Article from Stuff.co.nz Graham McGregor • 12:00, Nov 12 2020 OPINION: Many years ago I discovered a simple business success strategy. Talk to successful business people and ask them two things: What did they do to build their successful business and how did they handle the many challenges along the way? Whenever I do this I’m amazed at the terrific ideas I get and that’s the purpose of this new series, Real Life Business Lessons. I’ll be interviewing a wide range of successful business people around the country and finding out what worked well for them and how they solved big problems along the way, with the goal of uncovering some helpful ideas that you can use in your own business. One of the good things about business success is that often you don’t have to super clever to build a successful business. In fact, if you can just be brilliant on the basics that can often work very well to create all the business success you want. In this edition of Real Life Business Lessons you’ll see some great examples of being brilliant at the basics to build a successful business. I was chatting recently with Mike Kidd, the managing director of a successful new home-building company in Christchurch called Fortified Homes. Mike is 30 years old and has been in the building game for 10 years. He was 20 and on his OE when he got an opportunity to come back and work with his dad doing building (Mike’s dad had been a builder for 40 years.) Mike knew it would not be easy as his dad took a lot of pride in being a builder and worked really hard. In fact everyone that knew Mike’s dad said he was the hardest working and best builder they had ever seen and that showed in his workmanship, how tidy he kept jobs and how well-organised every building job was. It was from his dad that Mike first learned the importance of becoming brilliant on the basics. Mike remembers as a building apprentice with his dad he had just finished nailing some ceiling battens off. His dad walked over and said: “Come with me”. They walked to the end of the house where Mike could see the ceiling battens were nailed at the correct spacing’s but didn’t line up with the rest of the house. His dad pointed to the room Mike had completed and asked: “What do you think of that?” Mike replied: “Doesn’t look great”. His dad nodded and went back to his work. Structurally the work Mike had completed was sound and it would never be seen.But that didn’t matter to his dad. He wanted the work to be 100 per cent right. Through his apprenticeship these values of high quality and hard work were strongly instilled in Mike and this is how his business runs today. After a number of years working with his dad, Mike decided to start Fortified Homes. He spent a lot of time thinking about what to call his new building company and had a light bulb moment while on his honeymoon in Bali. At the time Mike was really into reading historical fiction books about kings and queens of medieval England and was thinking along the lines of ‘Every man’s house is their castle’. Mike got thinking about castles and wondered – how do you make a castle strong? You fortify it. Mike got really excited about this as he knew he had found the name he wanted. Initially when Mike started Fortified Homes they did subcontracting work for other building companies. But after a year or two that work dried up, so they decided to jump in the deep end build their own homes and sell these homes to clients. Now they were new home builders and no longer sub-contractors. They did some brainstorming and had a planning session and decided that first home buyers would be a good target market to build new homes for as they got a bit of help from the government. Mike realised they needed some plans to sell at the right price and got their draftsman to create these plans. They then started advertising their home building services on Facebook. Mike told me they built their business on Facebook. They just kept pushing the fact that they offered a great product for a great price (that’s a basic message, but very powerful). They didn’t really know what they were doing but could see that their posts were reaching people and getting likes. They would spend between $50 to $200 per post to get their name out there. After some time they took some courses and got clued-up on how Facebook marketing actually works. This is another ‘brilliant on the basics’ strategy: Identify the skills you need to do well in business and if you don’t have some of these skills then learn them. Mike’s wife Courtenay is now their Facebook marketing expert and they use their money a lot more effectively on Facebook now. They do a range of things on Facebook – they offer info in the way of blogs on their website, and they give people handy tips they can use. They update people on the home building jobs they have currently and the progress of each job. People love seeing their handover posts where they can see the finished home after watching the progress shots of that house over the previous months. Mike finds that these posts are usually their most popular ones. Mike was very nervous about what other people would think when they first started promoting their house designs on Facebook. However, they started to get calls and messages from people enquiring about building. The next step from there was to actually sell a home to someone. In the early days Mike was not very good at selling. He didn’t take notes properly, he didn’t have his figures worked out for potential upgrades, and he didn’t have a set sales process to take clients through. Every time Mike had a rejection he had to go and analyse why he wasn’t getting the job. Mike wasn’t previously used to getting rejected. He was a builder doing subcontract work, and he didn’t have to do any selling. Now he was a business owner it was very different. Mike still doesn’t really know how he sold to his first few clients! But a few key basic things he had going for him were his knowledge about the products he was using, the best way to get ‘bang for your buck,’ and that he could also help out with almost any technical question the client had. So with these things and a truckload of enthusiasm, he got a few clients across the line. Mike then went to a few free seminars on how to talk to people, how to structure a simple sales process and just general business guidance which gave him a bit of a base which helped him to get a few more clients on board. From there Mike started to get into networking groups which was a big unknown for him at the time. He got in with The Networkers and they have been great connecting Mike with different professionals to help their business (this is where Mike managed to get a connection to build a website so that Fortified Homes could be found on Google). The key Mike found is that they kept investing in themselves with the money they made as they always wanted to be better. Today they still invest a lot of money in improving their business and their skills. All part of being ‘brilliant on the basics’. Mike identified the skills he needed to improve in and took action to improve his skills in these areas. Another basic business skill that is critical for business success is finding new ideas to improve the results you are currently getting. Mike found that he gets lots of good ideas from his own people. They have taught Mike how he can manage them better and stop and look at things from their perspective. Mike remembers when he had just employed his foreman Ryan. He was the first qualified carpenter Mike had employed which was interesting as he hadn’t been taught Mike’s way of doing things. This was a bit of a struggle for Mike at the start. Then Mike decided to listen to Ryan’s ideas and look at how he was doing things and was pleasantly surprised that some of those things were better than his way! Mike and his team now ask some very simple questions about every part of their business: Is it economical? Do we achieve the same or better outcome? Is the process easier? Is the process faster? Is it easier to understand? These questions help them to come up with lots of good ideas for improvement. As Mike told me: “Who cares where the idea came from? If it is a better idea that is great for everyone!” Mike also enlisted the help of Andreas Becker who is a business coach for builders. Andreas has been a great help in teaching Mike some of the in-depth keys to success in business with regard to sales, forecasting and tracking your numbers. He has helped Mike implement an effective sales process and helped them to put great lead generators into their website. One key take away from their coach Andreas is that they went from shotgun marketing to direct marketing. In other words they now do marketing to the people who were already looking to have a home built. This has produced a nice boost in the number of quality prospects they talk to each month. And they achieved this result with less effort and less money than they had previously been spending. They now track all of their marketing numbers, so they can see everything happening in real time. Mike made a great comment about business success that I really liked: “No-one in business seems to know it all and it seems to be a journey rather than somewhere we get to”. And a major part of the journey is learning how to improve your key business skills. Being ‘brilliant on the basics’ has meant the number of new homes that Mike’s company builds each year is steadily increasing. In 2018 Fortified Homes built seven new homes for clients. In 2019 that increased to 11 new homes built. In 2020 there were 15 new homes build. And it looks like they are on track to build around 20 new homes in 2021. When I interviewed Mike I discovered that his whole family was involved in the business. His mum and dad have been Mike’s rocks and mentors throughout the business to date and all major decisions still get discussed in depth with them and his wife Courtenay. His mum does all the accounts side of the business and Mike’s brother is their accountant. This meant the business has tidy books and good cash flow. His dad helps with costing all the jobs and does the project management of every job as well. And Courtenay does all their social media marketing. Mike found that the best thing about having family involved is that you can always count on them to do their share and if they aren’t doing something you like, you can always have a frank conversation about it. The worst thing about having family involved is that when you have a family tragedy, someone has to pick up the slack. Earlier this year Mike and Courtenay’s daughter Emily was born and through some complications, they had to bring her home on palliative care for three weeks. Four weeks after she was born, she died. This all happened just after lockdown finished which was stressful enough. Unfortunately, Mike’s parents had to pick up the slack and carry on the business while Mike and Courtenay got back into a space where they could function again. They were running on minimum capacity for a while and Mike told me they were very fortunate to have some understanding clients at the time. Every single business owner I have interviewed for my Real Life Business Lessons has had big challenges and hurdles to overcome in building their business. Sometimes the challenges are in the business side of things. And sometimes (like with Mike and Courtenay) they are in their personal lives. Whatever the challenges you face in business it is critical to have a good support network in place to help you through these tough times. One of the keys to success for Mike and his new home building business was their focus on a very specific market niche: First home buyers. Fortified Homes focus on building single story homes for first home buyers that are around $500,000–$550,000 (including the land). The homes they build are high quality, they can be customised for clients and are built on time. Mike knew they could offer a better quality at a better price for people. They had friends who had built with other builders, and he remembers thinking that we should be able to compete with a higher quality product as well as one that was bigger in size. They created a few set plans which could be paired with a section and come in under the $550,000 budget. Mike gave me a typical example of this type of home. A section in Rolleston is approx $190,000. You then add a 213m² home for $339k and allow $20,000 for landscaping and driveways. Total investment: $549,000. Because Mike’s company offered such great value they attracted a wide range of first home buyer clients. They had one couple who had put down a $1,000 non-refundable deposit down with another company and still came to build with Mikes company as they offered much better value for the same price and they got a customised home as well. They also have another couple who did a complete custom build and personalised their home to exactly what they wanted (Mike has this home entered into the Master Builders House of The Year competition currently so it will be interesting to see how that goes). Mike and his team love building for first homers as they are always so excited about the process and it is a real journey for them. Mike told me it feels great that they are actually making a difference to them and making their lives better. Mike had some great people who gave his business a go at the very start which he will be forever grateful for. Millie and James were one of their first clients a young couple in their early twenties. Mike and his team built them an awesome 213m² 4 bed first home in Rolleston for under the $550,000 cap. Millie kindly passed on Mike’s details to another couple who were looking to build which translated into work. They have since built for three people who they know and Millie’s parents. They are also currently building their second home for James and Millie as well! Mike laughed and said that if Millie ever wanted to give up nursing, he may have to offer her a job as their salesperson! MIke discovered in new home building there are four factors that are really important to customers. These are the four basics if you like. They are speed, quality, service and price. Usually most building businesses get three of the four basics right. Mike said that Fortified Homes is consistently hitting all four of these basics and not just three of them. Mike and his team have set the bar high which is stressful at times but worth it when they see how happy their clients are when they hand over a dream home at the end of the build. Mike has always had the approach that “we are just there to help the clients build their home, that’s it. If the client needs the time to digest what they are doing or get things to contract really fast, it doesn’t bother us because we are just there to help! That is our commitment to good service, just helping!” They have really good subbies who do a fantastic job consistently. Mike sets his quality standards really high for his subbies and they know it. Mike and Courtenay always do the final touch up clean on properties before they do a handover with the clients. Mike knows that Courtenay has quite an eye for detail when it comes to making sure things are as they would want a house handed over to themselves.. Mike summarised his ‘brilliant on the basics’ philosophy like this: “We are a small family run business; we use good quality products and awesome subbies who give us a fair price. We run the business as lean as possible so that the clients get huge value for the price they pay.” They also commit to building in six months and under (they average four and a half to five and a half months depending on the house size and specs.) They make sure that their clients get a tentative date at lock-up stage with that being confirmed a few weeks after that. How do they do this? Mike explained: “Our builders are awesome and we run a tight ship when it comes to timelines and schedules, so we consider it a failure if we don’t hit target dates. (They are so well practised in this now that they rarely miss dates.) The fastest new home build they did was 14 weeks – They started at the end of August and had their clients into their new homes before Christmas. One of the biggest business challenge for Mike has been this realisation: “We are running a business and we have to somehow get the message to people that we are here and not be the world’s best kept secret.” At the end of 2019, Mike went through a dry spell with sales. He was doing the same things that used to work but it didn’t seem to make a difference. Mike had the realisation that without sales, there is no business. Who was to blame for no sales? The salesperson. And who was that? Mike was! It was a hard pill to swallow that Mike was the weak link in the process, and he needed help! So he decided to get off the tools completely and concentrate solely on making sales and improving the business. And within a year of doing that it made a huge difference to their sales results. Now they are into a position where they have a great sales process so sales are easier to make and prospective clients are also a lot happier. I asked Mike what his clients really loved about his business. First Mike said his clients love being treated like people and not just another sales figure. Mike told me they also love the one-year inspection service after their home is built, the weekly progress reports while the house is being built and how they only deal with one person. I asked Mike how his one-year inspection service worked. One year on from the build Mike and his team come back for an inspection on the house. Anything that needs fixing they will fix and they will do any settlement paint touch-ups around corners of windows and doors where you are likely to have the most movement. They find this service is great because it gives them a chance to catch up with their clients. It also gives their clients a chance to bring up any small things that they might be unsure of. I asked Mike for any advice he would give other business people that would help them to do well in today’s environment. “Cash is king,” Mike said. “So many tradies have terrible bookkeeping and invoicing, so they always seem to have cash issues. Get every invoice out the next day at the latest and have a minimum number of days for clients to pay. Find a good mentor to help with the business side of things. We are usually awesome builders when we start out but apprentice business people.” I finished out interview by asking Mike what we he would do differently if he was starting his business again today. “I would bring in other mentors a lot earlier,” he said. “I would nail down the sales process earlier. Without sales, you have no business.” Summary The big takeaway I got from talking with Mike is the reminder of being ‘brilliant on the basics’ in business. Learn how to promote and market your business and put in place a proven sales process. Continually look for good ideas that can improve your results. Identify the key skills that will help you to build a successful business and spend money and time to learn these key skills. Get good mentors. And focus on delighting your customers (because delighted customers lead to a huge amount of very easy and highly profitable repeat and referral business). See original Stuff article here.

Article from Stuff.co.nz Graham McGregor • 12:00, Nov 12 2020 OPINION: Many years ago I discovered a simple business success strategy. Talk to successful business people and ask them two things: What did they do to build their successful business and how did they handle the many challenges along the way? Whenever I do this I’m amazed at the terrific ideas I get and that’s the purpose of this new series, Real Life Business Lessons. I’ll be interviewing a wide range of successful business people around the country and finding out what worked well for them and how they solved big problems along the way, with the goal of uncovering some helpful ideas that you can use in your own business. One of the good things about business success is that often you don’t have to super clever to build a successful business. In fact, if you can just be brilliant on the basics that can often work very well to create all the business success you want. In this edition of Real Life Business Lessons you’ll see some great examples of being brilliant at the basics to build a successful business. I was chatting recently with Mike Kidd, the managing director of a successful new home-building company in Christchurch called Fortified Homes. Mike is 30 years old and has been in the building game for 10 years. He was 20 and on his OE when he got an opportunity to come back and work with his dad doing building (Mike’s dad had been a builder for 40 years.) Mike knew it would not be easy as his dad took a lot of pride in being a builder and worked really hard. In fact everyone that knew Mike’s dad said he was the hardest working and best builder they had ever seen and that showed in his workmanship, how tidy he kept jobs and how well-organised every building job was. It was from his dad that Mike first learned the importance of becoming brilliant on the basics. Mike remembers as a building apprentice with his dad he had just finished nailing some ceiling battens off. His dad walked over and said: “Come with me”. They walked to the end of the house where Mike could see the ceiling battens were nailed at the correct spacing’s but didn’t line up with the rest of the house. His dad pointed to the room Mike had completed and asked: “What do you think of that?” Mike replied: “Doesn’t look great”. His dad nodded and went back to his work. Structurally the work Mike had completed was sound and it would never be seen.But that didn’t matter to his dad. He wanted the work to be 100 per cent right. Through his apprenticeship these values of high quality and hard work were strongly instilled in Mike and this is how his business runs today. After a number of years working with his dad, Mike decided to start Fortified Homes. He spent a lot of time thinking about what to call his new building company and had a light bulb moment while on his honeymoon in Bali. At the time Mike was really into reading historical fiction books about kings and queens of medieval England and was thinking along the lines of ‘Every man’s house is their castle’. Mike got thinking about castles and wondered – how do you make a castle strong? You fortify it. Mike got really excited about this as he knew he had found the name he wanted. Initially when Mike started Fortified Homes they did subcontracting work for other building companies. But after a year or two that work dried up, so they decided to jump in the deep end build their own homes and sell these homes to clients. Now they were new home builders and no longer sub-contractors. They did some brainstorming and had a planning session and decided that first home buyers would be a good target market to build new homes for as they got a bit of help from the government. Mike realised they needed some plans to sell at the right price and got their draftsman to create these plans. They then started advertising their home building services on Facebook. Mike told me they built their business on Facebook. They just kept pushing the fact that they offered a great product for a great price (that’s a basic message, but very powerful). They didn’t really know what they were doing but could see that their posts were reaching people and getting likes. They would spend between $50 to $200 per post to get their name out there. After some time they took some courses and got clued-up on how Facebook marketing actually works. This is another ‘brilliant on the basics’ strategy: Identify the skills you need to do well in business and if you don’t have some of these skills then learn them. Mike’s wife Courtenay is now their Facebook marketing expert and they use their money a lot more effectively on Facebook now. They do a range of things on Facebook – they offer info in the way of blogs on their website, and they give people handy tips they can use. They update people on the home building jobs they have currently and the progress of each job. People love seeing their handover posts where they can see the finished home after watching the progress shots of that house over the previous months. Mike finds that these posts are usually their most popular ones. Mike was very nervous about what other people would think when they first started promoting their house designs on Facebook. However, they started to get calls and messages from people enquiring about building. The next step from there was to actually sell a home to someone. In the early days Mike was not very good at selling. He didn’t take notes properly, he didn’t have his figures worked out for potential upgrades, and he didn’t have a set sales process to take clients through. Every time Mike had a rejection he had to go and analyse why he wasn’t getting the job. Mike wasn’t previously used to getting rejected. He was a builder doing subcontract work, and he didn’t have to do any selling. Now he was a business owner it was very different. Mike still doesn’t really know how he sold to his first few clients! But a few key basic things he had going for him were his knowledge about the products he was using, the best way to get ‘bang for your buck,’ and that he could also help out with almost any technical question the client had. So with these things and a truckload of enthusiasm, he got a few clients across the line. Mike then went to a few free seminars on how to talk to people, how to structure a simple sales process and just general business guidance which gave him a bit of a base which helped him to get a few more clients on board. From there Mike started to get into networking groups which was a big unknown for him at the time. He got in with The Networkers and they have been great connecting Mike with different professionals to help their business (this is where Mike managed to get a connection to build a website so that Fortified Homes could be found on Google). The key Mike found is that they kept investing in themselves with the money they made as they always wanted to be better. Today they still invest a lot of money in improving their business and their skills. All part of being ‘brilliant on the basics’. Mike identified the skills he needed to improve in and took action to improve his skills in these areas. Another basic business skill that is critical for business success is finding new ideas to improve the results you are currently getting. Mike found that he gets lots of good ideas from his own people. They have taught Mike how he can manage them better and stop and look at things from their perspective. Mike remembers when he had just employed his foreman Ryan. He was the first qualified carpenter Mike had employed which was interesting as he hadn’t been taught Mike’s way of doing things. This was a bit of a struggle for Mike at the start. Then Mike decided to listen to Ryan’s ideas and look at how he was doing things and was pleasantly surprised that some of those things were better than his way! Mike and his team now ask some very simple questions about every part of their business: Is it economical? Do we achieve the same or better outcome? Is the process easier? Is the process faster? Is it easier to understand? These questions help them to come up with lots of good ideas for improvement. As Mike told me: “Who cares where the idea came from? If it is a better idea that is great for everyone!” Mike also enlisted the help of Andreas Becker who is a business coach for builders. Andreas has been a great help in teaching Mike some of the in-depth keys to success in business with regard to sales, forecasting and tracking your numbers. He has helped Mike implement an effective sales process and helped them to put great lead generators into their website. One key take away from their coach Andreas is that they went from shotgun marketing to direct marketing. In other words they now do marketing to the people who were already looking to have a home built. This has produced a nice boost in the number of quality prospects they talk to each month. And they achieved this result with less effort and less money than they had previously been spending. They now track all of their marketing numbers, so they can see everything happening in real time. Mike made a great comment about business success that I really liked: “No-one in business seems to know it all and it seems to be a journey rather than somewhere we get to”. And a major part of the journey is learning how to improve your key business skills. Being ‘brilliant on the basics’ has meant the number of new homes that Mike’s company builds each year is steadily increasing. In 2018 Fortified Homes built seven new homes for clients. In 2019 that increased to 11 new homes built. In 2020 there were 15 new homes build. And it looks like they are on track to build around 20 new homes in 2021. When I interviewed Mike I discovered that his whole family was involved in the business. His mum and dad have been Mike’s rocks and mentors throughout the business to date and all major decisions still get discussed in depth with them and his wife Courtenay. His mum does all the accounts side of the business and Mike’s brother is their accountant. This meant the business has tidy books and good cash flow. His dad helps with costing all the jobs and does the project management of every job as well. And Courtenay does all their social media marketing. Mike found that the best thing about having family involved is that you can always count on them to do their share and if they aren’t doing something you like, you can always have a frank conversation about it. The worst thing about having family involved is that when you have a family tragedy, someone has to pick up the slack. Earlier this year Mike and Courtenay’s daughter Emily was born and through some complications, they had to bring her home on palliative care for three weeks. Four weeks after she was born, she died. This all happened just after lockdown finished which was stressful enough. Unfortunately, Mike’s parents had to pick up the slack and carry on the business while Mike and Courtenay got back into a space where they could function again. They were running on minimum capacity for a while and Mike told me they were very fortunate to have some understanding clients at the time. Every single business owner I have interviewed for my Real Life Business Lessons has had big challenges and hurdles to overcome in building their business. Sometimes the challenges are in the business side of things. And sometimes (like with Mike and Courtenay) they are in their personal lives. Whatever the challenges you face in business it is critical to have a good support network in place to help you through these tough times. One of the keys to success for Mike and his new home building business was their focus on a very specific market niche: First home buyers. Fortified Homes focus on building single story homes for first home buyers that are around $500,000–$550,000 (including the land). The homes they build are high quality, they can be customised for clients and are built on time. Mike knew they could offer a better quality at a better price for people. They had friends who had built with other builders, and he remembers thinking that we should be able to compete with a higher quality product as well as one that was bigger in size. They created a few set plans which could be paired with a section and come in under the $550,000 budget. Mike gave me a typical example of this type of home. A section in Rolleston is approx $190,000. You then add a 213m² home for $339k and allow $20,000 for landscaping and driveways. Total investment: $549,000. Because Mike’s company offered such great value they attracted a wide range of first home buyer clients. They had one couple who had put down a $1,000 non-refundable deposit down with another company and still came to build with Mikes company as they offered much better value for the same price and they got a customised home as well. They also have another couple who did a complete custom build and personalised their home to exactly what they wanted (Mike has this home entered into the Master Builders House of The Year competition currently so it will be interesting to see how that goes). Mike and his team love building for first homers as they are always so excited about the process and it is a real journey for them. Mike told me it feels great that they are actually making a difference to them and making their lives better. Mike had some great people who gave his business a go at the very start which he will be forever grateful for. Millie and James were one of their first clients a young couple in their early twenties. Mike and his team built them an awesome 213m² 4 bed first home in Rolleston for under the $550,000 cap. Millie kindly passed on Mike’s details to another couple who were looking to build which translated into work. They have since built for three people who they know and Millie’s parents. They are also currently building their second home for James and Millie as well! Mike laughed and said that if Millie ever wanted to give up nursing, he may have to offer her a job as their salesperson! MIke discovered in new home building there are four factors that are really important to customers. These are the four basics if you like. They are speed, quality, service and price. Usually most building businesses get three of the four basics right. Mike said that Fortified Homes is consistently hitting all four of these basics and not just three of them. Mike and his team have set the bar high which is stressful at times but worth it when they see how happy their clients are when they hand over a dream home at the end of the build. Mike has always had the approach that “we are just there to help the clients build their home, that’s it. If the client needs the time to digest what they are doing or get things to contract really fast, it doesn’t bother us because we are just there to help! That is our commitment to good service, just helping!” They have really good subbies who do a fantastic job consistently. Mike sets his quality standards really high for his subbies and they know it. Mike and Courtenay always do the final touch up clean on properties before they do a handover with the clients. Mike knows that Courtenay has quite an eye for detail when it comes to making sure things are as they would want a house handed over to themselves.. Mike summarised his ‘brilliant on the basics’ philosophy like this: “We are a small family run business; we use good quality products and awesome subbies who give us a fair price. We run the business as lean as possible so that the clients get huge value for the price they pay.” They also commit to building in six months and under (they average four and a half to five and a half months depending on the house size and specs.) They make sure that their clients get a tentative date at lock-up stage with that being confirmed a few weeks after that. How do they do this? Mike explained: “Our builders are awesome and we run a tight ship when it comes to timelines and schedules, so we consider it a failure if we don’t hit target dates. (They are so well practised in this now that they rarely miss dates.) The fastest new home build they did was 14 weeks – They started at the end of August and had their clients into their new homes before Christmas. One of the biggest business challenge for Mike has been this realisation: “We are running a business and we have to somehow get the message to people that we are here and not be the world’s best kept secret.” At the end of 2019, Mike went through a dry spell with sales. He was doing the same things that used to work but it didn’t seem to make a difference. Mike had the realisation that without sales, there is no business. Who was to blame for no sales? The salesperson. And who was that? Mike was! It was a hard pill to swallow that Mike was the weak link in the process, and he needed help! So he decided to get off the tools completely and concentrate solely on making sales and improving the business. And within a year of doing that it made a huge difference to their sales results. Now they are into a position where they have a great sales process so sales are easier to make and prospective clients are also a lot happier. I asked Mike what his clients really loved about his business. First Mike said his clients love being treated like people and not just another sales figure. Mike told me they also love the one-year inspection service after their home is built, the weekly progress reports while the house is being built and how they only deal with one person. I asked Mike how his one-year inspection service worked. One year on from the build Mike and his team come back for an inspection on the house. Anything that needs fixing they will fix and they will do any settlement paint touch-ups around corners of windows and doors where you are likely to have the most movement. They find this service is great because it gives them a chance to catch up with their clients. It also gives their clients a chance to bring up any small things that they might be unsure of. I asked Mike for any advice he would give other business people that would help them to do well in today’s environment. “Cash is king,” Mike said. “So many tradies have terrible bookkeeping and invoicing, so they always seem to have cash issues. Get every invoice out the next day at the latest and have a minimum number of days for clients to pay. Find a good mentor to help with the business side of things. We are usually awesome builders when we start out but apprentice business people.” I finished out interview by asking Mike what we he would do differently if he was starting his business again today. “I would bring in other mentors a lot earlier,” he said. “I would nail down the sales process earlier. Without sales, you have no business.” Summary The big takeaway I got from talking with Mike is the reminder of being ‘brilliant on the basics’ in business. Learn how to promote and market your business and put in place a proven sales process. Continually look for good ideas that can improve your results. Identify the key skills that will help you to build a successful business and spend money and time to learn these key skills. Get good mentors. And focus on delighting your customers (because delighted customers lead to a huge amount of very easy and highly profitable repeat and referral business). See original Stuff article here.

Article from Stuff.co.nz Graham McGregor • 12:00, Nov 12 2020 OPINION: Many years ago I discovered a simple business success strategy. Talk to successful business people and ask them two things: What did they do to build their successful business and how did they handle the many challenges along the way? Whenever I do this I’m amazed at the terrific ideas I get and that’s the purpose of this new series, Real Life Business Lessons. I’ll be interviewing a wide range of successful business people around the country and finding out what worked well for them and how they solved big problems along the way, with the goal of uncovering some helpful ideas that you can use in your own business. One of the good things about business success is that often you don’t have to super clever to build a successful business. In fact, if you can just be brilliant on the basics that can often work very well to create all the business success you want. In this edition of Real Life Business Lessons you’ll see some great examples of being brilliant at the basics to build a successful business. I was chatting recently with Mike Kidd, the managing director of a successful new home-building company in Christchurch called Fortified Homes. Mike is 30 years old and has been in the building game for 10 years. He was 20 and on his OE when he got an opportunity to come back and work with his dad doing building (Mike’s dad had been a builder for 40 years.) Mike knew it would not be easy as his dad took a lot of pride in being a builder and worked really hard. In fact everyone that knew Mike’s dad said he was the hardest working and best builder they had ever seen and that showed in his workmanship, how tidy he kept jobs and how well-organised every building job was. It was from his dad that Mike first learned the importance of becoming brilliant on the basics. Mike remembers as a building apprentice with his dad he had just finished nailing some ceiling battens off. His dad walked over and said: “Come with me”. They walked to the end of the house where Mike could see the ceiling battens were nailed at the correct spacing’s but didn’t line up with the rest of the house. His dad pointed to the room Mike had completed and asked: “What do you think of that?” Mike replied: “Doesn’t look great”. His dad nodded and went back to his work. Structurally the work Mike had completed was sound and it would never be seen.But that didn’t matter to his dad. He wanted the work to be 100 per cent right. Through his apprenticeship these values of high quality and hard work were strongly instilled in Mike and this is how his business runs today. After a number of years working with his dad, Mike decided to start Fortified Homes. He spent a lot of time thinking about what to call his new building company and had a light bulb moment while on his honeymoon in Bali. At the time Mike was really into reading historical fiction books about kings and queens of medieval England and was thinking along the lines of ‘Every man’s house is their castle’. Mike got thinking about castles and wondered – how do you make a castle strong? You fortify it. Mike got really excited about this as he knew he had found the name he wanted. Initially when Mike started Fortified Homes they did subcontracting work for other building companies. But after a year or two that work dried up, so they decided to jump in the deep end build their own homes and sell these homes to clients. Now they were new home builders and no longer sub-contractors. They did some brainstorming and had a planning session and decided that first home buyers would be a good target market to build new homes for as they got a bit of help from the government. Mike realised they needed some plans to sell at the right price and got their draftsman to create these plans. They then started advertising their home building services on Facebook. Mike told me they built their business on Facebook. They just kept pushing the fact that they offered a great product for a great price (that’s a basic message, but very powerful). They didn’t really know what they were doing but could see that their posts were reaching people and getting likes. They would spend between $50 to $200 per post to get their name out there. After some time they took some courses and got clued-up on how Facebook marketing actually works. This is another ‘brilliant on the basics’ strategy: Identify the skills you need to do well in business and if you don’t have some of these skills then learn them. Mike’s wife Courtenay is now their Facebook marketing expert and they use their money a lot more effectively on Facebook now. They do a range of things on Facebook – they offer info in the way of blogs on their website, and they give people handy tips they can use. They update people on the home building jobs they have currently and the progress of each job. People love seeing their handover posts where they can see the finished home after watching the progress shots of that house over the previous months. Mike finds that these posts are usually their most popular ones. Mike was very nervous about what other people would think when they first started promoting their house designs on Facebook. However, they started to get calls and messages from people enquiring about building. The next step from there was to actually sell a home to someone. In the early days Mike was not very good at selling. He didn’t take notes properly, he didn’t have his figures worked out for potential upgrades, and he didn’t have a set sales process to take clients through. Every time Mike had a rejection he had to go and analyse why he wasn’t getting the job. Mike wasn’t previously used to getting rejected. He was a builder doing subcontract work, and he didn’t have to do any selling. Now he was a business owner it was very different. Mike still doesn’t really know how he sold to his first few clients! But a few key basic things he had going for him were his knowledge about the products he was using, the best way to get ‘bang for your buck,’ and that he could also help out with almost any technical question the client had. So with these things and a truckload of enthusiasm, he got a few clients across the line. Mike then went to a few free seminars on how to talk to people, how to structure a simple sales process and just general business guidance which gave him a bit of a base which helped him to get a few more clients on board. From there Mike started to get into networking groups which was a big unknown for him at the time. He got in with The Networkers and they have been great connecting Mike with different professionals to help their business (this is where Mike managed to get a connection to build a website so that Fortified Homes could be found on Google). The key Mike found is that they kept investing in themselves with the money they made as they always wanted to be better. Today they still invest a lot of money in improving their business and their skills. All part of being ‘brilliant on the basics’. Mike identified the skills he needed to improve in and took action to improve his skills in these areas. Another basic business skill that is critical for business success is finding new ideas to improve the results you are currently getting. Mike found that he gets lots of good ideas from his own people. They have taught Mike how he can manage them better and stop and look at things from their perspective. Mike remembers when he had just employed his foreman Ryan. He was the first qualified carpenter Mike had employed which was interesting as he hadn’t been taught Mike’s way of doing things. This was a bit of a struggle for Mike at the start. Then Mike decided to listen to Ryan’s ideas and look at how he was doing things and was pleasantly surprised that some of those things were better than his way! Mike and his team now ask some very simple questions about every part of their business: Is it economical? Do we achieve the same or better outcome? Is the process easier? Is the process faster? Is it easier to understand? These questions help them to come up with lots of good ideas for improvement. As Mike told me: “Who cares where the idea came from? If it is a better idea that is great for everyone!” Mike also enlisted the help of Andreas Becker who is a business coach for builders. Andreas has been a great help in teaching Mike some of the in-depth keys to success in business with regard to sales, forecasting and tracking your numbers. He has helped Mike implement an effective sales process and helped them to put great lead generators into their website. One key take away from their coach Andreas is that they went from shotgun marketing to direct marketing. In other words they now do marketing to the people who were already looking to have a home built. This has produced a nice boost in the number of quality prospects they talk to each month. And they achieved this result with less effort and less money than they had previously been spending. They now track all of their marketing numbers, so they can see everything happening in real time. Mike made a great comment about business success that I really liked: “No-one in business seems to know it all and it seems to be a journey rather than somewhere we get to”. And a major part of the journey is learning how to improve your key business skills. Being ‘brilliant on the basics’ has meant the number of new homes that Mike’s company builds each year is steadily increasing. In 2018 Fortified Homes built seven new homes for clients. In 2019 that increased to 11 new homes built. In 2020 there were 15 new homes build. And it looks like they are on track to build around 20 new homes in 2021. When I interviewed Mike I discovered that his whole family was involved in the business. His mum and dad have been Mike’s rocks and mentors throughout the business to date and all major decisions still get discussed in depth with them and his wife Courtenay. His mum does all the accounts side of the business and Mike’s brother is their accountant. This meant the business has tidy books and good cash flow. His dad helps with costing all the jobs and does the project management of every job as well. And Courtenay does all their social media marketing. Mike found that the best thing about having family involved is that you can always count on them to do their share and if they aren’t doing something you like, you can always have a frank conversation about it. The worst thing about having family involved is that when you have a family tragedy, someone has to pick up the slack. Earlier this year Mike and Courtenay’s daughter Emily was born and through some complications, they had to bring her home on palliative care for three weeks. Four weeks after she was born, she died. This all happened just after lockdown finished which was stressful enough. Unfortunately, Mike’s parents had to pick up the slack and carry on the business while Mike and Courtenay got back into a space where they could function again. They were running on minimum capacity for a while and Mike told me they were very fortunate to have some understanding clients at the time. Every single business owner I have interviewed for my Real Life Business Lessons has had big challenges and hurdles to overcome in building their business. Sometimes the challenges are in the business side of things. And sometimes (like with Mike and Courtenay) they are in their personal lives. Whatever the challenges you face in business it is critical to have a good support network in place to help you through these tough times. One of the keys to success for Mike and his new home building business was their focus on a very specific market niche: First home buyers. Fortified Homes focus on building single story homes for first home buyers that are around $500,000–$550,000 (including the land). The homes they build are high quality, they can be customised for clients and are built on time. Mike knew they could offer a better quality at a better price for people. They had friends who had built with other builders, and he remembers thinking that we should be able to compete with a higher quality product as well as one that was bigger in size. They created a few set plans which could be paired with a section and come in under the $550,000 budget. Mike gave me a typical example of this type of home. A section in Rolleston is approx $190,000. You then add a 213m² home for $339k and allow $20,000 for landscaping and driveways. Total investment: $549,000. Because Mike’s company offered such great value they attracted a wide range of first home buyer clients. They had one couple who had put down a $1,000 non-refundable deposit down with another company and still came to build with Mikes company as they offered much better value for the same price and they got a customised home as well. They also have another couple who did a complete custom build and personalised their home to exactly what they wanted (Mike has this home entered into the Master Builders House of The Year competition currently so it will be interesting to see how that goes). Mike and his team love building for first homers as they are always so excited about the process and it is a real journey for them. Mike told me it feels great that they are actually making a difference to them and making their lives better. Mike had some great people who gave his business a go at the very start which he will be forever grateful for. Millie and James were one of their first clients a young couple in their early twenties. Mike and his team built them an awesome 213m² 4 bed first home in Rolleston for under the $550,000 cap. Millie kindly passed on Mike’s details to another couple who were looking to build which translated into work. They have since built for three people who they know and Millie’s parents. They are also currently building their second home for James and Millie as well! Mike laughed and said that if Millie ever wanted to give up nursing, he may have to offer her a job as their salesperson! MIke discovered in new home building there are four factors that are really important to customers. These are the four basics if you like. They are speed, quality, service and price. Usually most building businesses get three of the four basics right. Mike said that Fortified Homes is consistently hitting all four of these basics and not just three of them. Mike and his team have set the bar high which is stressful at times but worth it when they see how happy their clients are when they hand over a dream home at the end of the build. Mike has always had the approach that “we are just there to help the clients build their home, that’s it. If the client needs the time to digest what they are doing or get things to contract really fast, it doesn’t bother us because we are just there to help! That is our commitment to good service, just helping!” They have really good subbies who do a fantastic job consistently. Mike sets his quality standards really high for his subbies and they know it. Mike and Courtenay always do the final touch up clean on properties before they do a handover with the clients. Mike knows that Courtenay has quite an eye for detail when it comes to making sure things are as they would want a house handed over to themselves.. Mike summarised his ‘brilliant on the basics’ philosophy like this: “We are a small family run business; we use good quality products and awesome subbies who give us a fair price. We run the business as lean as possible so that the clients get huge value for the price they pay.” They also commit to building in six months and under (they average four and a half to five and a half months depending on the house size and specs.) They make sure that their clients get a tentative date at lock-up stage with that being confirmed a few weeks after that. How do they do this? Mike explained: “Our builders are awesome and we run a tight ship when it comes to timelines and schedules, so we consider it a failure if we don’t hit target dates. (They are so well practised in this now that they rarely miss dates.) The fastest new home build they did was 14 weeks – They started at the end of August and had their clients into their new homes before Christmas. One of the biggest business challenge for Mike has been this realisation: “We are running a business and we have to somehow get the message to people that we are here and not be the world’s best kept secret.” At the end of 2019, Mike went through a dry spell with sales. He was doing the same things that used to work but it didn’t seem to make a difference. Mike had the realisation that without sales, there is no business. Who was to blame for no sales? The salesperson. And who was that? Mike was! It was a hard pill to swallow that Mike was the weak link in the process, and he needed help! So he decided to get off the tools completely and concentrate solely on making sales and improving the business. And within a year of doing that it made a huge difference to their sales results. Now they are into a position where they have a great sales process so sales are easier to make and prospective clients are also a lot happier. I asked Mike what his clients really loved about his business. First Mike said his clients love being treated like people and not just another sales figure. Mike told me they also love the one-year inspection service after their home is built, the weekly progress reports while the house is being built and how they only deal with one person. I asked Mike how his one-year inspection service worked. One year on from the build Mike and his team come back for an inspection on the house. Anything that needs fixing they will fix and they will do any settlement paint touch-ups around corners of windows and doors where you are likely to have the most movement. They find this service is great because it gives them a chance to catch up with their clients. It also gives their clients a chance to bring up any small things that they might be unsure of. I asked Mike for any advice he would give other business people that would help them to do well in today’s environment. “Cash is king,” Mike said. “So many tradies have terrible bookkeeping and invoicing, so they always seem to have cash issues. Get every invoice out the next day at the latest and have a minimum number of days for clients to pay. Find a good mentor to help with the business side of things. We are usually awesome builders when we start out but apprentice business people.” I finished out interview by asking Mike what we he would do differently if he was starting his business again today. “I would bring in other mentors a lot earlier,” he said. “I would nail down the sales process earlier. Without sales, you have no business.” Summary The big takeaway I got from talking with Mike is the reminder of being ‘brilliant on the basics’ in business. Learn how to promote and market your business and put in place a proven sales process. Continually look for good ideas that can improve your results. Identify the key skills that will help you to build a successful business and spend money and time to learn these key skills. Get good mentors. And focus on delighting your customers (because delighted customers lead to a huge amount of very easy and highly profitable repeat and referral business). See original Stuff article here.