Master Agents

Introduction

Some folks have very strong sales training and experience. They have had decades of experience in the field, selling everything from screws to software. Now they have moved into the “Silverback Gorilla” stage of their career, giving back to the community that had helped them so much.

Initially when we talked to them, hitting the street enrolling the hiring/working side of the Hefe platform didn’t motivate them as much as teaching a new generation “the art of selling.” This how and why we created the “Master Agent” level commission system. You might have seen it before in other parts of the materials we have covered. Now you’ll learn come of the tricks of these Master Agents we had worked with.

As a reminder in case you missed it.

Master Agents earn a small commission from Agents that enroll folks to hire and/or work the system. Master Agent themselves don’t sell directly.

The Side Hustle
Today we are going to learn more about two master agents, Joe of Nevada County, California and Steve of Copperopolis, California. Both of these guys have had a long career in sales, starting from the very bottom selling things like garage doors, screws, bailing wire before moving up into selling technology and expensive tech consultants. Both made six and seven figure salaries. Both trained and mentored many other sales people, but never made a dime off of the earnings of those folks they trained. It was in conversations with them that we fully formed the master agent model. Though the credit for lightbulb event goes to David who sold fleet vehicles. Hopefully soon, you’ll start to see more of David’s upcoming videos.

Joe’s Angle
What Joe had really learned how to do very well from his corporate job is sales training. Not just running the event and teaching people, but everything behind the scenes. From creating killer Power Point Slides, which he says he learned from me but honestly, he has taken it to a new level. To managing logistics, marketing, and so forth. He is a high demand individual in his Fortune 100 Tech Company’s sales arm. Despite the pay check, benefits and stock options…the job never set well with him. It was corporate, which means lame. Long periods of boredom, too many rules, too much management indecision and the list goes on and on. You probably know it yourself, or heard stories.

Joe’s goal is to buy a big ranch, but the price tag is awfully steep in California. Leasing land isn’t much better as he is learning from his current hobby operation for hundred heads of American Waguyi he is running. Plus he has a love for three gun, gun smithing and forging. None of these activities he has enough time for, as he is raising a family and working corporate. Only if he didn’t have to spend 10 hours a day in a job he hated, but they paid so well.

Obviously, Joe does not have the time to go door to door, business to business to sell Hefe services in his area. He can’t give up his day job because of the mortgage and family expenses. So, instead Joe has been training the younger generation in his area through his church and community. These young folks don’t have much opportunity in the area, they needed something. So one-by-one, he has been setting up young folks to learn, sell and work on Hefe. Sure many times they have a problem sticking to it, but for Joe, these are foundations for a bigger problem which we will showcase in the near future. Joe’s goal is to use the Master Agent system to build another revenue stream to replace the corporate job to allow him more time for the cattle business, his kids and his hobbies. Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing Joe featured on our platform in the near future. He does make an occasional appearance on our insiders Zoom call.

Steve’s Angle
The one thing you will notice about Steve is he looks like and has the smile of Tom Cruise. Good or bad, this has been his golden meal ticket to have built up a massive contact list of folks he has sold to, or taught to sell. While having his dream home on the lake, boats and all the toys he has ever wanted, he still made the long commute to Silicon Valley to work his VP job. After all, retirement is expensive when you have expensive tastes and expensive kids. Plus as he said, when you retire, you die. He was looking for something that keeps him in the mix.

Steve’s initial angle has been soft selling his contacts to use services off of Hefe to get stuff done at their own houses. More of a favor to us, than something for himself. Though he didn’t mind the “ammo money” it was generating for him. Like Joe, Steve also had similar sales training experience and has kicked off a mentoring program for the children of the folks he knows. Creating future sales folks by getting them experience in selling of value, NOT selling steak knives and time-shares like he did.

Steve’s biggest contribution to the platform has been the agent dashboard which he uses in everyone of his mentoring calls. He does weekly calls with the kids he mentors. The “Come to Jesus Call” as he calls it, where each person has certain goals they have to reach, they have a minute to say what they promised to deliver by this call, what they have actually delivered since that last call and what they are going to deliver by the next call. This could be number of sign-ups, revenue numbers, etc. Then the call focuses on learning one new skill and having the kids learn how to apply it.

His total investment of effort is about 30 min to onboard the kid to his program. And then one hour on Monday morning with all the kids in the program. The first 30 minutes is spent going through the “Come to Jesus Part” and the last 30 minutes is lessons. When I say “kids” I don’t literally mean kids, but young adults. He occasionally calls bullshit on the call using the dashboard, but not often as he says, because he just needs to instill just enough fear that he is watching, without actually watching. He does it from his Zoom account which he just switched over to the $14.99 a month version for more features.

Steve doesn’t need the money, but it is a nice bonus income stream. His reward is providing a future for these kids either through the Hefe platform and eventually a professional Fortune 500 job if they choose. Steve is awesome to talk to. Maybe we can get him to do a Podcast on the lake this summer.

David’s Angle
Now I said two, but I mentioned David earlier. We are work with David on his new, upcoming podcasts and videos. Exciting stuff as we learn the art of podcasting. David’s weapon is all the other automotive sales guys he has met over the decades of selling cars (David has sold me 2 cars thus far, with 2 more on the way). As you learn more about David, you’ll love his story as well. Coming to the states alone as an underaged youth, getting a job to survive, his first boss forcing him to go to school as a condition of employment. True rags to riches story.

Bigbox David
One more person we need to highlight as well, the other David which we refer as Bigbox David or BBD. Or as he describes himself as “The Guinea Pig” as he has been around the platform since the early days. BBD is an injured general contractor that can’t work anymore in his trade. So he has taken up a retail job at a Bigbox company to apply some of his knowledge and for the benefits, which aren’t great but better than nothing. Just like the pay.

Unlike Steve and Joe, BBD has no formal training or experience in sales or sales operations. He is a very smart guy and just wings it. He is slowly building up a network by helping folks he naturally befriends through his day job. BBD has not only onboard a ton of folks he gets commissions from, but many of them have become agents themselves, making BBD a Master Agent by default. Which at first he, due tot he design of our commissions dashboard, he was a bit confused where the extra money was coming from. Money from people he didn’t know. He thought it was mistake, a nice mistake. So now, in the dashboard, we now show your network.

Helpful Tips from the Guys
This is the part where I try to call out what I learned from them, things you can apply for your own community.

• Think Scalable. Always think about how you can scale your time, which in non-tech speak is “work smarter, not harder”. Which means to make things more systematic and repeatable. For each of these folks, it means different things. For Joe, it meant certain presentation slide decks and other documents filled with links to videos and such. For Steve, it was following a more classic verbal approach that he started with earlier in his career, before the internet. With David, we are working with him and his son to develop to come up with a modern social media approach. Each of them is highly effective and unique. But they all have a common pattern. Repeatability. Same script, same content, with minor delivery differences to spice things up a little

• Be authentic. Folks see straight through you if aren’t legit. Sure there is “Fake it until you make it” but there is a nuance to it. There is folks that want to be successful that carry folks together on a journey of becoming successful. They might not know what they are doing exactly, but are trying to wing it. Versus on the other extreme those folks that rent out supercars, mansions, and parked corporate jets shooting videos pretending to be something they are not. You can smell those con jobs a mile away, and if you can’t, you will learn quickly as they steal money from you with zero results. It is okay to be a Master Agent that is not making HUGE money off the Hefe. Besides, we are not about making “huge money overnight” as a brand or company. Sure we talk about it as potential benefit of hard work. Joe and Steve both sold their experience as seasoned sales folks…and Hefe is a great way to learn and apply those lessons on something that goes back to #1 point…scalable. Not just scalable in selling it, but scalable as a revenue stream.

• Teach Beyond. Part of the value of the master agent is to teach new tricks, even ones you just learned yourself (be authentic). The tricks don’t have to be selling either, they could be as simple as setting up an LLC to help manage your expenses and minimize your tax burden. Or how to get the business to pay for that dream car without getting into trouble with the IRS. These soft value things are of huge value to your network. You’ll set up your network for success and make life long friends if you treat them as family, not tools for your own gain.

• Be a Leader. This is what the world sorely lacks. Being a leader doesn’t mean you have to be some kind of special person like Jocko or Goggins. What it means is that you care for the downstream folks in your network. That you look out for their interests, not just yours. This is so much different than say an MLM which is 100% about exploiting and pressuring everyone downstream to buy, buy, buy. Which as I have said a thousand times before, we are not an MLM, not even close. Every Master Agent we know that succeeds does so by caring about the people they enroll in the program. About the bigger picture of not just their income, but the bigger mission of making their communities stronger. About stopping the theft of big tech that robs them blind. Leaders that believe in themselves, their mission, and care for their people go a long way.

• Apply your skills. Everyone has skills. Even the ones that say they don’t. Maybe you don’t believe in yourself enough to know what those skills are. But you have them, you just haven't listened to your true self. We have a guy in Atlanta that just drove and didn’t think he had anything, but he did. He knew other drivers, he knew how the system worked. He knew how to talk to folks in his ecosystem. Discover your skills and apply them

• Make a Plan. Stick to it. Now Joe we knew for years, he has gone through the Retro 168 years before we came up with Hefe. It was one of the tools he uses in his fight with adult ADHD. Otherwise, he’d fall back to his natural state of being a “professional procrastinator”. He makes sure he has his to-dos and goals for the next 6 weeks written down.

• Have Fun. This has got to be awfully hard for those that are desperate. These folks above are all doing well before they took on being a Master Agent. Having personally lived in a trailer and have once owed more money than I could make in a decade…not a penny left after bills. I questioned them how a person in this situation could be successful. While their first answer it to “just work harder”, I pushed back on them harder to figure out from those that they mentor, what was the breakthrough mind shift to make folks successful. They said that the moment folks went from “having to do it” to “liking to do it” the close rates went up 1000%.

• Your Reputation. It means absolutely everything. It is the only asset you have that you can control. It will either make or break you.

• Build Good Relationships and they will pay off. Joe would add “damn good relationships” by keeping you word. Making sure folks know you by reputation.

• Don’t burn bridges. Or in other words, don’t let your ego take control and ruin everything. If something is fustrating or makes you angry. Walk away. Cool off. Reapproach it after you have a had chance to reflect.

Hopefully, this gave you some ideas on how you could potentially use the Master Agent capbilites of the Hefe Platform leveraging your experience and know how. Please let us know if you have questions, comments, want to share your experience or be in one of our upcoming podcasts.

Hotshot Trucking

Introduction
There is a rapidly growing market called “Hotshot Trucking” which a kind of hauling using heavy-duty pickup trucks with smaller loads. Things like moving a few cars on a flatbed to the next city. Hauling a large amount of lumber out to a construction site that is a bit difficult for a traditionally flatbed semi-truck. Or hauling a load of hay for a horse stable. The list is endless. For many states and cities, there is very good money in hauling. Especially near urban centers.

Use Case
Jesse was frustrated with the main freight broker in his town. While many brokers he had worked with over the years were great folks, including the previous owner of this particular brokerage. Jesse felt this new guy was taking too much off the top and tended to route better loads to certain folks that didn’t include the local haulers like Jesse. Mostly out of towners. This was hurting his income and those others that he knew locally. Jesse heard about Hefe through one of our ads and decided to reach out to us to figure out how he could use our platform to cut out this broker.

Now Jesse didn’t want to get his Freight Broker License. It was just something that didn’t interest him, he knew how to haul and loved being on the road, not be chained to a phone and computer all day. He felt he already had enough paperwork to deal with on his own operation. Taking on more paperwork and more fees for bigger bonds. Managing drivers, schedules, etc. So much work and people, besides he got into trucking to get away from people.

Looking at his town, most of the loads weren’t something you would find on one of those fancy trucking job boards. He knew most folks around town, had indirectly hauled for them for years, and just wanted to bypass this broker.

Push came to shove and Jesse took matter into his own hands. He reached out to all his buddies that also hauled. Enrolled them onto the Hefe platform and together they formed their own virtual hotshot hauling co-op. Their goals were putting the local drivers first, keeping out the out-of-towners and getting rid of this bad broker. They together started to canvas the town, talking to every farmer, dealer, supplier in town about switching their business off of the broker to the Hefe platform. Most of the shippers they talked to knew funny business was going on ever since the new broker acquired the brokerage from another local who retired. The time and effort to switch to someone else that they didn’t know, using some out of some remote call center on the other side of the world didn’t appeal to them either. So they just went along with the funny business and excuses. After all, those guys have their own problems and all they cared about was something making to where it needed to go safely and timely. Which this broker was doing.

Benefits
The first thing that Jesse and crew notice and liked was the immediate pay bump. They had no idea how much the broker was taking off the top and now they knew. Also being able to negotiate directly with shippers was nice for so many reasons. No middlemen offering almost no value as they weren’t the guy doing the actual work. Heck it was nice talking to the real customers instead of relaying a message through some guy on the other side of the world that didn’t care or have any sense of urgency. Jesse had the number of the customer and could call or text with them directly when instructions were funny or if there were some delays. But where it really mattered the most was the bottom line. Before he was earning around $2.00/mile and now he was getting between $2.50-3.00/mile and at times more. These are all ballpark numbers, he didn’t want to provide more specifics when we talked to him. But he said he was on track to getting himself into the upper end of hauling in his area and state. He is also finding himself servicing regions and time slots he hadn’t had access to before. Along with buying two additional trailers, a dump trailer and a smaller trailer to get better MPG.

Oh, as for that broker, that guy basically is out of the hotshot business.

Best Practices
In partnering with Jesse we learned a few things:

• If you don’t have a brokerage license, do not insert yourself into the process between the shipper and carrier. You will get into trouble by your state’s attorney general office for violating the federal and state laws. Do not negotiate on the behalf of anyone, help with schedules, negotiate rates, exchange documentation, and so forth.

• The Hefe Platform is not a brokerage. We do not negotiate rates, schedules, screen drivers, ensure anyone, and so forth. We serve only in the role of a communications platform and processor of transactions. Just like Visa, AT&T and the internet are not brokers, neither is Hefe.

• When enrolling other drivers to serve your community or business. Or you want to offer your services to haul, please remember that this is a highly regulated business. You need to basically get permission first, then start hauling. Getting educated on the requirements of hauling is important and only a short Goole or Youtube search away. That Mother Trucker has an awesome 9 Steps to getting started in Hotshot Trucking.

• When in doubt, take a class at your local trucking school or seek out a local attorney specialized in trucking. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration can be quite complex and their regulations can be, like everything else, interpreted differently by different people. Know what you are getting into before getting into this business. Ideally, you need to be a driver already. Just because you have a small pickup or box truck, you can automatically offer your service on the Hefe platform.

• When enrolling a business to use Hefe as a platform for hotshot hauling, be sure to educate the business on the risk and requirements. They should always ask for appropriate licenses, bonds, records, etc of the person they are negotiating and hiring. Just because someone has been hauling for years for them, it doesn’t mean that they are legal and safe to haul for money. The business might run the risk of losing their load or run into other problems. Yeah, it seems like a pain for them, but the rewards outweigh a couple of minutes of extra effort.

• Some Hotshotters will push back, saying you’ll ruin their rates by introducing too much competition. Obviously getting the broker out of the picture will help rates, but many don’t have brokers in between them for now. With anything, where there is growth, there will be more brokers squeezing the margins, taking 30-40% off the top. The key thing is we are working together to grow the market by making it easier for more folks to hire hotshots. All while helping these operators keep more of their hard earned dollars. But more importantly, keeping more of those dollars inside their own local communities. Making those towns stronger.

• Stress the flexibility and cost advantages of hotshotting. It is the biggest selling point of the business in general. It doesn’t replace traditional trucking, it just gives folks one more option that they didn’t have before. For example, getting a custom-built car engine over to a customer a 100 miles away is faster, easier and cheaper with a hotshot than dealing with a traditional LTL carrier. Okay, maybe not dollar-for-dollar cheaper. But having it there in a couple hours instead of next week. Not having to worry about getting to and from a dock. You know, all those extra things that eat time. Plus your customer will be 500% happier getting it quicker and not dealing with the delivery pains of an LTL.

Summary
Hotshot trucking is booming market during the pandemic. From talking to unbiased experts in this business, they think it will keep growing as we move into the new post-pandemic economy. Shippers will continue to have smaller loads going to more unique places that it is challenging for full-sized trucks. The pandemic was the first time that many of the shippers ever used or consider hotshots for their loads. Or they had to let go of their in-house delivery drivers and sell off their trucks to survive. Either way, they have come accustomed to the speed, flexibility and better rates of a hotshot. And their customers like it too.

For the independent owner-operators, while many truckers did well during the pandemic, many others had to give their truck back to the bank. Have had other challenges staying or getting back on the road. While others just simply got tired of big trucks and want something easier to own and maintain. Many of these operators already have a one-ton pickup with very few miles on them that they can put to use right now. They can use their F350 for hauling loads and taking their family to Foster’s Freeze for ice cream cones. In talking with others, Hotshotting appeals to them because they can be closer to home, doing smaller loads or starting a side hustle to make up for lost hours.

Folks looking to grow hot shot trucking in your community should do well.

Personal Note
For more than 20 years I have been on the shipping and receiving end of traditional and LTL freight. Never knew there was such a thing as hotshot trucking. There have been untold dozens of times where the LTL guys gave me outrageous prices along with horrible lead times. Most of the time it is not their fault, it is just the way it is. Other times it was completely their fault. Like one time I had a shipment of fiberglass race truck fenders that went back and forth across the state of California five times (yes I said FIVE TIMES the LONG way from San Diego to San Jose) over three and half weeks because of confusion on labels and paperwork. No one knew where it was, by the time they found it, it was back on another truck going the wrong way.

Needless to say, the part was horribly late causing other headaches and was damaged. Getting the claims process going was even more time and effort. Paid a thousand dollars for that botched LTL shipment and lost so many hours/days of my time that I will never get back dealing with the problem. Even before it all happened, I would have been happy to pay a hotshot put the crate into the back of a 1/2 ton pickup and drive it up here for a thousand bucks (or a tad more).

For the hotshot driver, 460 each way miles in an F150 would have been $80 of gas. Two drivers could have made $400 each in a day, 16 hours round trip each driving 7 hours…netting them $50/hour. How many jobs pay $400 in a day? And they could have done this after work was over on Friday evening and be home Saturday afternoon. Actually, I would have been happier receiving those parts on Saturday morning than the super busy regular business hours.

At the time of writing, we needed to find 2x 3/4 ton pickup trucks to haul 2x double axle trailers from Safford, Arizona to Madera, California. Wish we had someone in Tucson recruiting hotshot drivers to help with this urgent, complex emergency. It would have paid extremely well for these drivers for a 12 hour, 777-mile trip.

Tutoring

Introduction
Tutoring services has always been a hotspot for the Hefe platform.

High Schoolers and College students are always on the hunt to find a part-time job to fund their schooling without having to flip burgers, which doesn’t use their knowledge or skills.

While on the other side, parents of small children have had very few resources available to help to find these kids. Mostly word of mouth. Who wants to put $10 on a Craigslist ad to get a bunch of strangers applying? School job boards have become professional platforms that either charge too much or make the process so darn tricky for parents to use. Lastly, those other platforms take so much in fees to pay for their investors, executives, and high priced employees. It makes that $10/hr tutor becomes $25/hr when everything is said and done. Who can afford that?

Personal Needs Becomes a Business
Our showcase is Elena, who has two younger kids. She needed to find tutors for them before discovering Hefe. As she described, it wasn’t easy in her small city to find the tutors she wanted. As she will admit, she was very picky about the tutors. Over weeks and months, she learned to find tutors through friends, parents groups on Facebook, used NextDoor, church groups, and more. Through this process, she discovered that other parents were facing the same problem. Usually, the difficulty had the parents just not doing it.

So when we first were introduced to Elena to the Hefe platform to track hours and pay the tutors she had, the light bulb went off. She could use her knowledge to help other parents in her community and surrounding towns to build her own passive income business. From there, she dove head first into it.

That evening, she began her first adventure with an old piano that her husband just brought home.

Elena created her first Piano Tutoring ad on Hefe and then posted the job link back to the various places she had found tutors in the past. Within an hour, she found eight fantastic kids that were incredible tutors, but she could only hire one. Elena then posted videos of the tutor and her daughter learning back to the Facebook group, exciting other parents. Before she knew it, three other parents had put up postings on Hefe for piano tutors. From the first idea to the first deposit was just over two weeks for Elena.

Now Elena has set her eyes beyond just piano tutors. Presently, her side hustle is earning a few hundred dollars extra income. She re-invests her earning to pay for more tutors and other projects. As she says, she is doing nothing particularly special except talk about the stuff she does. Just basic marketing techniques through her social groups online and in her local community. Now that she has watched a lot of YouTube and Udemy videos on how to do better marketing (she said don’t bother paying big bucks for that content). She envisions it becoming a few thousand dollars a month, enabling her to work less and spend more time with her two little ones.

Some Helpful Hints from Elena
At the end of our conversation, we asked her about some useful tips:

• She noted that she added the shorten URL to her postings (https://bit.ly/3fMlZFC), waited until Facebook processed it, then deleted out the text as the bit.ly URL makes people a little hesitant to click on it.

• One of the most powerful things that has helped her so far is that she is authentic and truthful. Folks are using Hefe because they trust her. She trusts us to do the right thing.

• Some folks ask her if the company is paying her to push the platform; she says yes and explains the movement. That it pays for her time and expenses, but it is really about the movement to make the community better and stronger. As she noted, the part that makes them happy is when she says that they can be part of it. In her observation, the people that are concerned that someone is getting “paid” is someone that wants to be part of the platform as well.

• Don’t pay for those online scam marketing classes. Elena had wasted a bit of money on books and classes. She had found all it was on YouTube for free and felt like an idiot for wasting money. However, some of the Udemy courses were quite good.

Summary
We thank Elena for sharing her experience to help the others. She says she is not worried about someone else in her community stealing her idea because the difference between her and others is “talk versus doing.” We are excited to follow her and others as they figure out how to apply Hefe in their communities. If you would like to be featured, we would love to hear from you.

Heavy Lifting

Introduction
Sure there is a lots of other lifting and moving services out there, but who really wants to pay $99 for 5 minutes of help?

The Market
The market for lifting and moving is a large market that is ripe for disruption with Hefe. From large moving jobs that are dominated by franchises that pay their workers low wages. To smaller franchises that claim to be college students, but not really. Then there is the guys that troll the parking lots of big box hardware stores. For the consumer they don’t want to think, they just want someone now to help them with problem right now.

Success Stories
Meet Taylor, his approach to Hefe is a different. His first objective is to create jobs for himself before looking to build an agent business. He needed the work and the platform is relatively new in his community. So Taylor sought out to use his pickup truck and trailer to build his own side hustle. Working odd moving and lifting jobs. He didn’t need to use Hefe for getting paid. But when he saw the platform model the light bulb went off.

When folks hired Taylor for his jobs, he provided them the referral link and asked the them to post the job to the platform. He said he told them is was for contract, to have the location information handy and make it easy to pay him. They of course agreed.

When he completed the job and they settled up with him through Hefe, he then took a moment to explain the platform and how they could find all sorts of folks on the platform to help them with handyman projects, cleaning, automotive and more. Taylor is gambling that they will continue to use Hefe for other uses, making that one job into something that will pay dividends long into the future.

Best Practices
Taylor’s approach to kick start his market is to use the platform for his own side hustle in his local market. Giving a small percentage of his earnings, about 3% of his earnings as he is getting a chunk back in commissions through the referrals. Then he would normally have to pay transaction fees to Square and his bank for the transaction. So the loss is minimal in his eyes.

As he is jus starting his market, Taylor has been slowly recruiting others he knows or runs into. Teaching them his practices and benefits. While leveraging the multi-level commission system to year from their growth.

Welding

Introduction

Finding a great welder has always been a challenge for everyone. There are just not that many welders out there anymore. Not to mention the simple fact that there are so many different welding processes and materials.

The companies that need welders all the time tend to horde all the best welders to themselves—paying fantastic salaries to their welders because they know how hard it is to find and retain the best welders. For everyone else, finding a highly experienced welder for a particular job is impossible.

Sure, finding someone to lay down a simple bead with an arc welder to fix a wrought iron chair should be easy and cheap, but it is not. Much less finding an experienced TIG welder to fix an aluminum structure is just about impossible.

When faced with a problem that should be welded, most handymen will typically do an ugly, non-kosher repair. Or recommend someone throw away a perfectly good chair over a minor broken weld that can be fixed in minutes with a guy and a portable 110v arc welder.

Approaching this market.

We have been dealing with this problem in our local market. We have seen all sorts of businesses that need good welders, from automotive to watercraft, agriculture, and construction.

The way we came into this segment was a local marine repair shop. On the west coast, Aluminum fishing boats are popular, especially the welded hull boats. These boats are subjected to much abuse in the rivers, at the ramp, or rough swells. Any repairs or modifications to marine-grade aluminum requires specialized knowledge and skill. It is not something that some guy with a cheap harbor freight welder can fix.

The particular shop we worked with was stuck between a rock and a hard place. They didn’t have anyone in-house with welding skills. Typically they would pull the boat halfway across the state to another shop, which was expensive for them and the customer. Clients didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars for repair. The other alternative was mechanically riveting or screwing a repair patch, which was downright ugly. Who wants to see a big huge patch on the side of their nice fishing boat?

Enrolling the shop was easy. The challenge was finding someone local to do the work, especially in our area where there isn’t much work for highly skilled marine TIG welding. Approaching the trade schools was a terrible idea. The kids there were more likely to blow holes into the side of the boat, causing more problems than they fixed. Until it finally dawned on us to approach the local welding supply stores. These shops knew qualified marine welders and were able to connect us. These shops had job boards that we posted information on as well.

Having welders on the platform has also enabled us to go back to the automotive and construction businesses to let them know that they had a new tool at their disposal. This enabled them to take or suggest new projects that they hadn’t thought about before. Recommending a rather expensive wrought iron gate instead of a more common wood gate is one example. Another one was building a patio cover out of steel instead of traditional wood. Projects that excited their clients, but previously was unimaginable because they didn’t have access to a professional welder and their equipment. 

Summary
In the course of solving one problem for one customer, keep in the back of your mind on how you can leverage that work to the benefit of companies you already onboarded. This is working smarter and not harder.