Contractor Success Secrets: BBB's Role in Home Services

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Contractor Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Phillips. This show exists to help small business owners like you escape the tyranny of Contractor Freedom and enter the bliss of Contractor Freedom so you can have the Time, Money, and Freedom to Live Your Life With Purpose Beyond Your Business.As a certified human behavior consultant in DISC personality styles and motivators, I'll be sharing with you skills for life, love, leadership, and business. I'll also be connecting you with experts that can help you scale your business and your life. So if you want to build the business and life of your dreams, then you are in the right place.Let's go. Jason Phillips: Hello, contractors. I'm excited today to have with me a very special guest. , his name is David Beasley and he's the, he is the Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the, for the BBB serving North Central Texas. He start, man, he's been with the BBB a long time. He started way back in, in [00:01:00] 2006.So he's been there like 17 years and he's been in various leadership positions. Now he's the COO. He's been recognized with 17 different Better Business Bureau Outstanding Awards as well as, gosh, he was the Dallas Business Journal's in 40 Under 40. Just an incredible resume, but I've invited David to come on today because David understands, he understands trust, and you know that I'm, you hear me say this all the time, trust is the currency of business, and so we're gonna, we're gonna talk about that.We're gonna talk about, how relevant the BBB is, why you should be using a member and why you should be actively educating your potential clients on the value of the Better Business Bureau for them. And so we're going to have a really interesting conversation, David, I am glad to have you.Welcome. Thank you for joiningDavid Beasley: us today. Thanks for having me, Jason. I always enjoy having conversations with you and this one today. Jason Phillips: One of the things, David, that you know [00:02:00] the BBB is a foundation of trust, right? And so could you maybe just tell us what does that David Beasley: mean?A lot of people that are, there's still this big question that I always get sometimes whenever I say I'm more at our business bureau, I'll get family members who say Oh, so you work federal government, right? The truth is that BBB has been around since as a philosophy since 1912 right here I'm sitting here in Dallas and the concept was born out of a big assembly that was had here by the advertising industry way back then it was far more of a, of an issue on truth and advertising and the advertising industry was trying to figure out how they were going to be able to survive past having the power as far as advertising still working if people couldn't trust it.So at that time it was a snake oil salesman, some wildcat[00:03:00] oil investment schemes. Obviously Ponzi schemes started in that same century. So the. The advertising industry took it upon themselves to say, look, the only way we're going to survive as an industry is to self regulate ourselves and to demand more of ourselves.And then over the next hundred years, it turned into just more than advertisers, but any industry that could potentially benefit from self regulating themselves. And. And the fact that recognizing that the best way to promote capitalism, to promote a great business is to make sure that consumers trust business to continue doing it.Jason Phillips: Wow. Especially, right here in, in Texas, of course, not every, not everybody hearing us is going to be from Texas, but in our state for the business I'm in. For home improvements, there's for painting, roofing, gutters, things like that. Those are not [00:04:00] licensed trades.And it's like nobody, if you do shoddy workmanship nobody's going to come and yank your license. Or if, gosh, I had a a buddy a number of years ago that moved in from California. And I asked him, I said, Hey, what brought you to Texas? And he said I was running out in, I think he was in LA.I was running a, running my business. It was a home improvement business. And me and my partner, we were doing well and we decided to open a new location. So I moved an hour down the road, opened up the new location and he said my, my partner back home stopped taking care of the clients and the state of California yanked our license to do business.So I came to Texas because it's easy to do business in Texas. And you think about that, all those people that are in Texas, not taking care of not running a, an ethical business, they are They're just, if they get a bad name, they'll just shut down, get a new P. O. box, a new LLC, and start up under a new name, right?David Beasley: Yeah, you know the Fly By Nighters for Towards the beginning of [00:05:00] our early years with the Better Business Bureau we're a primary concern, obviously in deregulated areas, BBB tends to do quite well because In areas where there, there is no state license or county license or any kind of licensing standard for the quality of services or for competency purposes we really depend on industries to be able to, the good actors in an industry to be able to self report to the better business bureau serve.The Better Business Bureau whether on boards or on committees to be able to advance their marketplace, advance their industries, obviously, that's always been true as far as the the mission of Better Business Bureau trying to advance trust in the marketplace.But, I think that one of the benefits here to each industry that we serve, in this [00:06:00] instance, the painting contractor industry, is the fact that We're helping consumers distinguish the difference between those fly by nighters or somebody who hasn't taken care of their customers, aren't transparent in their business practices, just aren't responsive, potentially took upfront payments, large upfront payments for services, and then either, either didn't provide the service or have had extremely long delays in providing those services, and we're trying to sit in and use current technology to be able to provide information to consumers so they can make the distinguish and distinguish the difference between a business that has pled to. Take care of its customers no matter what, or no matter how hard it might be versus those who potentially went and bought a few cheap paint brushes and a roller and became a painter overnight.[00:07:00] Jason Phillips: I find that extremely valuable, by the way. So if, if I'm a small business person, a contractor, a painting contractor, for instance, what's the value to me? of, of becoming an accredited business with the Better Business Bureau? David Beasley: I think that there's there's two ways in, in, in two primary categories that we typically put the benefits in, right?First, when we, when you're looking at the fact that last year the BBB. org had, almost 150 million visitors to its website with consumers who were either looking for looking for. the right business to to hire, or were maybe even coming to us after they were having a problem with the business or needed help trying to resolve a dispute.When you have that many consumers coming to our organization certainly [00:08:00] there is some practical business benefits to when you have a great BBB business profile that defines either a great rating defines that you are taking care of your customers.And then if you're talking about BBB accreditation the. The feeling of of confidence that you can give a consumer that if a problem were to to occur that they will be taken care of because a business has pledged to do so that's somewhat the business benefit to it.But then there's also the civic benefit to a business. And that's just the fact that I think that those, Business owners that truly, they truly have a passion for the industry and not only just for their own individual business, but they want to move their industry forward. We, offer opportunities for businesses to be able to [00:09:00] serve their marketplaces, whether it's just financially.By becoming a BBB accredited business or whether or not it's through serving on our boards or for serving on committees. This allows businesses to be able to. to try to take and put into action any kind of servant leadership that they might, would like to provide. But it's funny, my mom as I was growing up, my mom always had this poster that said everything I learned or everything I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten, right?I don't remember every single part of it, but I do remember the general takeaway, which was that sometimes even the most basic concepts are the most fundamental things that we need to learn. And I think that one of those is certainly the company that you keep is immensely important to the kind of person or kind of business that you want to be.And so whenever you are in the accredited business and you have [00:10:00] the ability to start interacting with other businesses that have the same values as you, I argue that is immensely important. Jason Phillips: 100%. You thinking about. We're in the people business, even if, regardless of the widget we're selling or the service we're providing, we're in the people business.And I tell my people this, is, we're not selling a paint job or a freshly painted house, if you will. What we're really selling is peace of mind. Because... A home is typically someone's most valuable investment. There's a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and emotions connected with homeownership, along with...