Real-Life Business Benefits to Optimizing Your Offseason: A Client Case Study

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm throwing a little something different. I'm actually giving you guys a little bit of a bonus. We just wrapped up a three-part series but I decided it needed to have more. I love real world, you guys love real world, everybody loves a story about how does something actually go into practice.

I was working out this morning and I'm thinking, “What story do I tell? Which story really relates to these three topics that we've talked about in the offseason and what we could be doing to leverage the offseason and really articulates how this would be a benefit?”

Just as a quick recap, what we've talked about is we've talked about grow or die like if your business isn't growing, it's dying. Think about just inflation. If you're not making more money, you're not covering your costs as well each year, therefore, you're actually probably declining. You have to have that mentality of I'm going to grow even if it's just by X percent which gets you over that hump.

But for most of us, we didn’t start these businesses to just grow, we have bigger ambitions, we’re building it for a future. We're wanting to build it into something that we can sell, that's going to take care of us or family and retirement. Whatever that is, it's not that we've built this so that we just flounder, stall out, and eventually die.

We also talked about decision-making and not just decision-making, but the symptoms and the side effects of decision fatigue, which is a major problem for a lot of us that are in key leadership roles and have that pressure of carrying all that weight. How could we take an approach to not just being decision-makers but strategic decision-makers?

In an episode right before this one, we actually got into it a little bit deeper and we talked about what is the difference between strategy and tactics. That tied in really great with decision-making because if we have a strategy, it's the key to really moving from decision-making to strategic decision-making, eliminating so many of those decisions, making it easier not just for us, but for our entire team to be more efficient and to make better decisions.

When you have people making decisions on your behalf, which as your business grows, you have to move towards that and we want to move towards that, it's really important that you give them a strong vision of the outcomes that they need to be moving towards and that can be captured in a strategy.

We also even went into that episode how you would actually distribute that strategy down into your company all the way to individual levels. That is a really great gem of information. If you didn't catch those episodes, make sure you go back.

But today what I'm going to talk to you about is I'm going to walk you through a case study, an actual client of mine, and I'm not going to share names or anything like that because we are a big yet small industry, but I’m going to walk you through and you're going to see how doing this work, when they have time, having the foresight to do this work, how it actually impacted a specific situation and the tactics that were deployed there and what happened, what was the outcome? How do we approach it? How did we also make better decisions throughout that process with that?

Let's talk about, first off, I want to give you just a token of wisdom, basically, it's one of the biggest mistakes that people make and it's super easy: starting with tactics. That's the biggest mistake. I would say that this was a great company. They had incredible people, they still do, they've actually had some really big, incredible, and exciting transitions in their company because they've built such a great business continuing to grow by leaps and bounds but also stayed really strong at the core. It’s a really great business that I love working with.

They have great tactics. They had great executioners and they were very lucky that they did. But everything really changed what we were starting with our early work, which we realized was a lot of inefficiency in terms of how much effort people were having to put in to get these outcomes.

That was really one of the main objectives on a very high, high level is how can we streamline all this? So many good things, but things taking way too long, costing too much money, really taking too much from individuals and distracting them from where they can be spending other priority time.

Here's the situation. They had an opportunity to do a project with a special system of theirs for a dream client, not even a Dream 100 client but probably a dream top three client for them. The project went incredibly well. Their team, like I said, they had great team, they worked really hard to get that opportunity, they worked incredibly hard to make sure that it would off that glitch, they had a lot of partners involved in that, they made sure that they had their best partners on it.

It was an absolute win for them. But it was years in the making to get this one opportunity. There's no profit really there. It was earning the right to have that next opportunity, which in our industry, a lot of us really do understand that.

They have this one good project and then here comes the opportunity. The opportunity arises that their main contact for this project and the person that actually manages assets on a bigger level for this company comes to them and says, “I really love this. It made my life easier. We're really impressed with everything,” but to really do this on a bigger scale, to put you guys in a position where we can even have a preferred provider contract, which just to give you an idea, they have over probably close to 11,000 physical locations that could be using this product across the United States.

We're talking about one project to all of these assets that a certain percentage of those on an annual basis are going to need this product or service or maybe other products or services that this company can provide. It would make their life easier if they had really good solutions to managing these products.

These people were not in the business of maintaining surfaces, they weren't educated on that, they didn't have engineers so they thought that there could be a really good partnership, but they also don't know what they don't know. They're a giant company.

Here's the deal. They were going to get an opportunity for the inside contact to take the presentation to the big decision makers, the people that can say, “Yeah, we want to do a trial run of the preferred provider opportunity where they are the people that we just call. They don't have to sell us every single time we need this done. We call them up, they put us on the schedule, and it gets done. Huge, incredible opportunity, game changer.

Here was part of the problem with this opportunity, as there is with opportunities, they actually only had two days, they found out on this about on a Thursday. As of Friday, they were trying to put the plan together and it was going to be presented in a meeting on Monday.

The other one was that they couldn’t present it. They cannot go into this meeting. They needed to figure out what could they give this person that they could go in and give this information for these people to consider this opportunity. It was probably going to have to be in a presentation format.

Very great and exciting opportunity, but sometimes the more exciting those opportunities are, the more challenging they are as well, and this presented some incredible challenges, very narrow options on how to present. It was largely going to be taken out of their control. It wasn't going to be presented by one of their incredible team members that had tons of technical knowledge.

We had two days over the weekend when I got this phone call I think on Thursday evening or Friday morning of, “Hey, we have this opportunity and we need help. What do you recommend? What do we put together? How do we put it together? We think it just needs to be presentation but it has to [inaudible], it's got to be so great, and it's got to be pretty short and to the point.”

That's the situation and the scenario. That's the problem that they were facing. Here's how we solve this problem and why we were even able to solve this problem. If you can imagine yourself in that situation, what do you do? You don't even have time to develop a strategy, you have to roll out tactics.

Here's the great thing: we already had done the first phase of my business growth strategy flywheel with this company, we had done the investigation, and they were getting into a really great routine inside of their business about thinking about investigation on their own.

The people on the ground were doing really great at sending all that feedback that they were getting upstream, to marketing, to sales managers, to those head people that were also helping create tools and assets for that sales team. They already were developing a really great system. It was new but it was far enough along that we can really leverage it in this situation.

We had hours and hours of actual phone calls with clients. We had some from this company and we had some from companies that were very, very comparable, and the actual decision makers in those roles that were going to be sitting in that presentation.

We basically could go back and look that we've already done the work to narrow down the highlights of that, create messaging based on those conversations, not messaging based on what a competitor was doing or what we think sounded really cute, but actual research, not just market research even.

We've done market research but we had actually already talked, researched, and had direct insights from those types of buyers and decision makers. We even had some from that company directly. We had this incredibly valuable asset that we can turn right around to and really pull some great stuff from.

What we decided we needed to do based on that strategy, we already knew very, very quickly the two outcomes that we wanted to try to achieve. We wanted to try to explain very clearly the differentiation that we provided over anybody else. What made us so unique from everybody else? What made us stand out? We wanted to align that differentiation with the problems that they were trying to solve. Fortunately, we weren't guessing those problems. We knew exactly what they were.

The next thing that we wanted to do was create value. We wanted them to be able to because for a lot of these types of companies, they understand that it's all about value to them, add value. Sometimes they care about the best price, this, or that but when we actually had those conversations, what we learned during the research phase was price wasn't necessarily the best value for them. It was limiting downtime. It was extending the life of that asset.

They had people managing the assets that weren't experts in that specific asset. That was just one thing that they were managing so they also wanted to borrow expertise and have really strong unbiased advice about those assets and the best way to manage those. We knew that those were the big value makers for them.

A lot of companies that they didn't have the research in place already, they weren't following this approach, maybe in an offseason, or anytime really, they hadn't taken the time to decide that they were going to grow to figure out how they can make better decisions on the fly because what we're doing right here is we have one weekend, and we're making huge decisions, scary big opportunity decisions.

What are we going to present? How are we going to present it? What are the few things that we're going to focus on what we knew very quickly, because we had a strategy and it was a strategy that was built upon research. It wasn't just brought out of the sky somewhere.

I'm going to go into this a little bit deeper. Like I said, I'm not going to give details but I am going to go into a little bit of what that looked like as we were creating that presentation. We had messaging elements. We knew what elements of a story that we wanted to incorporate into this presentation to make it slow, and to really help them process it inside of their brains.

That's all based on research and things that geeky people like me know but lots of great research out there. Building A Story Brand by Donald Miller is a great framework that we use oftentimes and I translate that into internal communication pieces, HR pieces, presentations, everything. It's really a great, great framework if you want to research that. We’ll include a link in the notes.

But for that differentiation piece, we decided we needed to focus on differentiation. But what was the outcome we wanted from that presentation? We can talk about that differentiation, but we wanted to talk about it in a way that it actually changed their buying criteria.

Not only were we different from all the competition, but we actually pivoted the way they think about their buying criteria for this type of business partnership that they're looking for and it would actually put us in an advantageous position. We were the obvious choice because we were actually designing that buying criteria, helping them design that buying criteria.

Incredible strategy and it aligned with everything that we put in place and everything we knew from the research. They were kind of foggy on what their buying criteria should be because the people making these decisions, this wasn't the only thing that they were charged with and they weren't an expert on it, they were looking for somebody that was an expert.

We had an opportunity to change that buying criteria based on our unique differentiation. That was one primary focus of this. Then on the other side, what are we going to do to create value to really [inaudible] your value propositions and all that stuff and people are almost 99.9% of time doing that wrong. But we wanted to show that we understood their pain points, because that was what created value. So simple.

It wasn't necessarily solving their problems during that presentation. They had seen us do that in a project already. But we had to reiterate to them that we had researched them. We had listened to them. We understood their pain points better than anybody else. We were able to talk about them and position them into that differentiation in that buying criteria.

Oftentimes, in your competitors, sales, marketing efforts, all of those things, even if you got HR talking to prospects or talking about what we think their pain points are or we’re talking about our features and our products and the pain points that we just assume in general are in the market, we know what assumptions are, we know what they make of us out there, and you're going to find probably 8 to 9 times out of 10 that if you really dig deep, the real pain points that your customers, clients, or partners have are not at all what you think, or you can find really, really unique ones that can align to your differentiation, or you can pivot to make sure your differentiation can serve them and match that pain point.

That's exactly what we did there. We focused on only two things in that presentation. We knew we could keep it really short, really sweet, differentiation and value, value of our knowledge and understanding of them.

This is what happened next. We did have to put in some hours over the weekend but we weren’t just putting together a presentation, that's hard enough, that can take a whole weekend, but we already had all the research to really support the tactics that we’re going to use.

We didn't have to go develop how we were differentiated. We had already developed that in a strategy, and we just had to execute it in this tactic. We also already understood the real value that we provided because we knew from them what their pain points were and we were very, very clear on what the perceived value of our unique business was to these people.

They had already told us themselves and peers of theirs had already told us themselves and we have validated that and supported that with some market research as well. It was absolutely doable. As a matter of fact, I think I put together this presentation in one day, part of the day because it wasn't about the presentation, it wasn't about the graphics, it wasn't any of that. It was about what went into it. It was about the words that we use, the story that we told, and making it very easy for them to digest.

We didn't want them to burn a lot of calories consuming our presentation during this meeting that we couldn't even be there at. We wanted to be so super easy for them to digest. Because like I said, we didn't even get to go in and present, it was going to be presented by somebody else.

Actually, a funny nuance of this is I recorded myself giving the presentation, not on camera, but I used my voice. I gave it to the company's sales team so that they could re-record it. Therefore, the guy presenting it would have two options. He could listen to that and then he could adlib himself and have the presentation and the slides there or he could play one of their sales persons presenting it.

I wanted to have that option out there if they were willing to consider it. We didn't know because it was going to happen on Monday. We couldn't ask that question. But it was easy for us because we didn't have to spend nearly as much time preparing the presentation itself. It was easy for us to give them a couple of options which felt really good to them. It felt like we were really going above and beyond to help him out and make it easy for him.

Later on, what I found out they did is they actually just played my recording, which was not what I intended but it worked really great because here's what happened, they nailed that, they got that opportunity and locked in a partial contract to be the preferred provider for that company. It was incredible in terms of the future of that company.

Just to reiterate, they had a strategy in place and that strategy informed the tactics. Think about the decisions that needed to be made during that weekend and the level of stress that needed to be really put out and the effort that needed to be put out, we cut that easily 10 times.

It was really, really easy for our team to put that together. It was doable, because those are the types of opportunities that we want to be prepared for and like I said in the second episode for this series, we don't want to default to the easiest thing in this.

The easiest thing would have been just to throw up some pictures and talk about the features of our product and all of those types of things that really they don't understand and they don't care about because they don't really directly relate to their real pain points, the real things that are helping making them make decisions.

But we'd already done the research. We knew we would have to go on it several layers deeper and we knew what our strategy was. We knew that we wanted to capture this opportunity. We can position ourselves to be able to capture this opportunity and we have the research to roll up tactics that were supported by a strategy.

If you think about this, what would a company that didn't have that strategy, didn't have that research, and that method for taking that research and strategy to make better decisions in place, what would they be doing in this situation?

Imagine if it were your company. Do you have this type of strategy in place? Have you taken time in the past? It seems like a heavy lift. Maybe the first time through, it's definitely a heavier lift than when you're just maintaining this approach to your business ongoing but they've done this.

Imagine if you hadn't done it and this opportunity came in front of you. How would you approach it? What would the tactic, what would the action or that product that you put in front of them look like as it compared to the product that we were able to put together to put in front of them?

What we want to do early on in this process, and pretty soon, we're going to talk about that complete flywheel: the investigation, the identification of things that need to be done, and implementation, measuring results, which we can measure results from those tactics with us because we can easily show this huge contract that we got and how it was going to increase profit.

We were then talking about we're going to have to hire more crews and buy more equipment and how much of that are we going to have to do, which that's a great problem to have. This was just a story that I wanted to share with you because it really hits home on everything we talked about.

Offseason is a great time to undertake this. It's just like a giant flywheel. It takes a little bit more energy input the first time you get that ball rolling but once it's going, all you have to do is give it a little push to keep it going and then in 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years, whatever those new opportunities are at your door, you're ready and you're prepared.

But not only that, this was a specific situation, a specific opportunity, but they were actually decreasing the amount of time it took them to close deals all the time during this. We knew our ideal customers where we were spending less time targeting other customers that weren't the ideal and most profitable customers and the best fit customers for us.

I say us because that's how I think about it when I have a long-term engagement. They’re a client of mine, they’re not a one-time customer. I always feel like I want to picture myself as part of the team and like I have stakes in it too. Anybody that works with you or supporting these pieces along the way, they should, they should be part of that team. Maybe they're slightly outside of that primary family, but they're part of that family and they're cheering for your success.

This is a great example. They decided they were going to grow up, they weren't going to die. They positioned themselves to have these opportunities and they were able to make very quick decisions. But not only that, they were able to make strategic decisions that got them much better results in a very short amount of time.

They couldn't pull everybody in the sales team in on this over the weekend. We did this with probably two of us working on it. Fortunately, they were able to tap me. But honestly, even inside of their team, they could have pulled all those strategy assets and somebody other sales team or their marketing team could have put something together as well.

Also, their tactics were educated and deployed based on strategy, strategy that their competition didn't have, research that their competition did not have. It was a really great story that I wanted to share with you to show you how doing some of this work now can pay dividends down the road.

Think about your own business. Think about what you would do if you were in this situation and you have that type of opportunity. Do you have the strategy in place? Does your whole team operate and live by that strategy? How do you attach your strategy to your tactics?

When the fire is burning, when it’s getting really hot, like I said, they didn't have much time and they had a very narrow window of what they could implement to present that to them, when things are really hard, is your team going to really be able to pull stuff together?

Giving them the tools and the strategy and the research helps them make better decisions and execute better tactics, tactics that save them time, save you time, save you money, and make you money, and reduce the stress that goes into these types of opportunities.

Sometimes these opportunities feel like a crisis instead of an opportunity. They should feel like an opportunity. They should excite you, not terrify you and make you feel like you're running around putting out a fire with only a cup instead of a giant fire hose. Make sure that you are thinking about what you're going to be doing in the offseason.

You probably should talk to somebody about what should you do in offseason. That doesn't mean that you're the right fit for working with somebody like me but we can definitely give you some tips and tricks and some ideas to help you focus your offseason.

We have some time on our calendar that we always block to talk to the people that we love in our industry. We would love to talk to you guys about your business and what you're planning to do in this offseason. We're always happy to share some resources and ideas and maybe even during that conversation, we can gain enough knowledge that we can start pointing you towards some resources.

Make sure that you schedule your time and that's at storybuilt.marketing/schedule. You owe this to your company, you owe it to your team, you owe it to your clients, and you owe it to your future clients and partners, the ones that are going to give you these opportunities moving forward. Make sure that you're ready when that next crazy, exciting opportunity hits you.

Schedule a time on our calendar. It’s storybuilt.marketing/schedule. Thanks so much. Make sure you have subscribed to The Contractor’s Daughter. Make sure you leave us a five star review and follow us on LinkedIn. We always love hearing from people on LinkedIn. That's where we mostly hang out. We would love to meet you, meet your company, follow you, and see what you're up to and how you're making a difference.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.