPEAKER_02Understand that. Yeah. It's called man science. The wolves in me. The wolves in me. I got a whole pack of wolves in me, dude.
SPEAKER_01All right.
Measure By Booked Versus Billed
SPEAKER_01A busy contractor measures a good year by how hard it felt. A booked contractor measures it by booked versus billed. How much did I bill? How much did I book? What were my numbers? What are my profitability? What's my net percentage of profit versus my gross? Like all of those numbers are going to tell you if it was a good year. Most guys show up to the retreat saying, I was busier than I've ever been and I made less money than I've ever made. What the heck's going on? It's because you're saying bit busy, right? Like you're not booked, you're just busy all the time.
SPEAKER_02You know, as we're talking through this, um busy just sounds like you're operating out of a place of emotion, whereas booked is you're preparing and you're being more scientific with your time. Yeah. Like every one of these is emotional response. Sells everything in front of them, fills gaps by dropping price, just carrying around jobs in your head, call subs when you need them. It's all reactive, busy panics at the first slow week. It's all emotional triggers.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. No, I mean that's 100%. I have no notes.
SPEAKER_02I just noticed a pattern.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, and it's it's all reactionary, which is emotional. Like it's and that's also translates to I got three clients that are yelling at me right now. And so emotionally, I can't even interact with the next estimate. Like I can't even like get there as opposed to I've got a two-hour block Friday morning to build that estimate, no matter what happened on Thursday. And I'm gonna get, I'm going to be, I can have those emotions, but I'm not gonna let them drive my actions. I'm gonna be planned and and have the actions in place on my calendar of when I'm doing what. Um I think understanding how the rut actually starts and how it runs.
How The Rut Starts
SPEAKER_01Estimate turnaround start slipping. This is where it always starts. Is if I like one of my first questions uh in our coaching meetings that I have is how many estimates do you have on your desk right now that need to be written? If it's anything more than one or two, and they were the ones that I went to yesterday, then we got a problem. Well, I've got four, two of them were from last week. I just haven't gotten two yet. All right, that's that's a big red flag. What's going on? That's that's kind of my litness test of like, oh, things are getting crazy, things are getting sideways. How do we, how do we protect some more time? Um, pipeline dries up six weeks later, not next week, usually. So it's not there's not a sense of desperation mode to get things landed. It's like, I'm good, I've got a bunch of jobs. Yeah, six weeks later you get it.
SPEAKER_02It's like you glance at the calendar and you realize it, you're like, oh, I really need to get on that. And then the next fire pops up and you get invested in that. And then four days later you look at the calendar again and you're like, oh, we need more work. And so you panic work at figuring out how to do marketing, and then the next fire pops up, and that's how it sneaks up on you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's the I'll deal with that next week. I don't gotta deal with it right now. And though next week the pain doubles because I didn't deal with it this week. Yeah. And so it's like this kicking a down kicking the can down the road constantly.
SPEAKER_02And the can gets heavier, and someone keeps filling it with heavier and heavier objects until at one point you go to kick the can, and guess what? You break your foot. It's true. I mean, we've all done it.
SPEAKER_01Uh after you get the estimate turnaround slip, the fix nobody does is rank your open opportunities, keep what you can serve, and call the rest and push them a couple weeks. Yeah. I think that's like when you've got seven estimates unwritten on your desk, call them. Hey, I'm so sorry. I could some fires happen, I had to deal with it. I just want to let you know, like, my current signed clients are priority over potential clients. And I don't mean that insultingly, because when you're an actual client, when we start work on your job, you're gonna be my top priority. And so in this moment where I'm writing estimates for people, it's a secondary um concern as I got to take care of my current clients. Right? That's an okay conversation to have with them. I I would respect that as a customer to hear that from a from a contractor. Say, listen, if you don't mind, I'm gonna sit down on Friday and do it. Now, the hard part is you got to do that. And if you don't deliver on what you promised, it's done. Don't even worry about writing it.
SPEAKER_02Dead space.
SPEAKER_01You're gone. Um pushing an estimate isn't losing it. Going dark is. And most guys go dark on accident until it's dark. And I'll just call her tomorrow. Oh, I'll deal with that Thursday.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I gotta figure out how to respond to her because I have bailed on her twice now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And then it's Saturday at 11:45 p.m. And you're like, oh no, I never emailed her back. I never sent that to her. Oh well, I guess I can't. So it's not a decision to go dark from on, but from their side, you walked out of their estimate and were like, screw this guy. I'm never doing anything for him. And that's what they feel from you. But for you, it was like, I I wanted so badly to do it the right way or get back to them. I just kicked it, kicked it, kicked it. Now it's been three weeks. I can't call that guy back. And I broke my foot. And I broke my foot.
Don’t Go Dark On Clients
SPEAKER_01Uh, and then gap filling by discount trains your marketing on your new price or your market on your new price. It doesn't come back up. When you start discounting stuff, if that's the only way I'm landing a client is by discounting it down. There is no chance that I'm ever gonna get well paid on any job with that client in the future. Um, that's kind of I'm starting to set my pricing. And then it starts to uh like I cut my profit down to just to get land this job. Something goes wrong on the job site. Now I've got to hit them with a change order, even though it's kind of my fault. And it's just this ugly cyclical downfall because I drop my pricing day one just to land the job. So don't fill gaps by just discounting jobs down. There's ways you can do it of, hey, we're gonna start early. I love to get this going for you. One thing we've done is surge pricing. Like, hey, uh it's going into the winter seasons. I tell clients, is this something that you want? Like, I can give you a discount if you wait till the winter, or if you want to get done in the fall, no problem. We're just really busy, so I got to do our normal price. What does that mean? Right? Like, what's your normal price versus this kind of pricing?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But being like, I can be a little more flexible because it's easier to get guys to work in the winter outside up north because they don't have any other jobs to do. So I can build your I can build a deck for cheaper up there in the winter months. Uh so kind of having those type of conversations of of pricing.
SPEAKER_00Um James. Clark. How's it going?
SPEAKER_02Not great, man. Um life's been life's been pretty vicious. Yeah. Um no one's listening to your other four podcasts. No. I have like have everybody that's following me. It's my mom, my aunt, yep, my grandfather unfollowed me. I get that though. Which was hard. It's a it's a tough listen. It is a tough listen. There's a lot, there's a lot of gratuitous language. There's graphic content somehow. It's not a video, it's all podcasts, but it gets graphics. Rated X podcast. Uh I draw, I just do a lot of, I talk a lot about and then just like build pictures with my words. Perfect.
SPEAKER_01All
The One Change To Start
SPEAKER_01right. If a guy does one thing off this list, out of the things that we've talked about, everything that that what a booked contractor does, what would you be your advice to uh to change one thing today? Let's say they struggle with all this. I'm just I just head down and this is how I run. What would you change first? Where's the where's the first guidance as a coach um to get all of the stuff corrected by the end of the year?
SPEAKER_02Uh track projections, projection tracker. So which one uh busy has jobs in their head, booked has a tracker. Yep. Yep. That's number one. I mean, that's what illuminates the whole situation. Most people, if you have not done something like this, the first time you do it will be a click moment because you'll see like all your jobs, uh the months, and then you're like, oh, this is how we look at a pipeline. Yeah. If you've never done it, it'll it do it.
SPEAKER_01It'll be a click moment for you. We and we've got a tracker that we give to all our coaching clients that we share with them. We've also about to have it on the software built out where it pre-builds all of your projections. But all that being said, um start with an Excel spreadsheet. Put all the jobs that are potential estimates that are out there or jobs that you're running, everything that you think you can land in the in the rows, and the columns are gonna be month, uh month in and month out for this month all the way through the next 12 months. Yeah. And then just start plotting out this job's $80,000. I should do 20 next month, I should do 30 the following month. And it doesn't need to be perfect, doesn't need to be specific. Round numbers, round numbers, and and we're gonna adjust it, we're gonna massage it month in and month out. But I want to capture day one, what we captured with all of our coaching clients. Day one, what is your projection? And then day 31, where did you end up? And let's see the gap there. Let's start start honing in. Because if you thought you were doing 300 and you did 200, that means there's a hundred grand worth of work that your clients thought they were getting, but they didn't, because we're telling them this is what we're doing, and we were expecting it according to my projections, and then we didn't do it. So what's that gap? How do we start adjusting, start setting different um either getting things done quicker or changing how we write can charts? But yeah, I think you're right. Like building out, having your projections of what can be and what will be really helps. We we do any job that we think is 50-50 chance of landing or above, we put on the projections worksheet. And so we kind of manage 80% chance, 90%. Okay, this one landed, it's approved. So that one goes into my approved work column. Um, that being said, looking at any potential also gives you the decision making of, all right, we have nothing in October. If we can land this one job, we'd feel really good. So I'm gonna go after this one and I'm gonna make that person, hey, I'm gonna you mind if I come back over there? I want to show you some sample boards that I've got, but like whatever it is to try and give yourself a leg up because I'm gonna target these three jobs because they all seem like hot leads that could start in October. This other job seems great, but they didn't want to start till the new year. So we're gonna wait on that one. I'll send them an email, but I'm not gonna go aggressive because I'm trying to fill October right now. And they already told me new year. Yes. So it's it's I can look at it visually all together and make decisions around what estimate I need to double down. Like I only have so much hours in my week. And if I've got a healthy pipeline of potential work, I need to start picking and choosing and sorting out who who I need to go after and who I want to land.
SPEAKER_02If you struggle with only having a certain amount of hours in your week, you should listen to one of my other podcasts where I break down how to get like two to three times more hours. Oh, really? I I thought you were gonna push your yoga podcast. No, that's the seven. Okay, and that's uh that's on long form.
SPEAKER_01That's a YouTube channel. It is, that's right. But there's no video, it's very it's like a black screen on YouTube, and you're just talking people through doing yoga. It's it's an it's insane. Well, there's video if you go on Patreon. Okay, you gotta pay for it. That's right. Yeah. All right, that's that's what we got.
Retreat Offer And Next Steps
SPEAKER_01Um, if you want help with this, this is the I feel like we covered a lot of overwhelming stuff where guys are like, how do I do that? Um, I think this is part of this isn't a fix by tomorrow. This is part of the processes that we have to build for your company to where we start, the goal is in the next four or five months, by the time the January retreat rolls around, we have a lot of the stuff in place. So if you want to get started now, set up a call. We uh I've uh if you're coming on the retreat, but you're not ready for coaching yet and you're signing up, we we're gonna be running a promotion very soon. But it I'll go ahead and give it to you and we'll we'll announce it on this. If you sign up as a non-coaching client for the retreat, we are giving away three free sessions of sessions of coaching. So we're gonna do an intake right away, and then we've got some leading up to the retreat where we're prepping for it. And really, my goal is to get you on a really good path from now until January. And to be honest, by the time November, December hits, when everyone's starting to really get serious and sign up, we're slammed. So we can't give as much on the on those months. But if you're signing up early, you're getting in on the early bird special, we'll do a meeting this month and kind of say, okay, what's your game plan for the rest of the year? What's it look like uh going into the retreat and start helping you kind of, even if you're not in coaching, get that growth trajectory towards the retreat. So then you come on the retreat, really launch into the next year. So Clark, that sounds like a screaming deal. It's a really good deal.
SPEAKER_02I don't know how you're managing that.
SPEAKER_01It is costing me billions. Um, so thanks so much for listening.
Visit Contractorcast.com And Wrap
SPEAKER_01If if you uh want to connect and and hear more about the retreat and talk through uh kind of the pricing model changes per person depending on what they're gonna be doing and what course they're going through at the retreat, go to contractorcast.com. Free 15-minute call with me. I'll tell you all about it. Love to chat with you. And uh hopefully we'll see you guys on the retreat and talk to you on the next podcast. Bye. See ya.
