Transcript
Eric Triplett (0:04)
Welcome to the deep end with Eric Triplett, the pond digger. This is the show for contractors, tradesmen, and entrepreneurs who want more from their business and from themselves. Eric brings decades of experience as a seven figure contractor with expertise in leadership, sales systems, and the discipline it takes to build something real. Shaped by years in the aquatics world, his insights are rooted in precision, craftsmanship, and performance. If you're done skimming the surface and ready to go deeper, it's time to dive in.
Eric Triplett (0:46)
Welcome back to the deep End. It's triplet here. This one's going to be fun for me because there's a story about a government that tried to solve a cobra problem that we talk about today. You know, like, talking about government's not always a whole lot of fun, but this one is one that's gonna hit you. Okay, so imagine the government in India trying to solve a cobra problem, but ended up creating more cobras than when they started. Okay, so if you're a contractor listening to this right now, I'm willing to bet you've got a few cobras in your business too.
Sam (1:22)
You know, not the kind that bite
Eric Triplett (1:24)
and kill you like these king cobras and stuff, but the kind that bleed you out slowly. And it could be your pricing, in your team, in your sales process. And it could be a problem that you've created on your own, much like this one that we're talking about in India. Because sometimes the systems that we create to fix problems are the exact reasons the problems don't go away or they even get worse. Today's episode's pulled straight out of a live compass call we do on Fridays inside the train with triplet contractor circle in Facebook. Link is in the show notes if you want to join me. One Friday and we break it all down. It's what I'm calling the contractor cobra effect.
Sam (2:04)
Okay?
Eric Triplett (2:06)
How your incentives might be screwing you, how you train your team to fail.
Sam (2:11)
Why would you do that?
Eric Triplett (2:13)
I know you didn't do it intentionally, but why? 48% of contractors never follow up on their sales calls. They actually ghost their prospects and they lose the jobs that they actually should have won. This one's gonna sting a little bit, but if you're serious about leveling up, you're in the right place. Welcome to the deep end.
Sam (2:38)
Today the topic is called the cobra effect or the cobra conundrum. You could say I heard about this, this whole story, and it kind of blew my mind. I'm a reptile guy, a fish guy, outdoors kind of thing, and there was something going on in India. I don't know the time frame or the timeline, but all I can tell you is the government decided to pay people to bring them cobras because the cobras were kind of out of control, right? So the government says, hey, bring us the cobras. We're going to give you money. And then so this deployment happened, and so people started bringing the cobras to the government, and they would kill them and do whatever they did with them. And then those seemed to be working out really well. But then some people decided to start breeding them. So let's think about it. You know, now you got all these people in India, you know, collecting cobras and setting them up and breeding them, and then waiting till they had like a hundred cobras at once and they'd come in with the cobras, and then the government will be paying out all this money. And then the government figured it out, like, hey, this is. This is not. This is not working out. They're. They've kind of duped us, and this is not a good thing anymore. So they. They crushed the plan. They're like, we're not going to do this anymore. It's not working out for us. So then, as you can imagine, all the people that were breeding the cobras were like, well, shit, I got to feed them. There's so many mouths to feed. And then I got to clean them. And there's kind of some danger involved with me cleaning them. There's a lot of risk for. But got all the money, so it made sense. So everyone releases the cobras back into society, and their cobra problem got worse. And, you know, things like this go on and on. I know there's a giant toad in Australia that they brought in this giant toad to help combat some kind of problem that they were having there with an insect or something like that. And now those frogs have taken over. And, you know, you just think about these things on and on, and this is. This is not. This is much different than what's going on in the Everglades of Florida where, you know, these. The anacondas and the boa constrictors are kind of going crazy, right? And the. Even the. You know, the iguanas and things of that nature. You hear about all that stuff, right? But those. Those weren't released as a problem. Those were released as, like, just human negligence and stupidity and ignorance or whatever. I just let my snake go. It's, you know, it's too much work for me. It got too big. If you've ever played with an anaconda, you Know, they get too big. But so that was done out of ignorance and stupidity, but this is done out of, hey, the government said, hey, let's solve this problem by paying people for cobras. Hey, let's solve this problem by bringing in this giant toad to help with this. And then they overpopulated. And so there's, there's examples of this that, you know, certainly could go on and on and on. And I just thought this framework would be kind of important for us to talk about in our business, because sometimes as entrepreneurs and business owners, what we're doing to solve problems in our business, we think that we're helping things out, but in fact, we could be creating other problems along the way that are holding us back from moving forward. And so I kind of wanted to go over a couple of those things. But before I would do this, I want to give you one more example of the government thing, right? So. And you know, China used to have this. You know, they were just having babies like crazy. You know, the population was exploding and they were having problems with overpopulation. And so they came up with the one child policy. You know, like, you can't have more than one child or, you know, we'll just kill all you guys, right? So like the communist country, they're really strict. You have one child, that's it. Otherwise you're in big trouble. So they went to one child in China. And if you're studying anything about, you know, the population and the way our culture works and all this, their, their birth rate is so low that, you know, in the next 50 years, their culture will be gone. Talk to Elon about it. I don't know, it's a little bit above my pay grade, but all I know is their, their birth rate is so low that they can't sustain themselves as a, as a human culture. So imagine the Chinese, you know, Chinese people would be gone in 50 years. It's hard for me to fathom that, but people much smarter than me have already done the calculations and the math on that. But there's not enough young people coming up to actually take care of the older people along the way. So now they said, hey, we kind of changed our mind. Let's have babies again. Everyone, let's go, let's have some kids. But the fact is now the people in China don't want to have more than one kid anymore. That would became the new norm. So it's something that the government did. It's kind of like the cobra effect. It's something the government implemented to Solve a problem and incentivize people to do something a certain way. And then it backfired and it made things worse. And this can happen in our businesses a lot. I know of lots of contractors. One contractor comes to mind just like vividly. He's cheap contractor, okay? You know, he wants, he wants to get more jobs. He wants to outbid people. He'll bid jobs low certain times a year because he wants to keep his guys busy. You know, I got to keep work on the board to keep my guys busy, right? And so it's the contractor that is always under bidding because he has a scarcity mindset, because maybe he's not training it, doesn't have the skill set to sell jobs at higher jobs and sell his company on the value that they provide. So it's always he's a price guy, right? But what happens is as becoming the low price guy, you know, he runs into trouble with low margin margins. His jobs are stressful. He's robbing Peter to pay Paul. He's constantly in negotiations and by default, he becomes that negotiator. He negotiates with himself. Even with clients that are not really interested in negotiating, they're more than welcome to pay you your price. And then you're like, hey, if you pay me cash, I'll give you a discount. They're like, oh, cool, I'll take a discount. But like, that person is constantly creating that issue within their business. So, you know, their workmanship gets worse. Their employees don't stick around because they can't pay the employees, right? So, like, he solves this problem to keep his guys busy during the winter, but he doesn't solve the problem of having the right profit margins to take care of people, to get shirts to take care of, you know, buy proper vehicles and tools, and it becomes a shit show.
