How to Create "Endless Chains" of Roof Referrals
Today I want to issue a challenge to you.
A challenge that has the power to transform your marketing… and ultimately your business.
The challenge is based on something called “The Endless Chain of Referrals.”
I first heard about it from Paul J. Meyer, a famously successful insurance company developer, who went on to create the Success Motivation Institute (SMI) who for decades have been a leading force in sales and success training and publishing.
Paul’s premise is that you never need to be without a good prospect as long as you have just one client, unless you are inept at trust.
In other words, every client should beget another.
I made this challenging concept THE foundational piece of my own business approach. In my own roofing business, I have over 95% of my business come in via referrals from insurance agents.
Tens of millions of dollars have been brought to me by insurance agent referrals—not just told about me—brought to me.
This reveals how effective I am at creating and managing trust.
When an insurance agent refers one of their clients to my roofing company, they know their client will be putting their trust in my company and that insurance agent is also risking their professional reputation.
And... if that client has an unsatisfactory experience, the insurance agent, who referred him, will hear about it. Endlessly.
This is a critical fact few marketers grasp. There is risk in referring. Even more risk in hand-delivering clients to you. Greater risk than there is in doing business with you.
The trust hurdle becomes increasingly more difficult as prospects ascend from buying from you to referring clients to you.
In other words, it’s easier for said insurance agent to trust you enough to make a purchase from you himself, but it takes a much greater level of trust in you for that insurance agent to risk his professional reputation and refer one of his precious clients to you through word of mouth.
My challenge to you, this weekend, is to look at your true statistics. How many “endless chains” do you have?
Building endless chains of referrals can transform your business. One of my coaching clients recently said that learning to get referrals from insurance agents is
Changing my business model and making door knocking and FaceBook ads a thing of the past.
Acquiring new business is one of the toughest challenges businesses face. Asking the question “Where can I find clients?” is the wrong question to ask.
The right question is “How can I construct a business model and marketing system so that clients seek me out, with trust in place in advance?”
Building chains of endless referrals brings you more, of what I call Perfect Prospects, and helps you save a ton of time and money by attracting only those prospects who have already been told you are the trusted expert.
You must have trust in place to do this.
If you do not have highly influential people bringing you Perfect Prospects and endless chains of referrals, you won’t like this, but you are failing.
There’s something wrong.
You are creating only enough trust to get customers, but you are NOT creating enough trust to get referrals.
Don’t kid yourself. Results are reality. If they are harsh reality, do something about them.
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If you're ready to take a deep dive into the psychology of why you need referrals and learn how to get them at will...
Check out my Master-Class for Roofing Owners and Marketers HERE!
5 Signs You Still Have What It Takes To Be A Roofing Contractor
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” --Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook)
When I look back at what it took to start my roofing business, it almost feels like that was another life. Or like I was another person back then.
I took chances and made decisions as though there were no consequences.
I didn't worry about what would happen if it didn't work out. I never spent time mulling it over. I just reacted.
And it's a good thing that I did, because that's exactly what was required to get me to where I am today.
Any hesitation or reluctance to push forward would have resulted in a less desirable outcome. If not outright failure, prolonged discomfort for sure.
Now I find myself in a different place. Not having to react. I have the luxury of time. Nothing is so pressing that I have to make a decision about it today.
And while that may feel good, it is actually a false sense of security. Even though there are no barbarians at the gate, the danger is real.
I have to guard against getting so comfortable that inaction becomes the enemy.
I believe that you are either growing or dying. There's no such thing as maintaining a business, because there's always someone in your market willing to take the risks necessary to grow and acquire your customers.
I've learned that every new level of success comes at the expense of where you are now. You can't become who you want to be without deciding who you are now isn't good enough... and really meaning it!
So when your back is against the wall, (like it was when I started my business) you'll do whatever you have to do, instinctively.
But when it's not, you have to convince yourself that what you have isn't good enough, and keep pushing forward.
To that end, let's look at some of the characteristics that made us entrepreneur material in the first place. And what we just might need to rekindle to keep us that way.
1. You Can Execute on Your Ideas
The roofing business you currently operate started out as an idea. And without proper execution, you would be working for someone else right now, dealing with an entirely different set of problems, so congrats for making it this far. Most let their fear take over, but something told you that your idea mattered and drove you to make it a reality. If you have trouble executing along the way, my advice would be to find someone who has already climbed the mountain and follow their lead. Trust me... it's a whole lot better than trial and error and spending another year stuck.
2. You Genuinely Care About What You Do
This is a given for most owners, at least in the beginning, because of the sheer determination required to move a business past the idea phase. The problem occurs when you run into challenges that seem to have no answers and your passion becomes a source of frustration that affects not just you, but those around you. That's usually about the time that your dedication to roofing begins to waver. Not to say that you can't get it back, but wouldn't it be easier to focus on your customers if you had a handle on every facet of your business? If you can figure it out... then do it. If you can't, find someone who has.
3. You Are Able to Get Over Failures
No one gets it right every time. As a new entrepreneur, we expect to stumble. That makes it easier to chalk it up to a learning experience and move on. But later, when we have years of experience under our belt, we take mistakes personally. When we take a risk and it doesn't go exactly as planned, we don't see it as a temporary setback on the path to ultimate success. Instead, we associate every risk with failure until we eventually grind any and all progress to a halt. Think like a new business owner and expect to get it wrong occasionally. That way you can find out what doesn't work quickly... and move on to what does.
4. You Are a Passionate Life-Long Learner
This is a big one. When you stop learning, you stop growing. And when you stop growing, you die. But it's not enough to just learn for the sake of learning. You have to learn exactly what you need to know, when you need to learn it. Otherwise, you're out of sequence. What good does it do you to level up your management skills when you're still a one man show? How important is it to develop detailed hiring practices when you can't even keep your first crew busy? These examples may be extreme, but we are often guilty of working on projects that don't matter, so that we can hide from the difficult ones that do. If you've already learned how to solve the tough problems and just haven't, then stop procrastinating. If you haven't... get some help.
5. You Can Handle Risk
Now for the grand finale. A lot of roofers think their success lies in the quality of their craftsmanship. And in the beginning, that's technically true. But when you graduate from skilled labor to ownership, your role changes entirely. Now you're responsible for things that you never had to worry about before. You probably feel like a temp service one day and a finance company the next. People are counting on you to keep the jobs coming in and everyone wants to be paid before you get yours. Responsibility and risk. These are your new stock-in-trade and you're not a business owner without them. And your customers still demand a quality roof, of course, but that's only after you've sold the job, arranged the labor, and taken on all the other risks and responsibilities. So, the moral of the story is that labor builds roofs by managing quality... just as ownership builds a business by managing (not avoiding) risk. Embrace your role.
To your success!
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If you’re ready to take a deep dive into the psychology of growing your business at will…
Check out my Master-Class for Roofing Owners and Marketers HERE!
Are You Making Sacrifices for Growth? Or Just Sacrificing Your Future?
"Growth and comfort can't ride the same horse"
The success of your Roofing Business is absolutely dependent on the amount of comfort you are willing to sacrifice.
Think of the discomfort you experienced when starting your business:
- Loss of regular paycheck
- Funds invested in the new business
- Time and effort spent getting the business up and running
- Assumed liability
- Uncertainty that comes with a new venture
And that was just to get you in the game. To get from where you were in your life to where you wanted to be, required you to assume risk. You risked your time, your energy, and your effort expecting that if you did your part, it would pay off.
The risk was uncomfortable, but you understood that it was the price of admission.
Since then, any advances that you've made since then have, no doubt, been accompanied by additional sacrifices.
The ability to do more work comes with the discomfort of more payroll, more training, more expenses, more complication, etc.
I guess there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
Do you really want what you say you want?
If we take a closer look at why someone chooses discomfort over comfort, we start to see a common thread.
It has to do with the human brain being wired to keep us safe and comfortable.
There is security in doing what you've always done. If it worked yesterday, it can seem logical to assume that it will work tomorrow.
With markets changing constantly and new competitors joining the fight every day, that's not exactly true, but it's the way that we've evolved to think.
It kept us from being eaten by lions thousands of years ago, but today it prevents us from venturing outside our comfort zone and reaching our full potential.
The question you have to ask is... do I really want what I say I want? Or am I more committed to being comfortable? Whichever one you want more is what you'll have.
Losing weight is uncomfortable. Quitting smoking is uncomfortable. Investing money in fixing or growing your business is uncomfortable.
But if you want to have success with these or any other goals that you set for yourself, you have to want the outcome more than you want the comfort of doing what you've always done.
You'll know when you've decided that you want the results more than the comfort, because you will find yourself taking steps to bring about change.
That doesn't mean you won't have to earn it, it just means that you've crossed the threshold and you're no longer willing to accept being stuck.
Is security really safe?
Often we find ourselves thinking about the right concepts, but in the wrong time frames. Doing what feels safe to us today can have an incredibly negative effect on our security 5, 10, or even 20 years from now.
Now, I don't advocate being careless with your resources (time, effort, money, etc.), but there is another enemy that we have to keep at bay...
Stagnation. This is what happens when, as business owners, we are constantly trying to make the prudent play. To most, that means not behaving recklessly today so we don't get knocked out of the game tomorrow.
The problem arises when we become too "prudent" and lose our ability to keep up in a constantly changing marketplace. We don't fail while fighting for better opportunities for us and those around us.
We do something much worse...
We wither and die.
Motion is the cure for stagnation, but we can never be sure which moves will produce the best outcomes without experimentation. If you have an abundance of ideas and the time and patience to determine which ones give you a return...
Then get to work!
If not, find someone who has already figured it out and get them to share their secrets with you.
Your future self will be glad you did.
👇
If you’re ready to take a deep dive into the psychology of marketing and growing your business at will…
Check out my Master-Class for Roofing Owners and Marketers HERE!
4 Choices That Highly Successful Roofers Make
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” ―
Success in life is determined by your thoughts, your beliefs, and especially your choices.
We make so many decisions on a daily basis that it is impossible to come up with an accurate number. One study suggests that it could be as high as 35,000. As absurd as that sounds, consider a Cornell University study that found we make 226 decisions about food alone in a given 24 hour period.
And as your level of responsibility goes up, so does the opportunity for decisions to be made. With a couple of thousand choices being made every hour, you can surely see the need for the subconscious to help us handle the workload.
Imagine the overwhelm if we were aware of all those choices. The downside, however, is that our autopilot makes decisions based on our past and current belief systems.
This works well if our goal is to stay exactly where we are, but it becomes problematic when we want to achieve higher levels of success. With that understanding, the challenge becomes taking manual control of the choices that have the power to change your life for the better.
Here are 4 choices that highly successful contractors and business owners make that seem to elude everyone else.
1. Control
The best of the best choose to be in control of their destiny, and therefore their success. If you believe that life happens to you and that there is nothing you can do to change it, you will never find the success you are looking for.
If you're not in control, you have a built in excuse for not achieving your goals. Don't set yourself up for failure. Choose to believe you're in control.
2. Commitment
Many contractors commit to the change that growth requires, right up until the going gets tough. Then they fall back into the perceived comfort of wherever they were before.
Top performers know that commitment doesn't even get tested until adversity punches you in the mouth. It's not something that you possess, it's a choice your make even though giving up looks like a much better option.
In case you're wondering, it should feel like picking a fight you're not at all sure you can win. Commitment makes damn sure you do.
3. Opportunity
The most successful among us focus on the opportunity instead of being blinded by the risk. This won't come naturally, given the way we're taught to think about money and our feelings about losing it.
But if you understand what's happening, you can choose to place the emphasis on the potential gain instead of the risk of loss.
If you're worried about making a mistake, be absolutely sure that you will. Nobody's perfect, so the goal is to win more than you lose and keep pushing forward. Whatever you do, don't let fear turn into inaction. That's a prescription for mediocrity, followed by a healthy dose of regret.
4. Knowledge
High level contractors and business owners learn how to be successful from those who have already achieved what they want to achieve.
That can be a hard pill to swallow at first. As business owners, we believe that we can handle anything. If we didn't, we would never have had the confidence to start a business in the first place.
But it's this self reliance that actually prevents us from seeking or accepting help when we need it the most. Whether their business is struggling or they're just stuck and can't seem to get to the next level, successful people choose to learn from a proven winner.
Why hope you have enough time and resources to figure it out on your own? Acquire the knowledge and achieve your goals.
If you truly want more success, find more successful people and do it the way they do it.
All the Best!
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If you’re ready to take a deep dive into the psychology of why you need referrals and learn how to get them at will…
Check out my Master-Class for Roofing Owners and Marketers HERE!