Good morning. Welcome to the Path to Warren podcast. This is Matt Warren. Today is January 31, 2022, the last day of the month. It’s Monday morning, about 7:19am. I hope you’re having a wonderful day, man. It was a busy weekend. I’m a little tired. I normally have to go to work in order to rest from a long weekend. It wasn’t necessarily a long weekend. We just got a lot done. Yesterday we had Mario, many of you know Mario from previous podcast, Mario Majia, he’s the main man. He came over and took down the second pecan tree in the backyard. So we were able to get that on the ground. That was the second pecan or pecon, however you want to call it. There were two trees in the back of our yard that we’re looking kind of sick. And they were dropping stuff all the time. And I just made a mess in the yard and they shaded out the garden beds too much. So it was good to get those taken down. Although I’m a tree guy, I love some good trees. It was hard to take them down, but I feel really good about it and it’s nice to be able to afford it and be able to pay them. What I want to talk about is a quick story from last week, and I was sharing about it with my accountability partner, JB, on Saturday morning. And I was like, man, I got to share about this. It’s so good. Last week, Friday morning, I went in and sat down into George’s office. George is our structural engineer. He had gotten a call from somebody that found him off the Internet. He got a call maybe Wednesday and talked with this lady. It might have been Tuesday, but he talked to a lady about she had an apartment where the client above her, not the client above her, the person living in her condo complex above her. A pipe broke twice. And the first time it flooded her apartment, she fixed it back up. Then it happened again. She flooded the apartment. And so she’s calling for a structural engineer to fly up there and help her figure out the damages and write up a report so that her lawyer, her plantiff attorney, can have something to basically speak to all the problems of her property since all this flooding. So she talked with him on Tuesday, and George took a bunch of notes and told me about it. But what he didn’t do was he did not get all the information to do a conflict check. And he left it in her court like, all right, well, just give me a call. And he told me that she was shopping. I had a little talk with him on Friday morning because he was planning on calling and following up with her on Friday morning. I said, George, how do you plan on calling this lady and talking to her about what she needs. He had a couple of notes written down. He said, I’m going to call her. I’m going to pick up the phone and I’m going to call her and I’m going to say, hey, I just want to know if you’re still shopping for an expert. And depending on what she says would depend on what he says after that. But I told him, I said, Well, I would do it a little differently. I would come up with a reason for calling her. You got to have a reason. I said, you can’t just pick up the phone and call and say, hey, I’m just following up. Just wanted to know if you’re still shopping. You can’t do that. Well, you could, but it won’t work. I said, the best thing you could do is have a good piece of information or a good article or you thought about it really hard and you came up with XYZ. So he had found where a plane flight was like $250 round trip from Columbia, South Carolina, to New York City. I said, well, that’s pretty substantial right there. So I told him, I said, George, you would have a successful call if she allowed you to send her a budget, if you got permission to send this lady a proposal on what it would cost to get her to what she needs. Now, let’s talk about what she needs. I said, she needs a photographic study detailing all of the damage with a report to give to her attorney. That’s what she needs. That is her pain point. That’s the pressure she needs. Once she has that, then she’ll be golden. So you’re going to talk to the features and the benefits of what you’re doing. You don’t need to go into your background very much. And this is a key takeaway. Jeff, my dad, told me the other day after a sales call, after I told him what I had done on a sales call, he said, I went the other day to have some heart. My heart looked at by a doctor. He’s a heart doctor. And he said, not once did I ask to see his resume. Not once did I ask for a CV. I didn’t care about where he went to school. I didn’t care how many years he’d been practicing. I don’t even care how many jobs he’s been on, how many patients he’s helped. He said, that doctor didn’t show me anything. He just spoke to my problems. He said, what’s your pain today? Tell me about your problem. And he spoke to the problem. I said, So instead of going into you’ve got 30 years of experience, you’re a structural engineer, this is your bread and butter. You built houses that are residential houses. Instead of going into all that, I said, that would be the medical doctor talking about his CV, okay? Instead, in your limited amount of time with this lady, who, by the way, is a very affluent lady, she teaches at Yale. She’s a professor. She’s a doctor. I said, you’re only going to have a brief moment with her. I said, you need to speak to her problem. So talk to what you have been thinking about since you last spoke to her. Talk about the different rooms. Tell me about the kitchen. Is the roof caving in? Tell me about the electrical do we have electrical issues with all this water coming in? Tell me about the carpet. Is the carpet peeling up? Is it folding up? Is it molded yet? Talk to the pain. Talk to her issues. That is far more beneficial during your brief five to ten minute conversation with this lady, then she doesn’t care about your credentials. If you just talk to and talk to how you’re going to fix and what she can do to fix the problem, it’ll take care of itself. You don’t need to go into your resume again. The moral of the story is doctors, when you go visit the medical doctors, they don’t give you their resume. So sure enough, Friday afternoon, he calls me or comes in my office late in the afternoon and says, Matt, she called me back. Let me say something before I get too far into that. I told him, I said, I’m going to guarantee you she’s not going to answer the phone. You must leave a message. And I want you to leave a message with everything that we’re talking about right here. Leave a message of I just want to let you know I found a plane flight for $250. I wanted to let you know I’ve been thinking about this room in that room and how we’re going to do this. And this is the best way to handle this. Speak to everything that we talked about in a brief voicemail, because she’s not going to answer the phone. She’s a busy College Professor. But when she gets your voicemail, she’ll be so happy, she’ll call you back. I said, this is going to differentiate you from the rest of the structural engineers out there. All the other structural engineers, when they hung up the phone, they said, oh, well, she’s shopping. She’ll get back to me. And you just those experts fell into the mix of just another structural engineer. What I want you to do is I want you to take away the ice cream cone. And I’ve shared about this, but it’s one of the most important things that I talk about almost once a week. I said, take away the ice cream cone. So when you try to give kids sometimes candy like ice cream, they might or might not want it. But the second you take it away, the second you pull that ice cream cone away and say, you can’t have this, they go nuts! They go nuts, don’t they? They have to have it. They have to have the ice cream cone the second you take it away. So my suggestion to him was, you got to take it away every time you have to take it away. So what does that mean? I said what it means is when you’re talking to her, you’re not going to say, all right, well, if you’re interested, just give me a call back. You’re going to take that ice cream cone away and you’re going to say, I need to know the date of the loss, the location of the loss, and the injured party so that I can do a conflict check. And all of the parties that are involved in this complaint, I need to do a conflict check to make sure that we’re not conflicted out and that somebody in our firm has not worked. This case may be on the other side. We call it a conflict check. And once the conflict check is complete, I’ll have our office manager who does the conflict checks. She will send you a letter of agreement. The letter of agreement is just our standard paperwork. It’s got in there, our pricing structure, our fees, it’s got in there the terms of what we do. You can read through that. And if you’re interested, let me know. But we can’t move forward. And I don’t want to have any photos or anything until after we do a conflict check that’s taking the ice cream cone away and is putting it in your court. So what’s going to happen between the time that you get off the phone with her and the time that she gets the email back from Kimberly? Even though we know the conflict check is clear, we always do a conflict check. It’s part of our process. So we’re not like lying here. We’re not exaggerating the truth. We have to do a conflict check. That’s part of our policy. And what’s going to happen from the time that you get off the phone with her to the time that she gets that email? She’s going to wonder, oh, I hope I can work with George, but he’s going to let me know if he’s available because of the conflict check. He’s going to let me know, right? It’s totally different than the other engineers who are also sitting there saying, well, she’s going to call me back. She’ll call me back. Yeah, I think I’ll get that. One, it’s a totally different case. Number one, you’ve taken it away. Number two, you’re going to do a conflict check. So that put the action back in your court. And number three, what I’m telling them to do now is get permission to send a proposal based on the latest plane flight information so that’s putting more action in your side of the court. So now you’re providing her with a turnkey price of what it’s going to be to go from Columbia, South Carolina, to New York, take the photos, do the study, talk with her, come all the way back home, write a report. There will be no question in her mind. I said that’s the next little baby step you got to think of all these proposals and sales process think of them in baby steps. That’s the next baby step. So hope you found this beneficial. It’s going to be a great day. It’s going to be a great day. We’re going to have commerce and we’re going to open cases. Hope you have a wonderful day and remember as mom always says, make your contribution. Thanks for listening. Bye.