$0 to $60k in 30 Days: How to Land Your First High-Ticket Jobs ⏐Ep. #265

Chris Koerner (0:03)

So, I come across this guy on Twitter named Jameson, and he is my brother from another mother. He worked on Wall Street, private equity, making a lot of money. And then he thought, you know what? I'm done, I want to own my own business. So, he goes to Southern California and he starts a deck business called West Coast Decks. His first month, knowing nothing about decks, having no experience, he does $60,000. His first year, he does just under a million bucks. So, this is a playbook. This is tactical, how to get your first home service customers to pay you a lot of money. Doesn't have to be decks, any local trade or home service business. This is the playbook for you. We talk a lot about how to find customers and how to close those jobs. When you quote the jobs, oh, and he talks about VAs at one point, that means virtual assistants. Please enjoy this conversation with Jameson.

Jameson Haslam (0:45)

I wanted to do something with a relatively large average order value. And that's not really necessarily the term you use in construction, but it's like a new home term. I didn't want to do like super high-volume, low-ticket. I didn't want to do something like custom home building, where there are literally maybe four or 500,000 decisions that need to occur. And this is just me, but I think it's actually like a pretty good heuristic, which is like the ratio of average order value to number of decisions that the client needs to make reduces the opportunity to screw things up. You're still going to screw tons of things up, right? You're still going to make tons of mistakes. But if you only have five variables, if you hit on four out of five, you're doing great versus whatever. So with a deck, you've got the shape of the deck. Is it square, 10 by 20? You've got the type of material. It can get nuanced, but it's basically like, is it wood? Is it composite? Is it which brand? Which color? Yeah. What type of railing? And that could be it, right? You could get into lighting and outdoor kitchens, and it could get more complicated. But really, you can go into a sales meeting and do a one-meeting close for a $50,000 deck with three decisions in an hour. Yeah. It's not that easy, but you know what I'm saying? It's pretty good. You know, I don't want to compete with every chuck in a truck, Tom, Dick, and Harry, that can sort of say, yeah, I can do that. And decks are just intimidating enough to deter the handyman who can build a fence.

So there's a little bit of a barrier to entry of kind of complexity and project management. You know, now we have to do some decks that are like half a million dollars and have $200,000 of foundation work and are very complicated and there's a big barrier. That was my thought process at the time.

Chris Koerner (2:37)

We're very similar because I use the analogy of our tree trimming business and like a custom home building business, just like you said. I call them binary outcome businesses. Our tree trimming business is not nearly as high ticket as yours. I wish it were. It's like $1,500 average order size, but we come in, we remove the tree, we get a five-star review. There's one decision. You want that gone? The branch of the tree.

Jameson Haslam (2:57)

Cool.

Chris Koerner (2:58)

All right, cool. That's it. And we get it like we've never had less than a five-star review. And it's not even because we're amazing operators. It's just that type of business, whereas a custom home builder, you have like the emotional aspect of it, like the homeowner. There's so many ways you can screw up. Like, I would never want to be in that business.

Jameson Haslam (3:16)

Look, we're not binary outcome, but we're not close to the custom home building. But still, like, any time you have a B2C business, you're going to have scenarios where you do something that you think is good but is a mismatch in client expectations. And there's a big skill as an operator in kind of managing that, right? A lot of times, it'll be like, we install literally half a million square feet of decking per year, and then you'll get a client, a Karen or whatever, and she'll be like, well, this cut doesn't, I don't think the cut's supposed to be that way, right? And you can't say to her like, no, like, I mean, you can, you can say like, you're an idiot, it is supposed to be that way, but you know, that's not how it works.