Tradies, How You Present Yourself Matters
Tradies – Presentation Counts – How’s Yours?
Part of my business coaching program for tradies and builders (it’s called the Tradies Toolbox Coaching Program) is building a Sales Machine. That’s all about doing sales properly, using a process and commanding better margins. That’s important. I want you to shift from putting a quote forward when you’re asked, to explaining and proving your value and putting your quote forward in context.
Part of that context is how you look.
The better you look, the more your customers will be inclined to pay. Think about a burger.
- A Mcdonald’s Big Mac is $6.40.
- There’s a burger bar near me where the burgers are about $16. It’s called Old Maids.
- In Sydney, you can pay $30 for a burger at the Cut Bar & Grill – made by hand.
- I’m going to ignore the $1000 gold leaf burger that came up when I searched for an expensive burger.
Now, there are undoubtedly quality differences between our $6, $16 and $30 burger but how they look is also different. And how they look is very much part of how much we’re prepared to pay.
Macca’s is served in paper. It’s limp and floppy, served by a spotty kid in a cheap uniform, in a ‘restaurant’ that’s slightly grim too.
The burger bar here in Brunswick Heads is a bit funky with pretty girls serving and cool people eating on the tables outside. Your burger comes in a cardboard tray thing. The whole thing is a step up in how it looks (the burger tastes better too).
I haven’t been to The Cut Bar & Grill in Sydney but it’s a step up again in what the burger looks like (on their cool looking website).
So 3 burgers. 3 price points. We’ve probably all paid all 3 price points at different times, haven’t we? (I know I have.)
Presentation Matters
Now, where I’m heading here is not a comparison of the relative price & quality of the burgers (although that’s an interesting conversation).
Where I’m heading is a discussion about presentation.
Part of why we’re prepared to pay more for the more expensive burgers is their better quality – texture, taste, ingredients – all that. And part of it is how they are presented.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jon likes helping business owners and especially owners of trades businesses. Life can be a bit frustrating when you run a business and a trade business can be even more so.
If you're a tradie and you've got successful then you probably feel like your life is not your own, that you are always making sure everyone else is OK before you and you never get everything done. You probably work too many hours each week and take your work home with you and you probably don't make as much money as you should.
Jon reckons this stuff is fixable and that you can fix it by making some fairly simple changes to the way you do things. He should know, he's been helping people do it for a long time and he's seen the same changes work time after time. He lives in Byron Bay because he likes it and he doesn't surf because he says it's too hard but he likes beer and food very much indeed. He's written for various magazines and newspapers in his time. Mostly because they think he must know something if he's survived this long. His children disagree.
cited from SMH, Money Magazine