How to Create a Competitive Advantage

You do not want that sales call to be a crapshoot. You come in and say the same thing as the next guy and the next guy. And as you said earlier, the tiebreaker is price. No, we're not having that.

So then I'm gonna come up with three metrics, and those are going to be the ones I measure customer facing, not internal. So what's step three?

So what we do, we don't let any of our customers put any metric unless we validated them. You want to say on time delivery, show us, send us your material. And very often we have to mine the data for them. We had a chemical company up in New England. Quality was number one. We said, how do you measure quality? They say, well, return rate, I guess. We said, what's your return rate? We don't know. He sends us, he dumps eight years of raw data on us. One of my consultants puts in an Excel pivot table, and for eight years they had less than 1/2 a 1% return rate. I said, do your salespeople have that? Are they armed with that since that's the number one most valued attribute?

Hey, everybody, it's Jim Johnson, your host here with Contractor Radio, and welcome to another awesome episode. We've been so fortunate here in 2024 to be attracting some pretty awesome guests. And today's guest is somebody that you're going to want to hear. This concept of gaining a competitive advantage. I think that's one of those things as contractors that we're all searching for. How do we go out there and get an advantage in our marketplace versus all the other folks out there trying to do what we do? And I have an absolute specialist at that. Now, if you are a contractor out there looking to get control of your business, in other words, you want to lead it better and you want to build the processes and systems so that that thing becomes repeatable and scalable so you can grow. And then you want to achieve what most people are after whenever they start a business, which is to have that business work for them instead of them working for their business. You might go check us out@contractorcoachpro.com there's a button on there that says take assessment. If you take that assessment, it's going to tell us a lot about your contracting business. And we're going to offer you a free coaching call where you can actually hop on. We're going to go over that assessment with you and probably point out two or three things that you could do right away to grow your business to get better control over your business and to start moving you into that position of working on your business instead of in it. If you like coaching, great. We would love to have you as a client. If not, at least we served you well that day and you know the next two or three things you need to do in your business. Now, as far as one of the things we all need to do in our business goes, it is creating this competitive advantage. We do it here at Contractor Coach Pro. I did it as a contractor for many years. I also did it at my time while I was at acculinx as their director of sales for the software out there for this industry. But today I have the pro. I have a lady here who is a award winning consultant. One of those days, I hope to be one of those folks. She has written two amazing books. I'm going to let her introduce those books and she's a keynote speaker. She spoke all over the world. I am super excited today to bring on Janie Smith. Janie, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Jim.

Yeah, like we hadn't met before, but we had somebody reach out and say, hey, I think I have somebody that would be great for your podcast. And I, you, I, I look at every single one of Those and about 1 out of 20 I go, yeah, that person would be a good fit. And as soon as I read yours, I was like, yes, we, we need to have Janie on here. Tons of experience, 20, 25 years of teaching this competitive advantage thing and then also a lot of experience in corporate America before that. That kind of helped develop some of this. Could you give us the Reader's Digest version of like kind of how you got started in it and where you are today?

Sure. So, yeah, early years of my career, I was in Fortune 500 companies in New York City. You know, did the proverbial climb the corporate ladder. Got experience in a lot of different departments, which was good because I had a lot of different disciplines that I lear. And so I moved from New York to Florida, worked for another corporation and finally one day I said, I don't want to do this. I want to be a consultant. It was a real big leap of faith. I did the proverbial jump off the cliff with a little bit in the bank. And I said I got to make it work. And I was very fortunate. I got some early clients, I got Aer Lingus. They said I was the first woman they ever hired us consultant they ever hired. I got some big travel agencies. Of course I Had airline background. So I was attracted to the airline industry. So I was doing that for a while as a consultant, which was good. It was paying the bills. And then along comes this organization that says, you know, we're really looking for people to run these CEO roundtables in South Florida. There weren't any before and you'd have to open it up. And at first I thought, what is this, you know, some kind of pyramid marketing thing? I was very suspicious. It sounded too good to be true. So anyway, I jumped in, went to a couple of their meetings. I was so impressed because it's like you describe your business. It was people who wanted to learn. You know, we use the phrase green and growing. No matter how much I know, there's always more to grow. And I thought, I love this. Excuse me, I definitely want to do it. So I signed on and I started working with these mid market companies. Now I want to tell you, coming from corporate America, I didn't even know what mid market was. I didn't know what small, medium sized businesses were. I thought, I'm really a fish out of water. So I started to learn what their challenges were. The people you work with. One of the things I started doing very early on, I would look at their marketing materials and I would say, well, what differentiates you? One guy was a real estate developer. I said, your brochure says the same thing as your top three competitors. I can interchange them. It's all the same cliche, all the same, excuse me, garbage. And so I started to devise this process for uncovering and identifying competitive advantages. If you'd like, I can give you one of my favorite case studies I think that people will relate to.

Yeah, I would love to hear it.

Yeah, so I love to tell this story. It was a very early guinea pig of mine and it was really amazing outcome. You know, the pagers you get when you go to the restaurant. Your table will be ready, sir, when this lights up. Well, early on that company, I was working with that company, coaching one to one with the CEO and they were manufacturing jtech pagers. But I have to go back to how they came there. There were a couple of guys who owned a very trendy restaurant in Jensen Beach, Florida. And if you know anything about Jensen beach, there is nothing going on there. So trendy restaurant, place to go. People were flocking there. But like most of us, I'm not waiting an hour for a table. And they would leave and the owners saw, you know, these dollar signs walking back to their car and lucky for them, they were techno geeks and they cobbled together the very first jtech pager. They bring the pager to the restaurant, they use it. Remember the first time you got one of those at a restaurant, you, this is cool. I know I'm properly in the queue. And so it worked, People stayed. But the PS to the story is they had a major unintended consequence. They just made these pagers for themselves. People came up and said, hey, where'd you get those? I want to buy them for my restaurant, for my car dealership, for my hospital. They said, we didn't buy them, we made them for ourselves in the garage. Literally. They said, if I give you an order, will you make some for me? Sure. So lo and behold, they go out and they get Bain Capital, give them big money, set up a manufacturing plant in Boca Raton, Florida and they start making these things and they're selling them now they're going nationwide. Well, along comes Motorola. And if you remember, this really dates us, the beepers we used to wear before the phones. Motorola said, we're the beeper people. Why are we letting this little upstart do these restaurant pagers? We're gonna move in. So the CEO, one day, I'm sitting with him, long faced, he says, oh my God, we're being attacked by the 800 pound gorilla. I said, bring your people together in the conference room. I just started to devise this process to uncover and identify competitive advantages. Let's see what you have to fend off the 800 pound gorilla. So we went through this process which I'll describe later in detail, and we came up with a whole bunch of things on flip chart paper. And there was one thing I said. You take this one competitive advantage statement and you shouted from the rooftops. You let every restaurant owner using your pagers hear this. And you let every restaurant owner who doesn't have a pager yet hear this. And more importantly, you make sure everybody down in Motorola in the pager department hears this. And it was one simple competitive advantage statement. And it was this. Of the 50 major restaurant chains in North America, 100% use our JTech pagers.

Wow. Yeah, that kind of gives you a bit of advantage.

I mean, so what is it? What are we telling Motorola? You know, we own the market. You can come in if you want. Motorola does some research and the people using jtech pagers is my servers. My customers love it. I'm not switching, forget about it. You never entered the market. That company, jtech, went on to sell for multiples. They never Dreamed possible to a gigantic point of sale Company, massively successful, fended off the competition with one simple competitive advantage statement that was low hanging fruit. It was there for the taking, but they didn't see it. And that's what we find in most companies, construction companies, anybody in that space. We find them all day long because their eyes are on something else. You know, can't see the forest through the trees. I can't do it for me. I can do it for you.

It's actually funny that you bring this up because this is one of those things we talk about in our own coaching is like, I come from that world. I even sent you an email earlier today. Like that was one of the things I hung my hat on as an owner is I was able to identify these places where we had a competitive advantage. Or if I didn't, I was able to create one like, hey, okay, we are like everybody else. We're a commodity. A roofer is a roofer. So how do we become something more than a roofer, something different as a roofer? And we, we did several different things. But when I tend to ask somebody like, what differentiates you from the competition? I get the same answer almost every single time. Well, our quality, our service, like that kind of stuff. I'm like, that's what everybody says on their website. They're exactly the same. So how do you, how do you see through the veil? How do you like.

So when we ask them and we get those answers, we give them one of these.

Can you send me some of those, please? I would love those.

Blah, blah, blah. No blah, blah, blah. Because it's all cliches. Is your message at risk of dying from a thousand cliches? And I, you know, I tell people, go to your website, go to your marketing and sales material, use a yellow highlighter and highlight all of the cliches and see what's left. Not much. And it looks just like everyone else's. So that's the starting place to recognize that you and your competitors are all pretty much saying the same thing.

Well, the thing of it is, is if you're all saying the same thing, you do truly become a commodity. Which then means you start competing on price versus something other by you.

Yeah, go ahead. We say you paint yourself into commodity corner by not differentiating. And price does become the differentiator. And nobody wants price to be the differentiator. And it doesn't need to be. In fact, when we do our workshops, we tell them you're not allowed to use the five letter dirty Word, P, R, I, C, E. When we're talking about differentiators, that's not. That's not.

You shall not be named. That's so great. I love it. So what is this? Because you've alluded to it a couple of times, that there's a process that you go through that helps people kind of identify these differentiators. What does that look like?

Well, the first thing we do is workshop whether we do it on. We did one this morning on Zoom. We usually do them on site. We got about 16 key employees from different disciplines. And the key is really different disciplines. You don't want all marketing, you don't want all sales. You don't want all executives. You want the plant manager, you want the project manager, you want the estimator. You want the different disciplines there, because they all have a different perspective. And so we show them this process and we prime the pump by asking them to think about, what are all your deliverables? What are the things that I have an expectation about if I hire you as a roofer? Is it being on time? Is it getting it right? Is it accurate invoices and accurate measurements? Those are all deliverables. What are those things? List them. And then when we get done, they have lists a mile long of things that they have taken for granted. We have a lot of mantras. One is don't take for granted that which is taken for granted. And one of the things, you know, you just talked about commodities. We always make that point early on. 99% of businesses are commodities. And it's not what you sell because it's a commodity, it's how. And so we help them find the answers in how, how are you selling? That makes you different or better. You know, we use an example with commodity. I like, if I'm doing a PowerPoint, I show a picture, you know that bag, lettuce you get at the supermarket, the bag of lettuce? I say, how many of you bought this bag of lettuce? Everybody raises their hand, why did you buy it? It's twice the price of a regular head of lettuce. Convenience saves time. Your customers will pay more when you show them how you save them time and make things more convenient. And we do it all day long, but we take it for granted. We must be able to find those things and monetize them, quantify them. And much of what we do in the next step of our process is quantifying it. Take the obvious one, you know, on time delivery. Okay, you know, I asked a room full of people. How many of you think on time delivery is important? Everybody raises their hand. How many of you measure on time delivery? About half of them raise their hand. Of the half who just raise your hands that on time delivery is important and you measure it. How many of you update it monthly and use it in marketing and sales, about a quarter of the people. And on time delivery is one of the most obvious metrics, but there are many, many more. We have a list of about 1200. So the key is, which are the ones that matter most? Which are the most relevant ones to the people who make the buying decision? You know, like I think I told you earlier, we did a number of window companies. Well, if you're taking my windows out and putting new ones in, I want to, I want to know it's accurate. What can you tell me about accuracy of those windows that are being installed and the people who are doing the install? We had one big, well known window company say no window installer can work for us until they've installed at least 6,000 windows somewhere else. You know, they really have serious criteria. So that's another thing companies can do. What's the criteria for your estimators? What's your criteria? What's their back? Don't say they're experienced. That's.

Everybody says that it has no meaning.

Those are the words. When I'm critiquing somebody, I cross them all out. Has no meaning. You know, I just did a website review for a group I'm going to be talking to and it's we care, we're passionate, blah, blah, blah. Everybody says that. And you know what? People's eyes glaze over and they zone out when you start talking that way because it has no meaning. We live in different times. People don't have time to wade through this cliche after cliche. Get right to the point. I just found something on a Nielsen quote that how much time do people spend on your website? 10 to 20 seconds, unless you have a value proposition above the fold immediately. And that value proposition above the fold is the only way you're going to get them to stay and click further. But most people, and this is another thing, it's funny we're doing this today because I'm just doing a bunch of critiques for a group in Atlanta that I'm going to do next week. And I said, you know, these web designers have creative license to do what they want. So how many websites you go to, there's wonderful pictures of buildings and roofs and sides, and it's like Pictures sliding through. I don't, I don't have time to sit through those pictures. You better have above the fold an answer to why us and about three bullet points. Otherwise I'm gone. I don't need. But, but, you know, these, these web designers, they just, they love being creative with the pictures they can cut and paste.

Yeah, tell me about it. Like, it's been one of the challenges, you know, building a coaching business. It should be like building any other business. But it was new for me. I wasn't like digital background, that kind of stuff. I was hands on. Like, we put, put a roof on, we put siding on, we put like that kind of stuff. And so that was a little bit of a new thing and I had to start learning some of that stuff. Then I started realizing this is just the same thing in a different world.

You have great metrics on your website. It's very well done.

Oh, I was just in here, like, while you were talking. I pulled it up. I'm like, what does it say? I want to go make sure I got that on there. And I'm going to be adding something above the fold immediately after our conversation.

They should be above the fold.

I think that's one of the golden nuggets from our conversation today. Like, hey, 10 to 20 seconds, unless you have a value prop, what's your value proposal? So coming back to that process, is there like a step? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Yes. The first step, we do the workshop. We uncover, you know, when we're on site with about 16 key employees, up to 16, it doesn't have to be that many. We will usually by the end of the day have no less than an average of 50 statements that they've come up with. We break them into teams and by the middle of the afternoon they're like, who knew we were this good? Oh, my God, this is wonderful. New employees say, I've learned more about this company today than I did in the last year. You know, so it really, really, I like to say we give them rocks to turn over to find these things. So the first step is to draft all these potential differentiators. Now, I will say that if we come up with 50 or 60 statements, most of them will hit the cutting room floor. Why? Because they're not relevant. Our second step is to do some research with your customer. We talk a lot about double blind market research, which is where the respondent, your customer or prospect doesn't know what your company asking, and you don't get to know what customer a, B or C said you remove the bias. You test 20 buying attributes and you say what's most important. So let's say it's on time, order accuracy and post sales support. Let's say those three things come in super high. Well, we better have metrics for those so that we can talk about those and build the value proposition. Now I will tell you something stunning, Jim. Brace yourself for this. When we go back with the research, we go to the client and we say, okay, here's the research. We just got your customer research. But before we tell you and your team what are the top three most valued buying criteria, we want your team to guess Mark 1, 2 and 3 what you think your customers value most out of all of these 20 tested buying attributes. And don't shoot the messenger, Here it comes. 95% of businesses do not know their customers top three buying criteria.

I would agree with that.

85% don't measure them.

I for sure believe, especially in the contracting world, you would think as much as we use a tape measure, we would think measuring is important, but it's not one of the things that we as business people are real great at. Although I do see the companies that grow the most tend to be really good at measuring data.

You just said it. The ones that grow the most are disciplined. And I tell them, you know, if you do the research, you don't have to measure 900 things, you need to measure three or four. The top of the list. What are the three or four things that you positively have to operationally now, if it's on time, delivery or turnaround time, on estimating whatever it is, you make sure you have metrics that you can back it up and validate it.

Now, these 20 buying things that you have, are those 20 for everybody or are they different?

No, no, no. Every client is different, every industry is different. And it usually comes out of the drill down. And some of our experience, you know, what is it people are looking for in that industry? Some of them are the same. I mean, clearly something like on time delivery might be there for most people in your industry on time completion. You know, certain things like that.

How often do you see the removal of stress being one of those buying things that people are looking for? Because I always say as a contractor, that's what we're selling this that we're going to take the stress off of you. Because doing anything to your home in any way, shape, form or fashion, you tell me, Janie.

Yeah, so you. So again, here's another one of my mantras. You'll like because it fits right there. It's in the sales encounter. You have to be able to build confidence and reduce risk, and that's the stress you're talking about. So for the homeowner, you know, using that window company, if I tell you that none of my window installers can even come into your house unless they've done 6,000 windows and we've had less than 1/4 of 1% redo windows in the last five years, is that going to build confidence and reduce risk? You bet it is. Are you willing to pay more for that? You bet you are. And that's how you get away from price. You know it. Absolutely. Build confidence, reduce risk, and minimize price as an issue. It works every time. We've seen it. And the two books, you know, my two books are loaded with real case studies.

So I have a question for you. On the books, did you write the book before you started consulting or after you started consulting and you saw something, you're like, oh, wow, okay.

I never wanted to write a book. I will tell you that. I started to do this process and I started to see how it worked. And I kept seeing like jtech was one early on the pager and, and a chemical company, and it works so well. So I had, you know, the proverbial yellow pad where you have your to do list every week. So I had the yellow pad, and on the to do list, I started to have something that said, write the damn book. It wasn't really something I wanted to do, but I kept collecting these case studies. Well, lo and behold, I went to New York. And in my old New York days, one of my old drinking buddies was the former senior editor of Forbes. And I run into him at Smith and Wolinsky on 49th and 2nd. And I say, hey, Bill, you got anybody who would like to help me write this book? And he said, send me the tapes of your talk. So I did, and he called me back and he said, this is good stuff. I'll write it with you. So I immediately had a really skilled co author. Very lucky, very good stroke of luck.

That's unfair.

It kind of was. But I had done all the hard work I had can, you know, so in the book, I wrote all the case studies. And he was really good at organizing it. And he was also smart and said, put that jtech story first, first chapter, because people will relate to that. But it was. It was really wonderful, of course, because he was accomplished writer, he already had an agent. That helped too.

It was the same thing for me Like I had been coaching for three years before this blueprint concept came up. And I started to notice something, some timing of events and there's a bunch. And I started talking about it. I then started talking about sharing it. And I had more than one person, and I mean like more than I can count on my fingers and toes, come up to me and say, you should write a book about this. And I did the exact same thing you did. Write the damn book. Right? I had it on the wall like write the book, write the book. And I didn't want to be an author or anything like that. Unfortunately, I didn't know anybody at Forbes, so it's just me. But it went pretty good and it went really well. So I got step one, draft the potential difference differentiators, right? And then research with the customer is kind of step two. And this is to best be done blind, like so that nobody knows there's.

No, I mean small companies can't afford the double blind research. So everything from create your own list of attributes and ask people to force rank them, hire a college intern who does this for marketing, they'll do it for free or for a school project. And the bigger companies really should hire out and do the double blind research. It makes a difference. But you know, my point is ask the damn customer what they care about. Favorite quotes that I use is Drucker says 90% of information used in organization is internally focused. That's exactly backwards. 10% comes from the customer.

Exactly backwards.

So unless, you know, people get into their huddles. Oh yeah, that's really good. Let's market that. Let's put that on the brochure. Let's leave with that on the, in the website. Well, let's put that in our rfp. But they're just agreeing on it internally and not really asking the customer what are the top two or three things you positively absolutely have to have to get the customer feeling confident. I always say you do not want that sales call to be a crapshoot. You come in and say the same thing as the next guy and the next guy. And as you said earlier, the tiebreaker is price. We don't, we're not having that.

So, so then I'm going to, I'm going to come up with three metrics and those are going to be the ones I measure. They're customer facing, not internal. So what's step three?

So, so what we do, we don't let any of our customers post any metric unless we validated them. You want to say on time Delivery, show us, send us your material. And very often we have to mine the data for them. We had a chemical company up in New England. Quality was number one. We said, how do you measure quality? They say, well, return rate, I guess. We said, what's your return rate? We don't know. He sends us, he dumps eight years of raw data on us. One of my consultants puts in an Excel pivot table, and for eight years they had less than 1/2 a 1% return rate. I said, do your salespeople have that? Are they armed with that since that's the number one most valued attribute? Nope. I wouldn't have believed it was that if I didn't send you the data myself. So, you know, step one, brainstorm potential differentiator. Step two, find out which ones matter. Step three, make sure you have the metrics and don't say, we will deliver on time. That's a promise. Nobody believes promises. You say for the past two years, three years, our on time delivery has been 98.9%. We'll show you the data because past performance is the best indicator of future performance. People want to make promises. Nobody listens to promises. You've got to be able to.

So step three is validating the data.

Validating the data and make it accessible. And then we have, we create what we call a sales sheet, which is we take the top three attributes and we have anywhere from one to three differentiation statements that prove the point on the top three. All right, Values. So that, I mean, right there, you've got a value proposition. And you know, for small companies, I always say, this is your strategic plan. You don't need to go bend over backwards with big planning processes. Find out what's valued, work on those three, operationally measure them, talk about them, make sure anybody who's on a sales call knows what, what it is.

So it's not a hard process, right? I look at this and I go, that's not a hard process. Why isn't everybody doing it?

That's a really good question.

Is it, is it the research part? Is that the part that holds it? Because it takes work. It sounds.

No, because we, a lot of our clients will just do the workshop with us. We say, if you go, you know, we ask people, what's your number one competitive advantage? And they give us the blah, blah, blah answers. And I write them on the board in the book on page 100, it says, Quality, good customer service, innovation, experience, people. And I'm like, yeah, everybody says that. So we go from that to the top Three or four things that ma that matter and, and we measure those, but we've got to get people to stop saying those cliches. And in the book, if you do pick up the book and what I.

What I hear you saying is you got to stop saying them the way you're saying them. Like, if you're going to say them, they need to be quantified. There needs to be data that backs them. That it's like, it's so. It's just too fluffy for everybody.

Our people are knowledgeable. Well, good for you. You know, what does that mean? You should hire me because I've got really good experience. What does that tell you? Not a damn thing.

Right.

It's subjective, but like, that's what I liked about your website. The metrics on your website show some really good results for you.

Yeah, we do. Okay. We've had some pretty good success with what we do. And, and it is hard to get some of those points across, but it is this validation of what you do. And that's I think, what people are buying. Validation that this person I'm going to hire and you said earlier, you know, past performance gives you what the future is going to be like. That's what people are looking for. So that's kind of your book, the Competitive Advantage. Right. Like that's most of the stuff we've been talking about. Tell me a little bit about your other book. That, that one was intriguing to me. The, the Relevant Selling.

Yeah, so, so that was creating competitive edge. That's the first one. And Relevant Selling, this is the one that's focused mostly on the research. It gives many examples of the research, how it was designed, what people were saying before, what they learned and how they changed their message. You know, I pulled a couple of these messages. So one of the window companies I was describing before, technicians have achieved 98.2% measurement accuracy, eliminating the need to redo the job. That's a heck of a lot better than saying they're well, they're good, have good experience.

I did not achieve that as a window person. That's a pretty good number.

We will even consider an installation crew. They must have replaced 5,000 windows. Even then, only one in three of the applicants meet all our criteria. People want to say experience and years of experience, but by the way, don't say we have 150 years combined experience. I picture two old guys sitting around a desk or 151 year employees. You know, never do that and you see that all the time. It should be average or minimum.

That's a great thing that you bring up. One of the challenges in this industry is there's not a lot of a track record for some people the first year or two that they're in business. Have you had any experience with that? Number one. And if you have, what can you say or do that has honesty to it so that you can have that competitive advantage?

So I get that question every time I do a keynote. Okay, great. There's always the startups in the audience and I say to them, what did you do before you decided to do this? What skills, what experience? So we had a big air conditioning company in Atlanta and experience of their technicians and engineers was number one. So we said maybe it was number two. We said, so how many years? So he said, well, most of our guys have been with us a minimum of 10 years. So he said, I don't care about that. How long have they been putting these air conditioners on the roofs of big buildings? I don't know. So HR spent a couple of months contacting each of the guys, asking them what their background was, how many they've installed, how many years they've been doing it. Because it's what do you bring to the table from your prior experience? And people forget to do that. Well, I just started the company, I don't have any history. Well, sure you do. You're bringing history there. And if you've hired one or two people by now, what do they have? And you have to build on that. And this is what I'm helping a guy with locally on what were the successes? Not just that I've done this for X number of years or X number of transactions, but just like a resume.

Yeah. You can turn it into percentages versus total number. So maybe you're a sales guy that has worked in the construction industry and you're going to go start your own. Well, you've sold a certain amount of jobs, what percentage of those went well? And 99 of 99.2% of customers have left a five star review or something like that. Right. Like that's kind of what we're shooting for is in some specifics. I'm sure you could word it better than I just did. Right.

But the other thing you can do is you can start measuring now. So we come back with research and we may say, company, hey look, order accuracy was number one. Well, we don't measure it. We say, okay fine, we're going to start measuring it today. And then in three months you're going to be able to Say last quarter we had order accuracy of, right? Then we're going to be able to say for the last 2/4 and last 3/4. So you can start today measuring those things that you find out are important so that in a few months you've got a story to tell.

That's really great. I think everybody wants things instantaneous sometimes.

Oh, yeah.

And the key is really finding out what is it that our customer wants, really not what we think they want, but what they really want by going to them and asking them. It's some of the best advice I ever got from a coach personally. And it doesn't matter. I've had a coach tell me this at least five times in my life about five different things. When I wrote the book, it was, go ask all my clients what they want in a book. And they, they were able to tell me, whenever I was starting off my roofing company, it was go ask your clients what it is they want to have the best possible roofing job. I just, I. I cannot wrap my head around why people won't do that. Do you come up with, have you come up with some kind of like, hey, this is why people don't do. Or you think they just don't know?

I think people don't know. And I think, especially in the smaller companies, the startup, you said a lot of your clients are in that mode where they're smaller, they're in survival mode early on. And so it's about the next sale, the next sale, the next sale, cash flow. Cash flow. Some of them aren't even looking well enough at cash flow. You probably know that coaching with people, and so you have to yank them out of that long enough to say, if sales and cash flow are your biggest issues, which often I hear in startups, then you want to be able to close better. In order to close better, you need to differentiate and you need to get away from price, buying the business with price. And so that can usually get their attention. And they'll do this.

So I got a question for you. You seem to be very much in the line of data metrics and those type of things. Whenever you work with somebody, what do the metrics tell you? Like, hey, we've put these things in place and so there's got to be some numbers closing percentages go up, amounts per profit, percentages.

If you go to smartadvantage.com, our website, just like you have your metrics, we have ours. If you pull it up, you'll see the three blocks, which I did notice that answering your question right there. You want to read the numbers? I don't want to.

I would love to. 91.9% increased revenue and or margins. Because it isn't always about increasing revenue. That's one of those things we coach, too. Quality over quantity sometimes is more important. 86% implemented metrics to quantify their competitive advantage. So there's still 14% that went no. This is frustrating, isn't it? You're like, here's the magic. Here's the red and blue pill, and they end up taking the red one. 76.5% experienced operational improvements. Oh, tell me about that. What is that?