When it comes to our industry, too many men and women go too much away for free, that that's just the expectation.

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to Midweek Modern Craftsman, where today I'm going to dig into some real world situation, some project inquiries, some leads, and how I work

my way through them, focusing primarily on how to protect my time from the outset. And this is

something that I think I learned just through experience, through confidence, right? It's not something

that I would have done or said early on, but at this point in my career,

I understand what my time's worth.

I understand the value that I'm bringing through my experience, and I want to ensure

that these clients who are reaching out understand that from the outset.

So I need to delicately set the tone. And I'm going to walk you

through how I do that based on a couple of different scenarios. If you did not listen to the main

podcast this week, give that a listen. Nick and I walked through four potential leads that we created and did some role playing.

And just how we reacted to those leads, how we vetted those leads, how we gauge them as far as how

legitimate they were if it was something that we wanted to take the next steps on.

So I would definitely recommend listening to that, just all the information from those clients,

what their needs were, and how they fit into our program as contractors.

So somewhat of a similar scenario here, but I mostly want to focus on, as always, those

smaller contractors where our time is so valuable, where we need to capture every hour of our

time. If I go and run it and look at a job for a client and I spend two, three hours doing

that and I don't get that job.

I'm losing considerable money in the grand scheme of things when you consider how many hours I can bill for in a year being a smaller business.

So those hours, capturing those hours, whether it's through an overhead

or like what I do, just a fee up front is so important to me and really changed a lot of

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