Cracking the Code: Purchase Cycles, Messaging, and Marketing for Home Services with Tom Casey
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Speaker 1: 0:03
Oh, what's up? Lemonheads, welcome to another episode of From the Yellow Chair. I am Crystal and listen, I've got a real SOB in the virtual lemonade stand today and I can't wait for you to hear the conversation that we are going to have all about marketing. He comes from the trades. I think he kind of knows what he's talking about here. We're going to talk about messaging. It's going to be a great time together, really pushing you to think about how you're doing your marketing. Let's sip some lemonade. Well, joining me in the virtual lemonade stand today is the real SOB, which is the son of a boss. So, technically, I'm not a son, I'm a GOB, a girl of a boss. But I've been in this same boat as Mr Tom Casey, the master advisor at Best Postcards and also America's most awarded contractor. The 2022 Contracting Business Hall of Fame entered into that, and so, tom, I just always like to ask our guests why should anyone listening today care what you have to say?
Speaker 2: 1:13
Besides my good looks and good nature, because I've got the experience of been there, done that, I probably paid the tuition on many, many lessons through all my time of Odin businesses.
Speaker 1: 1:26
Well, I mean, how do you feel about what's all going on right now? You know I was thinking today, you know we have and I'm kind of going off script of what I just told you I was going to do but you know my brain kind of goes to you're from this. This is definitely not your first rodeo. Tell me how you feel right now about, like all these influencers that are calling themselves coaches, and you know all these companies there's tons of marketing companies like how are you feeling about the like that, Even the social landscape of of our industry?
Speaker 2: 1:55
now, from someone that's been in this mix for a while, that's a really good subject and could go like a lot of different ways. A good subject and could go like a lot of different ways. My approach is always reality over theory, like practicality, pragmatic, being pragmatic, and I think having more voices is great. I think the fear right now that I see, or maybe the worry, is that we've been kind of struck with this guru-itis. Everybody's a guru and whether it's flashing fancy washes or private planes or fancy shoes or I don't know whatever it is, I think at the end of the day those can be shiny objects to distract us when really we're in like a blue collar salt of the earth business. Right, we're fixing heating and air, we're fixing plumbing, we're fixing electrical, whatever our trade is, we're climbing in basements and attics and crawl space. There's a practicality to our business and I think, just like in other industries, the get rich quick schemes usually get the person selling the scheme rich and not the people trying to get rich. So I love it. I love the perspective. I think we can all learn from everybody. But you know, there was a time before things called cell phones and computers and we had to listen to cassette tapes from guys like Doc Rusk and Jim Abrams and you know they didn't have the internet, they didn't have Google. They built businesses just on solid principle and I think the more things change, the more they stay the same, particularly in this industry. So the idea right now is we got to like take a pause and just kind of run it through like our BS filter.
Speaker 2: 3:44
I used to always say when I took my people to trade shows all right, turn on your BS filter now, because some people are going to be saying a lot of stuff, but you got to use your brain to kind of work through. Does it make sense? And the fear or the worry I said about the guru-itis and there's a lot of good guys and there's a lot of maybe not so good guys is each of us has to make things our own. Just because you do something in your business that crushes it for your business doesn't mean I can just plug and play to my business or my market, particularly marketing things, right. They don't go the same based on weather patterns and a lot of things. So I love it. But I'm also apprehensive Don't go hook, line and sinker without doing a little bit of thinking, a little bit of talking. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: 4:39
Oh yeah, and I have that same philosophy. It's one of those things that's my most hated thing, that I love because I love all the information. I love to be able to filter through and keep what I want to keep and throw out what I want to throw out. But I do work with so many contractors and I watch them like hook line and sinker, take the bait of what they have been sold is a silver bullet. So you know, even even clients of limited life, they'll be like, oh, I found a different agency that's going to do this and so we're going to pull all of this. And so I'm like, okay, Just because of one little audit or or things like that. So I've really learned to like, like you said, filter through all the information that's out there, Because they're the only silver bullet that I've been able to find that really helps grow your home service business is consistency.
Speaker 1: 5:27
Consistency in training, coaching, answering the phone, marketing, spending. I mean all of those are investing. All of those things are the power of consistency, and so it led me right into this. The purchase cycles, which this is an interesting topic that not a lot of marketing companies really get into, but they should. We should be like hyper-focused on the power of purchase cycles and home service marketing, and so I just thought maybe we could break down the concept of purchase cycles, their importance when it comes to making smart decisions and you know, it's a much more important concept that I think we give credit to. And so I thought like kind of you know level set us here, like exactly what are purchase cycles, what are we talking about when we say that, and why do you think they're so crucial?
Speaker 2: 6:16
So I would agree with you. I hear no conversations going on about it. So when I talk to people it's kind of a mind blowing moment because they've never heard this before. But when we talk about it it's going to make complete sense to people. And the reason it's critical is if you don't understand this, then your marketing and your messaging will probably be wrong and you'll be wondering why it's not working.
Speaker 2: 6:38
So purchase cycle basically is how often is the client or the prospect in the market to make a purchase? So there are short purchase cycles, like something that will happen less than 90 day cycles, say, like food or clothes or things along that line. And then there are long purchase cycles. If anything, there's more than 90 days. The 90 day barrier is kind of like how do people remember things and think about things? Long purchase cycle things will be things we sell, like heating and air and plumbing and electrical, and even within the long cycle there's a couple of different periods. And the way that kind of crystallizes short term long term concept is everyone is listening.
Speaker 2: 7:22
Imagine you get something in the mail and you get a coupon for $2 off a large cheese pizza and you get a mailer for $1,500 of instant rebates off a new heating and air system. Which one are you hanging on the fridge? You're keeping the pizza coupon because you're going to have a cycle. You actually want pizza. The $1,500 is not going to motivate somebody. We can't convince somebody in something in a short-term tactic to make a long-term purchase, and so getting this wrong creates like tons of strategies. And what I see happen and you probably see more so is people say I tried radio once, I tried direct mail once, I tried that once and it didn't work. And the thing is, yeah, of course it didn't work. I bet it didn't because you you attack it as I'm going to run a radio campaign for 30 days and get a bunch of work. That's a short term strategy for a long term problem. I mailed my customers twice a year and they didn't call Bad, bad strategy because you're trying to short term, that are long term purchases that make sense.
Speaker 1: 8:34
Oh, yes, yes, and you know so. I love direct mail. I'm a huge direct mail person. I'm actually. I love messaging, but I tell my contractors all the time the biggest mistake that contractors make is not having a realistic expectation of what they're about to do. So there's nothing wrong with sending like a newsletter twice a year to your team, to your clients. You just have to understand what and have clear expectations of how that is going to perform. If you're just doing specifically things to build your brand, it's probably not going to have this huge immediate ROI, but it's about constantly chipping away and building up that brand presence and that brand recognition for those people. And so you're right, like the messaging on there matters, consistency matters, the strategy behind the mail plan, as far as when it drops, and heck heck any marketing you know, and so many people just throw those things at the wall like it didn't work.
Speaker 2: 9:27
I'm like there was no time, nor did we have clear expectations yeah, the first thing, if I you know, you say right, you're talking to me like what's the marketing budget and there's like people could debate, you know, are the new business, old business, small business, large business, like uh, they got a. Then the second question I have is how are you going to split it between long and short-term focuses? And that usually is where there's a stumbling block, because they want to go right to digital mail media. But there's got to be some consideration of what are our sales activation tactics. On HVAC, what's the average across the country?
Speaker 2: 10:02
Probably the average time people need an HVAC service for a repair three to five years. New system 10 to 15 years probably, maybe longer in certain parts of the country. Plumbing every three, four years. You need a plumbing call. Water heaters every eight or ten years. These are long purchase cycle products and if we're always trying to run a special, have a coupon, get somebody to do something that they don't want to do. The other thing is nobody wakes up this morning and says I hope I got to buy a new water heater. It's a grudge purchase and it's being triggered by an external event, like I have no hot water or there's a flood in my house, I have to buy a water heater. You can't like mail or Facebook or anything to get there. That's going to activate them or convince them. The event has to happen. So I see that as a big mistake, getting too imbalanced on the short term, always running specials, always trying to get we need leads, we need leads and not understanding farming versus hunting.
Speaker 2: 11:01
Right Marketing is farming, planting seeds, nurturing the seeds, fertilizing, watering, weeding to get the harvest, and it takes patience. You're right. You got to make sure as contractors. This is not a one month one and done. This is like a 12 month plan. This is a strategy and we have to have the right tactics for the right situation. The way I kind of think about it is like maybe a playbook. You don't run the same play on first and 10 as you do in fourth and two. You know you don't run the same plan when it's third and eight as you do with third and one, and so we have to have the right tactics and the right distribution.
Speaker 2: 11:42
And to me, marketing if it's an 8% or 10% of the top line revenue, it's a huge number. It's one of the biggest numbers on our P&L, and so I think we should look at it not as an expense. I think we should look at it as an investment. And if I tell you how would you manage your 401k or your retirement account? You would have diversity, you would spread the risk, you would look at how the whole portfolio performs. No one is going to go in and kind of churn their stocks all the time in their retirement account. Why? Because it's a long-term thinking. We're like I'm saving this for when I retire, so over time it will ebb and flow. As long as I'm on a trajectory, the marketing investment to me should be the same thing when we're thinking about long term versus short term tactics.
Speaker 1: 12:26
Yeah, and I use the term marathon approach, you know. So it's so much about expectations. So many people just will call me and say, oh my gosh, I got to have leads right now. And I'm like man, once you are in that bad of place, like it's really hard to have things that instantly make people's air conditioners break or their water heaters bust Right, like it definitely takes a lot of intentional brand building to be to have consistent lead flow for sure. Well, how do you think these cycles differ for like HVAC versus plumbing versus electrical, or even you know now that you know that, even like pest control and things like that?
Speaker 2: 13:01
Great question again. So HVAC has the shortest cycle. Typically is plumbing, because plumbing breaks more, there's more obvious fixtures in the house that can go wrong or drains and the equipment doesn't last as long. So typically plumbing services every two to three to years, maybe two to four years on a cycle where, like the equipment side of plumbing is like eight to 10 years. Hvac is about every three to five years for a service call on. Some climates say 10 to 12 years for equipment replacement, others like 15 to 17 years.
Speaker 2: 13:34
And electrical electricians are the ones who are like the Maytag man a little bit. They don't. People don't have a lot of electrical breakdowns the same as they do plumbing or heating and air. So service calls there might be every five, six years and you know when it's time to do an upgrade every 15 or 20 years. So electricians in particular have to be very strategic.
Speaker 2: 13:53
Pest control is a little different. Pest control is a subscription service. So when I see people there you know pest control is all about gaining that customer and most of them make a mistake that they're not paying attention when they're leaking them out the backside. So pest control people are in the market every two or three years to change their subscription service because somebody disappointed them, not for price, but the technician on site didn't do things he was supposed to do. I was literally in a meeting with a pest control company last night and that was like your guys are not wowing the customers on the service. So their cycles are shorter and they don't really have a large install thing, even if they do mosquito systems. It's like a one and done period.
Speaker 1: 14:36
They make their money 40 bucks at a time. That's what I think.
Speaker 2: 14:39
Yeah, it is. They got to just focus on the right messaging to attract a long-term customer. They want to attract somebody who's going to be there longer and that's usually through differentiating through service and sometimes having a lot of services. So if you have to call a lawn guy, a pest guy and a termite guy or whatever a mosquito guy in four companies and the more of those you can bundle together, the more attractive it is to the homeowner. As long as you're good at all of those things You're not like mediocre at any of them Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: 15:09
My brother and sister and I started a pest control company about a year ago now and we just, I mean, we just went really hard branding and people are like how do you afford this? And we're like, man, how do you afford not to? Because it's just you're, you know you're picking up stepping over dollars, dimes when you're just chasing that fast lead and so you know it really takes a lot of dedication to understand like the sales cycle or the purchase cycle is very different for these different things. And you know, when contractors ignore this concept whether it's through, you know, just ignoring it altogether concept, whether it's through, you know, just ignoring it altogether but mainly when they just, you know again, I keep using this term throw things to the wall to see what sticks.
Speaker 1: 15:53
I probably see that statement on more intake forms for Lemonsie to support these clients. I see that like I just throw things to see what works and there's a lot of fun to that, like marketing is. I think marketing is fun because it's like a puzzle and everybody's puzzle is a little different, like what worked for them doesn't work for them, or you know that price point. You're constantly pivoting and moving those puzzle pieces. But again, understanding like that you have to work really hard years sometimes, a lot of times before clients actually need to make a purchase with you that you'll look up and be like why have I? You know, I'm always chasing this little bitty bottom of the funnel, the marketing funnel, that little bitty funnel piece. Then I am chasing the people at the top of the funnel, which is just awareness. You know, people making sure people are aware. So how do you feel about that, like, when contractors really just maybe ignore these purchase cycles, how can it really impact their branding budget or their marketing budget?
Speaker 2: 16:47
Well, I think that most contractors are that. I need leads now, especially as digital. You know, digital was a boost in the arm for a lot of people for a bit, but now reality is coming, coming to roost. As far as digital with, there's more competition. It's bloody water, right, it's not clean blue ocean, it's bloody water, Everyone's fishing it and I don't believe you can really build a brand and paid. You always got to participate, you got to be on Google. I'm not saying I'm an anti-digital guy, but you can't build a brand through paid, because people going to paid have no brand preference and the goal of marketing to me, of all marketing any type, is to be known, liked and trusted. How do you become known, liked and trusted in your market? You've got to have strategy.
Speaker 2: 17:34
The people who make the mistake of always needing leads. It's like a cycle of a dog chasing his tail. Whether they get on paper crack and they can't get off of it and it was working great, now it's not working. Whether they try to do like coupon mailers buy now cheap. You can train your customers to wait for sales because you always offer sales. It's just the what you're putting out there. I think, the mistake a lot of us make as contractors is we forget we're contractors and we have this like momentary moment of insanity and we think we're marketers. So I was talking to somebody the day volume.
Speaker 2: 18:12
I said, um, let me, you're. You're a contractor, so let me ask you a question. I rate this customer I described to you on a scale from one to ten, ten being amazing, one being, oh my god. They call for an estimate when you get there. They've already done all their research on Google, they know all about SEER value and they have model numbers they thought about and they know, you know they've done some research, they know how much the units cost, they know what components they need and don't need.
Speaker 2: 18:40
I don't need a thermostat. And, by the way, they have a cousin, a brother, somebody on their mother's side, three times removed, who can do it really cheap. Tell me, is that customer a 10 or a one? They're like a negative, two, right, they're just. Nobody wants this customer, I said to this contractor. Then why are you that customer when it comes to your marketing decisions? Just like you're the expert at heating and air, plumbing or whatever, shouldn't the marketing company be the expert? And I'll put a PS If they're not, fire that marketing company. They're the wrong one Absolutely. And so they got to be careful of that. And it also comes on sometimes where you can have an agency that's really competent but you can have an agency that's really a sheep in wolf's clothing. They're a digital company. Oh, and, by the way, we can do direct mail.
Speaker 2: 19:35
Or, by the way we can do whatever or we're a branding company and now we're doing copywriting. It's really hard to do that, um, because really you're trying to make the digital sale or the branding sale or whatever sale under the guise of we can do everything for you, so that you dilute it. You become a jack of all trades, a master of none. So if we want to do our marketing as contractors, we're probably going to limit ourselves. And I can look and you can look it up. I can look at your Facebook and tell, oh boy, this is bad. I can look at your website and go, oh, this is not good. I can look at anything you do and be like you're meddling and that, and that kind of leads to the messaging right, most of the messaging that these guys, us contractors I'm one, I'm a reformed, I'm like a recovering, like I'm a recovering marketing anonymous guy, um, but we try to like show up and throw up.
Speaker 2: 20:28
We try to like say everything. We try to, you know, think how we would buy. We're're not our customer. I would never use financing Me either, by the way, but my customers seem to love it. They use financing for a lot of things in their lives.
Speaker 1: 20:45
Oh yeah, contractors themselves. They decide. All the time I have to tell them, like, get out of your customer's pocketbook. Odds are that you're not even your exact target market, tom.
Speaker 2: 20:56
I'm so sorry, hold on, somebody's knocking on our door Hold on one second.
Speaker 1: 21:00
I'm so sorry. So you know that leads into that messaging that we talk about too. You know I try to tell contractors one of the biggest mistakes they also make. Yesterday, for example, we were dealing with a client this happens to be a billboard example, but along the same lines this client messages us and was like hey, I want to do a billboard, will y'all help me? And I want to do it about my membership club and I want you to list all the perks of my membership club. And I'm like on a billboard when you're going 80 miles an hour.
Speaker 1: 21:31
So you know, and so the messaging can be as clear, like as shallow as those types of conversations. But also around that purchase cycle that we were talking about. You know, and you made the mention of the two dollar pizza coupon versus fifteen hundred dollars off a system. You know, really thinking through number one, how do you differentiate your message between everybody else in the market? But also how does the message match what you're asking them to do but also have a long shelf life, and so messaging, I just think it's game changer. You really can see the creativity come out in contractors as well when it comes to their messaging.
Speaker 2: 22:11
For sure. I think that messaging to me it's a couple of high level ways I think about. It is one Marketing is understanding the psychology of the buyer, right. So is your onsite process too, right. Whether it's a service call or a sales leader or install, the customer already has things going on in their mind and they have value systems and they make money decisions in a certain way. And so how do we understand that and then gear messaging around that? If we can get tap into the conversation already happening in the customer's mind, our messaging will be more, will resonate better, right?
Speaker 2: 22:48
One of the issues you kind of alluded to with some agencies and also some organizations who are all well-intentioned and a lot of gurus in gururitus land, is they have experienced, a certain way, a lot of people in agency world and in organization world, their marketing group or their marketing people, don't have real world home service experience. They're coming from the airline industry or the travel industry or the hospitality industry and those are different buyer psychologies, not grudge purchases, not external triggered events, short-term purchases versus long-term purchases. So the messaging sometimes is off kilter and we trust them, we believe in them. But we still got to think about what's happening in the customer's mind. Contractors are desperate for leads so they yell, sell, sell, sell, buy, buy, buy, deal, deal, deal. That's not a message. That's not a message. That's just like being a used car salesman. When it comes to messaging, I always tell people close your eyes and think of an image of a rhinoceros. What distinguishes a rhinoceros? That one giant point, the message in any single marketing piece, a billboard especially, has to be a single memorable, a single compelling point. Don't put your phone number on it, don't put a qr code on it. You got to get your brand and one compelling or memorable message. One thing if that thing could be a distinctive thing about you, that would be amazing. So a billboard that says when, when your AC breaks, we get there fast Done. It's like I get it in the psychology when my AC breaks. What do I want? I want someone to get here fast. You know that type of a message. A message that says clogged, drain 123 or it's free, like something basic. And I'm just sort of winging off the hip here.
Speaker 2: 24:58
Don't get clever in your messages, don't get cute, don't assume that the inside joke will be known by the prospect seeing your message. You know there was a pool company that ran. Is your wife hot? Yeah, that was kind of whatever. I think it's super cheesy, but is that in the mind? Is that really the thing that the woman of the house who's probably doing initial calling and reaching out it's like, yeah, I want to have a guy come to my house who wonders if I'm hot? Like that's a terribly wrong, clever message that might resonate with some people but does it with the psychology of your buyer.
Speaker 2: 25:34
And the other thing with messaging I see, and you probably see, is I want to talk about we do heating and air, we do plumbing, we do duct cleaning, we do all these things. Now you just watered down that message unbelievably, and so the brain is a part of the brain called Broca, and Broca's job is to like protect right, it's to say I don't need this information. Protect, it's to say I don't need this information. This is scary information. I want to just keep you from using your brainpower to get bogged down in this distracting information. So the messaging that really resonates is something that surprises the broken part of your brain. It gets through. It gets past the goalie. You're not going to get past the goalie with a bunch of like white noise. We do everything. Quality three generations trusted.
Speaker 2: 26:25
Yeah, trusted, that's all. Broke is going. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. But if you said something like we're open late every day, broker goes, wait a minute. That's not a message. I see all the time related to a problem.
Speaker 1: 26:39
Right, right.
Speaker 2: 26:40
And that can get by by the goalie there. So, um, if you think about the message, the other sin. I see, and you probably see as well, people want the marketing to sell and close the job.
Speaker 1: 26:58
Yes, they don't want to have any part to really play in it.
Speaker 2: 27:01
No, they want to say people call up and say I've got a bag of cash, please bring an AC, I'm ready to go. The marketing's job is just to get the phone call to come in or the lead form to come in. Then the rest of the process. Marketing is like the fuel, but you've got to start the engine and get the engine rolling and produce all the rest of the things right. So in messaging you shouldn't try to make the messaging close the deal. It should get them to move to the next step, which is call, click, scan, do something to reach out that make sense.
Speaker 1: 27:38
Oh yeah, and you know, all the time I see people that just want to. They just don't grasp that. And so it's like you know what, like I'm just not, I'm not making any money, and I'll, I'll go open their dashboard inside of their own CRM and say, well, um, you have 50 calls, um, you only answer 20 of them. So it's not that we're not working. Uh, the marketing's not working is, you're just not answering the phone and it's not. They're like well, but this isn't working. And so so many times I have to literally go show them where it's not working and then, uh, where it is working. And then sometimes you can say, hey, you know, I want to see when we're not generating calls, but I need to trust that the calls that we are generating, like you paid a lot of money for that lead yeah so it's.
Speaker 1: 28:32
it's very much a partnership. Our job is like bring it to you your job, I'm the pitcher, but you got to be the batter. You know you got to hit the ball and I see that a lot with just I don't know what the word I want to use is and like because ignorance is not the right word it's just like their attention to that is not there they're so focused on. You know they're all trying to make money. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2: 28:58
The business as a machine has to be like marketing creates the lead. The call center, csr, dispatcher they've got to convert and book the lead. Then dispatch has to schedule and get that lead run. The field has to actually do their work in a wow fashion to get a review. Then you know, counting's got to do their job. All I say it's like gears. All these gears are meshing together and if one of the gears sputters out, the whole business machine sputters too. Um, and so is it. Is it unawareness? You know most of us road toolboxes into business so we're really good at fixing things.
Speaker 2: 29:32
We don't want no numbers. Hey, that phone man, that phone's a pain in the butt. What? What I hate to see on the phone. I was helping somebody yesterday. They had auto attendant. I'm like could you put up a bigger FU to your customer than auto attendant? Like that's, we can.
Speaker 2: 29:47
They're like well, we got this many calls but you know most of them hung up they got auto attendant and they need to. They have an emergency. They're having literally like oh shit, day. Yes, you're making them go through a phone tree, it's, it's. That doesn't add up. And so if we start to have those conversations I had it yesterday and I'm like so why do you? Because we get all these soliciting calls, all these things, and I'm like so what you're saying is you're going to penalize your customer because people are calling you. What if you just empowered your call tech to just say I need to disconnect or I'm sorry, I'm going to hang up and just don't engage. They're tying them up because they're really good on the phone. Just hang up the phone If they're rude enough to call me during business hours to sell me and keep me from talking to my customers. It's not rude to hang up on them. So we're trying to solve problems the wrong way and somebody might have told this a certain thing.
Speaker 2: 30:45
But on the messaging side, you know, I love this with plumbers particularly. So a plumber wants to market and I go what kind of plumber do you want to be? They go well. I want to be a plumber Well, they go well. I want to be a plumber. Well, there's lots of different kinds of plumbers. You can be a new construction plumber. You could be like a water heater, water filtering, conditioning plumber. You could be a drain plumber. You can be like a Mr Fix-It plumber. And my plumbing. We did all of it.
Speaker 2: 31:10
But my marketing had to focus on what type of what thing I want to call for. If I need more drain calls or I want to build more drain calls, then I'm going to do drain marketing and messaging. If I need water heaters, like we ran, we've done this program for a lot of plumbers same day water heater. We guarantee we'll change your water heater the same day, seven days a week, including holidays. The number one water heater company in most markets is actually Home Depot, so they have same day water heater. So learn from your market. And I just remember walking to home people one day to get something I had to get for the house and I was like the message was so simple Water heaters installed same day.
Speaker 2: 31:55
Sometimes the best message or the best way to sell a horse is a sign that says horse for sale. So the messaging has got to be that one point. What's going on in the buyer's mind? What is the trigger that's going to make them need my services? And let's cater the message around that Branded direct response. We got to get our brand out there because we got to be known, liked and trusted, but the message has to be something that resonates too. So we're balancing the branding with a direct response, and that's where the long and short term also come in too. But it's always sell, sell, sell, rebate, buy.
Speaker 2: 32:30
Our brand is there, but we're being branded as annoying, yes, or what is the flavor of the month.
Speaker 1: 32:38
You know, constantly having you know these different offers going. You know I lean into this sometimes about. There is a lot of power in understanding what else your competition is doing in the market and some people stay so offended and so, like you know, I'll see people post on Facebook all the time and say, well, keep copying us. I'm like you spent more time making that post. Like, move along. Like, if you're looking backwards you're certainly not rolling forward. So, and if I'm not getting kicked in the butt, I'm not in the front. So you know, I just keep plowing along.
Speaker 1: 33:08
But there is power in knowing what is happening in your market and not ignoring those things that are changing and just being fluid with your offers to where they're. They're meeting the homeowner where they are and it's just that one big thing. But so many contractors are not willing. They're not willing to commit to this one thing. They think they can make it off of referral or word of mouth and so they don't see an interest in changing to a full.
Speaker 1: 33:46
You know, 7 am to 7 pm, seven days a week, no overtime charges or guaranteed day install, guaranteed same day install, because you know what they do. They make all their processes around the outliers and not around the fact of what was mostly going to happen, and so we just live in fear I say this too, like progress over perfection. Get out there and start making these offers, making these aggressive promises, and then man deliver, knock those out of the park, and that is how you differentiate between you and private equity that's in your market, kicking you in the throat every day, you know. So, just trying to trying to get, trying to get there. Well, I want to kind of lean into this last thing and I know we're kind of going long here, but I loving this conversation. You know you bought and sold, do I understand? Like five companies.
Speaker 2: 34:27
So I I founded, exited five companies. I didn't buy any. I always started from scratch. No customers, no employees perfect, perfect, okay.
Speaker 1: 34:36
And so tell me, like, is this, this how you approach your marketing for your company? Is this, you know, branded first. I I like to encourage people from Living Seed like I want us to think brand forward. So the first thing that we do is we put our brand forward in everything that we do, because we're building long-term relationships, we're building these raving fans. I can dilly-dally down here in what you call paper crack, which cracked me up earlier. You know I want to let everybody else run on that hamster wheel. Every once in a while I'll jump on it for a little bit, but my favorite thing is when I can jump off because my branding has just pushed us forward. When I see people hard and heavy in PPC, it lets me know that they're pretty, pretty weak on their branding. And so is that the philosophy that you took with these five companies. What were those five companies?
Speaker 2: 35:26
I had Climate Engineering in Connecticut, which was a contractor of the year back in 2001. Climate Partners in Connecticut, summit Services in Hilton Head, south Carolina, dr Energy Saver, which is a franchise company nationwide, and then Griffin.
Speaker 1: 35:44
Service in Jacksonville, Florida. So different markets as well.
Speaker 2: 35:47
At one point I was Connecticut, south Carolina, florida. I was bouncing back and forth and running them remotely. One thing you know when I built the business, I built it with the end in mind and I didn't want to. I didn't have office in any of my my companies, like I needed to be a business person and my background is trades. I wrote a toolbox in as a steam fitter. Been there, done that, been on call, done all the work. It was my favorite job being a technician. Actually being a business person is harder, but I built my business on branding.
Speaker 2: 36:19
And so how to be different? I don't think today you can be unique. Back in the 90s you could have USPs and all these things, but with information and the homogenization of everything, you've got to have something distinctive. And so, whether it is you're like hey, we're open early, we open early and we're open late, kind of thing. Or you know seven days, same price, you know never over time charge, those are distinctive things, and the easiest way to be distinctive you nail it is with your promises. You know, and the really be distinctive, come up with a really badass name for your promises, right? Like that you can own the name Even if someone tries to copy it in your marketing, right they go oh no, you're copying Crystal. Crystal's got that lemon seed guarantee, you know type of thing you know.
Speaker 2: 37:09
But what people are afraid of on the guarantees is well, what if I have to honor one? And so I illustrate it by saying if I said to you if you could sell 50 more HVAC systems this year by guaranteeing putting a meteor guarantee on your system If your AC gets hit by a meteor, we'll replace it for free and give you back all your money Would you give that guarantee to sell 50 more jobs? They're like, of course, why? Because you're not going to get hit by a meteor, like it's not going to happen. So in the next day, install guarantee. How can you mitigate the risk? Can you have portable ACs? Can you have flexibility, like flex discounts? Hey, if we have to reschedule you, our guarantee is we'll give you $500 credit. Can you say if you get rescheduled, you get a free IAQ, you get a free water filter. There's ways to mitigate the guarantee. And the best part about those guarantees you already know this. Most of your competition don't have the guts to make them. So they're really easy to be distinctive.
Speaker 2: 38:18
Because when I talk to people like I can't guarantee same-day service. When we get busy, we can't do same-day service. Well, of course not the. You have to have a consequence against you if we don't get there today. This is what we're going to do for you. We're going to give you a free tune-up next season. We're going to give you a wave the diagnostic fee. We're going to give you 25 or 50 off the repair. There's a consequence. People understand that. If it's just gimmicky, people see through that. They're smart, we're smart, and so I think that transparency is big and that's how we built our businesses.
Speaker 2: 38:50
We always started with direct mail. Heavy branding, really focused on the neighborhoods we wanted to do and we focused on the neighborhood. We mailed them, we did a job, we mailed around them with radius mailers, we hung door hangers, we put yard signs. We just went and tried to be I call it 10 mile Titan. We want to just own 10 miles of this place and just be the guy, and that's goes to the reach right. Some people like I'll mail 10,000 people twice a year. Well, that's 20,000 people. I'd rather mail 1500 people 10 times this year or 20 times, you know, 12 times this year, and just own my 1,500 people Way, way, way back in the day, jim Abrams and John Young had a thing called Victory Village and that was it.
Speaker 2: 39:34
You just keep mailing these same 1,000 people every single month and it worked. We just expanded on that idea. And if you're owning that idea, what we did then is focused on schools and sports teams and community events and fears and just became the guy they know, like and trust by being local. Of course, as you scale, then the next we want radio billboards are amazing too. Both of those are super affordable for the amount of frequency that people see and hear the message. For the dollars, if you can afford it, kick butt solutions.
Speaker 2: 40:09
Tv if you're going to get in tv, you know you got to be like really there. We, we got in tv as our company's got bigger in scale. But we had to have the budget to have that frequency and initially we did tv. We couldn't afford like every day, so we just owned a day. We own the, the morning show on Tuesday and Wednesday kind of thing where we can just be dominant for that period of time. And all of this marketing doesn't make a hill of beans if you don't deliver. So the alignment you were talking about of here's our marketing message. We started with what we're going to do to be awesome and then we figured out how to tell that story, then we delivered on it. And the temptation that we figured out how to tell that story, then we delivered on it, and the temptation that we didn't fall to, we didn't over-promise and under-deliver. We under-promised and then over-delivered.
Speaker 2: 40:53
Surprise and delight I would post it. The other day and one of the things like you have to surprise and delight your customers with something. And it used to be able to be like oh, we wear floor savers. Oh, we bring your garbage cans in. Oh, I brought your newspaper from the street. That's not doing it anymore. You've got to do something else to surprise and delight. And so then you do get word of mouth. You get good reviews. You know reviews are like rocket fuel for your machine.
Speaker 2: 41:18
You can't scale your business by word of mouth alone. You can get you know. If you can leverage that social media. You can leverage that on direct mail. You can leverage that someplace else on your website. If you're a salespeople can leverage it on site with, like video testimonials. But you can't scale a business on word of mouth. And I think that some people think they do. So we need word of mouth, we need to wow these people, but it's not going to build our business. We're going to build our business by fueling it with marketing.
Speaker 2: 41:46
Marketing is the only way to grow your business. Period. You can't be efficient. Efficiency grows your business. Efficiency can increase your margin. Raising prices, you can grow your business. Quote unquote. So like if there was a price increase of 12% this year and your business grew 12%, you didn't grow your business. Train grew your business. Carrier grew your business grew 12%. You didn't grow your business. Train grew your business. Carrier grew your business. Right, so you're going to need to have marketing do it. So we just believe in that. We committed a marketing budget. We developed long-term and short-term strategies. We defined our territories. Then we used the data to tell us what's working, what's not working.
Speaker 2: 42:19
Another thing which I don't know. I'm going to go on a limb here. You may or may not agree with this, but I didn't track a million things. I wasn't like put a tracking number on every single thing. I looked at my marketing budget again as an investment portfolio. Sometimes tech is up, sometimes tech is down. Sometimes blue chips up, sometimes blue chips down. In any given period of time.
Speaker 2: 42:39
I knew how many calls and leads I needed. I knew my marketing budget and, at the end of the day, if I had the leads I needed and I was in budget, did I really care? In the micromanaging side, what worked, of course, over time? Hey, this thing is not generating anything. I can redeploy that money better. But I wasn't herky-jerky and like I did mail it didn't work. I did a billboard it didn't work. I did something online it didn't work. I was willing to say am I staying within my 8% budget? And I got all the calls and leads that I need. That was different and I think some guys, that's how digital sells, right? Digital's like it's completely trackable. Well, it is sort of wink wink, but it's also bullshit. You're getting last click attribution. Google is the toll booth. Yeah, you get off the ramp. You're gonna pay the toll called google, so you get all the credit. Somebody told me last week google is my best lead source. I'm like, no, it's not.
Speaker 2: 43:35
It's not, it's where they're going yeah because of something what sent them to google. And my goal in my marketing was always to be I wanted people. The measure of success was they typed my name into the search bar, not a generic term.
Speaker 1: 43:52
Oh, 1,000%. So I love trackability. Again, it goes back to what I stated at the beginning. It's about the expectations of things. So I kind of put my, I put my tracking where people have given us and said they'll say this is going to generate all these leads. Well, that's fine, let me put a tracking number on it. So at the end of the day, I always try to utilize tracking numbers to help us have some insight.
Speaker 1: 44:15
I tell people that we are not going to be pushing and pulling extremely off of tracking numbers. It's simply a direction that things are working, because point of acquisition how you truly earn a new customer probably has many more touch points than the actual phone number that they called, and so really getting your headset right around how that's going to work is where the difference comes into play here. Because you're right, like we see so many people that just rock a boat. That doesn't need to be rocked, they just need to sit still and kind of ride out a storm. But we're jumping ship. I mean the moment that anything changes. We're changing.
Speaker 1: 44:52
I mean ask anybody anybody that's listening right now to this podcast if you've had more than two or three website providers over the last three or four years. You're the problem. Odds are you are the problem because you haven't given anybody time to be successful. If your social media is not performing and you're blaming all these social media creators, odds are it's not them, it's you. Just because of expectations not being set clearly, overly tracking things, putting so much stock in that I mean, right now there's a whole business that's built around. How fast they can change uh, everything, and so I guess I'm just a little bit on the old school side, like you.
Speaker 1: 45:30
Like I love being consistently branded in my market and staying flexible, staying focused and just keeping the customer at the center of all of our decisions. Like every time, like, but how does the? How does the consumer think? How do we? You know they may not get all the you start telling everybody that you're giving away a air purifier x 1000 uh, two of them. Uh, people, do you got to tell them what it solves for them? You have to tell, you have to give them that it's a solution to a problem. They may not even know they had um and so well. Well, tom, thank you so much. Like I just really enjoyed this If you had to give a new home service company owner. You know, a couple of pieces of advice. What would those be?
Speaker 2: 46:17
Always start off with understanding. We're not curing cancer and we're not solving world peace, we're fixing plumbing and air conditioning. So let's not like forsake all of our values and our family and the reason we went into business in the first place. If we start that, that's definitely sort of like even on my team, when it's the heat of battle, everything going on, I'd be like remember everybody not curing cancer, not solving world peace, so kind of keep right perspective there. I also would go back to kind of the guru-itis. Don't get caught up in guru-itis. Find somebody that you know and trust, just like you want your customers to do, and then listen to them, collaborate with them, have healthy debate back and forth, ask a lot of questions and understand why Crystal is telling you this. Why is tom saying this? You may not agree, you don't have to agree, but you should always start first with help me understand, not if I give you this money, you'll have a magic beans. I also think that um staying focused on a game plan, whether it's a marketing plan or the way you execute those plays so your marketing is one set of playbooks like offense, then your call centers and other set of plays like defense and your field operations is like special teams. They each need to have plays and if you assume you hired an experienced guy, you assume whatever and you don't go verify it, you don't make sure it's happening. Talking to somebody yesterday like we always do this and I'm like, well, I actually talked to two of your managers and two of your branches and they told me you don't ever do that, let's talk into the big boss, like you're assuming something. You're not like measuring. I also always operate my business and do no harm, do no harm to the customers, do no harm to the vendors, do no harm to the employees, harm to the vendors, do no harm to the employees, like if we just are, operate with good old fashion common sense and good neighborly type of stuff. And the end of the day, for the marketing, figure out with whoever your marketing people are, and it could be a team of people.
Speaker 2: 48:21
I had an SEO guy, I had a pay per click guy, I had a direct mail guy, I had a radio guy and I made them all work together because we're on a team now, but it was basically what can we be famous for? What can we be known for? So when somebody has this problem, they go. Those are the guys known, liked and trusted. And if you that you could, a one truck could do that, a five truck could do that. Electrician, a plumber, a painter, a pest guy, you can become known for something, but it can't be quality, integrity, these these vagaries. It's got to be something that matters. Who, oh who's the company that doesn't charge overtime on weekends? Boom, oh. Who's the company that's open late? Boom. Who's the company that has water reviews the next day? Boom. Those are the types of things Just become famous and it's going to be scary, because you've got to commit to it, yeah, and you can't compromise it.
Speaker 2: 49:19
And so when you're like I need leads and I'll become all things to all people. Don't do that. Yeah, stay with it. Work with your marketing team, crystal. How do we do this? How do we keep leveraging this? How do we spread it across all of our messaging? If you do that, I think those are all simple things. None of those should be like mind-blowing to anybody. They're all like duh. But doing them is the hard part. The consistency you said in the beginning consistency of doing simple things over and over and then tweaking and adjusting as the market shifts is going to be the formula to success absolutely well listen.
Speaker 1: 49:57
I have really enjoyed these insights on. I love the purchasing cycles, conversation, the messaging and, of course, building the brand. You know that's our jam here, so I think it's invaluable to contractors that are at any stage of business. And so, tom, thank you so much. We'll have all of your contact information in the show notes. And, guys, thank you for listening to another episode of From the Yellow Chair. We hope that you've enjoyed this. We'd love for you to leave us a review, follow us on all of our socials and, hey, if you're looking for expert guidance, lemon Seed would love to be your trusted source, as Tom mentioned, for strategy and branding and all things just helping you dominate your market. Thanks for sipping lemonade with us today. Until next time, see you later.
