How to Impress Your Clients

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Hi team!

Let’s talk about two wildly different businesses:

• A consulting business

• Those airport businesses that sell overpriced water and gum

You know, these ones:

They have a captive audience. If you’re thirsty at the airport, they’re the only game in town.

It doesn’t matter if the water bottle is $12 and warm. These airport kiosks will continue to survive, and thrive. Customers can’t go anywhere else.

Consulting is the exact opposite.

A consulting business survives solely by delivering good work. Our clients can go elsewhere. We aren’t the only store in the airport.

We have to impress our clients, or we lose them as clients.

That’s why most of you voted to read about how to impress consulting clients this week!

So today, we’re going to cover one of my favorite hacks to deliver good work.

As always, we’ll cover an interesting real estate property of the week and you can vote on next week’s topic!

Here we go!

1. A Hack To Deliver Good Work

Let’s say a client hired you for a 3 week project. You have a big deliverable that you’ll send to the client then.

You’re a few days in. The project timeline looks something like this:

You’re doing great work and know today that you’ll deliver a fantastic project.

Let’s flip this now and think about it from the client’s perspective.

The Client’s Perspective

The client thinks about this differently. They don’t know until the due date, when they review the deliverable, if you did a good job.

The client’s chart looks like this:

The client doesn’t know if you did a good job until three weeks later.

That means the client will have spend 20 of the 21 days of the project wondering if the output will be “good.”

That’s 95% of the time.

So, clients spend 95% of the time unsure if the work will be good and if they made the right hire.

It’s hard to sell another project to the client if they spent most of the first project worried about your deliverable.

We need to adjust that.

We’re going to shift the client’s perspective to look like this!

The ‘hack’ to shift their perspective is to over-communicate.

You don’t have a deliverable to show on week #1 of the project.

But by over-communicating, your client builds confidence in you. They begin to think “you got this” and that you will deliver good work.

This way, they’ll spend 95% of the project thinking you are in control and on pace to deliver the final output.

I’ve never had a client tell me that I communicate too much, but all of my clients tell me they feel confident in me being able to deliver.

Over-communicating works!

So what does over-communicating look like?

This can vary depending on the project. I tend to think about it this way:

• If the project is “immediate” and due that day, then the minimum is 1 message per hour

• If the project is less than 2 weeks, then the minimum is a daily status email

• If the project is greater than 2 weeks, then the minimum is 2 phone calls a week and a daily status email

Remember, these are minimums. Depending on project needs, you might need to communicate more.

Interesting Property of the Week

This week’s interesting property is a nice-looking 8 unit property from Steven’s Point, Wisconsin asking $1.65M.

The listing claims the monthly rent roll is $15,000.

It looks fairly nice inside…..

….but this is a TERRIBLE buy!

Here’s how to tell in ~30 seconds on Zillow

First, it’s clearly student housing

The only time you see 5 & 6 bedroom condos is for college students with lots of roommates.

So, I googled it and there is a college with almost 9,000 students there.

Student housing is difficult. Expect frat parties and damage from drunk students in every unit.

The maintenance bill for this property is going to be huge.

The property management bill will also be huge.

It’s a headache to deal with drunken damage, noise complaints, and students forgetting their keys & getting locked out.

The property manager will take a big cut of revenue to compensate for this headache.

Second, the climate

Steven’s Point is pretty far north; roughly equal to Northern Vermont and New Hampshire.

That means a TON of snow. Two big implications there.

First, you will have a huge snow plow bill. I’d guess at least $10-$20K over the winter.

In a single family home, the tenant can handle the plowing. But in Multi-family, which tenant is responsible for it?

Answer: none, which means it doesn’t get done.

Second, you’ll have a big utility bill. Even if heat is split utilities, the owner has to pay to heat the hallways and other common areas.

Third, your roof will take a beating due to the snow. You’ll have to replace it pretty frequently.

The “True” numbers:

On paper, the building brings in $15,000 in rent and your monthly PITI payment is ~$11,000.

Best case scenario, ~$4,000 in cashflow per month off a $330,000 down payment.

But throwing in the drunken damage, property management, snow, utilities, and snow-driven repairs…

My guess is you make ~$1,000 a month at best.

Not nearly enough to deal with the headache. And a terrible ROI on your $330,000 down!

How can I help?

For whenever you are ready:

• Grab time with me for a 1 on 1 session on consulting, real estate, or anything else I could help with

What would be most helpful for you next week?

This newsletter exists to help you! The topic that gets the most votes will be the focus of next Friday’s note

What would be most helpful for you now?

Is there anything I can do now that would be helpful for you?

If so, please feel free to reply to this email! It will come direct to me and I will try to help however I can