View Original article at JamesPFriel.com

By James August 14, 2016 The Bulletproof Businessman Series

We would all love as business owners a level of predictability, to understand where our next customer is going to come from. The best way to do this is to understand your customers on an emotional level, this will allow you to qualify the right person for your service or product.

For this episode we had a ‘hot seat’, This is a real consultation with thought provoking questions and some great insights come from it, where today’s guest finds the benefit of understanding your customer at an emotional level. In today’s Hot Seat we have Jason Thelen.

Jason is the creator of Little Bay Boards, a paddleboard company that makes gorgeous custom built, hand made in hollow wood paddle boards. It started as little side project a couple of years back and it’s slowly developed into something more and more people seemed to want.

It was always kind of a hobby for Jason, always worked in wood shops and building furniture, carpenter by trade and one day saw it as a challenge to build a hollow wooden paddle board, not unheard of to have hollow wooden surfboards. After building one Jason would have it on the back of his truck and received tons of attention, at traffic lights people would actually roll by the truck window and try and find out where the board came from and at the beach loads of people would stop by and want to talk about it and it developed from there. There just seemed like so much attention being caught that Jason thought it wouldn’t hurt to just dabble in it a little, he would build one for a friend and build one for a neighbour and just gradually grew into something that he realised he should try and make a profit from. He thought to himself,

“I really enjoyed doing it and who wouldn’t want to do that for a living.”

Now Jason is looking to create a constant flow of leads for his business, enough to financially support his family whist having the time freedom to spend with his daughter and wife.