Your Marketing Strategy

Hi, this is Mike Crowe, and I run home inspection business.

In fact, I've run a couple of home inspection businesses.

You know, true joy for me, though, has been helping literally

thousands of home inspectors build really solid home inspection business as well.

We can help a single man operation be able to do over three hundred

thousand dollars a year,

maybe all the way up

to 400 thousand dollars a year as a single inspector operation.

Even better for me is the 80 plus companies that we have helped

be able to build million dollar home inspection businesses.

I would like to help you be able to do the same thing.

Hey, everybody, this is Mike Crowe with Coach Blueprint,

and we are in the process of going through the book,

the e myth the new version of it out there is called The e myth Revisited.

And by the way, the e myth Revisited reads a little better, a little easier.

So that's all good.

But I am teaching from the e myth because that's what I learned

from probably, gosh, almost 30 years ago.

And I still have the book.

It's still marked up and and has different highlights and notes in it.

And so I'm going back to the book that helped me literally change

my business once everything kind of tried to fall apart on me.

And I was wondering what I did wrong.

And then what I realized was I built it wrong.

I hired my first consultant, my first coach, and he taught me this book,

which at that point, again, was brand new out in the industry and everything.

Maybe it wasn't quite 30 years ago. Sometimes things got away from us.

Last time we talked

about one of the most important parts, and that was your people strategy.

And how do you get people to want to get it done? Right.

And a lot of times I hear people say, how how do you want to get it done?

So they do it exactly like you.

Well, for starters, they're never going to do it exactly like you.

But you want it done right. You want it done in the same order.

You want it done with the same efficiency, if possible.

And it can be a little more tricky than you might think.

But we talked about that last week. And if you haven't heard that one.

Oh, boy, it was good.

It was important. And there's still a lot to learn on that.

You'll always be learning how to deal with people the entire time

you're in business every day.

I'm learning a little bit about how to work with people.

I just came back from another seminar this week that I was at.

And one of the things that I watched and learned was, you know,

what it takes to really help people want to make the right decisions,

because the world is actually trying to encourage them

to make the wrong decisions.

You need to know that.

You need to be aware that that's happening to you very likely,

which is one of the reasons I say, you know, be successful and be around

those that are successful, because successful people,

you'll see more right decisions than you will see wrong decisions.

You'll still see some wrong, but you'll see a lot more right decisions.

All right. So Chapter 17 is your marketing strategy.

Now, this chapter is actually pretty simple, pretty easy.

And it doesn't begin to cover all of the things in marketing.

In fact, we have been doing a three day boot camp on BIGBANG Marketing,

which is my marketing campaign that I helped people understand

and put together out there to do so much.

But it has a couple of good points.

We're going to talk about it a little bit,

and then I'm going to try to expand on it a little bit more.

One of the things I want to expand on right up front that's not in the book

is the difference between a client and a customer.

So a client is the person that a lot of times is paying you for your service.

So if you take real estate agents, they understand this really, really well.

If they go list a house, that home that they're listing, that seller,

that is their client.

But as soon as they put a sign in the front yard or put it out there, then

hopefully a buyer comes along and goes, oh, man, we'd love to see this house.

Could you show it to us?

And a lot of times they call the agent on the sign.

All right. And so the agent says, yeah, I'd be glad to show it to you.

Ah, you do need to know that,

you know, there's paperwork now and all this that covers this.

But you need to know that I'm working for the the seller and you.

So now the real estate agent has a client and a customer.

Which one do they owe a duty of responsibility to?

Both. Now, this is the big secret that I teach that

makes my marketing completely different than everybody else's.

As a home inspector, our client is the buyer

of our services, and in most cases, that's the person buying the house.

Like 90 plus percent of the time, the person buying the house is paying

for our home inspection.

And we want to make sure we take absolutely great care of them.

What I do on top of that that makes it a little bit different

is that there are like 11 other entities involved in a real estate transaction.

And most home inspectors, 95

plus percent of them all go, I wish they would all leave me alone.

I'm working for the home buyer.

Well, of course, you're working for the home buyer.

But what makes me different is I realize I'm not working for just the home buyer.

Yes. Highest duty responsibility to the home buyer.

They don't take great care of them.

Not going to cut any slack on the home inspection.

But I start building into all of my systems

things that will help the listing agent and the buyer's agent and the

mortgage company, the title company and the insurance company

and so forth and so on.

OK, because when I do that, then all of those other people

will start recommending my company to more buyers.

Now, when those people start recommending me, I call them MAVEN's.

A mavin is a person that influences

somebody else's buying decision, and they do it on a regular basis.

All right. It's not just a one time thing.

It's not like you put something out on Facebook.

Go, hey, you should go buy Apple Computer. All right.

And they go, oh, yeah, I should go do that.

Imagine somebody were

teaching you how to do video editing and do a lot of stuff.

And they had classes and they had 10 people in the class

and they go say, you should go help somebody.

You should go get an Apple computer

and you should go get this kind of Apple computer.

That person that's teaching the class is amazing.

And that's what I want to make sure that you realize and see and hear

on top of all of those other parts there.

All right. So in the book, it says customer, customer, customer, customer.

So here's what I want you to see.

I have kind of defined client versus customer in my book in my world.

The maven is our customer.

Are they paying us? No.

But if you think about it, in a real estate transaction,

the buyer of the house is not paying the real estate agent either.

The seller is paying them.

The seller is paying them completely, OK.

The buyer is not paying the buyer's agent even at all.

But there's still a customer.

So I want you to understand the big difference that I took

and turned around on that was that, hey, the client, the home buyer

who's paying us, we are going to take great care of them.

But we have several customers that were also trying to make sure

there's happy in the transaction.

So as I go through this

and I want you to hear when I say customer, I want you to hear Mavor,

because there's only three ways to grow your business, to grow your revenue.

One is to go get new customers. OK, or maven's.

And in some cases, clients, people will try to go straight to get clients.

But if I can get a customer a mavin,

they will recommend me on average five times a year.

Now I have some maven's that recommend us over a times a year.

Two other buyers that they're working with.

Those are some top producing agents. All right.

And then I have some, you know, people that will recommend us once

and we'll never see him again.

All right. So not a really strong maven, but on average,

a maven will recommend you about five times a year.

And so it's very, very important that you see that.

So as I'm going through this and he's you hear me say, customer,

I want you to think, Mavin, I want you to think about that person

that can refer you, because the challenge in most cases

is that the home buyer is going to use you once and they're done OK.

And you're looking for someone that you can work with on a regular basis.

So one is go get new customers. OK.

Two is to get those customers

and or your clients to pay you more money per inspection.

And by the way, when I show you how to raise prices, when to raise prices,

how to charge properly for your service, you're probably going

to make on the low side 40 dollars more per inspection on the high side.

Two hundred dollars more per inspection.

I know that sounds unrealistic, and I probably should have said less

because you might not believe it.

But when you see the thousands and thousands of people

that I have trained and coached,

you will realize that it's it's not that unbelievable at all.

I have one gentleman in California right now. Love him. OK.

You'll get a chance to meet him hopefully at some point.

But when he first started with us, his inspections were about

a hundred and fifty dollars less than they are right now. OK.

And when you can charge properly for your service,

it's amazing how many things you can add

to your service that make you different than everybody else.

All right. Oh, by the way, the third part was to get your customers

to use you more frequently.

In other words, get your referring partners to refer you more frequently.

So one was new clients or customers, too, was get two people to pay you more.

OK, and three was to get them to refer you more.

If you're a restaurant,

you want them to come into your restaurant maybe more often.

One of the things that I tell, especially at home inspectors

and I was talking with a

top producing agent today and he coaches a lot of real estate agents.

Was that you know?

When I teach a home inspector, I'm saying

you're either doing inspections or you're marketing.

Now, that's not 100 percent true, but that's so important to understand

the essence of that until you have enough business.

And until you set somebody else up in your business.

So they're doing the marketing for you.

You're either marketing or doing inspections.

It's really that simple right up front. OK.

And so in the book, it says,

marketing strategy starts, ends and lives and dies with your customer.

That's very important.

And because one of the things he talks about

is the development in your marketing strategy.

It's absolutely imperative that you forget about your dreams,

forget about your vision, forget about your interest,

forget about what you want, OK?

Forget about everything but your customer.

What do they need? What do they want? What are their dreams?

And when it comes to marketing, what you want is unimportant.

What you want is unimportant.

It's what your customer wants that matters.

Now, in our business,

we have to make sure we take really good care of our client, the home buyer.

But what makes my businesses different

and the hundred plus businesses that I've helped people understand

what they need to do to grow

into a million dollar business is what do the customers want as well?

What did their maven's want as well?

And when we start putting those pieces into place, everything changes. OK.

And so what your customer wants is significantly different

probably than what you think he wants.

Now, the good thing is you want to go find somebody

that Ari understands what your customers maven's want.

OK, inside of all that it did right down here, a quote from Zig Ziglar

that I've lived by my entire life, and that is basically when you help

other people get what they want, you'll get everything you want.

OK, it's not an exact quote, but you understand the essence of it

when you help other people get what they want.

You're going to get everything you want.

And that's one of the reasons

why life is so blache, just because I have lived by that.

And my whole philosophy is help people help themselves

when I help people help themselves.

I have gotten everything I need and want and desire

in my life, and it's been one of those cool things.

So when you see a customer, when you see somebody

and you're trying to get you're trying to influence them.

Here's what he puts in here in the book I thought was pretty good.

Imagine them having this little probe sticking up out of their head

like an antenna. OK, because that's what it is.

And at the end of the antenna is a sensor and it's beeping away like crazy.

And here's what you need to know.

They are reading

all of these signs of whether they want to do business with you or not.

They're talking about colors, shapes, sounds, smells, your store, your office,

the restaurant where they're meeting you for lunch,

but they're taking up all of these sensory data from you, OK?

It might be how you're sitting or standing the color of your hair,

how your hair is calm, the expression on your face and in the old days.

One of the things I tried to keep in mind was that most of my customers

maven's were slightly older women than average and very, very conservative.

Now, a lot of that's changed over the years,

but still in the very beginning.

I just don't want to wear t shirts. I don't want to wear shorts.

I don't want to wear some hat that has some really bad message on it

and a shirt on a t shirt that has a bad message on it.

So when we talk about colors and shapes and sounds and what you wear

and what you don't wear, then all of that makes a difference now.

I want to say this very carefully.

If you have any of those characteristics, let's say you have tattoos,

let's say you have piercings, you can market past all of that. However.

It's easier when you don't have to market past that.

Sometimes people go, well, I don't have anybody get mad at me

and they're covered with tattoos.

And by the way, we now have inspectors that have tattoos.

But in the beginning, I wouldn't hire people with tattoos

and I don't allow and I don't recommend facial hair. All right.

We have gotten easier on that, too, especially during the wintertime.

I read a book years ago called Dress for Success,

and you want to make sure that you're dressing

so that people feel more comfortable with you.

So nothing escapes that sensor

and it kind of absorbs all the stimuli from the environment.

Nothing escapes your customer as he absorbs the information

he is using to make a decision whether to buy or not buy from you.

By the way, this is one of the reasons your client coordinators are so important

or whoever answers your phones, because our inspectors are great.

They're wonderful, they're amazing.

However, if the people that answer our phones messed that up,

the buyer never gets to see how good of an inspection we did.

Now, if we're lucky,

they're doing the mavin and there is the customer and they know.

And so if they had a bad experience once, then they may give us a

little bit of grace. But you need to be very careful of that.

So think of the sensor, that antenna as your customers conscious mind.

Its job is to gather up the information needed for a decision.

And most of what it does, however. This is important.

Most of what it does, however, is unconscious, unconscious.

And it's more like a habitual decision making.

And the decision is made by your customers unconscious mind.

All right. So, again, the first thing is

that you need to know that they're taking in all of this data.

The second thing is you need to know that their unconscious mind

is making decisions based on their past

environmental habit , history or behavioral history.

When you realize that,

you have to start realizing, you have to think deeper than you might

at any other time when you're building your marketing strategies.

OK, so in your customers, unconscious mind is where all the action is happening.

And it's one of the most important parts. And in fact.

You probably know this, but for instance, in a television commercial,

the sellers made or lost in the first three or four seconds. OK.

In a print ad, 75 percent of the buying

decisions are made at the headline alone.

All right. In a sales presentation and presentations are your fastest number

one thing you need to do is make sure that you can build your business.

And if you can't do it, we hire people to go do those for us.

All right. And the sell is made or lost

in the first three minutes of the presentation.

And so it's very important that you understand how quickly somebody's

subconscious or unconscious mind

can make those determinations or whether you can buy something or not.

It's kind of funny

because we talked about this earlier and I kind of mentioned it earlier.

But first, it's research shows that the Navy suit, the Navy blue suit is

perhaps the most powerful suit a person can wear in business.

And you have instant impact and people

feel instantly more comfortable with you with that.

And in fact, did the guy that created Revlon,

it was said that he had two hundred and twenty suits.

All of navy blue.

OK. Because he knew that worked.

Now, once I figured that out from reading the book,

especially on how to dress for success,

and then I studied a bunch of other things, I realized, man,

that was the only color suit I was ever going to wear for doing

presentations like at real estate offices and different things as well.

All right. Now, since then, suits have become less and less important.

But I will tell you that,

you know, a lot of times when you're in the right circles,

you still see lots of suits.

I went somewhere the other day and four out of five people all had suit

jackets on. Some of them had suit jackets and ties on. OK.

So it's important that you understand that.

Now, here's what you may not understand.

You may go, well, that's not fair.

Because if you're thinking about facial hair,

if you're thinking about tattoos, if you're thinking about piercings

and you're thinking about all this other stuff

and you think they should use you anyway, you're right.

They probably should use you anyway.

However, their subconscious, though, their unconscious mind,

is already making decisions on whether they want to do business with you.

I'll give you an example here.

Use uses in the book. So.

You go in and you see this guy in this great navy blue suit

and does a great presentation and all that, and you go, wow, OK.

And your subconscious feels comfortable, whether you know it or not now.

Same exact presentation, same exact everything.

But you go in and the guy is wearing an orange suit, bright

orange, OK, an expensive one at that, maybe.

And he's wearing a white on white silk shirt and a green and white striped

Italian silk tie, maybe a silver belt buckle

with his initials in green

jade across the face of it, and a diamond tie pin to care

glimmering out at you just above, you know, the button of his vest

and a pair of white lizzard cowboy boots. OK.

Which one would you feel more comfortable buying something from?

See, the decision shouldn't be on whether it's orange or blue,

but your subconscious made a decision before you did.

And you need to understand that when you're out there marketing,

that's part of it.

And by the way, that's just getting your foot in the door, step part of it.

And you can think about it.

Don't take too long because that guy's out of business. Right.

There have been a couple of cases where I've actually joked

and I've actually dealt with people that wore orange suits,

but it was for an impact on some different things.

And so we had some fun with that.

So the fact that you couldn't conduct serious business

that way with the man in the orange suit, because, you know,

you could if he were wearing blue, says that there's no such thing as reality

because reality means it shouldn't have made any difference. But it does.

And someone said this, and I thought it was very profound.

You know, you hear people all the time tell you things.

And by the way, a lot of times you hear stuff that said

over and over and over and over again, it isn't true. All right.

So here's one of those.

Find a need and fill it. Find a need and fill it.

It sounds accurate, but it's not.

It's totally inaccurate.

What you should do is find a perceived need,

find a perceived need, something they think they need and fill it.

Because if your customer doesn't perceive he need something,

he doesn't, even if he actually does.

I mean, I hope you get that even if he actually does need it,

if he doesn't understand that he needs it or has a perception of needing it,

then you're dead in the water.

So those perceptions are at the heart of your customers decision making process.

All right. And so here's the question.

Are you beginning to get a sense of the complexity of the business

called marketing? And it's so, so important.

And I want to make sure that you see that and you feel that because so often.

People do not understand how complex marketing is, and it's one of the reasons

I have a three day boot camp on marketing, and if you're interested in the three

day boot camp, sent an email to hello at Coach Blueprint.

I don't even know when the next one is,

but I can let you know when the next one is

and when that's scheduled, and we can put you on the list for that one.

Usually they're filled up and usually I only allow a certain number of companies

and it's and it's a small number of companies

to come to that boot camp because we want to pay special attention

to each and every company during that and everything, OK?

And so anyway, I'm hoping you're understanding it,

because until you understand and until you begin to take your marketing

seriously, OK, until you give it the earnest attention it demands,

your prototype business

that we've been talking about building will continue to be only that, OK?

It could hope to be under the under the circumstances of maybe a crapshoot.

You know, hey, let's roll the dice and see what it comes up.

All right. And unfortunately, you may or may not get what you want.

And in fact, I'm going to tell you a big secret.

You want to write this one down?

You were not in the home inspection business.

You are in the business of marketing a home inspection business.

You're not on the home inspection business or whatever kind of business you're in.

You have a restaurant, you're not really in the restaurant business.

You're in the marketing of the restaurant.

If you're a CPA, you're not really you're not really just a numbers person.

You're not really just a CPA.

You're in the business of marketing, CPA services.

This is so important.

And it's one of the biggest breakthroughs

that when I'm coaching people, they finally get and they understand.

So your business is a lot more fragile as a small business.

Your business is a lot more fragile than, say, a big business like Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart can make some big mistakes, make million dollar mistakes,

and they'll survive it. Now, you can't afford that.

You might not be able to afford a ten thousand dollar mistake. All right.

And trust me, I've seen people

make those kind of mistakes and sometimes they go out of business because of it.

getting ready to put into marketing is done and done right.

And in the old days, I remember this and and you will laugh at this now.

But you have to know that 35 years ago, it was considered

a big thing to be in the Yellow Pages.

I told people years before

the Yellow Pages went out of business, I want to take that ten thousand dollars

that I'm paying in Yellow Pages and I want to put that into.

Well, what we call Big Bang marketing, which is basically making sure

that we're doing presentations at real estate offices, helping the

the MAVEN's understand who we are.

And of course, we do all of that more now.

As it would have if I spent it going after just homebuyer's, for instance.

OK, so if anything, you've got to take

your marketing more seriously than even a big business does. OK.

Even Macdonald does.

And we have kind of entered into an unforgiving age.

And I've talked about this many, many times.

We are in an age where countless small businesses will either accept

the challenge of an information blooded society. In other words,

there is so much information out there that you get lost in it.

And if they're not aware of that, they could easily be destroyed by that.

So one of the things that I want to make sure that you understand is that

we are in an age in which your customer or maven

is literally is covered up with products and promises

that he becomes swamped in confusion and indecision.

In fact, I tell people, if you want somebody to not make

a decision, confuse them.

That's all it takes. Confuse them.

And they will stop in their tracks and they will not make a decision,

you know, do you want a or do you want B?

In fact, they did this study one time, and I thought it was amazing that

they had this cart at like a state fair type thing or a craft show,

and it had six types of jellies on it.

And then somebody went, Wow, man, we did so good,

we should have twenty six types of jelly.

And so they did.

They sold more consistently every time they tested it.

They sold more jelly when they only had six guys than they did

when they had 26 guys. Consistently.

So a confused customer will not buy

and or will not buy as much. All right.

So the challenge of our age is to learn our customers language.

Our maven's language.

And we have to figure out what it is they want, what their perceived desire is.

Even before they do so, this is one of the reasons

you want to go study somebody that's been doing it for years.

And by the way, be careful.

Recently, I went and visited a restaurant and there were a couple of owners,

and I took some people to go there and studied them.

But the owners had not graduated past the infancy of their business.

And so they were still complaining about still having problems

with a lot of small stuff. All right.

And what you need to do is make sure you're studying somebody.

If you want to build a million dollar business, go study somebody that's built

a million dollar business or maybe built 10 of them or help

10 other people build them.

You know, for instance, I've helped over a hundred people

build a million dollar companies and I've helped a dozen or so

Singleman operations become what I call ironmen, where they're doing over

three hundred thousand dollars a year as a single inspector company.

But you need to make sure that you're understanding what it is

that the MAVEN's want and the clients want.

And, you know, as I go through this,

you might even be a little frustrated in if you get that.

I kind of understand that

because you might ask yourself and I get asked this

all the time, you know, well, how am I going to do all that?

How do I determine my customers? Demographics is psychographics.

What colors do you use, what shapes, what words to use?

But here's what I want you to know.

As soon as you hear yourself asking those questions,

you need to know you're on the right track. All right.

For the purpose of this book was not to answer all of those questions,

but to provoke you into thinking about those questions.

Now, my purpose of my three day Big Bang marketing and my big make

marketing itself and even my coaching is to teach you step

by step, by step by step exactly how to go do that kind of marketing.

And by the way, I was talking with a top top real estate agent today,

and he just sold his house.

And when he sold his house, he had an inspection company come in

because he uses our inspection company like ninety nine point nine

percent of the time.

But he had somebody else come in and do the inspection on his house

because the buyer chose it and there was some different agent or whatever.

And he went, Mike, I really did not understand

how much difference there was in inspectors

until I watched what that guy did compared to what you guys do.

And your inspection is so much more thorough.

His was so superficial.

He said it was just amazing to just see the difference.

So you need to know that, yes, your market needs to be there.

With that, you need to make sure you have a good prototype service to back up

or that you're marketing.

I will promote and the service will back that up.

OK, so it's not how to do it a lot of times, but what needs to be done

when it comes to your marketing. And that's the big thing.

So that is the big thing on the book here of your marketing

strategy, again, are your marketing strategy.

This doesn't get into all the how's the whys, the who's the winds?

We can teach you that more.

In fact, I was just talking with our staff here

and I was going,

you know, after I finish this book, because we only have

like a couple of chapters and the next is a doozy.

And it's a great one, because the next one is your system strategy.

And I am all about systems and we're going to talk about that.

And then it has a couple of other little things that are important towards

the end of the book that will talk about why you do that in a separate one.

But after that, I'm going to take my book Home Inspector Marketing Secrets,

which, by the way, if you want to go get it ahead of time,

go get it out on Amazon. It's out there.

And I'm going to start teaching you some of the basics of the marketing,

because you're not in the home inspection business.

You're in the marketing of the home inspection business.

And it's so important for you to understand that. All right.

Well, we only have a couple of chapters left.

And I want to tell you, thank you for being here.

And if you've been through

all of these chapters with me, feel free to shoot me an email. Hello, coach.

Blueprint dot com. And just let me know how you're doing.

And if you want to get some information on our Big Bang Marketing Bootcamp

or we've actually taken our marketing to online, so we call it

the online BIGBANG marketing, or as the lady that helped me design it.

We call it the accelerator.

You know, you can actually do that as well with us.

And we build that into our boot camp, just so you know.

So you have both of those parts at the boot camp.

Marketing is, in my opinion,

the number one most important thing you will ever do in your business.

People will say hiring the right people. Yeah, you're going to need to do that.

People will say, oh, you've got to deliver the best service.

You need to deliver a really, really good service.

But the best. Now, I am not the best home inspector in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

Now, some of my inspectors, man, there are just incredible inspectors.

But when I was doing inspections, I was a really good home inspector,

but I was not the best by any means in the imagination.

What I am the best at, though, is making sure that the home

buyers, my clients and my maven's both got what they needed

because the average home inspector out there wants to take care of just

the buyer, just the client.

And I wish the agents would get out of their way.

I want to bring them both together and make them both happy.

And if you do your marketing right and you build your servers right,

you can do exactly that. Well, this is micro.

I love to tell you, be successful and be around those that are successful

and never forget this.

The more money you make, the more people you can help.

Have a great day and I'll talk with you again soon.