Hi everyone, it’s jj levenske from bleuwave general contracting and another episode of bleuwave live today. I thought i’d share what I think is a great story as it relates to business development and sales, if you want to call it that.
So a few weeks ago, I received a call from a commercial broker that I know and he had a potential client that needed some help and said, hey, this person will be contacting you. Is that okay, jj? I said, sure. So in essence, here goes the story. But by the time we’re done with this, I want to put it in the context of how I think is a valuable life lesson for all of us in business development, whether it’s now or when you’re 20 years old or when you’re even older than I am now.
And so the story goes like this, that person did eventually call me, and the situation was is they had the potential to buy a parcel of land at a good price, and they thought that building a building would be something that would be befitting of the growth of what they were doing for their business.
However, again through mentoring and a lot of trial and error. In my previous life, I knew to ask a bunch of questions about what their situation was.
Everything that you should ask because the tangible part of building the building was the easy part. It was asking about all the “whys” and the “hows” and not so much the “what” of why they wanted to do it through that conversation.
This individual soon let me know that there were extenuating circumstances with them that probably would prevent them from doing the actual building. So in the culmination of that, I i kind of offered some advice, saying, hey, listen, with all that being said, what if you leased a building on a short term lease for now and put this on hold as far as building this building?
Because I think you’re gonna put yourself in an awkward position where you’re probably going to be successful, but, you’re going to be strapped because of this situation so that individual kind of tend to agree with me.
And so this is how this ends is that that person took the advice, went back to our mutual friend the broker, and they had a conversation, and they determined that was the best course of action.
Now the cool part is, is there was another part of this conversation was they had enough cash to take the land down so that they could have done it as a land bank per se.
And right now, in the in the phoenix market, that’s not the worst play you can make. Literally, prices are going through the roof, and their appraisals are increasing exponentially by the day.
So, in essence, this person had enough cash to take down the land, could have sat on it and sold it. If they got in dire straits, or held it as collateral or capital towards, you know, a note or a loan towards the the project in a future time.
But the point of the story is, that instead of saying no to the build or in this case, I could have said yes to the build and held them ransom on something that wasn’t going to be the long term goal.
I said no to the short term gain to hopefully build a long term client, so it only came back to me afterwards. That broker then called me later and said, hey, jj, nice play and I go, well, it wasn’t a play. It was me just being honest with them.
But it kind of alluded to me that, hey, if and when this person does decide to actually go through with this, I would probably be the first phone call. So for those of you that are new to business development and sales, I know you’re incentivized to go and kill, kill, kill and close the deal right away.
But sometimes that’s not the best course of action. So hopefully you can use this as a kind of a testament of saying no to the short term and saying, yes, the long term is sometimes better suited to your needs. Now I have the luxury or we have the luxury of doing that in the market that we’re in right now, and I realize that’s not for everyone.
But again, I think we can take a humble reminder out of this story. And you can still add a tremendous amount of value and make a potential sale at the same time.
So until next time, enjoy your day. And thanks again for attending blewave live.