The Confident Consumer

In today’s unpredictable marketplace, it can be difficult navigating consumer behavior, says industry advisor Mark Richardson. Many homeowners find themselves stuck in a strange limbo: financially stable, yet emotionally hesitant. They’re saying, “I’m okay, but it’s not okay.”

This sense of unease, this lack of confidence in proceeding with a project is challenging remodelers to find new approaches to closing a deal. In this edition of the Remodeling Mastery podcast, you will hear 10 strategies you can use to overcome a prospect’s hesitancy to proceed with a project.

Strategies

1. Find clients who can be motivated: 10:12
2. Be the voice of reason: 11:44
3. Help reduce client stress—remodeling is a stressful process: 13:45
4. Tackle projects in phases: 15:01
5. Make it happen quickly—time kills deals: 16:40
6. Know your numbers and sweet spots: 17:50
7. Adopt a selling down mindset: 19:08
8. Ask the right questions: 20:42
9. Hone your message and have success stories to share: 23:18
10. Focus on you—confidence creates enthusiasm and enthusiasm sells: 25:16

Partial Transcript:

Hi, I'm Mark Richardson. Welcome to modeling mastery, which is a podcast series that's really designed to help you think, reflect and act on your business, not just in the trenches doing your business. What I try to do is I take different topics that I think are thought provoking, but also very, very relevant to the environment and the times.

Over the course of the last couple of years, as we've moved out of COVID, most of what I've been talking about are really relating to leadership, sales and marketing. So as you go back and look at some of the topics, they all kind of fit together as a fabric and kind of puzzle pieces in terms of what's going on out there, and collectively, they do, in fact, tell, I think, an important story.

Today I'm going to talk about a topic that we're going to get into in a moment here that's really focused on, again, the consumer, but really nailing down a very simple theme, and that is, today you want to find and create the confident, the confident consumer. And that is so, so important. I actually heard that particular theme by one of my friends at Google, who does a lot of consumer research. And as a result of this, this consumer research, they listen to literally 1000s of 1000s of people in terms of their chatter, and they can extract particular words or particular kind of themes out of what they're healing, hearing and feeling out there. And this was one that really, I think, really set the court. But I'll get into that in more detail in a moment here.

You know, 2024 my theme was a year of uncertainty. And as I said many, many times in the podcast, uncertainty is not bad or it's not good, it's just uncertain. If you don't know whether it's going to rain that day, you have to prepare for it. If you don't know whether there's traffic going to be out there on the road, you've got to leave maybe a few minutes early so that you can account for those kind of things. Uncertainty is more about being prepared and being smart about the uncertainty and not being blindsided by it.

As we moved into and certainly had a historic presidential election, my 2025 theme, which I really have talked about again quite a bit, was a year of mastery. Now since I think there's been a lot of choppiness in terms of what's been going on in recent in 2025 it's really caused, I think many to say, Well, Mark, it still feels pretty choppy, uncertain out there, but I would go on it still applies to this theme of it's a year of mastery, because what we have to be more masterful at is working and pivoting and adjusting in uncertain times. You know, I'll have calls with different remodeling leaders and certainly folks that I work with on, you know, lead flow and marketing and sales kind of results and those kind of things. And we'll this year, we've gone through periods of time where I think we've had two or three weeks of really good lead flow coming in, and then it all of a sudden, goes dark, and it's scarcity. It's very inconsistent. It's almost like what we're experiencing, quite frankly, with many of the weather events and all those kind of things as well.

So this notion of mastery, while you might say, Gosh, I need to just kind of hunker down and just prepare for uncertain times. I would argue, when you put the two together in uncertain times, you have to become more masterful, not less masterful, of really navigating these waters. And I think if you can do that, you're going to be much more successful. So as I was thinking about this topic today, I think one kind of reference point that might be interesting to touch on is to kind of think about the environment, think about the consumer in particular as this series of jigsaw puzzle pieces, and each piece has a little bit of a story or a little bit of a theme or a little bit of a word, but collectively together, I think the more that you breathe it in and you can understand it, you will ultimately be much better off in terms of how you how you approach it.

So going back, for example, to, you know, all the way back as we were getting, you know, coming out of COVID, you know, one of the themes of my friend from engage Pam Tory kind of coined this little word. He says, you know, consumers have become feral, you know, and feral again, is all about controlling the process. It's all about wanting what they want. So during COVID times, they were very patient. They were, you know, hunkered down in their home, and they were very patient. They became kind of feral and, quite frankly, more difficult to deal with. I remember many years ago, I had a feral cat, and that cat who had been a house cat and became a feral cat all of a sudden wanted to eat when it wanted to eat, wanted to behave when it wanted to behave. And all of a sudden was, wasn't necessarily that warm and cuddly cat anymore. And as a result, we had to certainly approach, I think, that relationship slightly different also this notion of you know that Google actually coined that your competition is everything. As we've moved out of COVID, we found, for example, that everything, the cup is overflowing, I think, when it comes to your clients and everything is the cut, is the competition, it's that all the school activities, it's going out to eat much more often. It's the Taylor Swift concerts that even some of my friends who actually attended some of those, they actually went to Europe to be able to attend some of those things. So you're competing, I think, against a very, very busy and full client out there. So if you're not masterful at those kind of things, and you're going to be challenged. Another theme that I thought was really appropriate, that's one of these puzzle pieces, is that the theme that, again, came from some of my friends at Google, and it is, I'm ok, but it's not ok, as you really reflect on that simple little feeling and adage out there, I think it's, it's really important that your clients, and you look at the data, your clients for the most part, especially if they're upper, upper middle class client type of clients, they're doing fine. You know, they have jobs. The unemployment rate is relatively low for for them, they have equity in their homes. They have the finances, and even with the Herky jerkiness of the stock market, they still are in very good shape. However, they're looking out at the community. They're looking out at the world. They're looking out at kind of the political dynamic, and they realize, you know, it's not necessarily Okay, so they're okay, but it's not okay, and what that causes them is to want to just pump the brakes, push the pause button. And it's a very natural thing when you're looking out and you're feeling you're okay, but it's not okay out there that you may not be gung ho and really pushing far ahead. I also think, you know, in COVID, we were kind of driving through the fog a little bit, you know, we didn't know what was ahead of us, but we looked in the rear view mirror and it all made a little bit more sense. You know, my friend Allison talked about, you know, there was a time that, you know, is kind of wonky out there, and we're certainly seeing a lot of residue of that. So my point in all this is simply that all these elements, when you hook them together, like a puzzle piece or jigsaw puzzle, they really create. I think this, this dynamic of a lack of confidence on the part of the consumer. So this theme is that you really need to focus today on the confident consumer. Is so important confidence in almost anything that we do, they really create your ability to be able to go in and have conviction and be committed and be focused on proceeding with things, as opposed to being nervous and, you know, sitting back and pumping the brakes. So this confident consumer, which you're going to hear that term several times in this podcast, is going to be especially important moving forward. So in having said all that, in kind of my my typical podcast format here, I've created 10 themes or 10 ways to think about and approach this is as far as a consumer confident and I think what I'm really trying to encourage you not only have to know it and understand it, but most importantly, you have to start to live it, you have to start to move your game to that level four mastery, which is unconsciously competent when it comes to really focusing on that, this notion of confidence, confidence certainly most importantly with these clients, if you want them to proceed and want to see predictability, but also confidence when it comes to you and your team, to be able to convert and not necessarily have it be kind of a mystery whether something's going to happen or not going to happen. So in that spirit, really encourage you to pivot, adjust your game a little bit to this theme of the confident consumer...