WHAT DOES A WEBSITE DESIGNER & MORTGAGE BROKER GOT IN COMMON?

Hey there, it's Aaron Wybrow from Diagnostics and Finance. I'm the bagpipe mortgage broker. I'm sitting here with Connie Motshaw from online Spiderweb. Connie, what do you do?

So I help tradies weave their website into a profitable lead generating machine.

Cool. And I suppose if they get lots of profit, they can come to me and they can get a home.

Absolutely. We're all about helping tradies spend less time with tyre kickers, more time converting bigger and better jobs. And cut that bit out because I don't know what else I was going to say.

It's all good, it's all good. We don't, we don't even have to cut that out if we don't want to. With regards to, let's, let's talk about a scenario. We have a trades person, they're renting, they're, they're out flogging themselves day in, day out. They might have a bunchload of tire kickers. They don't have a website. They come home and their wife goes, we want to, I don't want to rent anymore. I want to buy a house. I want to settle down, I want to have my family. I want to have some, some land, some, some place to hold your equipment because it sits in the driveway all the time.

Yeah.

So what's, what's a couple of steps that we can get rid of these tire kickers out of a tradie's life?

Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing is your, the reputation and how you appear online. So a tire kicker can kind of smell if your brand is quality and if you're going to be someone that they can negotiate down too much. So what you want to do is put basically three main things on your website that they convey a message of quality, value, trustworthiness, so that you get more of the people that value those things than the people who just want to come to you for price.

I suppose just a barrier between the person getting hold of the person that actually makes the decision on the price is a good thing too.

Absolutely.

And you've got screen captures or there's different ways.

Yeah. So there's a few different ways that you can funnel out tyre kickers. I would say the first thing is the experience. It's a bit like if you walk into a physical store, you know, if you've just got things cluttered up on the shelf and you're trying to sell everything to everybody, then you can come across as cheap. However, if you refine that message and you Refine your products and services down to the, you know, the 20% of products and services that make 80% of your profit and revenue, then that makes you look a lot more valuable and less attractive to tyre kickers.

Yeah. So if we take our guy that's wanting to, his wife wants him buy a house and we've now kicked out the tyre kickers from the business and, and this trade, he's been looking at his financials and he's so close to being able to make the home loan work for the dream that is for his family. Which is why we get up in the morning, go out to work and get some money, come back and have what we need for our family. So we got rid of the tyre kickers and that's changed his profitability.

Yeah.

Now his profitability is jumping up. What's another thing that can help this tradie that's renting to try to get in their own home, we got rid of and has the tie kickers. What's the next thing we can do?

The next thing that you can do is one, attract the bigger fish and two, convert more of them. So there's a couple of things that you can have on your website that are big signals for people when they land on your website, to stop looking at your competitors and be convinced that you are the right solution for them. So you want to stop people in their tracks when they get to their website, because generating traffic is one of the hardest things to do. It's hard to be found in all the noise. So when you are found in that noise, you want to make sure that people are convinced the first time. If they're not convinced the first time, then you want to make sure that you have an opportunity to engage with them in some way or another so that you can continue the conversation until they are convinced. And that's going to help you, one, convert more traffic that comes to your website and to get bigger fish, you know, bigger jobs that you might have not had the confidence to do when you were dealing with all those tyre kickers that suck your energy.

So I suppose there's two things out of that that helps with profitability of the company. One is if you can make $300 for the one hour that you work versus 50 bucks for the hour that you worked before, that's changing your whole life.

Absolutely. And look, even clients who are not tyre kickers, even clients who are great people, they might be great people to work with. However, the scope creep can be insidious and that can also hit your Profitability really hard. So these are all things to look out for and things that can be addressed on that first page of your website in a lot of ways.

So I suppose we've got. Increasing your hourly rate for a bigger job really affects your profitability. I suppose the other thing that changes your profitability is your ability to now have people are human, like our customers are human. Our high big fishes, as you mentioned, are human too. They might be seeing your website and then get distracted by their child. They might see your website and then get distracted by something urgent that's going on. If you're an urgent job, an emergency job, and then they forget about you. And I suppose that's the other thing you mentioned, is being able to have that mechanism of being able to get back to that person.

Absolutely. And it's actually doing people a service. I think a lot of tradies, for example, they might feel like if they follow up people in email or they follow them on social media with paid ads or other ways to retarget people, you might think that you're being annoying or people don't like it. But in fact most people feel that that is a service because if they did find you and they really liked your message and they liked your product or service, then they want to see you again and you're saving them the hassle of having to do all that research because they weren' organized enough to save it in the first place.

So we've got to this point number two, we got rid of the tyre kickers, increased the profitability and getting the right jobs in. Now we're going after the bigger fish and we're going to have a rematching to them for the people that get distracted from your website and things. And now this whole scenario of this tradie renting and looking to buy their whole company is changing to be able to do the next step to buy the home, get the family, store your equipment, even continue to work from home, which is a new fangledangle thing that we're doing, keeping, not needing an office or a warehouse and just keeping everything at home. What's the last thing we can do to help with this tradie by having the right. Getting rid of the tyre kickers, having the right door entry to the company, filtering out different things and having an option for the people to come back onto the website. So. So you can win the big fish.

Yeah. So obviously we talked a lot about the quality of traffic coming or the quality of traffic coming to your website. So now that you're going to be moving away from attracting those people who are just coming to you for price. And let's face it, people who come to you for price are usually the most, they take away the most time, they're the most demanding, they're the most, least appreciative. So they're a high cost. So now that we're making sure that we're filtering out, you know, the tyre kickers focusing on that premium client, now, we want to duplicate that and get more of those premium clients.

Absolutely.

So how do those clients find you? And the number one place they're going to find you is on a search engine like, you know, Google, Google Chrome or Firefox or, you know, Safari, whatever they happen to be using. So, and let's face it, whenever we, you know, whenever we're searching for a restaurant or a service or a product ourselves, we usually don't go past the first page of Google search results. So, you know, your next goal really is to be in that, in those top organic searches and ad searches if you want to, if you want to, you know, put some money up front. So it's just again, refining that message and doing the work so that your Google score increases, because every website actually has a Google score. And the higher that score is, the more likely Google is to return your website to the top of the search when someone searches for a keyword that's relevant to your service. So let's say plumber in Castle Hill or electrician in Castle Hill, that type of thing.

Yeah, so I need electrician or plumber. And Google knows your location.

Yeah. And look, there is a lot of competition, right? There's a lot of plumbers, there's a lot of painters, there's a lot of electricians, all those tradies, there's generally a pretty, you know, probably a dozen at least in an area like this. So surprisingly, however, a lot of those tradies don't realize what they need to do online to be able to stand out, you know, on that first page. So quite often it doesn't take as much work as somebody thinks it does. And it just takes consistency, persistence, a little bit of time and effort and you can be on that first page of Google.

So I suppose in sort of a bit of a summary thing, the tradie that's come to me renting, wanting to look at his financials and wanting to improve, and I say he can't get his loan right now because he needs an extra 20 grand, 30 grand of profitability. These little tips and things that we've just gone through with getting rid of the tyre kickers, increasing the big fish and driving more of that traffic that is out there to your website now potentially changes his whole profitability. There's extra dollars coming in. There's more time to think about stuff.

More time to think about stuff, definitely. So he can probably make better decisions. He can probably cut a lot of expensive expenses because another thing that tire kickers generally do is they cost you a lot more money. So profitability doesn't just have to be about bringing in more cash, it can also be about cutting those expenses.

Yeah. So I suppose looking at a mortgage broker to a web designer, really, as we work together, your personal life with your own home and where you store your equipment, or even buying more equipment to do a certain. Some of these bigger hire jobs really works really well to then make sure that your front door is looking pristine, clean, easy to navigate. You're seeing everything there. Now we're moving from, honey, I can't buy this house to let's do more. Let's affect our whole future. Let's look at even going down the path of leaving a legacy for our kids.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we go into small business, whether it's a trade business, a service business, you know, we all have this dream that, you know, we're going to have more freedom, we'll have more time, we'll be able to work with who we want. But quite often we fall into that trap of I've just got to take on everything and everybody. But as our businesses mature, we, you know, we need to start stepping away from, you know, that mentality to, you know, I have the experience, you know, I deserve to, you know, I can solve problems for the bigger fish. You know, let the newer guys deal with the tire kickers and get their experience because you've already been in those trenches. Time to move up.

Yeah, I think you're right. And I suppose there's a whole different set of fear of missing out and a whole range of other things that we can talk about a bit later on. But I hope this conversation helps you guys out there trying to get out of the rent trap from a tradie point of view, or even just trying to get your next home for your family so that you can live, develop, grow, and be the business owner that you want to be.