How to Get Going When the Going Gets Tough

It's tough out there, says industry advisor Mark Richardson. The landscape has shifted for remodelers and it’s harder to land new business now that homeowners are busier than ever, and more cautious and less responsive than they were just a few years ago.

In the latest edition of his Remodeling Mastery podcast, Richardson offers 10 tips on how remodelers can get better results in a challenging environment.   

Timestamps

1. Focus on having the right attitude: 6:30
2. Study the data: 10:25
3. Don’t isolate, engage with peers: 11:48
4. Align yourself with successful people: 12:30
5. Focus on people, not just projects: 13:05
6. Sharpen your skills: 14:26
7. Work harder: 15:45
8. Focus on what’s important, not what’s urgent: 16:47
9. Embrace change to stay relevant: 18:01
10. If you fail to plan, then plan to fail: 19:46

Partial Transcript

Hi. I'm Mark Richardson. Welcome to Remodeling Mastery, a podcast series that's really designed to help you think about your business, not just do your business. What I do is I take different topics or themes that I'm really seeing out there in the marketplace that I think are pretty relevant, and just take some time to kind of try to unpack them for you, not just to identify them, but also to give you a little bit of prescription of how you might want to think about and approach attacking them. This week, I want to talk about a topic that I think is, you know, one of these little bit more kind of conceptual topics, but it's also hugely important, not only for your team and for you, and certainly the success of your business.

And the theme today is it's tough out there. Now that may sound like a master of the obvious, that it's tough out there because you see it and you feel it. However, if you don't really identify kind of what that means tough out there as it compares to the last five or 10 years, then chances are you may not be integrating the right strategies and doing what you need to get that one more out of 10 or inch up against the toughness that's out there. You know, you've heard that the little adage, you know, when it's tough, the tough, get going. You know, you have to be, I think, getting going. You have to make it happen in this tough environment. So before I unpack, I think some ways to really attack it. I want to talk a little bit about maybe why it's tough and why it's gotten tough. You know, we sometimes forget that it was only about five years ago or so that we were first, you know, kind of interjected into this COVID environment. And in COVID, you know, all of a sudden, everything went dark, everything the phone stopped ringing. Everybody hunkered down. But then, after a relatively short period of time, literally only a few months into COVID, the home became the home became kind of the silver lining. All of a sudden, people were hunkered down. They could focus on their home. They were working from home. They were their family situations were changing. They were doing a lot more leveraging technology. You know, it was a very different kind of environment, and therefore the home became a real top priority. And while, yes, there were certainly safeguards that were put in place during COVID. You know, for the most part, homeowners really, really focus on, how do I make my sanctuary, my home, the right kind of living environment for myself? And therefore, they really made it a priority. But secondly, they really had time to make it a priority. Many of the things they were doing before COVID, they didn't have time for so as we marched along and we got through COVID, and certainly there were headwinds, tailwinds, but for the most part, from a consumer point of view, mostly it was tailwinds to really the phone ringing and having many, many opportunities. I think, quite frankly, many remodelers out there got a little bit soft, a little bit lazy, because it was, quite frankly, easy to just show up, and quite frankly, many, many people couldn't necessarily attack their projects. Therefore, the flow of projects that came in didn't mean the business was easy, but at least getting the business was easier as you marched along, as we got out of COVID, this glass started to become fuller and fuller, you know, homeowners, people out there, started to go out to dinner again. They started to go to restaurants again. They started to fill up their lives with their kids and their family and their sports and all these kind of things that are out there, and now their cup runneth over. They don't really have the time, they don't really have the patience. And then you take into account some of the global and some of the political and some of the dynamics that are happening certainly out there that really cause people to say, you know, I think I'm okay, but it's not okay out there. So therefore, I'm going to push the pause button. You know, we've created an environment when it comes to homeowners that, you know, they're just a little bit grumpy, they're a little bit feral. They're out there. You know, wanting to control things and making it more and more difficult. Difficult is tough. So it's tough to get the phone to ring, it's tough to get the with get the consumers to move on and not push the pause button. You know, certainly, when it comes to your own people, in your own cultures, within your company, it's really tough out there, you know, and this whole theme of it's tough out there, you know, unlike a lot of things, you know, it's tough. You feel that it's tough, but you can't really see it exactly. You can't really identify it exactly, in large part, because, you know, it's one of these things that I think you just can't necessarily experience directly, but you can analyze it, and I think, understand the toughness, and start to see it really pop up more dramatically. You know, a couple months ago, is out on a hike in Scotland. And in this hike, you know, you check the weather report, you realize that this is how I want to prepare for the day. You realize that, you know you're going to experience extreme weather conditions in this particular region in Scotland, in the height and you prepared for it. You got out there and prepared mentally, and you got out there and prepared physically for it. You knew it was going to be tough out there, and therefore you not only were prepared for it, but you got through it. When it comes to the environment, when it comes to your business, I think sometimes it's a little bit more challenging and difficult to see. So I want to give you 10 little tips and techniques of how, at least I would encourage you to just literally breathe and take a minute moment and make a list of these things, of things that you can do to be better, to see better results, as in a tougher environment.

So the first thing is a little bit more, I think I want to touch on little bit more, kind of a month, some mindset stuff. You know, I often times when I'm coaching and working with individuals, I'll ask the question, you know, how would you feel, if, you know, as you're sitting here, you know, with the balance of the year in 2025 How would you feel if you accomplish ABC things? How would you feel if you fell short on those things? By really asking yourself that question, that's going to give you a little bit more motivation, because, needless to say, no one really wants to fall short. No one wants to not make the playoffs, so to speak, especially when you were pretty encouraged about having a good year. So asking yourself that question, and asking some of your team that question another thing, when you're feeling a little bit down and a little bit your mojo is just not there. You're striking out more at the plate when it comes to clients and projects or personnel. What I oftentimes will do, and I do this exercise for myself every seven to 10 days, I'll make a list of all the positive things in my life, and I'll make a list of all the negative things, and I literally will write down listing those things, personal or professional, all the positive things and all the negative things. And without fail, the positive things usually add up to somewhere between nine and 12 or nine and 13 things, and the negatives are one or two. And what's amazing about the exercise is the one or two things that are negative are usually things I can do something about. So I really have to just put a plan in place on those negative things, and you can immediately have the right mindset that, you know, I can get out and make it happen in this tough environment, not just watch or wonder what's going on around me, and if you take that right mindset, I think that's important. There's a little theme that I oftentimes use also when I'm either coaching or working with people, and it's one that you can do, and that is A + B = R. A is attitude, B is behaviors, and R is results. See, we have a tendency to focus on the results, not the formula of how to get the results. So what I would encourage you to do, start to think more about the attitude, start to think more about having a positive mindset. Start to really focus your attitude, the work ethic. It's hard out there, and therefore you gotta work hard. You've gotta surround your people with that right kind of attitude. But then mixed with the attitude is the behaviors. It's one thing to have a lot of hugs and high fives and all this and positive attitude. But if you don't, are not weaving in the right behaviors into that, the right behaviors of, you know, going out and touching the clients in the right kind of manner on a regular basis. Those are behaviors that's how you get, you know, past clients to come back and do more business with you, but you can weave in a whole bunch of behaviors, monitoring your reports, really understanding, I think, that where you're doing buying projects out to be able to squeeze down some juice and save some costs on the overall projects. So number one, again, it's focusing on just having the right kind of attitude, having the right positivity, and really identifying how you would feel if, in fact, you achieved or didn't achieve the goal...