LCC Referrals from Contractors

So I was having conversation with Lisa Bixler, about how do I differentiate myself? She's got it nailed for the residential, and the Aging-in-Place, and visible design, but when it came to commercial, how do I differentiate myself? So we talked about different ways. One of them is to differentiate yourself in that your design is better. Okay? So there's usually three ways to differentiate yourself in marketing, it's better, cheaper, faster. Now cheaper or faster, when it comes to an architect's probably not the greatest idea in the world. So we'd have to go down the better route. Okay, but how do you do better? Everyone's saying they're better. And there's a number of ways to do it, of course.

There's the Star Story Solution. There's return on design. There's having some proprietary secret source system. A lot of different ways. But we said, "Okay, there's a lot of people differentiating themself around better design, let's go for this thing here," which is the LCC. So you can differentiate yourself because you've got an LCC. So here's a little set of boxes that we constructed on our coaching call. She gets all her work from contractors, so this is how contractors can avoid a 'justa' project. So what's a 'justa' project? Well, when their clients says to the contractor, "Awe, it's just a this," or, "It's only this. It should be pretty easy."

So what happens is, the client does their research, which is probably not as watertight as they would like to believe, they call the contractor, [inaudible] the submits for permit, rejected. Rejected because there's a whole lot of stuff that the client didn't give them, because the client didn't know to give it to them. Right? What happens to the contractor? Loses face, time delays, angry client, loses money, has to reschedule crews. Painful. So then what happens, is we have to go through the roundabout, and call the architect, "Can you help me out?"

The architect then submits for a permit, and the permit gets accepted, right? But not without having to climb, doing the old detour de France, where you have to detour back to the architect, and go through the whole process again, and then do the king of the mountain. Painful for the contractor. So I reckon if you could draw this out for a contractor, because most of them will have been through this, and if they haven't, they're about to. That is what they don't want. They don't want a 'justa' project, where the client thinks it's really easy. So here's what Lisa's got. Client does their research. They call the contractor. The contractor should then call Lisa in for a 'justa' research. So if you think you're about to face a 'justa' client, then get me in to do a 'justa' research. She's not going to call it 'justa', but that's what we're calling it for now. And then, submit for permit, and then it gets accepted. Boom.

So it's nice and visual. I don't know. So basically, it's about selling that LCC, a 'justa' research, or whatever you're going to call it, to the contractor, but having a good story around it. Whoever tells the best story wins, right? So you get to avoid all that, if you get me in when you think you're going to have a 'justa' project, which is probably most of them. So [inaudible 00:03:32]. I don't know. Can you use this? Hope so. Let me know what you think. And I only really want to know if you think it's really good. If you don't like it, don't bother telling me.