If you're a self-employed tradesperson, okay, and you pay checker trade each month,
and that's starting to frustrate you, then you're always going to have to do that until you
learn the skills and knowledge in sales and marketing. And your only other option, if you
don't want to do that, is you subcontract to other companies to continuously feed you work.
If you neglect your sales and marketing knowledge and skills and training, then throughout your
entire career as a tradesperson, you're always going to have to depend heavily on somebody else,
whether it be checker trade, my builder or other builders, whoever it is, you're going to always be
dependent upon these people to feed you work. Now, the alternative is you learn the sales and
marketing skills, which often become overlooked if you're a tradesperson, because we think
as long as we're good on the tools and we're good at our craft,
and naturally I'll be busy and work will find me. It's a myth, guys. It's a total myth. And when I
was a young lad learning my trade, I would turn to other self-employed tradespeople and I'll talk
to them and ask them, how do I find regular work? I've got my van, I've got my skills,
I've got my trowel, I've got my mixer, I've got my buckets. Raring to go, how do I find work? And
the message was always the same. Just get good at what you do and people will, you know, phone you
up and work will find you. That was the first bit of bad advice. Forget about marketing and sales,
you know, a good tradesperson shouldn't have to do any marketing. This was the advice. Or,
on the flip side of that, the other advice was join checker trade.
So those were the two pieces of advice that I got from other self-employed tradespeople.
What I didn't realise is at the time, guys, is when I was young and naive and I went self-employed,
the people that I was talking to to get advice from on this were struggling themselves.
So they didn't know the answers or have the answers, so they just told me what they were told.
And of course, if you do get a few little jobs off checker trade,
naturally you think, well, it's working, it's working, I'm getting work from it. But what they
don't realise is long term, that's going to cost you thousands of pounds, right, that could be
kept in your back pocket. I've got one lad in my coaching group who spent 10 grand over a four-year
period with checker trade. He built up over 255 star reviews and when he left, he lost all of his
reviews. And his phone just completely stopped ringing because he was so heavily dependent
upon checker trade to give him consistent work. And this guy is paying his mortgage and feeding
his family through his business. So he's the breadwinner. So he ended up going back to checker
trade and paying, I think it was something like over 300 pounds per month that he was paying.
And then there's more fees on top. So guys, listen, it's not a great long-term strategy and you
could be in a position where you've been held over a barrel by these companies
if you become that heavily dependent on them, whether that's builders or trade association sites,
we have to become self-sufficient and self-reliant and build our own brand and do our own marketing.
Okay, that's the only way that you're going to be able to increase your earnings
and have consistent regular work on your doorstep without having to pay out
big money each month to these companies or rely on builders and developers and stuff like that.
So the question come up, should I get business coaching
on my community group? How do I know if I need business coaching? That'll all depend on what
your end goal is and what you want to do, where you want to take your business. Some people are
happy plodding along as a subbie, earning a basic wage and that keeps them happy and that's absolutely
fine. Other people want to build a brand, be more flexible, earn more work less, maybe they want to
work around the school run, maybe they want to start niching down and specialising so that they
don't have to be doing six, seven days a week grafting. And if that's the case, then you need
to consider learning some skills and some new knowledge on sales and marketing. Many trades,
people see sales and marketing as something sleazy, something, I don't like the idea of sales,
but think about this, anything that you've ever bought in your life, you've either seen or heard
about it first, before you purchased it, it's very rare that we just stumble across something and then
make a random purchase. Usually we've seen and we've heard about that product first and that's
all you're doing with your sales and marketing, you're just making your potential customers aware
of your products and your services. And what we teach in Solid Decochin Group is very simple,
you need to get good at what you do before you start promoting yourself.
You need to become an exceptional tradesperson, because many of us are good on the tools,
but when it comes to things like communication, cleanliness, being organised, being punctual,
etc, things that matter to your customer, we're weak, we're weak in these areas. So just being good
at your craft and being good at your on the tools, it's not enough to make a crack of business.
So if this interests you, have a look at the link below and you'll see a bit more information on what
we do and how much money you could potentially save by going fully organic in your business
and not paying out any money on ads on your marketing. So you do your marketing yourself,
it's a DIY job. So if it interests you, check it out and have a look at the link.
Now I just want to end this video with one last point and something I had to learn and pay the price for.
Whenever you're trying to get ahead and do better as a tradesman, earn more money,
get better jobs and just earn more profit and start to see a little bit of success.
Whenever you try and do that, right, like an elastic band between your fingers,
you try and reach and grow, what will happen is you'll always fall back to your level of knowledge
that you've got today. So you might try, you might try and strive and do better and earn more money.
You think I'll work harder and harder, I'll work longer and longer.
Right, but what's going to happen is you're going to burn yourself out and always fall back
to your level of knowledge that you've trained yourself on. And that doesn't matter if it's
something on the tools, like a new material or a new project that you're trying to take on.
It doesn't matter if it's skills off the tools, sales, marketing, organization, CRM systems,
digital marketing, websites, right, whatever it is. When you try to do something on your own,
it doesn't work because you're always going to fall back to your level of knowledge.
So you have to consider, do I need to expand my training, my knowledge and skills in this
specific area before I can move forward in order for me to grow and do better?
Because I spent way too many years, right, trying to do all this shit on my own,
researching loads of stuff online on YouTube and Google and trying to figure it out alone.
Because the people that were around me weren't a great help. They weren't where I wanted to be,
they weren't earning the sort of money I wanted to earn. They weren't living the sort of life I
wanted to live. I wanted more free time and I wanted to work less and I wanted to do six
figures a year, that's what I wanted. I couldn't find anybody around me that was doing that.
Okay, so whenever I try and grow and expand and do well and be a successful person, I would always
fall back to my level of knowledge. Okay, so I had to train and learn, which took fucking decades.
It doesn't have to take you decades because I've condensed all this information
into a simple online training course that you can access whenever you like.
And it's fucking 80p a day. It's not like it's going to cost you hundreds and hundreds of pounds
like checker trade.