Reflecting on COVID Personal Development Plans
This week, Tim and Carolina reflect on an older episode where they talked about their personal development plans that they made earlier in the year. They will address where they succeeded and where they continue to keep working to reach those goals.
More About the Show
The Build Perspectives podcast shares insider knowledge to build connections and community in the building materials industry. Tim and Carolina are friends, colleagues and former coworkers who love the construction industry and their clients, and want to share their passion and insights to attract future talent to the industry.
In this episode, Tim and Carolina are going to be reviewing their quarantine personal development plans that they made back in March of 2020. It is now December of 2020. It’s time to see if they “walked the walk.”
Carolina’s Plans
Tim asks Carolina to talk through what her plan was, and still is in some respects, what the outcome was and how she sees this developing over the next few months. Even if there is a vaccine, this is still going to be our reality for at least the next six months.
So if you haven’t listened to the past episode, Carolina encourages you to go back over and listen to it. Halfway through the end is when they go over all of the recommendations, and there is a sheet with the recommendations on the website. This will all make more sense if you go back to listen first.
This personal development plan is specific to Carolina. At this moment in time, she is a sales person with children at home and a relatively new job. So at the time the pandemic hit, she’d only been at her job maybe four or five months, and she’d only been in California for two years. She didn’t have a vast network of clients. It was kind of tricky for her when the pandemic hit because she was just starting to call on people that had no idea who she was.
A lot of these things are recommendations for personal development plans under normal times, not just pandemic times. Carolina highly recommends that you start with knowing your life goals. For her, part of her plan was to check on all of her clients, at the time, by phone and email.
She had enough time at home and was able to do that. She also wanted to start some prospecting on new clients on LinkedIn with LinkedIn Navigator. She ended up losing LinkedIn Navigator because it was too expensive and the business was trying to save money due to COVID and the unknown future.
She did end up doing a lot of prospecting, just not with LinkedIn Navigator. She calls it more of “web crawling.” She had around 500 business cards from trade shows, but she decided going through them ws not the best use of her time. Then, she decided she was going to talk to all of her clients that has set appointments before COVID hit, so she did that.
Turning Towards New Technologies
Carolina mentions she found that she and Tim were ahead of the curve when it comes to Zoom. They had been using Zoom for years, but others in the industry haven’t. It was interesting to wait for everyone to catch up to the Zoom technology. She even had to wait for people to be willing to have online Zoom meetings.
She did dig through Urbanize LA and Curbed and used those for prospecting, too. She has gotten into a couple of projects, so that was great. One of the things she had to do was create a video of her product presentations by part and product. She really got into video, and she has gotten better at video since COVID.
Tim pipes in, saying that Carolina is doing the right thing during these times. A lot of presentations he has been on across the industry have had people with their screens off and nobody knows what they look like. Carolina is more than presentable, looks great and is awesome on camera. That is what you need in an era when all you have is the camera. If you can do that and show up to things on time, that is a huge way to stand out.
It has returned tenfold for Carolina. She got a Loom account and has been using that instead of email. She puts up a video she made on the fly. This is something she learned from Pat Flynn of Passive Income. Instead of typing a boring email then pasting pictures into the email, she created these videos.
She has the product with her and creates videos in response to either a client request or warm/hot leads. She just says, “Hey! Thanks for your interest in Fire Clay! Here is the product you were interested in. I am happy to set up an appointment.” She has gotten countless appointments with people because she created the video and sent them online.
It takes less time to make the video then to type the email out. Plus, with Loom, you can tell who has viewed the video and when they watched it. They also get a much better open rate. These little videos have been the biggest game changer for her in terms of her work performance.
The book Weekend Language was something Carolina received when she was hired at Fire Clay. She ended up working that into her presentation. She also read Sell More in Less Time with Jill Konrath and her team (and she’s read around 60 books since then). It’s an excellent book if you’re new to sales. It also makes great sense with COVID, as people are trying to prioritize their sale activities. In the book, they suggest very specific time breakdowns, which Carolina has implemented into her ideal week.
Developing Ideal Day & Week
Tim and Carolina talked about an ideal week in their previous development episode, and they still recommend setting up and ideal day or ideal week. It is a game changer. Carolina committed to working out at least 30 minutes a day, and has lost 22 pounds since COVID started because she committed to working out and eating better to have the energy to do the other things she wanted.
It is a great way to explain the plan and the outcome. You can’t make a plan with 10 or 20 steps and hit every single mark. But, if you don’t make a plan at all, the chances that you’ll hit any of those marks are very low.
People need to do that in businesses, too. It keeps people on point and gives them a competitive advantage, while also helping them stay relevant. A lot of high achievers think about the things that did not go so well, but it is good to go over the things that were accomplished. Without a goal, one cannot be reached. It is so important to think that way.
Carolina has had her frustrating moments. Her house is a mess, she is tired of cooking and doing the dishes — it has not all been perfect. However, she is thankful that nobody in her house has tested positive. They have followed all of the recommendations.
Carolina will be planning out her 2021 goals for the next few weeks. Stay tuned for some information on that, like they did last year.
Tim’s Plans
Looking at Tim’s plan, he wanted to visit some jobs sites, do some prospecting, improve relationships at home and develop his writing and creativity. Tim has also had a major pivot, as he is no longer working at Nichiha.
One of the challenges Tim faces has to do with job sites, especially the bigger ones where they are fencing off for now. Near his home, there is Toll Brothers, KB, Pulte and a couple of smaller local builders. He and his family live in a town of 7,000 to 10,000 people, depending on what source is listened to. In the next five years, it will be 20,000 to 25,000 people.
Isiqua and Redmund have seen this play out over time, so he knows exactly how it will play out over time. Locally, Tim got to go to some residential job sites and take a couple builder friends of his through these different models. They have these regimens for COVID, like masks and sanitizer, and everything is set up pretty well.
Touring some of these models and looking at the materiality, he learned that they haven’t changed the materials since he started at James Hardy in 2003. He hardly saw any difference in the products.
Some of the Ashley product brands and things like that have been altered, but as far as advancement, not much has changed. For example, KB Homes is right behind Tim’s house and Toll Brothers is down the street. Toll Brothers has been building through the pandemic and has been herky jerky because of the state regulations. They were using a pre-built wall panelized assembly from BMC West. That is great, but because of all the supply chain disruption, they are stick framing everything.
This is a huge change for Toll Brothers, at least regionally. If Tim wasn’t at the job site, he would not have known about that change. He also saw many different trades working on multiple aspects. A trade that would normally just do sighting was now doing decks, pre-forming for the concrete stairs and all these things just to speed up the process because of the constraint on labor.
Tim mentions how prospecting has changed from two respects. Because of the podcast and other things, people reach out to Tim and Carolina to find out their thoughts on things, which has lead to new business, which lead to new prospecting opportunities.
He has also been using LinkedIn Navigator for prospecting, too. Because of his new relationships at John Burns, he has additional products and services that will be super valuable to a lot of people. Those connections help tie into offerings, these things that people can use in their business and apply it right away. The prospecting over the last several months will be really useful.
LinkedIn Navigator is semi-expensive, being around $70 a month, but it is super useful. When you think about your return on investment, you would have to be selling the smallest, cheapest product to not be able to dollarize that out in PR from a prospecting standpoint. If you’re doing something that sells for $2,5000, and you get one lead that buys the product in a year, then you have a great ROI. That is when LinkedIn Navigator is useful.
The videos or podcasts that people do are super helpful in growing the audience and helping everyone be credible so people know where to turn if they have a problem or an idea to share.
Those are the conversations Tim has had with people over the past several months and has schedules for the next several weeks.Using those integration tools with your CRM and LinkedIn can be really useful.
Tim’s Accomplishments
Tim also learned about the remodeling market. He went through a conversation with NADRA (North American Deck and Railing Association). They did a deep dive into aging and house stock and understanding how big the remodel market is in comparison with new construction — commercial, multi-family, residential, single family and build for rent. Combined, remodeling is bigger than all of them. Learning that it’s a bigger opportunity than he thought it was for building materials is a pretty big deal.
Tim’s relationships at home, especially with his daughter, has gotten better because she’s had space to have a support system around her instead of quarantining at her own apartment. She is back with Tim, and she can work on her career, personal development and all those things without worrying about her surroundings. He is really happy with her having a good support system.
For his writing and creativity goal, he’s read more books and listened to more content than he ever has in the past. He has done very little writing though, and that is one of his goals. A lot of folks say he should write a book or he and Carolina should write one. That is an interesting prospect for the future. That is where his results are as far as his personal goals and plans were.
It has been a very productive time for both Tim and Carolina. People say that COVID has been the catalyst for a lot of things good and bad, and it’s been a catalyst for Tim and Carolina’s careers for sure.
Push Yourself
They could have decided to take a break from the podcast. It is work, and they put a lot of energy and effort into it. It is easy to take a break. If people treat this as a time of opportunity and not a time of panic, then it can be really useful for the next few years or more. A lot of people that listen to podcasts, people Tim and Carolina are friends with and connected with professionally, are doing just that. Being able to still connect with people is a blessing to them.
They consider themselves lucky to still be able to reach people and connect. This is a great industry, and the theme when they talk to guests is about how this industry is full of passion and good people.
There’s so much great experience and knowledge and people that want to make a difference. Sometimes, people don’t know what to do to make a difference. That’s why these connections are so useful because when people connect or spitball and brainstorming, it starts to create an appetite for more of that. As people do that more, they start to create a structure around it and create goals. As those goals are created, people start to aspire to bigger things and have stronger results with specific business metrics.
If that is what anyone else wants, then this community around building perspectives, around Tim and Carolina’s two companies, around the friends and around interesting people can be really useful.
Looking Forward
For the next episode, both Tim and Carolina will bring up the plan of what’s next.
Carolina calls it hustle and flow. Her life philosophy is you make your plans and then you go with the flow. You have a plan that you can follow, and when life shows up, which it will, you pivot and go with it. But, if you don’t have a goal, you can’t hit it. Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else.”
Nobody wants to end up somewhere else. They want to end up where they are supposed to be. And where we’re supposed to be is all working together to make this industry better. The good thing is there are a lot of amazing people that can make just that happen.
If you have resources, share them. If you have thoughts that you want to share, jump on LinkedIn, a live video, an Instagram post, write a post and get it out there. It doesn’t have to be pretty, and it doesn’t have to be amazing. It just has to be real. That’s what Tim and Caolina endeavored to be.
The duo looks forward to when people can be at events and meetups in whatever city makes sense in the future. But, for right now, there are great provisions of Zoom and all these things. Make the most of them.
Join the Conversation
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this week’s episode! Shoot us an email at buildperspectives@gmail.com.