Midweek with Tyler: How to Find Clients Who Truly Fit

brand stand out. When you focus on serving the right clients, the ones who truly value your expertise, you build a stronger, more profitable and sustainable business. So stop wasting your time on the wrong clients and start attracting the right ones. I am here today to help you get started on that journey. A few weeks ago, I attended the International builder Show in

Las Vegas. Thanks to everyone who came out to all of our events, the contractor, coalition, Summit, reunion dinner, happy hour, and everyone who met for dinner, for lunch, coffee, said, Hi, listen to our presentations. It was a really great event, one of the more productive international builder shows that I've been to in a while, had my wife there with

me. So hopefully, if you met me, you got to meet her. But I was there, and one of my speaking engagements, one of my presentations, was with show from Anderson windows, and she she basically did a live interview where she had a handful of questions that she asked me, and I answered them on

the spot. And one of the questions that stuck with me is something that we've we've focused on a lot through our marketing course, our pre construction course, and the question was, how can brands effectively define who they are and what they stand for to create a strong value proposition that resonates with their ideal clients? And in

short, this seems like a simple question, right? But when I, when I have this conversation with people, or when I begin to explain this, there's so many layers here, and those layers sometimes are not as clear as they should be, right? Where do you start? Where do you end? Where's the first step in this process? You know, it's, it's a bit of a chicken or the egg which came first type of thing. So what I often see people

messing up right where I want to brand my company. I want to understand what my marketing process looks like, what my lead generation systems are, and you start looking to the consumer end of things. And for me, that's not the right way to do this. There's a bit of an overlap, and there's a bit of taking that into consideration at the beginning of this process. But for me, the first step is, is understanding you,

understanding your business, who you are, what you do. To me, that is the first step in understanding how to market yourself, how to how to create a lead generation, how to intake leads, how to create that value proposition. How can you understand who your client is, who your ideal client is? If you don't understand who you are, who you are, it's like, how can you love somebody else if you don't love yourself, right? It's

the same type of principle. So in order to create a really valuable and strong system, marketing strategy, value proposition, you can't put the cart before the horse. You have to understand who you are. So there's three aspects of who you are. It's going to be your mission, your values and your vision. So I'll repeat this, but your mission is why your brand

exists beyond making money. I understand we're all in business to make money, but what's your mission behind your business and your brand, your core values are going to be the things that guide your decisions and your actions within your business, and then your vision is what outlines the long term impact

that your brand wants to make. So again, your mission answers why your brand exists beyond making money, your core values guide your decisions and your actions, and your vision outlines the long term impact that your brand wants to make. Brand wants to make. So now that you start to understand who you are, you can start mixing in the consumer end, right where it's like, who's my ideal client. Not every client is the right fit.

Even the biggest business in the world, the most volume based contractors, still have a unique and specific client profile that fits them, and typically it's that client is not the same as somebody who is more similar to like a boutique style company like me, where I have a very specific client, they're typically not. The same as a volume based client. They have unique needs that I can serve, that I serve well, and that's

how I make money. Being a small scale contractor. Again, large the largest companies in the world with the do the most volume, they still have an ideal client for them, it's maybe they have a client profile that affords them more volume, but they still have a client profile, and that's the same thing for me, my client profile and my sales funnel just winds up distilling a lot more than a volume based contract or a

volume based builder. Neither one's right nor wrong, challenges with both, pros with both but that's just, that's just the way that it is. So in order to understand your client and who is not your client, you have to understand, again, what you can do, how you what, what you do well as a company, and then you you need to start digging into, what are my clients problems? What problems do they face? What do they

aspire to achieve through our services? And I think, as a brand, as a business, once you can define this target audience, you now understand who you are. You have a better idea of who your client is, and now you can begin to create the messaging, the marketing and the offerings that resonate with this ideal client with respect to who you are as a business and how you make money. So yeah, there's some overlap. Yeah, these things

happen at the same time. But to me, the first thing is to figure out who you are, know yourself, know yourself, know where you excel, know what challenges you face, know where you you know sometimes you're lacking. It's just not a strength like something for me, which I'm just clear with, is that I don't do a ton of work every year. I don't put a ton of work into place. So if a client really wants something started next month, I know that that's a weakness of mine. That's not one of my

strong suits. I don't have a massive team and operations that I can just pump out work and start a job next month, so that for me, I understand that, and that's a weakness of mine, that is certainly not a strength, but it also helps me shape my client profile. It helps me generate my my marketing, my lead generation, right? Even my marketing. It creates scarcity for my marketing, so I can use that weakness as a tactic to market myself in a way that creates scarcity, which, hey,

the demands there, the scarcity is there. Let's sign up, because we don't want to miss this opportunity. So sometimes your weaknesses and understanding your weaknesses can also be really strong, and you can leverage them to market your business, but I have to understand who I am. I have to understand my strengths, I have to understand my weaknesses, my shortcomings, and I use that to determine who my client is, and

my client is dictated by who I am. That's really important, like I'm not allowing my clients and my market to dictate what my marketing efforts look like, what my branding looks like,

what my lead generation strategy looks like. That's all based on my needs as a business, my needs as a human, personally, professionally, from a family perspective, that is all dictated internally by me, and then I'm looking to the outside, to the consumer end of things, to start figuring out what clients align with my needs, with my strengths and my weaknesses. So I start figuring out my branding. I start determining my marketing and my lead gen strategy based on those

two aspects of life and business. So once you have a better or a clear identity of yourself your business and you better understand who your ideal client is, the next step is to start crafting that value proposition. And you guys have probably heard me talk about this value proposition A lot. If you've taken the coursework, it's something that we stress a lot, and every business has to understand their value

proposition. And I'll be completely honest, I always had a value proposition, but I didn't know explicitly that this was what it was like. I don't think I called it a value proposition, and I was, I was utilizing this technique and leveraging this technique, but I didn't actually know what it was. So your value proposition, essentially, is what unique traits do I have as a business, as a person? Uh, that can serve my clients and will be the reason that my clients hire me

and not somebody else. So it's not only just like, hey, what? What do I do? What do I provide to my clients, either relief of a problem, if, if it is a price point, if it is cleanliness, if it's attention to detail, whatever it is what, what needs Am I suiting for my clients? That not only are they saying, hey, we want to hire Tyler at TRG, but they're also saying we're not willing to hire anyone else, and that that there is everything, right?

It's, it's not just, why are we hiring them, it's, why are we saying no to everyone else? So when you can create a value proposition for your business that basically dictates not only why your clients are hiring you, but why they aren't hiring somebody else, that's when you begin to understand your marketing, your brand and your lead gen. So all of this, again, it's overlapping, and it's a bit of chicken in the egg chicken, or the egg cart before the horse, which comes for you know,

all over the place. There's a little back and forth here, but this is the process that I find works best, understand who you are, understand who your client is, and now understand how those two boxes that we've created can be used to shape our value proposition. So your value proposition is going to directly address your clients needs, again, highlighting what makes your brand different, and then you should emphasize both the tangible and the emotional benefits that you can provide

through your experience. You need to be able to grab and tug on the heartstrings of your clients. That would be more of the emotional aspect of things, but then also grab and tug on those tangible heart strings right where it's it's the product that you create. It's the attention to detail, it's the processes that you use. It's your communication. You have to understand them. You have to market those things, and they

all have to be integrated and implemented into your brand. The best value propositions are not going to be these long, drawn out value propositions. They're going to be short, simple, direct and and focusing on the meaningful impact of the experience of hiring your business, so a brand that understands its itself, its audience or its consumer has the ability to create a strong, authentic presence within the market. This is going to establish trust with our

clients. Once our trying our clients, or potential clients, trust us. Oftentimes, that's what they need to hire us, right? You can be more expensive than somebody else, but they, if they trust you, they will be more than willing to pay the premium because they trust why you're charging a premium for that if they don't trust you, even if, if you're 50% more and you're putting 200% more into that project, and they don't trust you, they might not hire you, even though that's an

insane bargain, because they don't trust your process. They don't trust your systems, they don't know who you are. Your brand presence is not substantial enough, and you have not done the work to build and establish that trust through your branding, through your marketing. So you have to be able to align your your message with your audience, and by consistently doing so. This is how you build that trust. It also builds loyalty. It also builds long term success, a

sustainable business. The higher, the higher leads to me, right? The the higher value lead are the clients who are the potential clients who come to me and say, Hey, we understand who you are. How do we like, what does your process look like for taking on work? Can you walk us through that? Right? We, we, we live next to somebody who did their kitchen you did a renovation for friends of ours, so we understand everything. Like, what's your system look like for intake of jobs? What's

your schedule look like? How do we get on your schedule? These people fit my client profile. They're coming to me. They understand who I am. They're not looking for an estimate. They more than likely had a discussion with these clients

about my services, about the experience. So. So this is a higher value lead for me, and all of the work that I did on the back end, on prior jobs, previous years of business, all of that is now creating a more sustainable business where I'm generating referrals, and I'm generating the repeat clients, and it's based on all of those principles that I put into

place. So that's why it's so important for me to sit here and tell you that you need to focus on your ideal client, you need to focus on your business and your value proposition, and try not to deviate from that, because it's a very short sighted decision for your business, because you take a job that you didn't want to take, or it doesn't necessarily fit your client profile, and now that's not creating even if there's more work that comes from it, right? It's not your ideal work.

It's not your ideal client. So now you're you're not only shooting yourself in the foot immediately because you're working for a client that's not your ideal client. You're losing opportunity costs because you could have been been working for an ideal client, and then also on the back end, even if that's an amazing project and it works out well, it's still you're now building your business on the foundation and the basis of the wrong type of lead, the wrong type of client. So you're

hurting yourself down the road. You're hurting yourself with referrals. You're hurting yourself with return clients. So I have to tell you how important it is, and try and convince you to stick to your guns and understand who you are, who your client is, and tailor your messaging to align with those attributes and with those character traits of your business and your ideal client. A lot of times we we will concede to our clients program, or to a program outside of what

is ideal for us, because we're afraid to tell clients No. We're afraid of shutting the door. We fear shutting the door on clients that something bad's going to come from that. We fear creating a more or a narrower funnel, a more specific funnel, because what's going to happen when the economy slows down? What if I need more work? What if things dry up? What if this job doesn't work out? And to build a brand and a marketing

strategy based around hypothetical situations? I understand this is easier said than done, but these situations and what you're building, the basis of your brand off of, is

not ideal for your business. It's not ideal for your margins, it's not ideal for your processes, and to be honest, it's foolish at best, if you focus on building a brand that can execute an explicit and specific process for a an explicit and specific client, you're going to build a more sustainable, more robust, more profitable and more successful business in the long run, because you're aligning your clients, all your future clients, All your referrals,

your expectations and the results from the outset, and you're aligning that with your needs as a business, with your strengths as a business, with what makes you you right, your core values, your vision and your mission. So now your clients align with those things, your marketing aligns with those things, your lead generation aligns with those things, and you will create a business that, in the long run, is far more profitable, far more sustainable, and generates more

of the same type of work. So again, this, this, this question really was brought on to me during this interview, and it's something that we've dug into before, and I think that a lot of people lose sight of how, like the sequencing of this and what needs to come first, and there is some overlap, and there is a bit of back and forth. And even after hearing this, you're going to realize, right, well, as you're generating or as you're putting these systems into place, as you're creating

these systems, it's a bit of back and forth, right? You're understanding who you are, and then you're moving more towards who your client is, and then you're realizing, well, this client doesn't afford me that. So now I need to go back to really determining who I am and what's my mission, what are my core values, and then aligning that with again your client. And then you're going back to the client. And then at that point, you can work more towards your value proposition. And as you develop

your value proposition, you might circle back to the. Client aspect of things, because you might realize that the value proposition that you created isn't necessarily generating the ideal client for you, and there's a way that you can manipulate that to generate a better ideal client profile for yourself. So yeah, there's a bit of back and forth. And this isn't the type of thing where, hey, you know what I created, my

mission. I understand my core values, and I have clearly articulated our vision, which then allowed me to identify my ideal client, which allowed me to create my value proposition. That's all said and done, that's in the past. Now I can just work on the marketing and the lead gen, and just, you know, the wheels are turning, and now it's just feeding the machine and sustaining what's going on. No, you're constantly monitoring this, monitoring this. You're constantly inventorying and

gaging this, and you're constantly adapting. And it's not always going back to the beginning. It might just be going back to your value proposition, right? Changing that a little bit to dictate and really build a better client lead for you, or it might be just changing your client profile some basically, so that it better fits your business and your mission and your core values. So you need to constantly tailor this. You need to constantly be feeding this.

You need to be constantly just understanding that there's an evolution of this with your business. Not every day is the same, not every month, not every year. Your business is always growing. It's always adapting, and your systems are always

evolving, at least they should be. So this is just a bit of a cheat code to help you understand the things that need to be put in place and how you can build the trust, the loyalty, the return customers, and really that that sustained success through branding, through understanding who you are, through understanding who your client is, and how you position yourself and become visible through your value proposition to these clients. So this is how I go through that.

This is how I suggest that consulting clients of mine go through this process to understand, hey, who's my target client? Like, what's our target job, what? What from a numbers perspectives that look like, what trades are we owning in house? What trades are costing us money? Where are their bottlenecks within our system? You're using all of this information to tailor again, everything from your mission, your core values, your vision, your client profile and your

value proposition. So I hope that this was a short, sweet, simple podcast to help you better understand what that process looks like for me and how you can begin to tailor your messaging to create a better customer, a better end user, a better client, and really start establishing and maintaining that trust through your branding. All right, guys and

girls, as always, I appreciate everything. If you want to check out the blog on this head over to modern craftsman.co, also, if you're going to be at JLC, Nick and I have a few things going on at JLC, which is coming up. Thank you to everyone who has purchased the course, everyone who has reached out, everyone who has supported what we're doing, head over and check out the website. Sign up for the newsletter. Shoot us an email. If you have a question, you have a suggestion, how to make the

podcast better. How to make this podcast better. Nick and I were just out in Arizona recently. We sat down, we recorded a podcast in person, and to be completely honest and forthright, we are looking to do that more and more with guests and without guests. So we're trying to get the ball rolling there. Obviously there is an expense that comes with that, so we're trying to figure out how to offset that. If you have suggestions for us, shoot

us an email. Hello at modern craftsman.co. If you have any questions for me, specifically Tyler at TRG, home concepts.com, I do have a handful of people who are always reaching out and asking me, are you still doing consulting clients? I usually do one to two per week. It's first come first serve basis. I'm usually out a couple weeks in advance, just because, you know, only doing one or two a week does not allow me a ton of time

to get them done. So if you are interested in that, I would suggest reaching out sooner than later, and I can get you all the information around what that looks like. Or if you have any questions, I think that that about covers it for me. Today, I appreciate everyone. I just, I just actually circle back with Doug, and we're reviewing the numbers on the podcast, and midweek is still remaining steady and doing really well. So I am very appreciative of everyone who listens to this

weekend. In and week out and emails me and engages with me. It makes all of the hard work worth it, and I appreciate each and every one of you. All right, guys and girls, I'll catch you next week. Have a good one.