Wow, check out this guy's comment
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This is the first time I have read a blog and of course the first post of any kind. As a 36 year old plumber I have been fired from every plumbing company I have ever worked for. All of them fired me after about a year. The reasons have all been the same, they asked my opinion about their problems and I told them the truth. It seems every company always has some sort of problems they deal with but never know the answers. The last job I had was running a new hospital project and after 9 months I was asked by management to get rid of half the plumbers and replace them with non-plumbers to drive down cost.
The short story is I said no way, it’s illegal and I want no part of it. I then said if they go over my head I will turn them in to the state dept. of health. Well, I was fired….With the economy the way it is no jobs are available. So with a family of 4 and a new house and $300 in checking I started my own plumbing company. Anyone who cares to listen here is what I have to say. Weeks went by with no customers calling and I didn’t know what to do.
We were out of money and my wife gave me a choice of getting a wal-mart type job or get out. That night I freaked out and was up all hours of the night just thinking and thinking. Then it came to me. My problem was simple, I was going about this backwards. Money is a stupid motivator, customers are the real motivator. So here is what I did. I went to a printer and had them print up a 1000 $50.00 gift cards on heavy paper stock all of them with code numbers. The next thing I did was go door to door and meet people one at a time. Ya, it was crazy at first but the people were blown away, they loved it. As of right now I am the number one plumber in a town of about 40,000 people and am looking to hire another plumber.
So whats the secret? Give people what they want. All these years I was right, most people let money motivate them and that creates poor decision making. I let the customer decide. The economy is tough so just give the customers what they want, money. People were so blown away they thought it was a joke. Think about it for a moment, have you ever heard of a business come to your door, shake your hand, and while looking in there eyes tell them you would like to earn the business and by they way here is a fifty dollar gift card that can be used anytime for any plumbing service they need.
When it’s all said and done I wished I would have done this years ago. I enjoyed the article about Mark Cuban but I think money is just a poor motivator, money is the result of good business practice. My wife by the way thought it was crazy to give $50 to everyone I meet, she was wrong, but now she is my biggest fan. That $50 is nothing when you consider a customer spends thousands during the course of a life time, not to mention they spread word of mouth business like fire. Mike
101 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadBut Mark Cuban _was_ motivated enough to take his company public. And Mark Cuban likes to make extravagant purchases (e.g. The Dallas Mavericks). In a nutshell - he seems to enjoy the billionaire's lifestyle. So money was probably the right motivational force for Cuban.
Before Broadcast.com, he sold garbage bags as a kid, gave disco lessons to sororities in college, threw parties as a quasi event planner, started a computer company (MicroSolutions) and ran a hedge fund. After Broadcast.com, he bought the Mavs, started HD Net, formed a charity (Fallen Patriot Fund), actively invests as an angel and cofounded numerous movie production & distribution companies.
All these years I was right, most people let money motivate them and that creates poor decision making. I let the customer decide. The economy is tough so just give the customers what they want, money.
If it were really about him giving them "money" (a discount voucher isn't money, but we'll ignore that) and money creates poor decision making, then choosing him based on that offer is poor decision making.
Yes, but it is well-known that customers make illogical decisions. Recognising that a user interface that's strictly logical may, for illogical reasons, be less usable than one that panders to the user's "irrationality" is a good business decision. Basing your business decisions around the recognition that people make apparently random choices is a Good Thing(tm).
You say that the humanity has been overlooked, but choosing someone because you've looked them in the eye and pressed the flesh is less logical than choosing someone based on their references and an objective evaluation of their work.
Any business that overlooks the human factor, including customers' potentially irrational/illogical decision making processes, does so at its peril.
How do you arrange this short of sabotaging your plumbing after the first job? Major job are rare enough that I've never needed one in over a decade of living on my own, and in 3 different countries at that.
The $50 voucher is the thing that gives the future customer "permission" to follow up on their gut feeling of "Wow, I like being treated like a HUMAN BEING."
Perhaps this is part of the power behind "Viral Marketing" in the old days when its effectiveness wasn't diluted by so many trying the same thing.
I signed up with Dreamhost because I truly felt they would care - their site is very good at giving that impression. Their service was poor, so I left, but that's another story.
In the past I've found having an IRC room or a forum to help. I've chosen hosting providers this way and it's worked out every time. If they can answer my question on their IRC channel and have a bunch of dedicated followers (dedicated enough to be sitting in their IRC channel anyway!) that's a really good sign.
Real humanity means being vulnerable and talking about negative stuff, and risking people not liking you. But the people who don't dislike you will like you more. It means being genuine, not just "authentic."
When I left my parents as a teen, I partially supported myself with a Mac news/opinion site. Everybody told me that there was no room for another one, blah blah, but I decided to write like a real (& funny) human being instead of pretending to be a professional journalist like the rest. I earned $600-1000 a month in ad impressions, so it clearly worked.
Same thing worked for my current web site & information products I've created. I'm totally famous in the niche, and I'm not the best or brightest with the actual programming aspect. But my oldest tutorial from 2005 still gets about 15,000 views a month.
When it comes to my new SaaS that I just launched, it's the same thing. The blog is "real humanity" and I answer support requests myself.
I also think there is something to be said for meeting the person that's going to be doing the work. People make more confident assessments when they meet someone in person. It's certainly better than picking names of companies out of the phone book, or internet yellow pages, based on how "plumbing competent" their names sound.
As far as future prospects, the job is nominally scalable, and he can hire assistants to do the work. But he might be a terrible manager.
What I would do next is go to the places where all of the shoddy work was done and market there. There's probably a lot of work to be had fixing up that hospital.
If the plumber was a Chinese manufacturer, would we accuse him of "dumping"?
It's like Puritan Work Ethic porn.
edit: Also, he passed over the easy money (e.g. violating his ethics/the law) which got him fired to begin with.
Is it really this way in the US? As a foreigner I'm curious.
Sure it does. My ex-wife did it while supporting my step-daughter. Even had medical benefits for ~$20/month. She had to watch her spending and get a roommate, but she did it with zero .gov assistance (food stamps and the like).
While the unskilled jobs may not pay much, they pay more than nothing and will keep you fed and dry till you find something better.
I lived off a job where I was paid minimum wage in a small town and did just fine. I worked at a army surplus / outdoor store.
I was able to go to college, travel the world (backpacking and hostels) and do a lot of rock climbing and hiking locally all with this job. This was in the late 90s. I lived with 3 or 4 other roommates and I had no TV, a computer that barely functioned (internet access was through the university and already paid for since I was a student) and a car that got good gas mileage back when no one cared about gas mileage. More often than not I took the bus or walked. Not necessarily because it was more affordable but because it was more convenient.
Here is the breakdown from what I remember. I made about 600 a month. Food and shelter was about 60% of my income. My car was about 10%. I cut almost all unnecessary expenses. I lived in an appropriate location. I gave up perceived necessities like a telephone and cable TV.
Yes, I lived in a community where it was pleasant to make minimum wage. We had a university, a bus system and very low cost of living. I know a number of people that still make minimum wage, or close to it. They have lived in a number of locations and have made it work, including higher cost of living locations.
I can imagine many scenarios where it would be difficult. 1) Kids or other dependents 2) A location with high cost of living 3) Taking on expenses that you can't afford 4) Requirements to drive without appropriate compensation (likely a small town rural situation from stories that I've heard). I was always told that the purpose of minimum wage was to provide an appropriate starting wage for people with little or no experience. From my perspective it was appropriate. It was never meant to be a wage to support a family or pay for a cell phone or car insurance. I agree it would be very difficult, or possibly impossible, to make minimum wage and support a family on a single minimum wage income. But then again that is not what minimum wage was intended for.
I'm from Russia. Don't know about y'all, I wouldn't want to marry someone with a different attitude.
But you have to consider the other perspective; they have 2 kids to support and his business hasn't received any custom for weeks. I think the statement "get a job or leave" is more of a generic "something has to change" statement not something completely literal.
I would've had said "get a job or get some business, your choice". The concept of divorce should never be hung over anyone's head to spur them to action.
It's a pretty fair bet that the statement "get a job or get out" wasn't the first thing she said about the situation! And in any case we only have his version of what happened.
http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsWorld.shtml
Just wanted to mention something that you may not be aware of. In most russian cities, housing stock is in very short supply (thanks to the legacy of centralized city planning) and people often stay together because otherwise they would have nowhere to live. I believe this skews the statistic in favor of the US, i.e. I believe that the russian divorce rates would be even higher if more people were able to live separately.
In that context, perhaps his wife was threatening him to "get a stable job that provides us income, or else I'm doing to divorce and leave you."
A good movie to watch on the subject: "The Pursuit of Happyness" (2006)
Kids need to come first, and they need both parents. Mom and Dad: work it out -- for their sake.
Women have cried for centuries to have equality (vote, salaries....), which I totally agree with. Now on the flip side, they still expect man to be the provider, the protector etc...If you do not provide anymore, like Mr Pumbler, you can be sure that you will soon be out of the picture.
Also, I'm still curious as to how you inferred from said story that his wife wasn't also working to provide for the family since her husband couldn't hold a steady job. It was a stressful time for everyone involved, and when there are kids to provide for in the picture, even more so.
Losing weight is what is truly materialistic, as unless the person that needs to lose weight is morbidly obese and their health is directly at risk if they do not do so, it's something that does not directly affect their ability to get and pay for day-to-day necessities. It's nice if it happens, but it wouldn't directly threaten their ability to shelter their kids, for example.
The two are just not comparable.
If the guy told his wife who did the same thing as this plumber did ($300 in savings at start and no customers for weeks) that he'd leave her if she didn't get even an undesirable job soon, it wouldn't be unreasonable, and would be a more apt comparison to bring up instead of this losing weight nonsense. However, it would be crass for anyone in the relationship to threaten to leave, but you know it happens in a lot of them. :(
Materialism is a perfectly reasonable evolutionary outcome. It is nothing to be ashamed of or scoffed at. It has serious implications at the evolutionary level. If you have children you have to provide for them so they don't die.
It could very well be a US thing (I am not asserting one case or another). It could also be a self fulfilling prophecy. Unlike most other gene carrying robots, prophecies apply to us.
Even murders can be 'justified' by evolutionary biology but the court tends to put an end to further propagation of that gene :)
Here's a different view of what may have been going on: man has a family both he & his wife work full time to support. He cannot, for whatever reason, hang on to a job for more than a year at a time. This becomes frustrating to the other spouse, because they can't ever seem to get ahead of the bills, etc. He starts his own business, but can't get it off the ground. Meanwhile, she's working as hard as ever, is probably looking at getting a second job to support the family (a "walmart-type" job), and sees him puttering in the basement all day, every day. They have a fight, she's close to breaking & if anyone is going to get the crappy second job, it should be the guy hanging around the house with nothing to do all day.
That kind of stress will destroy a marriage. We're not talking about alimony or welfare queens, but ordinary middle class families that struggle to stay middle class.
Happy ending: he finally gets his business going.
It may have appeared that she gave up on him, but she obviously believed in him enough to give him another chance.
I think the story is awesome. I think the idea is great.
Yes, there are many women who are shortsighted and only realize after the divorce that life doesn't work the way they thought.
cousin_it, in the US, women have all the advantages when it comes to marriage. If they want a divorce, almost by default the legal system provides them with the kids, house, alimony, and child support.
Chances are, it was an off-hand comment. It is similar to saying, "my wife would kill me if I forgot her birthday." Rest assured, if I forget, I do not need to worry about being stabbed to death in my sleep. I hope...
I also grew up in Russia (25 years between Siberia and Moscow) and have lived in the US for the last 12 years. From my experience, the typical Russian attitude of moral superiority (Americans = materialistic, Russians = spiritual) could not be farther from the truth.
Perhaps I am reading into your comment a bit, but it seems to me that you were essentially trying to assert the above, even if you phrased your assertion as a question. Unless you are very, very young or very, very naive, I doubt that you were truly simply curious to find out whether every single woman in the entire country is a cold-hearted bitch who would kick her husband out when he can't find work, especially based on just one man's story.
If I am mistaken and your question was really a question, then the answer is no, it is not really "this way" in the US. Believe it or not, even in big bad America there are people who understand love and other human feelings, just like "foreigners".
I wonder how he found your blog.
It brings out one of the obvious truths in economics or business if you will.
Customers are not that interested in paying you to help you out. They are interested in getting what they want. Money is just a reward for getting what they want.
Too many businesses focus on getting paid, they lose track of why customers are there in the first place.
Nice, inspirational and all, but that was not written by a plumber after reading first ever blogpost in his life.
What the fuck? They really think everyone's goal in life is to buy as much crap as they can?
"...to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health to love and to cherish, from this day forward until death do us part."
It's reading things like this that make me appreciate my wife more than I already did. Get a 'walmart type job' or get out? My wife would _never_ say that to me, especially in such bad times. At the very least she'd suggest we _both_ get walmart jobs, not threaten to leave.
:/
How depressing.
But then you have 4 kids with her :(...you're kinda trapped there.
Sounds like things will just get worse for him again.
Sometimes helping someone means a good swift kick in the ass. That lady is a hero.
This is just good marketing. Small businesses do this all the time.
My mother owned a small business and did this sort of advertising at least yearly. I used to have to help hand out flyers as a kid. We would also go around and get permission from the property owners to attach flyers to car windshields. I always thought it was a waste but there is a reason people do it - it works.
What's also interesting though is who initiates divorce. I believe in the US, roughly 70% of divorces are initiated by women, while in Russia the opposite is true.
From what I read, it looks like in US divorces are a way for people to try to find a better match. People shuffle themselves among marriages.
While in Russia, it looks like there are some men which leave behind them trail of divorced women (with children) that do not remarry. Thus there must be many men that never marry/reproduce. If this is true, it would be rather disturbing, as it would create unstable society.
Why is it that so many people seem to think direct sales is some kind of new idea?