Unlocking Success: Sales, Culture, and Hiring Insights with Tom Reber

Jeani Ringkob: 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 where we delve into the world of pavement, asphalt construction, business ownership, and everything that goes with making your business and your life a success.

I'm thrilled to have you join us today because today we are going to be diving into the keys of success with none other than Tom Reber himself. He's a renowned author of Winning the Contractor Fight, a dear friend of mine, and somebody who has served our country.

In our conversation, we're going to explore powerful sales strategies, the importance of company culture, and the art of hiring the right people in our company. If you know me, you know I love all of these topics. Let's jump right in.

Today we have Tom Reber. I don't even know when I first saw you out in the world but I know we've been connected on the social platform as I've followed you for a while. First and foremost, thank you for your service.

Tom Reber: Oh, absolutely. Well, it was probably a year and a half ago or so. You were on my podcast The Contractor Fight. That's I think the first time we actually talked and then, what's the word, stalk at each other on social media and stuff. Yeah, it's been a good thing.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah, absolutely. I have tons of questions. I have a whole list of questions. We will be weaving some stuff in from conversation we actually already had pre-getting actually kicked off and started. That was super good. But you have also been busy since we talked because you have a book coming out, right?

Tom Reber: I do. It comes out in spring here of 2024 and it's called Sell Unafraid. It's in the final stages of editing right now. I think they're pretty much done and they're just waiting on me to answer a few questions and then we rock and roll with it. Yeah, Sell Unafraid: Unleashing Sales Success Through Personal Discipline. I think it's one of the biggest factors of success or failure or underachieving, if you want to call it that, in sales that nobody talks about is discipline.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. Nobody wants to say that word because it's the one thing that’s--

Tom Reber: Oh, no. Then you're accountable to something, right?

Jeani Ringkob: Right. I know you talk about integrity and discipline a lot in all of your coaching that you work on. I think that it just is expected that that would be a thread and a theme in the book that you discussed on sales.

Tell us a little bit more about when you are talking about sales with the people that you were coaching and mentoring, what do you see as some of the biggest hurdles that folks are having as they’re trying to, because I think a lot of us, in all of these industries, we have these different growth stages.

For a while, you're bootstrapping it, you're doing lots of things, but for a long time, even as your business grows and gets bigger, as an owner, you still pretty much stay integrated in sales, almost every owner in the industry. You may even be the one coaching your sales team or mentoring your sales team. What is it that you see with a lot of the service companies that is the biggest challenge for sales?

Tom Reber: Well, I think the number one thing that jumps out to me is that success is what we call an inside-out game. All the success you want starts with you. When I talk about personal discipline in sales, if you drop a rock in the water, where that rock hits, we call that a strong you are getting oxygen.

Get oxygen, workout, sleep, eat right. Don't be a knucklehead. Try to quit your meth habit if you have that going on, whatever. The stronger you are, the better everything else is in your life. Then the next ring of that rock comes out, we call a strong home and then our strong business.

The top performers that we've worked with and coached throughout the years, when they get that order of operation correct, their sales results are always way better because how you do one thing is how you do everything.

If you can't honor getting up on time, hitting the gym, controlling what you put in your mouth, taking your wife on a date on a regular basis, those types of things, the most basic level, how are you going to excel as an elite salesperson?

Even if you're a top salesperson in the company, there's always room to get better because what I found and what I've coached and seen myself is, man, when I give me priority in that inside-out game, I always reach a new level in my career.

When we get on the phone or do a workshop, sales workshop with people, one of the first questions we'll ask the room of all the sales reps, I'll go, “Okay, honestly, write it down, how many times a week do you work out? When's the last time you took your spouse on a date?” We do this little quiz to shine some light on like, “Guys, this is important. This is also why you're working your tail off because [inaudible] your family, and you want to be healthy.”

But so many people underachieve in anything, but especially sales, because I think sales is a contact sport. It requires stamina, endurance, mental toughness. You got to be able to reframe all the crappy deals with on a daily basis that comes your way and all the nos, and I don't think you could do that if you're not taking care of yourself.

To me, sales is again, one of those professions that I think your skills are perishable. In the Marine Corps, we go to the rifle range, we go to the pistol range, and we shoot, and I still shoot now. My wife and I go to the range a few times a month.

The more I shoot, the better prepared I am. When I'm not shooting, I'm not as good. That's why golfers go to the driving range every day because they're a professional golfers and you hit balls and so as a salesperson, you work so hard to have that sales call presentation, whatever it is in your industry that you call it, that's game day.

Yet so many salespeople don't take care of them. The typical stereotypes that you think of when you think sales guy, you think a guy eating a doughnut, and who's the pathetic guy on a rainy night sitting in the bar on the road and traveling and all that stuff from the movies.

I think you got to treat yourself like an athlete to some degree and understand the discipline of things like role-playing. Inside our community, we do probably 2,500 role-plays a month within our group.

Jeani Ringkob: Really? Wow.

Tom Reber: Every week, today, we have a live role-playing call, sales training call that one of our coaches runs and we have this whole belt system like martial arts, this many points gets you [inaudible].

We gamified a little bit. Because the best salespeople are competitive too. They want to [inaudible]. They want to get the next belt. To me, it's hands down just the discipline.

I'd say with that, one of the issues is that a lot of people, especially if they're a business owner and they're doing all the sales in their business, a lot of them don't see themselves as a salesperson. They see themselves as “I'm a concrete guy and I have to sell jobs.” They still see themselves as the trade or the profession.

I think you really got to take that sales hat, embrace it, put it on, and go, “Hey, we don't build anything or fix anything without a sale.” That's the number one role that I have in the company is either to sell or to be the champion of the sales and make sure our people are trained and stuff.

Jeani Ringkob: Do you find within your community, how much do you encourage, or what are your thoughts around that owner that is growing and adding sales team? What are your thoughts on that? Or what do you see in terms of how much does an owner need to stay involved in that as they're growing, as they're hiring salespeople?

Tom Reber: All right, let me address one thing here quickly, 90% of the time that people tell me they're hiring a salesperson, they don't need a salesperson.

Jeani Ringkob: Okay.

Tom Reber: Okay. A lot of people think, “Oh, this time of year, it's March right now when we're doing this.” If you're in a cold climate, you know that in March and April, your phone starts ringing off the hook and you start feeling overwhelmed. That's when a lot of people go, "Oh, I need to hire a couple of salespeople." When the rest of the year, there are not enough leads coming in and whatever it is.

When I say they're not ready for a salesperson, when you reverse engineer the math, when you reverse engineer and you look at their current sales process, there's a lot of waste in it, a lot of wasted time.

Especially in the service industry, the way somebody gets a price now is they call a contractor, contractor says, “Do you have a pulse and live in my area?” “Yes. Okay. We'll come out and I'll stand in your yard or in your home and tell you how great I am and write up this thing called an estimate. Then I'm going to leave it with you and then I'm going to pray to the heavens that you pick me.”

That's the average. There's a lot of wasted time in that. What we teach is it's going to cut about half your time out of the sales process. You're never going to go meet with somebody that's not already a good fit for you and you're not in the proposal-writing business.

I talked to a guy not too long ago. He's like, “Yeah, I got 83 bids out on the street.” I'm like, “All right, how many are sold? How much money you got in the bank?” He's like, “Well, I'm still waiting to hear.”

Jeani Ringkob: It’s easy to get sucked into that phase of it for a lot of people. I see. I will say I've found myself going, “Wait, I've spent way too much time with this proposal.” If they never see it, it doesn't matter.

Or I don't walk them through it and add value to that conversation. I do think there's value in a good solid proposal. There's certain elements to it, but yet you can template that and you can turn it in. I think this is one of the areas in a process where you probably just set a timer and say, “Look, it's better done than perfect.”

Tom Reber: Yeah. But a lot of it is on that initial pre-qualification call. The macro answer to your question is, as the owner, man, you have to be the champion of sales. You gotta be involved. You can't just hire salespeople, set it, and forget it. There has to be a high degree of accountability.

Otherwise, we have a sales team in The Contractor Fight and we are in contact every day, they're accountable to things they do, we're very on the ball with that, but I've done it wrong in the past too, where I've hired somebody with industry experience and you cut them loose and you realize, “Man, if I've created a culture where there's no accountability, that's going to be a problem.”

But most companies don't need more salespeople right away. I'm not saying you shouldn't hire more salespeople, but when you reverse engineer, like, “All right, how much more do you have to spend on marketing and you get the phone to ring the X amount of time to pay the sales guy? And then by the time you reverse engineer the cost of that and commissions and all those things out, what are you left with?”

We've found that it's a better place to start with your existing team, you, whatever it is, and refine this process to where there's no wasted movement. What that looks like is you reach out to the company, we're going to set up a 10 to 20-minute phone call with you.

In our process, step one, we call the motive. Why do you want to do this project? People buy for their reasons, not for my reasons. The room I'm sitting into my house is in our basement. It's about a thousand-square-foot area that we were converting into my podcast studio here.

I have a studio off site and then we have this here when I need it. My wife, amazing designer and things like that, she was going to do things here. So we called this company to do concrete staining in the basement. I wanted to rip the carpet out, put the concrete down, whatever finish.

Called this company, a guy walks in, stands in our foyer, tells us about his daughter's travel team softball or whatever it was, tells us about the classic car he's restoring, and all this other crap where he's trying to act like he's bonding and we're creating rapport.

We start walking down the steps of the basement. We get to the bottom of the basement and I turn and the only question question he asked me the whole day was, “What do you want to do down here?” I said, “Yeah, I want to rip the carpet up and do an epoxy.” Before it got out of my mouth, he cut me off and he's like, “No, you don't, you want the X 5000 flooring system and this and this and this.”

For the next 20, 30 minutes, all he did was barf all over us with all the reasons why you should hire his company.

Jeani Ringkob: You [inaudible] what you want, you want something else, but we have it.

Tom Reber: And then finally, my wife goes, “Well, how much is this going to be?” Now, there are so many things I can pick apart with this, which I do in the book, by the way. No, because I told the story, but when a salesperson hears how much is this going to be, most that aren't trained properly, don't control their self-talk, their negative self-talk, those different things, they make assumptions and they make stories up like, "Oh, she's asking because she only cares how cheap it is."

That's just one of those stories that you can tell. Well, my wife had $50,000, $60,000 to work with cosmetically down here. In her mind, she's just going, “Okay, whatever finish it is, I don't care.”

Jeani Ringkob: But I got a budget.

Tom Reber: Because we're putting in copper, we're wrapping the bar in copper, we're doing the tequila thing over here, blah, blah, blah furniture. She was just doing some math. She goes, “How much is this going to be?” He goes, “It's going to be really expensive.” We're like, “Okay.” He's like, “It's going to be, I don't know, $9,000, $10,000, $11,000.” I'm like, “So right there, you made another assumption that we would think this is expensive.”

Jeani Ringkob: So many mistakes.

Tom Reber: Anyway, I was bragging about my team here, if this guy had been trained by our team, first of all, he wouldn't have come over without having this conversation on the phone first. We would have sent him pictures or a video. I would have been happy to send pictures.

Now I know what we're talking. If he would have simply asked the question, “Tom, sounds like you're doing a lot of work down in the basement. What's the story?” if he would have just asked a question with some curiosity, genuine curiosity, and then shut his mouth, what he would have heard was that I fly my elite clients in here for coaching days and it needs to be sharp.

This is the big screen where we're going to look at numbers and some things like that. In the area, we're going to sit my drum sets over there, the pool table, we want the cool I-Beam metal base is what was going to go here. This is before this base was done. This was going to be a tequila bar with a black granite top and a copper on the front of the bar.

I would have talked about how important this corner and this part of the basement is visually because my floor and everything else needs to be on brand with The Contractor Fight, because I, on a daily basis, am in front of tens of thousands of people on lives, webinars, content, and this and that. So being on brand and making this part of the Fight was the most important thing and was my true motive.

Had he done that, I would have talked for 20 minutes nonstop. He could have spit out any price he wanted for the floor because I would have connected emotionally with him because he would have been curious, he wouldn't have been the know-it-all, and he would let me explain my reasons.

Then once he got motive, then step two is money. “Hey, Tom, I think I really understand what you want here. I've got one or two ways that I can handle your project.” “What's that sound like, Bob?” “Well, the first is, you mentioned the floor, the pool table, the painting, the copper, the tequila bar, some trim, and some of these things, so the first thing I could do is I can handle all of that for you with our team and our connections, take it off your to-do list, and do the floor. For all of that, you might be $90,000, $100,000.” Pause.

“Or we could just come in and bang out the floor for you for $13,000, $14,000, $15,000 and give you a great base to work with. Which of those conversations do you want to have?”

Now this would be on the phone, by the way, we teach people how to do this on the phone so I'm not driving to Tom's house in traffic, standing in the basement, tap dancing, typing shit up, sending it, waiting to get back up. We're going to know on that initial call at 10, 15-minute phone call, what's important to you, about what it's going to cost, and I'm going to get your true budget 100% of the time because of the way I bracket.

I give the high anchor, I give the regular, and I let you opt-in. Sometimes if somebody says, “Oh, $15,000 on the low end? That's ridiculous.” We got 17 other bids for $3,000. for this floor because people do that.

Then that's simply you affirm it. You go, “Yeah, I'm not surprised. Why do you think everyone else is so cheap? What do you think we should do next?” I'm taking control by putting it back in your court.

This process, and I'm throwing a lot at it here, there's more to it, there are other steps that we encourage people to follow, what's going to happen is you're estimating proposal, typing up time, follow-up calls, and all that, all that stuff in the sales process is going to be cut in half, the time that you spend.

You're only going to go meet with people that you know what they want, the motive. Not, “I just want my house painted,” but “My daughter's 16th birthday party is in three weeks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, and if it's not done, my wife's going to hang me,” that's a motive.

So when you get that emotional connection, then you could talk money. A lot of times, so before you go out there, they already know what it's going to cost within range. There are ways that we protect. If you get out there and you see a game-changing site condition, we teach you how to address that.

But what we see with this process is, guys coming in, doing $300,000 a year in topline sales and making no money to within 12 months later doing 2.7 at a 50% gross profit and they sell from their phone, meaning the main sale happens on the phone, you go out, you confirm it, and you write it up.

We've been teaching this for about a decade. You can get a mortgage on this thing. I can transfer money.

Jeani Ringkob: You can buy a Tesla in three clicks.

Tom Reber: Right. Yet in the sales world, I think it's so behind the times a little bit here where you got to go out, you got to touch the walls to give a price or whatever.

Jeani Ringkob: I think especially in these industries, when we're going out, we're looking at whether it's a paving project or it's a concrete floor, whatever it is, everything's a little bit old school, little behind the time, there's a ton of value to that. There's a lot of stuff I love about that in this industry, but I'm always challenging it too.

The question of when do you hire more sales or the salesperson, that's right. Are you optimized yet? Maybe you might even optimize what you're doing and you don't have a good process in place yet.

Tom Reber: Yeah. I mean, growing your sales team is no different than saying, “I want to scale my business.” It's the same thing. Well, don't scale a turd. You're just going to have a bigger turd. You use the word optimize. I love that word optimize, which you already have.

Am I as efficient as I can be in our current sales process? What needs tweaking? Let's get that dialed in, get the frameworks in place before we try to grow something bigger. Because again, I mean, I had a painting company a million years ago and we ended up doing the math and decided to train all of our crew leaders to upsell instead of hiring another sales guy.

That was way more profitable. Then our crew leaders, they're great people, they would take other appointments on the weekends and nights that we couldn't get to because they wanted to make some more money, but we coached them how to do that and started hiring a full-time sales guy. We were doing three to 400 projects a year.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. When you think about the base cost of the salary and the benefit, all the things, optimize, optimize, optimize what you're doing, test it, measure it, track it, question it. Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better way to do it?

Tom Reber: Yeah. We teach this, one of the metrics that we encourage people to track is, we call it the ESR, the Effective Sales Rate. If I sell $75,000 this week of whatever projects, a couple of different projects, and I spend 32 hours in the sales process, my ESR is $2,300. My effective sales rate.

This is all the time, it's a follow-up, it's type and crap up, it's drive time, it's standing on site and meeting, all these things combined, and what we see when people start implementing the process that we coach and we teach, we see that number double, because the 32 hours becomes 10 hours, 12 hours, for the same dollar amount or more, because when you also bracket properly, your average job size goes up.

One of the metrics that we follow is, are you and your team getting better? How do you know you're spending less time to sell more at higher profits? That's one of our indicators because how much time does the average salesperson spend with the wrong prospects and all that stupid follow-up calls when if you just had a conversation with somebody, an open and honest conversation? Which, again, there are so many things that feed into this.

Did you grow up with a crappy money mindset? I grew up with a terrible money mindset where I thought $500 was a lot of money. I just think if you're bringing that baggage, you're not role-playing, you don't know the frameworks to use, all these things combined end up in a bunch of wasted time for a salesperson.

That's why I said back in the beginning, you got to work on you. You got to deal with your self-talk and the consistency and following the process and putting in the reps so that when you get an objection, when somebody says, "Well, why can't you just come out here? Why do I have to send you pictures?" We get that from time to time.

“Hey, that's a great question. Are you cool if I share with you what our process looks like?” Then we map it out. A lot of this is the spirit of the conversation, tonality, empathy, curiosity, and what we found is that the consumer, the prospect is refreshed by this when it's done right because they don't want more people coming to their house and having to burn their time meeting with people.

Jeani Ringkob: And they want to take our time to meet you and whatever it is.

Tom Reber: Yeah, if you’re not a good fit.

Jeani Ringkob: I guess since I worked so much on the marketing side but I always talk about actually I'll be at World of Asphalt in a couple of weeks and we'll be talking about one of my presentations really has to do with how do we make sales and marketing work together.

I've been leveraging both of them because I grew up doing the sales piece. I mostly help with marketing now but I always have that in mind towards sales. I always say, and I think Donald Miller was where I came up with the original analogy, but my take on it is he talks about a plane and how your business is part of a plane. I like to think about the engines though, and I don't think I've ever heard him mention this, but it's like, if you have sales and marketing, it's like, do you have a sales team that's built for a 777 and then you have a marketing that's for a Cessna 210 or vice versa? Probably doesn't work very well.

But when you said something about the customer, the research shows that pre-COVID, people were 70% of the way to a decision about something because they were consuming content online before they wanted to have an actual touch point with a salesperson or directly with a company.

I think post-COVID that's probably accelerated. We've read that study. I think we're probably for around 80% and I think with the way technology is, the way content is being created, that's only going to accelerate. But our sales systems and mindset haven't really accommodated for that.

I think people would appreciate if sales caught up with the fact that that's the experience they want to have. Even if they're coming in and having a sales conversation earlier than that, or if it's a different type of product that needs that, I think that people appreciate you not wasting their time too.

I think they almost appreciate you qualifying them honestly and authentically and saying, “Hey, if you're not a good fit for us, I'm not going to waste your time coming out there. But if I have some other directions to point you, that's what I'm going to do.” That kind of conversation, I feel like it's the same mindset as saying, “I'm going to consume enough content that I'm pretty sure I already know what I want to do.” They want to feel like by the time you're in my home on something like this, I want to be pretty dang sure I don't have to have anybody else in my home.

Tom Reber: Yeah, I love that you brought up the content piece because that is a part of the sales process that I think a lot of salespeople go, "Oh, I don't have to do that." Again, I know there are different types of salespeople. There are people that are just fed 20 leads a day and they're just commission only. I know there are people that do some business development and sell, that whole thing.

But to me, you're either a true salesperson or you're just an order taker. A true salesperson to me finds their own leads. They're on the hunt. They're building their own pipeline. They're creating content. They're taking a camera out on a job site or whatever.

Jeani Ringkob: They're contributors to the company.

Tom Reber: Right, and they're going, “Hey, one of the biggest questions we get is when we do a driveway like this, why do we do this, act that, the other thing? Let me explain this to you here.”

Now, this is probably good to do in the long run, even though it could be another $5,000 to $10,000 more, but this is going to save the education piece. I bring this up because in our painting company back in the early 2000s, we started creating content, blogs, and all those different things and content has been my number one strategy.

I do it in The Contractor Fight. Let's be the number one educator in this space for the problems that our people have. The more you do that, you position yourself as the expert, you have less price competition because you're answering customers' questions, you're talking about money, you're talking about issues, all these things.

They're not going to call you if they're not cool with the pricing that's on your website or that you've done on social media or whatever it is. Again, you're saving yourself time by not meeting with the wrong people.

We talk about being forward-thinking with some of this stuff where sales is kind of lag behind. But I think the one area that we're trying to encourage salespeople to do is actually go back to more of a personal touch and have these real conversations where it's true, I can't overemphasize enough, it's true curiosity, you call my company, whatever I sell, I'm going to go, “Hey, Jeani, listen, I know this is important to you. Are you cool if I just ask you a few questions and make sure if I can even help you?”

You start with that spirit. We teach you how to have gratitude. Like, “Hey, last I checked, there were 600 other painters in the city you could have chosen. Thanks for picking up the phone and calling us.” You're just starting with a different tonality, a different spirit. That creates a connection between you and your prospect that your competitors aren't going to have.

They're going to make it about money, you’re going to make it about the motive. When you connect with the motive, the money's no big deal because what we hear in our clients here all the time when they give feedback is, “I really felt like Dave heard me. Dave really understood.”

A lot of our customers are dealing, I'm just throwing it out there, in the trades, they're dealing many times with the woman of the house. Last I checked, my woman wants to be heard, doesn't want to be dismissed, doesn't want some contractor guy coming in making assumptions.

I mean, you've grown up in the trades. For some guy to come over to your house, not know who you are and your history, and talk down to you, that's probably an issue. So, when you make somebody feel heard, everyone has that sign around their neck that says make me feel important, when you do that in the sales process, you're going to crush your competition, you're going to sell at higher rates, and you're going to do it in half the time because sales are pretty snagging easy when you take care of the basics.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. I keep thinking about the convert, the example you were using in your basement. I think you said your wife knew the budget was $50,000, $60,000, whatever it was, $60,000-$80,000.

Then you talked about the example when he was anchoring the price points, which is a tool, like, yes, you're offering [inaudible] things, but you're really also gauging. That might not be the only options, but you're really trying to get a taste. I love that idea.

I think it ties in so directly to asking about motive and understanding, letting them tell you all the things they need to tell you because if all you wanted was a floor, that's one story. If you're telling a story about the space, what it means, it impacts your business, and you're creating a space for people to come and thrive, to be able to focus and work on their businesses, it's like a shelter and a getaway for them, that changes everything.

That might in a good salesperson's mind, I hate these things but I just think then when he puts together the example of, “You know what, you've got all these things, we actually could just take that off your hands and we have some people we can manage and some resources, contacts,” whatever it is, all of a sudden, maybe you're willing to spend a lot more for that because nobody else has asked and understood that you're running a business, your wife has a business, that you have kids going on but you're creating this really great space and it's really essential for your business but so is your time.

All of a sudden, you and your wife might look at each other and say, “Wow, we hadn't even thought about that as an option, but given everything else we have going on, our budget just went up. We're really actually happy and grateful for that.” There are diamonds and gold nuggets in asking somebody to share their story.

Tom Reber: Yeah, and that scenario you shared with us finding more money for something is the result of trust going up. Trust is when somebody feels like they're understood, you're not interrupting them every five seconds in the sales. I've done that. I've gone into houses when I didn't know how to sell way back in the day and I would talk about stupid things like the size spray tip we were going to use to do the trim with.

I'll just speak to contractors, most contractors go to their comfort zone, which is technical stuff about the trade. You think you have to convince people to buy and win them over with, “We've won all these awards and we don't subcontract our work and we use this sort of paint,” and like, okay, all those things may or may not be important, but if none of those are the reason somebody wants to buy, then you got a problem.

So when I speak, I put this big screen up and I have been in business 20 years, member of this certification, this award. We do background checks, all the typical things that we all do. I asked the room to keep adding.

The question is, “Why should somebody hire you?” That's what I do, I forget about it. I don't put the slide up until I ask the question. I ask the room the question and they all start throwing out all these things and I hit the slide and everything they said is up on the slide, basically.

I'm like, “The problem with this is these are all reasons you think people should buy from you.” I had a woman buy a project from me that was four times the amount of every other contractor.

This was a long time ago because I understood that her motive was “Don't wake up my twin babies while you're here.” That was literally the only time that she got the sleep or the kids never slept except for like--

Jeani Ringkob: Twin babies.

Tom Reber: Twin babies. They slept, I want to say, from 12:30 to 2:00 in the afternoon or some crazy time like that. I'm like, “Hey, what's a good motive question?” It's like, “If you could wave a magic wand over this project, what would it look like?” Super open-ended, shut your mouth, and let them talk, and she's like, “Well, if I could wave a magic wand, you guys wouldn't make my twins up.”

Jeani Ringkob: When my kids were little, I'm sitting on the door. I have children, do not touch this doorbell unless there’s a fire or you're the police, don't touch it because I'm going to come out swinging.

Tom Reber: Yeah, I just said to her, "If you could wave a magic wand, you wouldn't wake your kids up. Tell me more about that. What's the deal there?" Again, it's being curious. Just be curious. She starts opening up going, "I've hardly slept since they were born. The only time they sleep is this crazy time in the afternoon. They're out like rock, and that's the only time that I can take a nap, I can wash my hair, I could do whatever I need to do, make a phone call," and they were driving her nuts.

I just said, "Hey, I got a crazy idea. What would happen if we made our start time later?” I think the kids slept around one, and then that way, we could start our lunch right around that one o'clock time when they go down. “I know there's ABC park or whatever it is down the street here. I'll have the crew go off-site for lunch. They'll take an extended lunch and we can do some training or whatever it is down there during the lunch break. When the kids wake up, you text the crew leader. They'll come back and finish the day out.”

I said, “What would happen then?” She goes, “You would do that?” I said, “Yeah.” She goes, “The job's yours.” I said, “You don't even know how much I'm going to charge you.” She goes, “I don't care.” That's what I mean. Motive is not always the money. It's the convenience. It's “Don't wake my kids up.”

Another story was, I had a woman whose number one criteria for hiring a contractor was her dad had emphysema and there couldn't be any dust. There was drywall repair that had to be done, sanding, and all these different things.

I was the only painter that got that information out of her because I asked the right questions about, “Tell me what's going on in the house when we're doing this project. Is there anything that we're going to do that's going to jazz up or mess up the flow of your life here?” She's like, “That's a great question. My dad, my father-in-law,” whoever it was, “has an emphysema.” It opened up the whole thing.

Jeani Ringkob: They're really nervous about it.

Tom Reber: Yeah. So we took extra measures and this and that, where all my other competitors were just about the X 5000 spray tip. “Here's the price and I hope they hire me.”

Jeani Ringkob: And I won that award.

Tom Reber: Yeah.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. I always tell people when we're looking at websites and stuff like that, or creating a piece of content and the job description, I'm actually doing a lot of work right now on workforce strategy, recruitment, and development, because that's a big bottleneck. You can leverage a lot of marketing strategy there.

When we look at job descriptions and stuff like that, I always tell people, “You haven't earned the right to talk about your business yet. You haven't earned the right to talk about your accomplishments, your awards, or how you're better than them. They woke up this morning with a problem. Until you prove that you understand it, and empathize with it, you build up to that.”

I always say job descriptions, they all start with like, “We've been in business for X numbers of years.”

Tom Reber: I don't care.

Jeani Ringkob: You guys do that at the very, very bottom. If they've kept reading that long, then you're on the right to say that. That's great.

Tom Reber: Well, it's what's in it for me, right? If I'm looking at job ads or whatever, and career pages on websites and stuff, I want something that's going to draw me in just like a good marketing message.

We had good friends, they have a big water feature business out on the East Coast and then create these gorgeous swim ponds and backyard ponds and this and that. They ran an ad and they needed a heavy equipment guy who run in the machine all day.

They spent an afternoon trying to figure out, “Okay, who could be ideal candidates to come work for us?” One of the things that came up was guys that work for utility companies. They run heavy machinery.

I'm going to butcher the headline of the ad but it basically said “Tired of no one ever seeing your work?” Because they were digging these things and putting the pipes in and they were covering and whatever it was and they picked up a phenomenal form and type guy from that ad because it spoke to the fact that he literally would drive home every day and he would be like, “I have nothing to show for what I did all day.”

He wanted to be able to drive through town and point to something and go, “I built that, I did that.” That's what was in it for him and he jumped ship in a heartbeat and he's as happy as ever.

I come from the painting industry. I think the best recruiting messages in painting are not showing a guy with a roller and a brush. Put a spray gun in his hand. What young 18, 19, 25-year-old dude, for the most part, doesn't want to pull a trigger and get paid?

You got to make it cool, what's in it for them? I think that's where the trades do a terrible job of this hiring thing because number one, most people only hire when they need people, they're not always recruiting, they're not always trying to build their bench, and the other thing they do, this is back to this whole sales thing I'm talking about here, our pre-qualification process, we call it the ‎Shin-Fu, and there's a long story behind it, it's called ‎Shin-Fu.

You can Fu, what we call Fu, you can Fu potential employees. What's their motive? “Hey, Dave, you reached out and you applied here and we're having a meeting. Wave a magic wand over your ideal day at work, what does it look like? Talk to me about this. You mentioned earlier that your boss didn't take care of you. What do you mean by that?”

I asked that question to a guy years ago and he said, “When he hired me six years ago, he said in six months, I was going to get a company truck,” and this guy had been carrying around this bitterness for almost six years that he didn't have a company truck and that's why he was leaving the company.

I'm like, “So all your boss would have had to do is honor the commitment that he made you to get you a truck.” I almost lost guys because I forgot to give them an iPad. I promised an iPad and I forgot.

Jeani Ringkob: The little things matter.

Tom Reber: My point is by asking motive questions, you could really draw what's important to somebody. I had an employee years ago who we were setting goals for the year and we called in all of our individual employees and, “Hey, what do you want to accomplish this year and how can we help you get there, and this and that?”

Jeani Ringkob: Right. We don't do this in this industry as nearly enough.

Tom Reber: Right. This one guy goes, my partner at the time, he goes, “What would make this a great year for you personally on the personal level?” Great question. The guy goes, "Well, my wife and I got married and I couldn't afford to take her. She wanted to go to this one place.”

If anyone that knows Geneva, Illinois, outside of Chicago, there was a place or maybe still is called The Herrington. It was this really nice, bed and breakfast place. I'm from that area.

But anyway, he's like, “My wife has always wanted to stay at The Herrington. I've never been able to afford it.” My partner goes, “Well, what's it cost?” He goes, “That's going to be $3,000 for the weekend that I want to take her on and I just don't have the money.”

My partner goes, “Well, what if we just created a plan based on how you're bringing your jobs in on time and stuff that we make this happen this year for you?” They sat down, reverse-engineered this whole thing. He hit it within a quarter. It didn't even take him the whole year.

I want to say it was like 70 days, he hit the milestones of bringing jobs in on time and certain gross profit. He knew that every time he hit the job budget, we were putting $500 into the pot for him or whatever it was.

In 70 days, he was able to take his wife. You think that guy's not loyal, sticking around because you're helping him get what they want. That's all sales is, whether you're selling your stuff.

Jeani Ringkob: It's a personal touch. It was unique to him. Yeah, that takes some time, but if I think about the best companies and the managers and the supervisors that are leading teams in those organizations, they actually would enjoy that stuff too.

They would actually enjoy, or the business owner, whoever it is, the ones that really attract and keep the best talent, they actually would enjoy doing stuff like that and being like, "Oh, I can do this?" It takes just a little bit of time for them to manage that, to flush it out, say manage it, say, "Hey, whoever an HR payroll, we're going to stick this money over here on the side for this as a bonus or whatever, doing this over here." Not that much work really for the amount of reward you're going to get then.

In our industry, I think stuff like that pays dividends because what you don't stop and think about is we're a referral industry when it comes to best people and I know because we're doing these projects and we always do research. We survey, we interview, and we know friends and family are one of the biggest pipeline feeders for workforce and yes, you want to have multiple pipeline feeders for that, but that's also some of the best quality if we teach our people how to bring them in, who is a great fit.

We talk about that they're going to be on your team with you, this is part of just putting it in perspective for them. But imagine how many times that guy is going to go tell that story at a picnic or at the bar with his buddies.

Tom Reber: It is. I'm smiling when you're telling that story because I'm reminded of there's a period in our painting business outside of Chicago and mind you, we were doing 300-plus projects a year, we're humming along. We gave our crew leaders autonomy on start times, finish times, work it out with the client, whatever it was, we gave them that autonomy because they pulled us aside one day. This was interesting.

Our top crew leaders pulled my business partner aside and he said, "Hey, I don't know if you're going to go for this, but I think this is important." He goes, "What's up?" he says, "Well, everyone on my crew, we all have young kids, pre-school, whatever." He said, “Would it be okay if one day a week we started later so that we could walk our kids to the bus?”

I'm almost tearing up when I'm thinking about it because as the owner, I walked my kids to the bus every day. I picked them up from school every day. I was able to do all these things as the boss. My partner's like, “I'm going to do you better than that. You guys can start and wrap up anytime you want. You just work it out with the client and you bring the jobs in on time and everyone's safe and everything's cool. You do what you need to do to be there for your families.”

That one thing where then they're telling their other family members and friends about working at our company, because most guys in the trades are on the job site at 7:00 AM or whatever it is. They're sometimes earlier.

Our guys were rolling in at nine o'clock and they had breakfast with their kids, they walked their kid to the bus, they hopped in the truck, and they drove to the job site, and they were as happy as a lark. That word got around in our team group from those relationships because they were telling people about that.

Jeani Ringkob: They probably worked a lot harder.

Tom Reber: Oh, totally.

Jeani Ringkob: They knew they still had to get the job done. I feel like this is a topic that comes up a lot because when we do research on workforce, one of the things that usually always stays in the top three is they wish they had time for taking care of personal matters, watching kids' sports, stuff like that.

I know mostly, I deal with the paving industry, especially if you're on DOT jobs or paid county jobs, it gets hard, it gets really, really hard to figure out “How do I do this?” But I will say it's great that people are starting to have a conversation like, “Are there ways we can do this? Does it mean shifts? Does it mean this and that? Does it mean certain crews that have needs to come in later, both work later or earlier or whatever, and group them together?”

At least those conversations are starting in our industries and I admire the people that are willing to have those conversations because it is hard. It's hard in these industries sometimes, we have restrictions, you're going on, the weather is good, different things like that. But to just have the willingness to have those conversations and like you said, it's the motive again, understanding that motive.

What are the motives of your employees? Why are they grumpy? Well, maybe it's because they have a sick mother in the hospital they're trying to go see. I don't know. But if you don't ask, you don't know either.

Tom Reber: Well, I want to pull back and shine a light on what you're saying here. It's going to sound like it's self-serving because we were talking about my sales book. But what I want people to see is that every interaction you have with another human being is sales.

I encourage you to have the discipline to do what you're talking about is having a conversation with your people. What's important to you? Don't make assumptions. You don't make assumptions in the sales process. Why did you make assumptions with what you think your employees want?

Just the fact that you or another company is willing to have these conversations where if you sat down and said to your team, "Guys, if I could wave a magic wand, you guys could go to the kids' events, you can do this, I don't know what it would look like, but I'm open to having the discussion and figuring this out together,” I think if more owners did that, you would find maybe all the single guys with no kids go, “Hey, we'll work the later jobs,” or whatever it is.

Because what we found on our crews, when we gave autonomy to the crew leader just to do it, they worked it out on the crews. One guy would be like, “Hey, my kid's got a game tomorrow and I'd really like to go see it. It's his first wrestling match,” or whatever it is. A lot of times, the crew leader would call another crew and go, Hey, you got a guy, you can give me tomorrow?” They would move guys around.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah. Or give me after this time, whatever it is.

Tom Reber: Or they would work it out where that guy who wanted to cut out early, would come in a half an hour early, get a little more work done. He'd work through lunch and he'd cut out early, but they worked it out. We treated them like adults.

I think a lot of times I've made the mistake where I'm treating employees like they're kids. Really, they'll blow your mind if you let them figure some things out on their own. I think they'll surprise you in a good way. Again, it goes back to “Make me feel important.” They're not leaving your company, by the way, for another dollar.

Jeani Ringkob: I have this conversation, I think, at least several times a week, and I tell them, like, nobody in the research that we do is going to tell you that you're paying them too much.

We will hear that you're not getting paid enough often. But when we ask them why they leave or why they stay, it usually has to do with the people they work with and the culture, we're celebrating the culture and the culture that they work with. They're going to the people and they want to work with those people and there's reasons behind that.

I always try to reiterate that. That's relevant to so many things, it's relevant to like what we were just saying, how do you figure out things, understand our motives, figure out how to accommodate them, or at least try making attempts.

But then also, it's important if I think about it from an employer brand marketing perspective, it's just as important to me that everything that we put out pushes with the candidates just as much as it draws in the right ones, you have to know who you are, what does your team look like? What does your culture look like?

You have to own that. I know some job descriptions or career pages that we've built out, people are like, "Oh, my God, we can't say that. Nobody says that kind of stuff." I'm like, "Just try it." They will appreciate the fact that I had a company, they were doing jobs across the entire United States. They already had them sold. They needed crews that could travel.

I need that, I come from the industry, I understand that pain point. We leaned into that super heavy in the job descriptions, and it was an absolute success. They nailed it, they had no turnovers, but I'm like, “You have to be really upfront and honest with people. They do not like it when they start a job, and it's not what they thought they were signing up for.” Like, “Oh, it's just a little bit of trouble.” Actually, no, you're going to be on the road.

Tom Reber: You are a road warrior.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. When the season's over, we're a couch potato, or you can go get another, like, whatever. But we were honest, we were really, really honest in that. I know it made them so nervous at first, but I think we ran it on LinkedIn and Facebook for two days and that's it. They had 300 applicants. They had one turnover all year long.

Tom Reber: Wow.

Jeani Ringkob: I mean, they just nailed it. They pitched and like, I know when he's looking at it, it was over Christmas week when we tested it out. He was like, “I'm looking at it. I have all these and it's more than I thought we'd get. I'm looking at them and they're actually good.”

Tom Reber: Well, again, it's good marketing attracts and repels. The best marketing messages are when it could be commercial, it could be print, I don't care what it is, because when you see it and immediately go, “Hey, that's for me,” or “Hey, that's not for me,” immediate, that's the best marketing right there. That's what you did with that. You spoke to it, the right people resonated.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah. I love the sales process that you use kind of uses that same format. Yes, there's interaction and they're not self-selecting, but you're allowing that collaborative conversation that's just a partnership early on so that both of you can say, “We should move forward or we shouldn't move forward.”

Tom Reber: Yeah, that initial phone call that we teach this Shin-Fu thing to do, there are five steps that we walk you through but the whole goal of the first phone call, this pre-qualifying phone call, is should we have a second date? That's all it is. Because right now by getting on the phone and having this conversation, it's like swipe left, swipe right on the dating app. That's all it is.

It's “Can I help you? This is in rough numbers, what this is probably going to cost based on what you're telling me,” which is, you go motive, you go money, step three is the truth, which sounds like this, you go, “Yeah, $10,000 sounds good. If it's around there, we're great.” “Hey, I appreciate that. If you should invite me out to put eyes on your project, I just want to let you know that on rare occasion, we come across a game-changing site condition or something we didn't talk about. In that event, I'm going to call a timeout if it's going to prevent me from keeping it around the $10,000 and we'll have a discussion around what to do.”

If you don't do that truth step, if I tell you $10,000 and then I go out there and now I go, “Oh, you know what, it's actually $20,000 or $18,000,” now I'm the typical salesperson with the bait and switch and all that other garbage.

Then step four is we call influencers, “Hey, who else is excited to do this project? Hey, what do you think they're going to think about spending $10,000 on this?” “Well, I'm not sure.”

We've literally had it where my husband's traveling is out of town and one of my old partners in this who's retired now, it took him three or four weeks to sell a $40,000 water feature to a guy because the husband was traveling and he wasn't going to go out there and do everything and play the typical song and dance till the husband was cool with the budget. He was protecting his time.

Then, then step five is what we call the BS Meter. If needed, it's a consultation fee. We got guys charging $500,000 to go out. If you just want me to come out and give you a consultation and you're not going to hire me and give me a deposit check, it's $500. Don't go charge consultation fees unless you know how to get motive. Because if you do motive right, the spirit of the conversation, and the rest of the steps are good, the consultation fee is a non-issue because you're not even going to be going out there if they're not cool with the budget.

All this is just rooted in an open honest conversation because how many times if you have a salesperson like, they take their secret notes and then they go in their truck and they're going to work it up and then they're typing things, the money is always this big secret, yet both parties know you got to talk about money.

Let's just, “Hey, what's important to you?” in the motive. Sometimes the motive, I charged more for the woman who had the babies, I charged more based on her motive and she was happy to pay for it. You can't get into price unless you really understand motive.

But on the marketing side, you can certainly soften the beaches, if you want to call it that, with what's the average cost of this, or paving this, or whatever it might be, you can talk about those things in your marketing so that you're only attracting people that are cool paying those prices.

Jeani Ringkob: Right, sure, sure, absolutely. Yeah. This has been amazing, and I probably kept you longer than I promised, but how can folks learn more about The Contractor Fight, the book, and how they can get it? Where can they follow you?

Tom Reber: Yeah, hop online anywhere with The Contractor Fight, thecontractorfight.com. I'm @realtomreber on Instagram and I'll be making book announcements there. Then I think it's thecontractorfight.com/sell-unafraid, that's the book.

Jeani Ringkob: Okay, awesome. Awesome. I'm super excited.

Tom Reber: Yeah. I appreciate you having me.

Jeani Ringkob: Everybody's telling you’re right, and we always got to be a student of it. Even when you're good, you got to keep studying.

Tom Reber: Yep, absolutely. And sales should be fun. It's like you're connecting with other human beings. You're solving problems, and sometimes, you're not the solution to the problem, and that's okay too.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. They probably learned something, and you should feel good about that. [inaudible]

Tom Reber: Right. But I appreciate you having me.

Jeani Ringkob: Absolutely, it's always great to talk to you, Tom.

That wraps another episode of The Contractor's Daughter, a huge shout out and thank you to our guest, Tom Reber, for sharing his time, his wisdom, and his expertise with us today.

Now remember, here are your key takeaways. We need to understand our customers, take time to understand them, and ask them questions. Nurturing our company culture and hiring the right people are all essential steps towards achieving success in this world where we are building essential businesses.

Now do not forget, if you enjoyed today's episode, I need you to subscribe and to leave a review. If you've been to any of my presentations during this previous construction conference season, you know I'm always shooting for a 10 out of 10 but in this case, we will take a five-star review.

We also have some incredible resources for you and they're actually pretty relevant to the conversation that we had with Tom today. So if you are wanting to take our Growth Strategy Assessment and get a really clear idea on what the bottleneck is inside of your business that is keeping you from getting to that next big level up in success, growth, and revenue potential, then you're going to want to take this assessment.

You can find it over at storybuilt.marketing/assessment. You can take that assessment, get your results, and then I'm always happy to walk you through those, answer any questions, or if you need additional resources, you know I love free resources and giving you the tools that you need to grow your business so you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn. That's where I like to hang out. In the meantime, keep building, keep thriving, and we will be back soon.

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.