Why Home Service Owners Lose Customers Before They Ever Pick Up the Phone

And 66% of people said trust in reputation, and only 7% said price. They don't trust you to pay the expensive price. If you take an owner, put him or her on the screen, and they say, this is my reputation, this is my face, my family, I'm standing behind my product, that's how you get scrappy. I think the personal brand of the founder is more important than the company itself. Marketing is doable, no matter your size. If you're a one-man show, if you're a $500 million company, start with everything that you own. All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert podcast. Today, I got Senya Spellman with me. She is an expert at lead generation performance marketing, brand reputation, and pricing power. Brand story, TV, CTV strategy, multi-channel marketing, PR and community campaign, sports sponsorships, CRM, and first-party data. Based out of Wisconsin, she's a fractional CMO, basically, that knows everything about Home Service. The episode thesis is marketing feels daunting to most Home Service owners. It doesn't have to be. Even a one-man operation has tools available to them right now. Referrals, reviews, brand storytelling, and smart channel strategy. Senya has spent the years inside of the marketing departments of companies like Tunderland, $100 million revenue, Leaf Home 7 brand's Bathworks, and Home Genius Exteriors delivering 10x increase in TV leads and moving set rates from 12% to 34%. Now she embeds inside of companies as a fractional operator showing them the marketing is more accessible than I think and that the reputation is directly tied to their pricing power. And that telling their brand story is the right way to change everything. This episode makes marketing feel achievable, not overwhelming. It's great to have you here. Yeah, I'm so happy to be here reading off that whole list. I'm like, wow, there's a lot of stuff that I've done, so I'm excited. I love this stuff. And it's perfect timing because we're like diving deep into marketing at the company right now. And we're doing all the above. We do a lot of TV, a lot of CTV, a lot of radio, a lot of display ads, a ton of money on PPC, multi-channel G&B strategy. Let's just jump in. So you graduated with a marketing degree, moved from Peru to teach English, came back and started at a dental office. How'd you end up as a VP of marketing help drive home? Gosh, well, my entire career, my goal is always to fill seats. And so whether I started in private equity dental, which is a dentist has X amount of patients that they can see a day. Let's get those chairs filled, move to disaster restoration, same thing. We have crews that need to have jobs to do, so let's get those in the door. And then it was a pretty natural transition to home improvement. I actually started at Tundra Land Home Improvements with Brian Gottlieb and Amy Zimmerman, two super huge powerhouses in the space. You can see them a lot in Paul Ketterer Modeler and speaking at these other events. As soon as I met Amy, I saw this beautiful, powerful, blonde woman. Like you work in home improvement. Like when I think of home improvement before I was in the industry, I thought overalls, maybe some cocking on there, you know, some tears and riffs, but it really is an industry that's so lucrative and has so much potential if you know how to do it the right way. So I went to Tundra Land on site. Brian Gottlieb is the most magnetic person in the world. He sat me down. He's like, what can we do to get you on the team? Whatever you want. He's all over the place and super exuberant. And so I said, well, this is where I need to be. And we were acquired by Leaf Home after that at Tundra Land. And so Amy and I had the opportunity to replicate this amazing funnel metrics that we were doing at Tundra Land at Leaf Home for the acquisitions. So after that, it was just kind of organic. We had a great time managing those brands. I felt like I kind of wanted to have more autonomy and really help a brand have super huge revenue growth and scale. So we took a bath works when I was a CMO there from 12 million to 25 million in about a year. Another pacing for 52. I just got a text from the owner actually this morning saying, you set up these great systems to help us keep thriving. So it was kind of a natural transition to just stay in the space. It's fast-paced. It's aggressive. And you just have to be scrappy. And if you're scrappy and creative, you can make it in this industry. Yeah, no, marketing is the lifeblood. You know, I got a buddy of mine that I was asked, what's more important marketing or sales? What do you think? I'm going to say an answer that the marketers won't like. I think the marketers job is support the sales. So I think that one can't work without the other, of course, right? If the sales team isn't closing, well, I have no marketing budget to spend. But if I don't have a really strong brand, well, then that sales person in the home has to fight 10 times harder than the other guys that might be a renewal by Anderson, a Kohler, what have you. So one goes without the other. But I think when sales does really well, I'm stealing this line from Eric Pesci, the CMOs in techs. But when sales does really well, doesn't mean that marketing is doing well. But when marketing is doing really well, it doesn't mean that sales is doing really well. So they all have to kind of work together. Yeah. So Bradley says, if you got 10 of the best salesmen, so you got 10 sales people and they're sitting around combing their hair waiting for leads. But you got 10 of the best marketing people, the leads are flowing. I think the main thing, marketing tends to get blamed for everything. I need more leads. I need more leads. I need more leads. But they're not the booking rates horrible. The conversion rates crap, the average ticket sucks. And obviously sales are the lifeblood because usually you're taking a comm. You're taking a percentage of 100%. 100%. And I think the way that you can actually make it work is by having a really great relationship with your sales leader. Whenever I'm in an organization, I love having really open rapport, sitting down with my sales leader on a weekly basis saying, hey, I'm seeing this source, let's say website, for example, that normally has a close rate of 75%. Right now, you guys are closing at 30%. What's happening? Are you hearing something that's consistent in these appointments that maybe they're saying, oh, I thought I was signing up for free windows or, oh, I thought that I was getting X amount off and you're only giving me Y. And that type of conversation, I think, is what makes that dynamic with marketing and sales works. Like you, you're all taking ownership for your part of the puzzle. Yeah, 100%. And they got to work really, really close. Marketing and sales is everything. You said home improvement is a $500 billion industry that most marketers overlook. It's such a big industry. It's huge. It's huge. I feel embarrassed to say that when I graduate with my undergrad, I thought I want to work for a Lululemon. I want to work for an Apple. I want to work for Nike. Some of these brands that are flashy, that were relevant to me in my generation, and I never would have thought I was here. But then I realized this industry, we actually do so much more than some of these other brands when it comes to the bottom line in making every dollar count. I just got done consulting with one of my clients. They're a $240 million flooring company and they've been tremendously successful. But one thing that we're focusing on now is what is the dollar actually doing? These companies, they'll spend money on TV, on direct mail, on this and that, but there's no tracking. There's no attribution. It's hard to get, how do you get attribution? CTV is easy, but with TV radio, I guess the main thing is you're looking at all your other sources, looking at Google searches, how's matter performing, how's your mailers enhanced? I mean, what do you do to actually get attribution for TV and radio? I have a really cool model for TV, actually. And I don't want to talk over everyone's head because I know that there's different levels of folks listening to this. So I'll just kind of simplify it here. You're familiar with TV and in TV and broadcast, you have these things called clearance reports. That's basically saying the time that your TV spot ran. You can request those from the station at the end of the month. And if you have a CRM that collects the data of when the lead came in from the time to the second, you can actually match that within the time that the TV spot ran. So I have a window model that if it ran within 10 minutes of the spot airing, I give that spot 100% attribution. If it came from a source where they would have to know the brand to get to us. So things like direct website traffic, organic social branded paid search, because you're not just going to somehow miraculously think of the name, you know, Bathworks without seeing an ad for it. And then I have a secondary window of 11 to 20 minutes after the spot ran where I gave it 50% because obviously sometimes it takes folks a while to act on it. And then everything else is just the halo effect, right? Is it lifting our sales rate? Is it lifting our set rate in other areas? But that model has worked actually really well for me. And I ran it with, I can't disclose the company, but a really large company that's privately held pacing over $500 million. And we saw 35% growth in the lead flow actually month over month when we were running this TV campaign, and they had never ran TV before. So it's like, if we can do these direct attribution leads and it's increasing by 35%, well, then something's happening with the TV. No, 100%. I feel like do you think all TV and radio should be primarily direct response with a good offer? There's a great book by Dan Kennedy, No BS about direct marketing, and you can get leads. I've always used it more to enhance the brand and really stand out in a crowded market for, you know, the Roy Williams, the way he's trying to make sure like, tell a story and don't necessarily make an offer. I think it depends on the position that you're in. So if you're a company that needs leads immediately, and you're really hurting with your cost of marketing, you don't have maybe the extra profitability to put towards a branding marketing campaign, then go with with a more direct response approach and you can do it. But if you're looking to create a legacy brand like a one did, I think you guys did exactly what I would recommend for a legacy brand building, which is telling your story and telling it a way that resonates with people. However, what I've been doing now with folks that are in like the 10 to 30 million spot that want to be that legacy brand, but also can't necessarily afford to only do branding, we do a combination. Yeah. So we'll run a 30 second spot that storytelling and then a 30 second spot that has really strong offers and we'll serve it to the same audience on CTV. So they get to hear the story and they say, wow, I really like this company. They seem honest and genuine. They're local. This guy has a kid on my little league team, like all of that connection. Oh, and now I also get half off installation. That sounds like a great deal to me. No, killer. Yeah, I love that. And I like the, you know, what's crazy is I watch a lot of Fox news. I'll watch CNN. I'll just, and I watch all the commercials and Lee Fitter is fricking nutty. I mean, they're on every other. And then I see Anderson, both of them are like, and I'll catch one of mine probably for every 15 of theirs. Yeah. That's why I do take a grain of salt when I get feedback from people that are able to lean on really strong brands to talk about their metrics. So at qualifier and modeler, we have a lot of people that speak that are Kohler dealers or jacuzzi dealers or exactly like you mentioned, Lee filter, uh, renewal by Anderson, and they say, well, our set rate is 35%. So then the little guys that have no brand name, they think, well, what are we doing wrong? We suck. We're not at 35%. We're at 20. Well, you don't have a hundred year old brand to lean on and be able to use that. So how do you get scrappy? You know, well, how do you get scrappy? I love storytelling. I love putting the owners on camera. Yep. I think that's a huge win, especially because this industry has so much distrust. There was this stat that I was reading the other day from the better business bureau, and they were asking people when it comes to home improvement, home services, what do they care about the most? And 66% of people said trust and reputation and only 7% said price. And in our space, all the time we say, well, it's too expensive. It's too expensive. They just don't trust you. They don't trust you to pay the expensive price. They don't trust that you're worth the amount that you're putting out there. So if you take an owner, put him or her on, on the screen, and they say, this is my reputation. This is my face, my family. I'm standing behind my product. That's how you get scrappy. The large companies, they can't do that. They're so far removed from the communities that they're serving because they have a headquarters in who knows where, and all these little areas around that they haven't even probably been there since they acquired it. You know? Do you think that the small guy has a chance with AI in where we're headed? I do. I think they have a chance because there's so much ability to learn on your own time and with your own self-commitment. So right now, we live in a day of technology where you can learn literally anything, anything you want. But just like fitness, you have to actually put the time and work and energy in to make it happen. You can't just say, oh, I bought the creatine, I bought the protein, and I got my gym memberships. Now I'm 12% body fat. No, you have to show up and do the work, same with learning AI. Take a day every day for 15 minutes and just learn, dive in, ask it questions, and it'll tell you. One of my, like that same Florent client that I work with, the owner is huge in AI, and he's actually creating courses for his team and having every single person sign up and do these Claude AI courses so that they can all be good at the program too. Yeah, you know, a lot of companies are making their team use a certain amount of tokens, and if they don't, they're no longer on the team. They're just getting uncomfortable with it. That's what service-tied does. That's a really good idea. You know, PBC is getting, I just got a report that our PBC campaigns are 35% down on volume and about 40% higher, and that's just last month. And I said, how in the hell could we be paying this much for our own keywords? We're paying more than generic keywords like Rajal. For your branded? Yeah. Well, then you guys are doing something really great with your brand. It's annoying though. It is annoying. Because we're, everyone's bidding on our keywords. We became the roto-ruder of Grazjors, especially in our big markets like Phoenix. And I'm like, how could we be, because our quality score is through the roof. How's that even possible? Well, I have a question. Is your lead flow down by having this PBC channel down? Are you guys suffering in that sense? Well, we're in 40 markets. Yeah. But overall, your revenue is growing. And your leads are needing to grow. Yeah, everything's good, but we got five markets that are down that we need leads. And there's no room. The only thing we could do is doing a lot of CTV, a lot more mailers, and then we're doing Pmax. There's more room there. Maybe this is a hot take, but I feel like that means that you guys made it. If your branded keyword is so high, I think you're in the space now. We're even with the sponsored messages of people saying, well, what about this Grazjor company instead? Or this one, they're scrolling down past those sponsored of other people and going to you organically. So we're going to do a test to only do the LSA. Make sure we're popping up there, but not do the paid PBC. Well, and you know, chat GBT as of two weeks ago just released advertising with them. Yeah, that's a hundred grand a month, right? It's five grand minimum that you have to commit to. I don't know, depending on maybe your service area, but I know that Angie is advertising with them right now. I've been doing some research there and obviously generating their generating leads to their own verticals. So maybe that could be a pivot because people are no longer looking for their information just on Google. A hundred percent. And we've been really focused. We actually did a huge study on how we're coming up on the LLMs. Oh, awesome. And we've, you know, it's a mix of PR and winning awards. And there's a lot. I mean, what helps on perplexity is obviously we got a lot of backlinks for answering a lot of questions. I'm looking for every single opportunity. Yeah. And you know, you'd think, man, that those guys are big, they're spending five million a month or whatever. It's close to that. And I'm like, man, I still feel like we're struggling. I still feel like there's so many opportunities. There is. And one thing I wanted to do when we were talking about filming this podcast is give people actionable takeaways that they can do no matter what revenue size they might be if they're a business owner. I would encourage everyone right now, go on Claude, go on Gemini, go on chat, GBT, the big three and ask them about your business. Tell me every single place that you can find a one garage reviews, every single place that you can find someone talking about a one garage experience and make sure that you're actually taking what you need to do to make those third party review channels be really strong and robust. I know in our space, we hate Yelp. I hate Yelp. No, it's not. But it's hard. It's hard to do. And right now, chat, GBT is primarily pulling from Yelp. So you're getting fed these reviews that they're saying your business is 2.1 stars, but maybe on Google, you have 4.9 because Google for a long time was the only thing that you had to care about. So I would encourage every single person takes two seconds, go on each platform, copy and paste it and see where your brand actually is and see if you even know that it exists. It's huge. What do you feel about Reddit? Oh my gosh, I feel like Reddit is, anecdotally Reddit is where I go now for feedback because I have so much distrust in the AI models and the search. I feel like there's something there. I just want to figure out how it's scalable. And if there is a software that makes it scalable without having to manually go in and have responses to where your company's mentioned. So if anyone's listening that knows about a scalable program that does that, I would love to know. You know, Joy Hawkins is working with me on some things with Sterling Sky on really how to pop in Reddit, but she's like, we're going to take your personal brand and then apply that to the company. And I've heard there's this questions database. I forget what the name of it is, but you should name your name of your company as your Reddit user and then go in and answer every question you could find on your subject. And if you do it correctly, that'll really help. So that's something we're going to focus on. I mean, I love that. That's one thing for people that are just starting. I always encourage them to join their local Facebook groups and have your company be the thought leader and the helpful hand in these different Facebook groups saying like, hi guys, my sync is leaking. If you're imploring, my sync is leaking really bad. And I don't know what the cause is. Here are some pictures. Be that person that lends a hand and says, hey, I think it's this. If you need some help, give me a call. And it's a great way to build trust on a smaller scale, of course. You know, I don't like B&I anymore, even though we still go to B&I groups and I don't like Facebook groups because it's a race to the bottom. There are people on there, like you got to cross your guy and everybody's like, I'll do it for less. I'll do it for less. My kind of cheat code in that is everyone's posting a hundred names of companies. All I do is message the person to say, I want to earn your business. Love the person that asks. Yeah. And they always respond. They're like, you're the only one that reached out. Yeah, you were putting the ownership on the individual to make the action. It's actually the complete inverse of what we do with when we get leads. If we're calling them or outbound dialing them. But that's a great point. And the Facebook space, we're waiting for them. You know, marketing is, there's a lot of opportunities. I mean, there's so many things we're testing right now. I just feel like we could be doing so much more. It's hard to pick right now with the age of technology and AI of what to focus on. You get a little bit of decision paralysis. What I've found as I'm consulting with some of my clients is don't lose sight of the fundamentals. I think we get so excited by the flashiness of the potential of AI and new way to reach people that we're not even focusing on the people that we actually have that want to hear from us and be in contact with us. So I think that for me, that's the first thing I go into to say, okay, you're generating X mental leads. You keep telling me you need more and more and more, but what have you done with the ones that you already generated? Yeah. And that's what I'm paying attention to even meta, like everyone's asking for quotes now. And we're getting so much through messenger. And we're not closing a lot of those. And it's a different type of lead. And you almost need a sales crew that specialized in the lead source. I mean, it's interesting to me because like PPC is easy. Those leads are easy, but they're super expensive. Like something's broke, they clicked on the first ad, they want us out there today. That's easy for us. The hard ones are like the price shoppers that are like I'm getting three estimates, especially on new doors. It's like they're just going to go typically if you could prove the quality and you get the financing dialed in, it's good. But yeah, it's do you feel like that is more prevalent in your newer locations than is your legacy brands? Like, well, it's interesting if you look at Google trends, 94% of people are looking for repair, 6% are looking for new equipment. And we're good at taking a service call and selling new equipment. But it seems like some of our meta campaigns are just really getting people shopping for doors. And that's not our bread and butter. Yeah, but yeah, you're right. I mean, in our newer markets, it's a lot harder. It's harder to hire too. Yeah, it was interesting, the more TV, radio, CTV, all that stuff that we do, the better we could recruit in that market. Yes, definitely. People need to start treating recruiting like lead generation. I would hound this into every single company that I work with. When you get someone that fills out an application, says they're interested in a role, that is a lead. You need to be calling them in multiple different ways, outbound calling them, texting them, emailing them, even serving them recruiting ads, if you have the bandwidth for it. That's actually something that I'm doing with one of my client's top home, the gentleman Lakota that owns it, it is his co-owner Derek. They're both really great, honest, young guys and people want to be a part of that. It's magnetic. So it's like, put his face out there, share this is the individual that you'd be working alongside and make people excited like a lead would. I love that. So how many clients do you work with? Well, it depends on the need for each individual. My fractional CMO work, I like to keep that a little bit more limited because it is pretty intensive. So on a rotating basis, I'll work with anywhere from three to four folks. I also don't like competing against myself. And this is a hot take. I don't like competing against myself, even if it's a different vertical, because I feel like everyone's competing for home improvement dollars in my space. So if you have a floor that's ugly and a bath that's ugly, you're not usually going to get both done in the same year. You have to pick which one we're competing for home improvement dollars. So if I have a business that serves all of Michigan, and maybe they do windows and baths, but I have a flooring company that says, Hey, Sanya, I'd love to get your help to generate leads. Well, then I'm still going to be taking a little bit away from myself. Yeah, that's my mentality. So that's what I work with on the fractional side. But my TV side with the broadcast that we talked about in CTV, I actually do full creative process, full storyboarding, scripting, filming, and then the buy in the attribution. And right now I work with seven folks in that space, but I have six proposals to send out and to keep growing that. But we take a lot of pride in being on site, getting a lot of really great scripted film and B roll. So the lift at the beginning is kind of a lot, but we have enough footage to last us for six months to a year at that beginning and then have it be seasonally relevant as well with the TV. That's amazing. So what do you know about home service versus home improvement? What are your thoughts? Well, so I've dabbled in home service with folks that have done like in-secrepellent, lawn care, things like that. I would say one of the biggest advantages a home service has is the seasonality in the customer lifecycle, where obviously if you're an HVAC, if you're in lawn care and moving, the amount of time that someone will use you is much more frequent than in home improvement. And I think that, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like home services is a little less price dependent because in home improvement, yes, in home improvement, we have tickets that can be upwards of $60,000 depending on your vertical. And that's a huge commitment. So, but I also will say in home services, I think there's a lot more competition because it's a more accessible specialty in craft to get into. Whereas with home improvement, there's so many moving parts with subcontractors and material. You've got cranes, you've got, there's a lot more to it. And you know, I'm jealous of home improvement because my blended average ticket is under 1200 bucks. Okay. So we generate 34,000 leads a month. Okay. And it's a machine and I'm like, man, if I was in home improvement, I mean, people are like, yeah, but the leads are way easier. I'm like, well, not necessarily, we still spend what I, what I'm jealous about home improvement is they go out and get the demand. They go out to home shows. There's people that do 500 home shows a year in one market. They go out there. They're at every home show. They're at every single football game. And then they also have the door to door side and they also have the outbound call center. So they get to create their own demand. I think I've kind of become lazy because I get so many inbound calls. We haven't been focused on the LCD getting back out to the customers each year. And I think there's just a massive amount of money just sitting here. Everywhere I look, there's bags of cash in the business. I love it. It's, it's those fundamentals again, right? It's so easy in the moment to kind of sit on your hands when you're reaping the benefits of your reward because you work so hard to build up the brand. Now you're getting this residual effects from it, but success is rented, not bought, right? So we have to do those fundamentals every single day. And what I will say is when we're talking about home services versus home improvement, a lead is a lead is a lead is a lead. I can generate leads for med spas. I can generate leads for dental offices. I can do for restoration, for home improvement, for home services. It's all the fundamentals of making sure when you generate that lead, you're getting in contact with them the way that they want to contact you, whether that's SMS, outbound call, email. And then when you do get in contact with them that you're selling them on the vision, the value of the visit is the same no matter what industry you're in. If I'm going in to see if I want to get a tummy tuck, that's the value of the visit you're educating me. If I have an appointment for Windows, you're coming and educating me about the Windows that I should get in my. You've got to get that appointment the face to face. Exactly. And that's as long as you can get in the home, then that's everything that you can do for the market. Now you're on the sales guys. Yeah. So, and it's also knowing your customer. I mean, one thing that I love doing again with having great communication with my sales team is asking what are people talking about in the home? What type of questions are they asking before you even get into your demo? What are they excited about? What are their pain points? What do you hear right now that's really common that people are saying, Oh, I really hate this about my bathroom and I wish I could fix it. And then let's be proactive in our marketing and utilize that ahead of time so that people can say, Oh, wait, that's me. That's me. I also feel like my grab bars are super unstable and I got them from home depokes. They were 60 bucks and I don't feel like they're actually going to hold my weight. And then create marketing material for that and resonate with your audience. It's very powerful. And you got to have that whole chain of communication. You have to. And it's tough. It's tough for you because even when you're working in four businesses, it's a lot to take on. Why wouldn't you, you know, I know there's Matt Esler is doing 1.3 billion. I mean, that guy with Anderson, he's like the goat. And he's like, dude, I got it figured out. I mean, he just does. But why not go to just big companies that can spend a lot of money? I mean, it sounds like you work with all the range. I think I have a really big soft spot for the smaller company and their commitment to their community. One thing I'll say is when we went through an acquisition with leave home from Tundra land, I felt like there was a lot of really great benefits. And there was also just some downsides that I didn't experience in a smaller organization. So for example, the red tape and decision making, when you're in a smaller organization, you can move a lot quicker. And I am a very high D and very high C. So I want things done. And I want them done right very quickly. And when you work with large organizations, you're having meetings with 12 different people because one person does this and one person does that instead of these smaller companies where they're like, this is the marketing guy. He does everything from PPC to canvassing to call center. You can move a lot quicker. I will say cybersecurity is a big concern when you get bigger. And just the way, I mean, I've had, unfortunately, with our CFO, who's absolutely phenomenal, but we need to make sure that if we're going to sign a contract that there's teaser across eyes are dotted and they're like, we go do a vigorous background. They got any access to CRM or any API's. And they all need that if you're going to have full transparency 360 type data, getting back to them. And it's complicated. And we make people jump through a lot of hoops. So now I like, if there's somebody that wants to talk to me about marketing, I'm like, just make sure you're compliant on all these things or we can have this conversation. Yeah. And you have to protect your business, which I totally understand. And so it's not that I look at that as a negative. It just look at it as not something that helps me be the most effective. And I would say when it comes to legality and mutually exclusive, non-disclosure agreements, of course, like I always abide by those regardless of who I'm working with, because that's my reputation and very important to me. But I will also say, I think the smaller companies outside of being able to move quickly is that they have so much more potential for growth and really great revenue scaling. So for example, I have a, that company again, top home improvement in Michigan, and the gentleman kind of trusted me just to come in and start tearing apart and building their processes. And it was hard because for two months, we actually were at 19% cost of marketing and 20% cost of marketing. They came only from door knocking. That's it. And they built it to 11 million, I believe. And they wanted to add in pay leads. They wanted to add in digital, all this stuff that takes a lot more fostering through the funnel. And so I took their best call center rep off the phones, who was also their call center manager, because I said, he needs, we need 10 of him. We can't just have one of him on the phones and then everyone else is just kind of hanging out going by. So we had two rough months of him not hitting, of us not hitting our cost of marketing, because we took him on the phones. And then for four months in a row, Tommy, we had 200% revenue growth under 16% cost of marketing. And now their goal originally was 18 million. Now we're pacing for 24 million for this year for 2026. And so I, I love that. I love the potential. And I think in these smaller organizations where you're at that 10, 15 million dollar plateau, because you can get to 10 million dollars by knocking doors easy. But I don't think that that will take you to 20 million, especially if you're not expanding your markets. So you have to start reaching people in different ways. And it's been great so far. Where do you, where do you think a comms should come in? Like what's a good comm and then what's a growth comm? A growth comm, I would say is anywhere from 20 to 22%. So if you're really having extreme revenue growth and you're looking to build long term, I would say that you're investing in these higher ticket channels like TV, radio, CTV, that costs more direct mail. But once you have established yourself and you just want to do like maybe a 15 to 20% revenue growth year over year, I think you can be anywhere from 15 to 18% as long as you have the right people in seats. I mean, it's interesting. I look back at my times at Tunderland. And when I was there, we were setting leads at 45% mixed everything, all in modernized, Angie, and we were closing at 50, 50% on demo. So you're at it up with 22 and a half percent of the leads closed, which that's unheard of in home service. Unheard of because it's really great in home improvement. It's the best. And what's nuts is most of people listening are home service. And they're probably laughing going, I'm spending 4%. You know, I don't know as much about, I spoke at remodel and I know the guys that you're talking about really, really well. I mean, in our industry, we say 15 is a really healthy number, 15% profit. I'm trying to get a 30. Wow. But then again, I got all these economies of scale. And you know, it's crazy. I got 70 guys training this month, 70 brand new techs. And what sucks is, can you imagine you got 70 new guys going all the way from markets, and you got to get them three to four leads a day, the day they start. No, I cannot imagine that. I can not imagine that. That's 210 leads. And you know, there's weekends, but there's capacity planning is the hardest thing in this industry. Well, and also because I'm sure it's the same in home services. If you set out an appointment more than three days, the, the, yeah, it's gonna cancel. So it's like, how do you generate? That's amazing. How do you generate 210 qualify leads that set the same day? I'll show you my formula. I think you'll do. Okay. So I take the revenue goal and then I divide this by the booking rate. And by the way, it's a contact center. So it could be a form fill, could be an Angie, could be a text, could be an email, could be an onsite lead. So your booking rate minus your cancel rate. And then I divide that by your conversion rate. That's face to face divide that by your average ticket. And then you times this by your CPL. And then this is your marketing budget. I love that. And it works perfectly. Yeah, I love that. And this is how I buy companies too. Yeah, I basically take all these numbers and I say, they're usually beating me on Cosper Leagues. They've been there for 40 years. And then I plug my numbers in. If I pay in 12x, when I fix all this stuff, I'm actually paying 5x. I love that. See, I do a very similar model when it comes to an established business, but when it comes to determining how many leads we need to buy at the beginning of the month. So I reverse engineer it. I say, okay, we need X amount of net closes. We're closing at this percent on the demo. We're going from issue to demo at this percent, such as basically the same model, but building it up. But I love integrating the CPL there for the cost of marketing and having that budget built out. I really like that. Never heard anyone do that before. Well, the other thing that I've kind of figured out is we've got such a strong recruiting and training team that I'm like, how do we take every effing lead we could get? Like if we could get let's think about exhausting every lead channel and how many people would we need. And then also, I have two and a half million people in my database. So then how do I kind of capitalize the most? And what's nice about the database is they don't necessarily need me out today. So I can say, hey, listen, I've got Margaret. She's 89 years old. She's in an emergency. Can we move this to Thursday? And they're fine with it because they don't need us out. So there's a lot more flexibility in the database leads. Yeah. One thing that that I always talk to people about when I first start as I ask them, do you have a retargeting program and a rehash program? Because that's money just sitting there. You've already paid for these people. You might as well utilize them. It's shocking to me how little we look at that existing data in home improvement and home services. We see a lead that came in. They didn't set in, let's say 14 days, we stop, I would never stop calling out to 14 days, but hypothetically, we say, okay, that leads dead. It's gone. Bye-bye. And it's like, they still wanted to buy. They're still ready. Maybe they just weren't ready right then. So let's stay in front of them top of mind. Yeah, there's a great company called Champion Group that sends a piece of mail to their members once a month. Yeah. And we did the cost of what that would cost. And it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think we need to test it in a market. That's what's nice about being in so many markets is we can test things very easily. Yeah. I would say that rehashing in home service is harder for repairs because if you've got a leaky, if your water heater's leaking, you're getting that replaced on new equipment, maybe. Yeah. I would agree. Working in disaster restoration, it was the same concept, of course. If you had flood, you're not going to be waiting 10 days to make a decision. You're just going to go with whoever can help dry out your basement faster. But what I will say, and maybe the seasonal part of home services, and especially in home improvement, there was a study, I'm all about studies and data that I read, that out of every single person that you're serving, you're at two, 5% of those people will actually be ready for it, regardless of what the product is. The other 95% will not be ready. And it's actually even a smaller percentage in home improvement because our customer lifecycle is so long. So it'll be about 3% of people are actually ready and 97% of people are not in that moment, which even makes branding so much more powerful and important because you have this huge base that's not ready for you yet, that's getting served your ad, but only 3% are going to need it now. Why not be proactive? At least somewhat and tell your story so that when these 97% of people start moving into that 3%, they think of you over other people. That's the little wizard of ads mentality. He's like, his mental, this is crazy to me. But he goes, my job is to hit half of the population in a metro. It doesn't matter if they're kids, how old they are, everybody, half of them and own that channel. And I think he said it's like 60 cents to own that person a year. But they, I'm talking crazy amounts of radio. He believes radio is the number one thing still. But he's like, you want to own that station. Like you're 27 ads a day in that station. And I think that's the problem with a lot of small businesses, they spray and pray and they don't own the channel. You are preaching to the choir right now. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I go into a business and they say, yeah, we've been buying TV, we've been spending 35 grand a month and it's not working. It's okay, let me see your buys. And you're spreading it out between seven or eight TV channels. So the people that are seeing your ad, maybe they're seeing it once a month. I have the same exact mentality as the wizard of ads, which I only focus on one station, one broadcast station in that DMA. And if we have an insane budget, then we'll do two. Even with Tundra Land being a hundred million dollar company, we primarily spend with two stations. That's it because in the Wisconsin market. So we had, yeah, we own the entire state of Wisconsin. We only did one expansion under the Tundra Land name, which was in Minnesota. And that was about eight months before we sold. And then we did have a Jacuzzi bathroom model dealer in Jacuzzi, excuse me, in Florida that we also owned, but a primary share of our revenue came from the state of Wisconsin alone, because we owned that state. We did every single thing we could exactly like you mentioned to have every single person know our name. And when I said that I was going to work there, my family is from Wisconsin, they said to me, oh yeah, I've seen that guy Brian on TV, right? Because, because they remember the owner, they remember the face. I love that. I think I want to have you come in and look at some stuff. I would love to talk to my marketing team after this. I love doing podcasts because one out of 40, I'll tend to like hire somebody. It's just weird how that works. I love it. Well, I mean, from what you guys are doing here, I want to give you compliments before I got here. What I think you're doing is so great because even though this isn't necessarily for lead generation, this is still branding. This is still you. These videos are going to go out. They're going to have the A1 garage name when people are looking you up and and seeing if they believe in you as an organization, they're going to hear your podcast and say, okay, wow, this guy is someone that's here for the long haul and I want to do business with him. So I think the personal brand of the founder is more important than the company. I completely agree. I can understand that. We've done a lot of studies on this stuff. And I always talk about this is like, we're making a lot of content. And what I'm trying to do is push some of my content back to A1, but also still blow out my personal brand. No other reason than to grow a one. Yep. I mean, it opens up a lot of other doors. It's funny. I talked to Alex from Ozy last weekend. Oh, yeah. And he goes, dude, I don't know if being famous is that cool. But one thing it does do is gives me access. People take my phone calls. Yeah, totally. And so I'm reaching out to Walmart. I got a big meeting with Home Depot and now I got access to answer my calls. Yeah. It's kind of like how our space and home service and improvement is so incestuous. Everyone knows everyone and it's so small that your reputation is the most important thing that you have in this business with your peers. But it's also the most important thing that you have with your clients and the people that you serve. Home improvement, home services, it's so intimate. You're going to a spot that people live where they raise their children, where they wake up, where they shower, where they eat their breakfast. And they want to have the people that come to see them to be people that they would want in their home, that they feel comfortable. So 100%. You have to have this type of aura about you that people can feel that they're like, yes, I'm comfortable with them. I want to work with them. It's so important. And you know, I think getting in the garage is a little easier, but still I had one of my texts out yesterday at my house and his wife and they pull out our Valpak and we've got a double, it's like a bigger one than everyone else's. And she goes, you know, Tommy, she's like, you don't have background check, you don't have certified, you don't have the thing with through this training program. She goes, I'm at home alone. Yeah, most of the time. Yeah. She goes, I want somebody that I could trust. And I know your guys, I could trust one of them because all the vigorous stuff you guys do, but it's not on here. Totally. And so Russell Brunson, you familiar with him? Yeah, I am. Yeah. So Russell was like, dude, I think you need to work on getting people off the print onto your site, then you can retarget them, then you can craft the message. But when they're going through mailers and there's five other companies, you're competing on a table. But if you could get them to go to your stuff and educate them, then it changes everything. Tommy, I just had an onsite with a siding company and decking company where they were going through all of their print material and every single piece that they had sending out was in a mass of competitors. And again, because I don't see competitors just as our vertical and home improvement, I see it as all home improvement dollars. I'm like, you're advertising in this magazine where the entire thing is home improvement. Why not? This is what I have done with my folks. I do direct mail. So I take four years of historic sales data and I give it to a data analytics company. And they build out the perfect audience that actually wants to buy from us in demographic segmentation, which for folks listening, so don't do too much jargon, that's basically education, gender, household income, household value, all that good quantitative stuff. And they also do psychographic segmentation. So what does this person like to do on the weekends? Do they have kids? Do they like to eat at restaurants? Are they a big spender? Yes, all those things. And then we take that data set that they sell us back of the perfect customer. And that's who we target to because those people actually want to buy from us right now with direct mail. And it just makes sense. And then using that same data set, we have targeting that we do for CTV. So we hit them in both places. We do the direct mail, that's static to tell them about the offer, exactly like you mentioned the certifications, all that fun stuff. And then we use CTV to tell the story and get the emotional appeal because it's not just one dimensional marketing is exactly 100%. It's complicated. And I think this could be overwhelming to a lot of people. I always say this, you know, one of my good buddies, he works with me at the family office, he did $12 million almost a decade ago in a track by himself. That's amazing. It's amazing. And what's crazy is, you know, he made a million bucks that year. But I'm like, man, when you got, especially in a track plumbing electrical, if you got guys out there that are doing all this marketing, but their average guy is only hitting a million, two million bucks, which is actually a home run for most companies. I'm like, this guy's hitting 12. My buddy Tom Howard, who's coming into town, is top guy to 20 million. One guy, one year. And when you see the sales numbers, and I'm like, in most industries, they go like this. So they pay about three grand for a unit. Their average sales about 27,000. That's a nine times what it costs. I can't charge nine times what a garage door costs. But there's a reason outside we got garage door freedom. We got 100 garage door companies coming here. We're trying to raise the industry. Like guys, let's start, we can't buy billboards because we don't charge enough. So we can't compete because we're going against the dollars too in a track, but we're marketing against these people because a billboard is a billboard, right? And a TV ad, if it's a track or a roofing or garage doors, it's the same amount of money almost, you know, that's a really interesting mindset. I really like that where even if it's people that technically you'd be competitors of, but in all of our markets, yeah, by lifting, by lifting average ticket, it's lifting everyone. Exactly. Like I had my CFO because I'm going to be on stage tomorrow and Friday in front of these guys. And I'm like, you know, we spent $6 million a year on insurance. We spend $7 million on our trucks. We spent this, this, this, this. And I'm like, you know, unfortunately, the facts are the client needs to pay for it at McDonald's. You got to add in all the costs. Yeah, exactly. The every single thing that your business wants to grow, if you got full-time recruiters, full-time trainers, full-time software, we're running 25 softwares in the background. These have costs. Yeah. But we're efficient. We're out there the same day. You know what our clients want? They want somebody that's background checked. They want great warranty. They want the work done right. They want to fix the right way, not the easy way. And they also want someone they could trust. And they want it done now. My clients, the perfect avatar or not like, I'm going to shop around. I want to get this done in the next two weeks. The ones that I want, they say, come now, get this done. And, you know, most of these companies that don't spend the money in marketing, they're not able to get out there right away. They don't have guys work until 10. They know guys working on the weekends. They don't have guys working on holidays. And that's why there are tickets. People are like, how do you get a bigger average ticket? I'm like, I'm not going after the client you're going after. I'm not on Craigslist. Exactly. And then the model that they're using in the home and the sales process I'd imagine since they're not doing the one-call-close and people are saying, let me shop around. Well, they already interacted with the Google search ad. They already interacted with a Facebook ad. So now they're in the algorithm. Now they're getting served A1 ads. And they're like, oh, let me shop around. And you guys are closing them in the home. They're ready right now. So it's like, I think it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy where, again, you don't have the fundamentals to make this work with the one-call-close, then your revenue is not going to be able to grow. It's the same concept between marketing and sales. They both have to be functioning the right way. You know, it's funny because I talked, you talked to an $18 million company. You know what the owner usually goes, we're good. We're fine. Yeah. Oh yeah. Let me tell you the problem with that. You know, I'm going to do $410 million this year. Amazing. And I'm like, F that, that sucks. We need to grow faster. We need to be bigger. I'm annoyed. Yeah. You get a founder that's content. We, you got people in your company that are like, we need to grow. Those guys are leaving. Those girls are leaving. So now you got everybody. Now you got a company morale in this culture. This is like, we're fine where we're at. Yep. And I'm going to be talking about that a lot on stages. You're the problem. You're the bottom. Get the hell out of the way. The founder is usually the biggest issue. They want to be involved the whole time. Yeah, we could try that, but really we're fine right now. And I'm like, this is your number one. This is your children and your children's children. This is your grandkids. This is your legacy. You put everything into this and you're treating it like a lifestyle business. Yeah. And they just extract money out of this bank account. And I'm like, why not grow it? Build it to sell it. Yeah. I completely agree. I think the one reason why the people that I work with, I work with So Well is because they execute. There's no such thing as risk aversion. There's no such thing as fear of making a decision. In my opinion, the loss that you're taking by not making a decision is so much worse than taking a quote, unquote, gamble in their eyes of a $5,000, $10,000 campaign to see what happens because all of that time your competitors are doing exactly that. They're investing in their brand. They're investing in lead flow and they're making something happen. And it boggles my mind that people don't understand that just because today you're hitting X amount in revenue, that doesn't mean that you're going to be getting that tomorrow. Again, you have to earn it. It is continuous. It is rent. It's not, just like you mentioned, you guys did a great job building your brand. You have all these inbound leads flowing your way, but now you're thinking, well, I still want the outbound. I still want to be able to chase people down. And so it all has to be continuous. And I don't know what it is about marketing specifically, but I feel like people think I launched one campaign that's enough to suffice, but it's an everyday thing. 100%. And I think you should double down on, most people don't have, they don't have UTM parameters. They don't really know where the money's coming from. They have no idea. And the thing is, once you figure out where the money's coming in, you double down on that. And you just, I mean, I am like going all in and I'm telling my team right now, I'm like, let's fail fast. I'm like, right now, Facebook's at about a 17% comm meta. And I'm like, how do we spend a million dollars instead of 400,000? But the thing is, I keep breaking it and it keeps the comms going up because they're like, well, we agree too fast. We need more creative. We need this. We need that. And I'm like, I will work all weekend. Let's do as much creative as we can do. Yep. And that's why you have to at least, at least consult with someone for an hour that's done this before in the space that knows your industry. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people say, oh, well, we worked with the local TV agency here or the local marketing agency, and they don't know our industry. They don't know what people care about. They don't know what people are asking. And they give them all of this money. And maybe it's even a better deal than if you would work with an expert in the space, but it doesn't have the results. And I love what you said about making a decision and fail fast. I believe it was Brian Gottlieb, but he said, you can be wrong, but don't be wrong for long. And that's exactly the mentality that I have too. It's like every single thing that I do in marketing, even if a quote unquote fails, it teaches me something. It's like, okay, that that failed because that messaging just didn't resonate with people. They didn't like that promotion. It wasn't strong enough. Maybe we said $1,200 off the project. And they think, well, if it's $1,200 off, how much is it to start out with? So let's pivot. But by not doing anything, you're staying complacent and you're opening yourself up to competitors that take your revenue share. Well, I had a buddy of mine, there are a couple hundred million dollar garage tour company. He's the CEO. He goes, I got to hire a CMO. And I go, you're good luck. I'm like, you're not going to find anybody that understands the space. Yeah. I'm like, if you knew, I've got a CMO, but I'm like, it all reports up to me. And I'm the decision maker. And I make decisions quickly. And I moved $450,000 this month of TV radio all over the direct response into PBC and LSA. I max out LSA, but a lot of mailers. Because I'm like, we're taking 450 out of the million and a half we spent. And I'm like, they're booked out eight days. They don't need this right now. Like let's figure out the capacity issues, move the money to the five markets we need leads, especially because there are big markets. But you're fortunate enough to know marketing. There's a lot of business owners that don't. They have to. That's one thing at Levy taught me is know your numbers. Like the CFO know those numbers and never let marketing go. And marketing is recruiting. So I'm in charge of recruiting and marketing. And I'm in charge, like the numbers all fall on me. So I ask a lot of questions. That's what I've been really good at. I get out of the way, but like my CFO and my CO are sitting in the office today. I want these four departments. I want to see, I want to see the salaries of all four departments. And I want to see that as a percentage of revenue that they bring in. I love that. And my CO all sitting there and he's going, dude, you're not going to like this. We've got to make some drastic changes next week. It's not a bad thing. I'm like, the crazy thing is I used to be fighting for my life at like 3% net. Now I'm like, now we're looking to get to 30. I'm not like struggling, but I'm like, there's a huge opportunity. And I'm acting like my life depends on it. Yeah. I made a post on LinkedIn the other day and I said, there is no secret to being a really good marketer. The only secret is curiosity asking why for every single thing. Why did it work? Why did it fail? Why is it not scalable? Why is it not growing? And there is no question. I firmly believe this. There's no question in the same age that you can't get an answer to of the why. And there's no such thing as we can't do that. I go into business all the time and we were talking about attribution earlier. It's so important to me to know where the bottom line is. And I'll say, Oh, I need to know how many leads came from this direct mail piece. Oh, well, we can't do that. Why not? Have you done a specific tracking number? Have you done a QR code? Have you done a specific landing? Well, no, that's too much work. It's too much work to know where your money is making the most impact. So I don't accept that. And most of the answers that I get aren't usually from business owners like that. It's from middle managers that either they don't feel empowered to search for that answer, or maybe it's just general laziness. But what I will say is any single thing that you have a question to of why and how it's possible in the age of technology. Oh, 100%. It's a lot of work. I agree with that. And, you know, but here's the deal. When you work with your vendors, I forced my vendors to do the majority of the work. I'm like, if you want my business, you've got great graphic designers. I don't know why companies decide I'm going to pick up three graphic designers. Yeah, every business you work with, if they're a good vendor and a good partner, they're going to have and they're going to get it done. And I think a lot of businesses are like, we need, I walked in an office one day of an HVAC company, they had 18 people working creating an ad. They were all working on a video. And I'm like, my guys edit the video. Yeah, they'll come shoot it and they do a great job. I was like, how do you guys make money? How important is brand? Brand is everything. Brand is everything. And brand doesn't have to be huge. Brand doesn't have to be a million dollar investment. Brand is you. Brand is how you show up. Brand is how you walk into the door. Brand is how you talk to the customer on the phone. Brand, yeah. Let's see the before. So the white old truck with the lettering. Brand is, we got our cover. We got the truck on every mail piece we do because people see, there's 90 of them in Phoenix. So they go, oh, I know those trucks. They're in my neighborhood all the time. Exactly. Consistency. Brand is consistency. Brand is you. I say to people, when they are first starting out, there's so many ways to build your brand. It sounds daunting, but it's not. Set up a location on Google My Business that people know you're real. Set up a location on Facebook so that people can see that you're a human company there. Start having everything that you have a touch point, have your brand. Exactly like you guys did. Wrap trucks, polos, yard signs, door hangers. If you have a guy doing an install and he has a couple extra time, give him some door hangers. Three, just put around the neighborhood. That's brand. It doesn't have to be a hundred thousand dollar month TV investment. It's just showing up consistently in the same way and having that be a process across your entire organization. Well, how do you, when you sit down with an owner and you want to go over their brand story, actually I talked to Donald Miller two weeks ago. Great guy. The story brand. I don't know if you ever heard of it. I have an authoritative. It sounds like a good one. Yeah. But how do you start out with the story? Like, what are you trying to pull out of them? What's the process? Normally, I ask what got them into this business to begin with. I found that a lot of people kind of found themselves here on accident. I don't know if you did as well. So they found themselves here on accident and then diving into, okay, well, what made you stay? What made you love it? What feelings do you get when you know that you made an impact for a home owner? Why do you get that feeling? What type of job can you think of off top of your head that really resonated with you, that you did something different and you made an impact for someone? What do you want your people to go home feeling at the end of the day that work with you? What do you want them to know about why you're in this space and kind of getting into those more emotional questions? And it's hard for some people because it's a male dominated industry and sometimes you guys are hard to get emotions out of depending on the person. But I think that when you kind of dig into a little bit more of the why, the why, the why, it does a really great job telling your story. And that's how I try to do my scripting and storyboarding for TV to be authentic to the person. Because of course, if you put them on TV and you're giving them some script that doesn't feel natural, they're not going to come across the right way and people are going to feed on that. We just did a TV shoot the other day with a business owner who we started his business in his mom's garage. So we went to his mom's garage and we started filming there and we said this is where the business started seven years ago and then we went to the warehouse and said and now here's where it is now. We still have that same mom's garage mentality but just a much bigger garage. That's so good. The origin story. My mom's in a lot of our commercials because she used to work for us and we just replaced her door and I just saw the ad yes two days ago. Oh cool. And I'm like my mom had a really bad contractor door when we replaced it. It's kind of fluffy but I want to see it. I'm sure I love it. I mean and also again when you're telling your story, know who your customer is, know what they care about, that kind of goes back to the data and you don't have to have a huge data set. Just talk to your salespeople, talk to them, understand what they are thinking in the home and what people are asking about and then curate your brand storytelling to fit what they care about too because I think a lot of times when we do TV at the beginning, a lot of ego comes into play of for example let's say there's multiple equity holders in a business and they all want to be on TV. Okay well that's not going to work. We just need to have the best person come and present themselves and telling your story and your brand isn't about you, it's about how you make people feel and I think that's important to remember. Yeah no that's really really true. It's weird. We got a really strong Facebook company we used. It took us like eight different companies to find this one and they're like Tommy you need to be in every one of these because you perform four times better and I don't have any ego attached. No it just is but late. I get annoyed watching myself. That wasn't good but I got so comfortable on camera. Well you know what I'll say usually the people that are the best on camera are the ones that couldn't care less about being on camera and I think there's something to say about that. That is true. I'm like guys I'll do whatever I need to do but it's interesting because we try these other ads and they just don't perform. Yeah and by the way I think testing stuff on meta and YouTube is probably the most important thing before you go test it on TV because you can tell a lot. You get a lot more attribution on that than you would and once you get you could try 10 ads find the killer one and then run that on TV. Much lower stakes yeah and as long as your audience that you're serving at two is one for one then for sure. One thing that I really love doing is running my CTV with Mountain. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's MNTN and my team that's actually a service that we offer to people to run their CTV ads and the type of targeting you could get is super granular. You can get all the way down to any demographic, psychographic and that you also can turn it on and off within minutes. So if I'm running an ad that's not working and I could see real-time attribution with CTV I can turn it off like that and make a change to the budget. It's all manually done and their CPM is about 18 to 20 dollars and for the people listening CPM is cost per thousand and normally when it comes to streaming TV you're pretty high you're usually like 35 to 40 dollars but because they have such a high amount of folks like buying through them they can offer lower CPMs and you have more autonomy but you have to do the whole lift yourself. That's interesting because was it Ryan Reynolds was advertising something and then you've got that's his company. So Ryan Reynolds we were doing that and we're getting a third of the price now. Oh lower than 18. Way lower. It's through Comcast. And you can have that same type of... You know what and then what's the one that Kevin O'Leary does? They build these things. Oh yeah I know I should write a but it's just yeah we'll talk about those. Yeah I want to pick your brain on that. For me it's always about the control like I don't really care if I'm getting a $10 CPM if I don't have control to turn it on and off if I'm locked into a contract. I always feel like lead generation is like the stock market you're trading all the time some things are working some things aren't and I need the ability to move quickly. That's true. You know what we'll sit down with Walt and Chase and talk about some of our strategies. I'd love to. So Lauren with Surge Kings was the one that really said this is a huge opportunity that you'll get a lot of control still but you'll pay it way less. Okay good to know. Look I'm not in the weeds on that stuff. I could speak generally about it but... Well one thing that I always want to do in any capacity is learn now that I'm doing consulting of course I'm bringing my own expertise to people but I'm not receiving as much expertise from other people that are doing things really well because usually people call me it's because they need help with their marketing net because they're killing it so I love having conversations like this where you can kind of bring me in the loop of things that you guys had the opportunity to try. It's so important like I'm sending all my marketing guys to events all the time. Yeah. I'm learning about the latest strategies. I talk to CMOs all the time and I want to get the introductions and I've probably had too many meetings and my team is like to do that lined up 10 this week and I'm like well we're going to try everything and most of the stuff's not going to work but we're going to give it a healthy chance of 90 days and learn something from it. And if we do find but one home run in marketing is worth a thousand RBI's. I completely agree. I just signed up for an on-campus class actually at Harvard that's a generative AI and marketing campaigns because I truly believe that that's going to be the biggest thing in the TV space, the creative space, help us pivot very quickly, the generative. So I'm a firm believer as well to continue to learn. I have to at where I'm at right now in my career I'm so busy that I have to force myself to schedule an on-campus very expensive class so I show up and have a time for it. I want to hear all about that. Yeah I'll have to tell you about it. Yeah. What are some things somebody should be doing? Like I tell everybody on stages I'm like first thing search your business. You see the Google My Business. Make sure your hours are 24-7. Yeah. Including weekends. That's a quick easy win. Make sure you're getting pictures in your reviews. Those count more. The reviews stuff has changed in April. I never pay my people to get reviews. It's on their scorecard but you're not even allowed to anymore. Oh okay so for your KPIs you're saying that's part of like the That's part of their scorecard but I never give them an incentive pay because that's just one against the rules and there's all kinds of stuff I'm learning like when to send the review link. It's just interesting all these things and how the review like if you send a review link to Yelp it won't work. You got to have them search organically on Yelp. Find your business click on it or they get filtered. See I use TapTile. So I have all of the installers have this little tile. It costs like eight bucks to get and you know when you do Apple Pay with your phone you tap Apple Pay. It's exactly like that. So you tap and you can you can change the the thing virtually where it lands and so like let's say you're it's called TapTile. Yeah. Tap cars I've seen those. Yeah it's awesome. If they lose it okay they lose it. It's eight dollars like it's not the end of the world. Yes exactly it's just the one time. You can change where it lands. So if we're really needing reviews on Yelp we change it to Yelp and obviously they're asking for reviews in the home so it's an easier process to educate people if they don't know how to how to navigate Yelp and there that's also part of their job. I've seen both obviously not anymore we don't like you mentioned for incentivizing reviews but I always have it be part of the installer scorecard and if you have in-house installers because that is the best way that people feel that type of emotional buy-in like they decide to work for me. And it's such a good picture of them before pictures. Yes yes totally. I love that and that we so I'm paying five of my installers right now they got all these camera gears and everything they upload every week I'm paying them a lot more money but that's going to be all the raw footage that we put videos in. I love that. And then a little testimonial at the end. Cute yeah and I think like a lot of times people don't want to ask their installers to take photos or videos because they think they're not capable but installers are incredibly vigilant with what they do they're very detail oriented. If you give them an example of saying hey this is kind of the the angle and the content that we're looking for we'd love for you guys to take it like this they'll execute it's just they do they're just not very compared to like a technician they're not as um yeah uh cordial with clients yeah there's not as much hander there yeah they don't necessarily like conversations like a little more introverted yeah which is fine yeah I love installers that are little that'll go the extra mile they'll talk to the client but it's it's just a rare breed they're high seas usually yeah yeah um so what else do I want to ask you what are some of the quick ones I did ask you that what what else should people be doing if they're just they're like I need more leads and I don't know where to get started. I would say so we talked about uh Google My Business profile having that be active we talked about kind of going into um I personally the Facebook groups if you have the bandwidth for it and if it's your customer reaching out to those folks in the groups um directly like you had mentioned um I would also say actually creating a comprehensive referral program a lot of times they'll say to people yeah if you have a um a friend and need something here's my card like having given a call yes but but oh for for probably like that I use get the referral as well okay um and and some of those programs some of those programs are still too expensive for people and it might not might not work but if you're able to have an incentivizing structure on referrals you're going to get a lot more referrals and people get apprehensive they're like well I don't know if I can do a hundred dollars for a referral do eight percent do ten percent yeah well could you do a hundred dollars for a demo like when the when the lead goes all the way through the funnel it's right now in home improvement a demo is nine hundred and fifty dollars so to have a hundred dollar demo is is a win win a no brainer to me so yeah like when we were going through the numbers reverse engineer what it can cost you to make sense make it the most enticing and those leads are are going to be winners because they're such high quality and already have a buy-in from the person saying I had a great experience so I would say that's another great one I would also say organic social take it's so easy take pictures of what your team is doing take pictures of the work post it on facebook for for free literally for free and you know your service area you know the age of your people go in throw five dollars at it throw ten dollars at it as a boosted post for a couple days and get more people to see your stuff have it be a little bit of a call to action like this week only we're filling our schedule for lawn care and we're giving a hundred dollars off to the the first people for or fifty dollars off whatever it looks like for the first people that that sign up for this summer's lawn cut it's it's that easy it is you know it the business that backs up the leads are I think where most people fail you know I want to talk a little bit about PR because I know quite a bit about bath baths and you know I was talking to Brian quite a bit about this and it's absolutely phenomenal like I'm going to start putting a lot like a couple million dollars of my own money a year out of the charitable trust into PR yeah I think the right causes the stuff that I'm really passionate about like like anything military I obviously love dogs I love dogs and I love about make a wish yeah we do shop with a cop we do all these different things but I don't it's probably like the same as maybe I don't know if I should be spraying and praying on the PR side or just go after one major thing that we stand out and create our own so what do you think yeah we've in my experience I feel like really owning one cause that speaks to your entire company's core values as the best approach because also you can really give a lot then to that cause a lot of these nonprofits really really need our funding desperately and so while it's amazing to give a thousand here a thousand there if you can give an organization 20 grand that can that can change the trajectory of someone's life and I also think that when you're when you're choosing something that is important as an organization it has to it has to be really special and really particular because obviously there's a lot of emotion that goes into different organizations that things people are passionate about so almost I would feel like it's hard to spray and pray because there's not so many that would align with everything that you're going towards but I would say like for example the the BAS for the brave initiative it's a really good starting point for people that are in the the BAS space that want to do something in PR because you already have the lift from our team that's doing everything to make it happen they're giving you all of the the SOPs the training documents we're doing all of the the best practices and these kickoff meetings and all you need to do is show up and do great work for a veteran and it really does reverberate throughout your entire organization I always say that the cause marketing is is great for branding great for the customer but where it really is great for is internal marketing and recruiting because now your people know that they're a part of something bigger they're not just installing a garage store they're contributing to the two million dollar donation that a one garage has made to our veterans in need to a child that has cancer like that is so much more powerful than just thinking well I'm just working day to day for the bottom line I'm doing something more and if I could I would love to just take this moment anyone that's listening that knows anyone in the BAS space or is in the BAS space please reach out to BAS for the brave.com we're accepting participants and our goal this year is to get to all 50 states so far we have 35 states that have registered it's our biggest year by far BAS of the Brave has grown exponentially over the last five years and I feel so fortunate that Brian Gottlieb trust me to be the person funding it or not funding excuse me running it and he's still funding it out of his own pocket so that says a lot about who he is as a person. He's such a great man yeah he's amazing. Yeah what else do we need to talk about so at LeedsCon you said marketing is meant to disrupt if you're doing the same thing as everyone else because you're getting your ideas from an AI model then what are you disrupting can you just unpack that a little bit. Yeah I would say when it comes to storytelling and when it comes to creative and copy and messaging we need to disrupt if we're doing the same promotions as everyone else if we're talking about the same warranties the same financing there's not really a big differentiator so for me it's all about how do you disrupt in that creative space I think the processes work the the fundamentals work the way that they are but where we need to disrupt is how we're getting people's attention so kind of when we were talking about tv right now one thing that again I love to do is do things a little different with the owners have them in in different situations humanize them because right now in home improvement a lot is here's a before project here's an after project we have great warranties and financing give us a call it's like we need to do something a little different to get the attention. 100 percent Ryan Holiday talks about that yeah get different be way different like I did my billboards upside down for a year oh I love that and it was crazy how many people came into the office they're like you only had one job yeah but we meant to do that. I kind of gauge if a tv campaign is working by how many people send me angry facebook messages sometimes at tundra land we had a really great really cheesy rapport after the acquisition with the president at the time Paul Likowski and then we actually hired a influencer Alex Whirly that was an influencer in Wisconsin and they had a really cute banter back and forth and we got a lot of mad messages from older people saying it's funny we would get some that say the woman is talking over that man all the time she's so rude she's interrupting him and then we would get messages saying that man is so rude to that woman the way that he's belittling her and meanwhile they're they're both just yeah adults joking but people are paying attention and they're they're passionate enough but we put out to send us a message that's meaning something my buddy Aaron Gainer is out of Ohio and he gets hate messages he just got into town they're like dude your voice is so annoying he's like he reads them all day and it's so funny because he just he's attacking he's working with Roy Williams oh and they just attack yeah and it's crazy how many ads they put out but it's like you're gonna remember them I do spokesperson work occasionally and I get a two I get why is that that woman so stuffy oh blonde bimbo what does she know and I'm like well you listened you took the time to give me a message so it must be you feel something the blonde chick that does the the bathroom stuff Christina Haw yeah yeah oh so I when I was working with jacuzzi all the folks at jacuzzi are so amazing and I'm really close with all of them we've shared feedback that people will say her her sweater was too purple that's one of my favorites her sweater was too purple don't know what that means but people always have something to say and I think when you're a smaller business and you get that kind of feedback you get really scared because you think oh no I'm ticking off all my audience no one's gonna work with me that's not the case they're remembering you yeah unless you're doing something I mean horrible and and hurting a group of people that's a different conversation but if you're just being annoying if you're just irritating people they're still remembering you 100% yeah Parker and sons will do 300 million in Phoenix and they used to have Melvin the bad guy and it shows Buck Crack when he's working and everything but he was like the bad plumber yeah and they created this whole character around it and that's kind of what you got to do is really get good at those type of things I have a friend that owns a door company in Dallas and he's working with the Wizard of ads and they've created such a fun campaign where he's the doorman and so he's like opening up the door and he spends a lot of time with me oh yeah Billy yeah you see you know Billy I didn't know if you guys were in contact he comes over my house all the time it makes sense you guys are both I see the the vibe you're both like the similar characters but yeah when he told me this when I we were working together briefly at the beginning and he mentioned to me what he wants to do and some of these ideas and I'm not gonna lie to you sometimes I'm like that's crazy you are actually insane but I think you can do this but our business is so archaic and everyone's doing the same thing all the time someone has to give it a shot so I'm excited different I love it yeah you know Bill uh Ryan Holiday is like what he'd go do is like spray paint his own billboards with like spray off paint yeah and the news would pick it up oh I love it which is like and then he'd say yeah we've got all these people yeah kind of covering up our ads and then they get the home show draw something on the van and park it out front oh smart I want to focus on parking in the right areas that's another thing that I haven't been able to do yet is park parking at like a Costco up front for two days that's a really good idea I never parking yeah parking there you go one thing that I was really fortunate to experience at Tungeland with Brian is his gorilla marketing ideas were insane one time he had us take a mobile design unit and bring it to a diner and give old people a free because at the you know it's a it's a blue plate special so a lot of senior citizens were there give them a free dessert coupon with a demo and and people were excited and they wanted to do it so and who else would think of that besides you know that's why being the CEO and founder yeah I just kind of like sometimes wish I could just just straight do marketing yeah it's just so fun creative but there's so many markets too it's like we're in 24 states yeah one thing I'll say is right now with my business I I get a little FOMO because when I go in and work with people I implement what I know is going to work and what's going to generate leads very quickly and that's not always the most creative and the fun approach now it works and it's great it gets you to where you need to go to a certain extent but I really want to start doing some some fun stuff too and you're inspiring me that some of my people in the space that I know have the the bandwidth to do some crazy stuff I'm going to text them after this and be like hey what about parking a truck at the Costco yeah well I want to get like a big floaty on top yeah totally the other day they were like we couldn't afford the uh or we didn't have time to get this so I'm flailing in the front we got a video of it that's awesome uh so how do people get a hold of you Senya if they want to reach out and and just get your take on a few things yeah um LinkedIn is always the best for me so send me send me a request on LinkedIn send me a message otherwise you can email me uh Senya Senja at sisusisucinergy.com and I would I would love to help folks out uh right now I can definitely help people with TV and storytelling if they need any assistance otherwise if people just have a quick question I'd be more than happy to help um I am 99.9% sure I'm going to be a qualified remodeler this November so if anyone in the home services or home improvement or home services space quite frankly because we all have a lot of the same practices want to go to an event that's really great inspiration I'll be there as well so we'd love to have an in-person conversation is there any books that change your life for marketing yes uh I'll shout out again Lakota Tidd the owner of top of improvement who not how I am a control freak Dr. Benjamin Harding good buddy yep oh is he really wow amazing I would love to meet him some days it's really powerful works I would love that I am a control freak and again with high d and high c I have high expectations I want things done quickly and I want them done right and that kind of hindered me from growing at certain parts of my career and um when I wouldn't allow people early on when I wouldn't allow people to really try things because I wasn't sure it was going to work and I was so concerned about the bottom line I think I might have missed out on some opportunity of new ideas even from outside industries so in terms of a marketing standpoint that um that really helped me that I brought these people on for a reason I have these people on my team for a reason I need to let them let them shine and do their thing I love this stuff I am so excited when I get somebody that's creative I just when I'm taking notes like this it's because I'm just like we gotta go we gotta do some stuff mutually beneficial because I wish that I would have had a pen and paper in front of me after all this I'm gonna take pictures of those after because it's like you have you have an amazing brain that's awesome I want to go sit down with the marketing team real quick but uh give us some final closeout thoughts final closeout thoughts marketing is doable no matter your size if you're a one-man show if you're a 500 million dollar company no matter what you have the capacity to do marketing start with everything that you own start with everything that you have the accessibility to to take like social like your team's apparel everything like that and then also don't lose sight of the fundamentals don't lose sight of the fundamentals the leads that you are generating they want to talk to you they're not dead after a day reach out to them get in contact with them and basically the ultimate marketing is a great experience I love it I got one quick shout-out for my guys at kick charge they created my brand love it they've done case studies in every brand and they they're typically 500 increase amazing and profitability you got to stand out in a busy world and if you just got lettering in a white truck you're not going to stand out in my anecdotal experience I now kind of can identify their style being in the space for so long and there's a couple two businesses and where I live that have used them and I always see their vehicles they look amazing I'm in Grand Rapids now in Grand Rapids Michigan from Wisconsin that's okay I'm heart heart of Wisconsin but I know everything about Grand Rapids yeah oh I go there all the time oh we're in Grand Rapids and we're going to tell you are in Grand Rapids I see my sister lives in Whitefish Bay oh amazing yeah we have we'll have a lot to talk about after this but yeah they do great work so hey listen it's been a pleasure to have you on and I'm sure there'll be a lot of people reaching out I love that you're making it down here yeah thanks Tommy thanks for having me this is super fun I appreciate it