The Home Service Expert Podcast - Applying the Power of PR to Dominate Your Niche

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

Heather Ripley is the CEO and founder of Ripley PR, as well as the founder and CEO of Orange Orchard PR. She authored the book Next Level Now: PR Secrets to Drive Explosive Growth for Your Home Service Business. She has also helped implement successful PR initiatives for several high profile clients with popular publications such as Entrepreneur Magazine, Franchise Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Forbes, to name a few.  In this episode, we talked about the difference between marketing and PR, effective PR on a limited budget, choosing the right PR agency...

PR is a tactic of marketing. It should be in your marketing budget, but it's not as measurable as marketing. So the way I like to describe it is PR is getting somebody else to say those great things about you. So when you pay for a billboard or you pay for a TV spot, you can repeat your message over and over and over. But a consumer knows that message is being, it's a paid advertisement. They know that, so it works to an extent. But then when you get that third party journalist or TV reporter,

then saying those great things about you, your consumers and the homeowners out there believe that more. So it's a lot more credible. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. Today, I have a guest visiting us from Maryville, Tennessee. Her name is Heather Ripley. Heather, it's a pleasure to have you on today. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, let me do some reading here on a little bit about you. You're an expert in public relations, B2B, sales, marketing, home service. And like I said, you're based out of Maryville. You're the CEO and founder of Ripley PR from 2013 to present. You also are the founder and CEO of Orange Orchard from 2018 to present. And then you worked at Fletcher PR, Vice President Media Relations and Social from 2011 to 2013. It says here, Heather is a CEO at Ripley PR and Orange Orchard, a division of Ripley PR. She is the author of Next Level Now, PR Secrets to Drive Explosive Growth for Your Home Service Business. Ripley PR works with B2B, franchise automotive construction home services,

manufacturing and tech companies, while Orchard focuses on eco-conscious, animal-friendly, green, plant-based vegan businesses that aim to make the world a better, kinder place to live. Through her company, she secures stories for clients and high-profile publications, including Entrepreneur Magazine, Franchise Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe, and TV shows like The Today Show. Well, Heather, that's quite the impressive resume. It's a mouthful, isn't it? A lot there. Yeah, it's great. So do you want to just get started by

telling us a little bit about how you guys started with your career, what you love about PR, and what your plan is here in the next few years? Yeah. So if we back up to about 2008 and 2009 and the height of the recession, I was working for a home service franchise or in Florida. Clockwork Home Services is the parent company of One Hour Heating and Air, Benjamin Franklin, Plumbing, and Mr. Spocky. Yeah, so I was there and we had about 600 franchise territories at the time. And Jim Abrams said he was ready to sell the company and wanted to do something big. So I started brainstorming and trying to figure out a way that we could get the brand some big national recognition. And long story short, I ended up

pitching the Celebrity Apprentice and got all three brands on the show in 2009 and then he was able to sell the company a few months later and that's when i left and went over to the agency side of things so you were working for one hour air and then admit mr benjamin franklin and then it went mr sparky those were the three there was terry over there terolson Nicholson, Tab Hunter, do you know him? No, I don't know him but I do know Alan Rohr very well Okay, yes, love Alan

Small world, huh? It is So then a lot of them started to do best practices and that's kind of how a lot of this came about is they get into best practices and then you get everybody in and then you kind of how a lot of this came about is you get into best practices and then you get everybody in and then you kind of try to roll it all up, right? Right. Yeah. I learned a lot at that company. And really, I had been in marketing for about

10 years at that point and just fell in love with working with home service businesses and just the energy and passion. I fell in love with it and I wanted to combine my expertise and I grew up in a blue collar family. So, you know, this just made sense for me to want to help those guys. I love it. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So I don't know how much you know about me, but I have a garage door company. We're in about 20 states right now. And I absolutely love the industry. I love technicians. I love CSRs. I love dispatchers. We formed a training school here in Phoenix. So the PR is one of the most underrated parts of everything. We try to get certain awards we get involved with the community we definitely have been involved i mean just yeah just last friday i was on the news because we're

doing a uh a water bottle drive we're trying to raise 25 000 bottles for the homeless here in phoenix wow that's awesome it's part of getting entrenched to the community it's definitely pr and it has everything to do with non- everything to do with news, everything to do. It's like a kill 10 birds with one stone. So I want to take a deep, deep dive into PR here. So I'd like to know more about how you help brands tell their unique stories in a way that resonates with their target audiences.

So let's just start into the questions here. Number one, what does PR mean to you? Give us some examples of what it's done for businesses and why it's important to get involved with PR. Yeah, that's a good question because a lot of business owners, especially in the service industries, understand that they need PR for a crisis situation, which I think we're going to talk about. There's so much more to it. There's so much proactive PR that you can do to not only build your brand, but build your credibility in the community, which helps you attract more technicians. It helps your technicians want to

stay with you. It can just build the overall recognition that you have in your community and a lot of the companies that hire us have some specific goals in mind whether that's you know to position their company for a sale anywhere from two to five years from now and they want to build up the brand and get some attention from prospective buyers sometimes those companies want to build up the brand and get some attention from prospective buyers. Sometimes those companies want to buy up other companies. So we have a very different strategy for those to attract smaller companies that are looking to stay in the business maybe, but just aren't good business owners and ready to sell. We have some clients who are looking to add service lines or change

their brand after many, many years of serving the community under one name brand. They're now changing. And if you don't do that right, you could lose customers. So there's a lot of different reasons to partner with a PR agency or hire a PR person that goes way beyond mitigating a crisis situation. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's what usually comes out of it is the crisis stuff. I've always recommended people read the story brand. It's all about telling a story with your brand and then your marketing meets PR, right? What's the difference between marketing and PR? Yeah, that's a great question too. I have a visual whenever I'm doing a presentation. I like to show it because marketing, branding, advertising, and PR all go hand in hand.

And really, PR is a tactic of marketing. It should be in your marketing budget, but it's not as measurable as marketing. So the way I like to describe it is PR is getting somebody else to say those great things about you. So when you pay for a billboard or you pay for a TV spot, you can repeat your message over and over and over. But a consumer knows that message is being... It's a paid advertisement. They know that so it works to an extent. But then when you get that third-party journalist or TV reporter then saying those great things about you, your consumers and the homeowners out there believe that more. So it's a lot more credible. It's a lot more difficult to get than a paid ad.

And you can't control the messaging like you can a paid ad. But it's a lot more valuable when you do get it. So I had a client for a while talking about PR. And he used to say that PR is like planting an oak tree. It takes a long time to grow, but it's momentum building. And once it's there, it's solid. And you could just continue to build upon it. So I liken PR to that. It can take a few months of introducing yourself to your media, getting in front of them. But then you become that go-to source.

Anytime there's a freeze or a weather event or something in the national news. If your media knows you as the expert, you're the first person they call when they need an expert to interview. I agree. You know, there's a great book called They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. And I talk a lot about it because I think it's an amazing book of just answering questions that becoming the expert in your field and coming up with really good infographics and things that answer questions

that quite frankly don't come up when you search on pay-per-click. Like what's the difference between a certain brand versus this brand? Google's not going to charge somebody to do that because it's just a research term. And that's not really necessarily PR. But when you start putting out those facts, sometimes the sources come find you. But it's a full-time job. A lot of people think they

could do it by themselves. And they could do press releases. What are your thoughts on press releases? And when do you use them? Yeah, I am a fan of press releases, but they have to be written in a journalistic tone and not a marketing tone. So one of the things that we've found over the years is a lot of the smarter, savvy home service business companies have a marketing person in-house and that's all they do is marketing. And that person could be really good at organizing events and possibly even strategic partnerships with charities and things like that. But when it comes to writing a press release, you kind of have to put on a different hat. The goal is to sell your services, but you have to be smart. You have to write it in a tone that is educational and informative and not salesy. Because journalists will see right through it

and throw it in the trash if it's a marketing message. So one of the things that our team is really good at is we have a lot of journalists on our team. And they're good at taking a message like trends in garage doors, for instance, and making it news. Possibly getting your customers to talk to the TV stations instead of just having the company owner talk to the TV station. There's ways you can do it. That's why they say we spin the message. We're spinning it in a newsworthy way. And sometimes that can be a difficult thing for a marketing person to do

if they can't think like a journalist. I do think it's wise to go get somebody to come out. And have you ever heard of Hara? I'm sure you have. There's a lot of places. There's like mommy bloggers. There's a lot of places out there too that you kind of get some access to this news.

But it's not a great plan just to have that. You know, people talk a lot about PR. They say earned media. What does that mean to you when you hear earned media? Yeah, I use the term quite frequently and it's in my book a lot. It's how I differentiate paid, owned, and earned. Paid is a paid advertisement of any kind. It's a door hanger. It's a mailer. It's a billboard. It's a TV spot that you're paying for. Owned media

could be your social media, your blog. It still thinks that you're controlling the message, but it's on your own platform. You can control who sees that to an extent with some ads. Earned media is taking a third party or someone in-house, like a PR person in-house, and then leveraging the media to tell your story. So you kind of lose control of the message a little bit. If you have good relationships with the local journalists and local reporters, you have more control, but you never have 100% control over the end story. So you're hoping that you have a good interview, you answer the questions well,

and ultimately the journalist has a good feel so that when they go back to write the story, it's a positive message. But that's why we call it armed media. It's a lot more valuable, but you don't control the entire message. You know, what's interesting is we talk a lot about branding on the podcast. And I think making sure you have a really, really great logo, a great name, and it mirrors

your website, it mirrors your yard signs, it mirrors your stickers, it mirrors everything out there has to kind of unite. And I think so does the story. There has to be a story that's memorable. I look at the largest companies in the country, and they've created a story brand. What is your take on creating a story of who are we? What's our mission, vision, core values? What do we stand for? What are we doing? What's our involvement in the community? Some people would say that's a bunch of hogwash. I can make a bunch of leads. I can make the phone ring. But what they don't understand... And Heather, I think you have a lot

of input on this. I did an orientation today for three hours. I do it every month for all the new guys that join. And I said, there's two types of calls. There's branded. And then there's just like Garage Door Repair Phoenix or Garage Door garage door repair Detroit or garage door repair Orlando. And those are good calls, but they're not the same as when they just searched my company, A1 Garage Door Service. What are your thoughts on the story brand? What are your thoughts on getting those branded calls? Because I can't even compare them in the same sentence because the branded ones are so much better. Yeah. I mean, they're gold, right? Same for my business. When somebody hears about Ripley PR and they call me and say,

I heard about you because you work with a good friend of mine or you work with one of our clients or something like that, those are gold. Whereas if they're just searching public relations agency and find me, they don't know who we are. They're just hoping we can perform this service. Branding. I love branding. I'm with you that if you have a compelling story, share it. We work with Service Titan for the past seven years almost. And their story just resonated with the media and it's a really good founder story wait you guys do service titan yeah we've had them for about seven years oh wow i'm very good friends with the owner and the founder uh all Vahe. And I know that. Yeah.

Yeah. I wrote the foreword for my book. So I'm thankful for that. That's awesome. Yeah. He actually wrote the foreword for my book too. Very cool. That's funny. Yeah.

He contributed a chapter in my book. That's awesome. Yeah. I love Aura. So home service companies, this is a challenge for them. They'll call and say, we don't know what our story is. It was my dad's company and now it's mine. Or I left this company and started this company 5 years ago and I don't really have a compelling story. Some companies just don't. But sometimes their culture is unique or some of the people

that work for them are unique. Sometimes we have to kind of dig and find out what those unique stories are. Petri Plumbing is one of our very long-term clients. I think they were one of my first clients when I started the agency. And they're in Brooklyn, and they were Brooklyn's first green plumber. For a while, that message resonated with New York City media. It's a company that's over 100 years old. That message is not something that we always put out there, but when it makes sense, we do. So that's a difficult question to answer because not everybody has that cool, unique story to share. And so trying to figure out what that is with them, maybe it's their values, maybe it's something

really unique about the owner or a passion or some charity, their charitable giving programs or something like that. So we'll work with them and try to figure out what makes them unique in their market. I love it. Yeah. The unique selling proposition. I had a gal on here. She wrote the book, Relevant Selling and the Competitive Advantage. And we're actually going to be doing a little course of hers here. She's flying in with a couple of people. And what are the differentiating factors? And they're not what people think, Heather. A lot of people think, oh, I'm open nights and weekends. We do background checks. We got wrapped trucks. None of those are really good reasons why you're different than

another company. Exactly. Or great customer service. Oh, do we do great and we care? Oh, you do? Oh, wow. That's really great. So no one else cares. Well, not like us. We just know more. Okay. So I hear this all the time. I mean, you really got to write down, like we've got trademarks. We are open on Christmas night. We do things differently here out of the last 10,000 jobs that started 89% of them started out on time. Those do things differently here. Out of the last 10,000 jobs that started, 89% of them started out on time. Those are things that we're measuring. Are you measuring what's best for the customer? Most people don't. So they have a hard time even seeing what they can talk about. You should see our checklist after we finish an installation. This is the checklist we go

through with our clients one step at a time and make sure we delivered five out of five service. Those are actually things that can be measured. It can't be this blanket statement that we're really, really good at everything we do. It's just interesting when you really look at it. So you wrote the book exactly is called Next Level Now. But tell me some of these secrets. I want to hear just a few things that most people wouldn't think about if you want to give those out. I mean, everybody's got to buy the book. You're not going to get all the secrets unless you guys buy the book out there. One of the things that I share is if you think about marketing versus marketing 10 years ago, it's very different.

Even 15 years ago, it was very different. People are not looking at the yellow pages anymore. What makes you stand out now is it's getting more and more difficult because quite frankly, there's a lot of really cool truck wraps on the road now. 10 years ago, your truck wrap probably stood out more. People are doing the same things. The companies that are $2 to $5 to $10 million are all doing the same types of things. But very few of them are leveraging PR. And that is one easy area for you to really stand out in your market is to be the first there. So if you're the first HVAC company in your market to really leverage PR, you're going to

become that go-to for the journalists there. Now, eventually you'll get some competition because your competitors are going to wonder how the heck you're on the news all the time. But it's a very easy way to stand out. And so I call PR the Wild West for home service businesses because they're so smart and savvy when it comes to marketing, but very few really understand PR. And it's an opportunity for my team to help educate on the power of it. And our clients, like Petri, have been around for 8 years because they see it and they feel it. When they go on a home service call, those homeowners already know who they are. And that TV coverage, not a commercial, but an interview, that coverage makes a lot of difference in credibility.

So that's one secret. It's just a good, unique way to stand out in your market. Another one is a lot of companies don't realize that they should start PR the day they open. I've heard so many times over the years, like, we're waiting till we hit 2 million or we're waiting till we hit this goal of ours. But if they start PR right away, they get that recognition in the newspapers or business journals for their growth and they can attract some technicians and they can grow more quickly. It's something that you don't have to do month after month after month if you're not big enough, but it is something you could do every quarter and not just at Christmas when you're competing

with everybody about your charitable donation that you gave and you want that in a newspaper. There's a lot more you can do throughout the year to help your company grow. Yeah, I think that's a great point. I got to tell you, I'm one of those guys that I have a hard time. Now we're in 19 states, I think 29 markets beyond. I do have a certain threshold I like to hit because I know the power of PR. And I think you might have changed my mind just with that sentence. But ultimately, I think I need to have certain key performance indicators. Conversion rate, average ticket, cost per acquisition will go down with PR.

But what ends up happening is loyalty. It'll probably cause the average ticket and conversion rate to go up. So it takes a little bit of time, especially when you're growing greenfield to grow a really nice market, about a year to get the staff in place that you really, because you don't want to have an opportunity for someone at the news to maybe have an experience with you two months into it. And you say, look,

we really didn't have the right staff hired then and we can't handle it and we got supply chain issues. So I think at least you got to have your shit together before. You do. But if I could just add one thing that I think very few people think about is PR done the right way could replace some of your pay-per-click ads. Because if you think about the viewership on the TV channels, websites, and

the biggest newspaper in your market, their readership is so high that if they include a keyword or phrase in their article, that article is going to show up at the top. So ultimately, what we've seen with our clients that we work with month after month after month is they can replace some of those pay-per-click words that they're buying because of the strategic use of those keywords in the PR that goes out. So just something to think about. It doesn't necessarily have to be an add-on cost. You can move some money around too. Yeah, absolutely. I 100% agree with that. This is a crazy day and age because you've got satellite TV, you've got streaming, you've got Hulu, you've got YouTube TV, you've got all these different

TVs now. You've got the different Siri radio versus all the stations you've got social media where it used to be a couple now it's TikTok Instagram Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube I can keep going and it almost seems like you know it really was simple and I'm glad it's not like this like it was 20 years ago just you got to have the double or triple truck in the yellow book but it just seems like i've been talking a lot about the power of tiktok the average user is on their 58 minutes if you do it right it could be the best recruiting site way better than indeed or or glass door or even zip recruiter or monster i mean but it seems like every you know the guys that are listening to this especially that maybe aren't as sophisticated in all these social medias, they're going, wait a minute.

I'm supposed to be doing Google and Bing. I'm supposed to be doing Valpack and Money Mailer and Clipper. I'm supposed to be doing TV, radio, billboards. I'm supposed to be doing maybe deal of the day sites. I'm supposed to be doing Angie's List and Home Advisor. I'm supposed to be doing the newspaper. Now I'm supposed to be doing TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. At what point did they... And then, oh yeah, then they got the PR and you got the earned media. I'm not trying to confuse people.

I'm telling them at my size, I need to be invested in all of them. And I'm getting trained on all of them all the time. And I'm keeping an eye out for everything. And we've run 30 different softwares right now on top of ServiceTitan. I mean, everything from HubSpot, I use so many different softwares. I mean, we use a thing called Monday for project management. I mean, it just keeps going, going, going, going, going. What do you say to somebody when they're like, so PR, Tommy's talking about social media. What do I get on with TV? Do I do broadcast? Do I do network? What do I do here? Wow, that's overwhelming. Yeah, I mean, PR is what we focus on. So while we do social media for some of our clients, we usually refer them to a digital agency to kind of take over that

because they're, like you said, there's a lot going on. One of the things that I talk about in my book is companies don't have to be on all of the platforms. If you're a young, vibrant company, you absolutely should be looking at TikTok and all the various different methods to reach your audience. For some companies, that just doesn't make as much sense. If you're going to be on TikTok, you should do it really well. We have clients that do and we have clients that don't. So it still depends on your company's culture and going back to what makes you unique. There's a lot of tech involved in PR. We do use HARO requests to an extent. It used to be better than it is now, but

we use some platforms like PR Newswire. We push press releases on the wire. We do manual pitching though to the local journalists. So PR can help with SEO. The online PR newswire helps with SEO and backlinks to your website and all of that. So anyway, I would say just don't get too overwhelmed with everything because I don't think that everything makes sense for every company. I think they really have to look at what makes the most sense for their company culture I think they really have to look at what makes the most sense for their company culture and

who they are. You know, what's interesting about that is I used to think every customer is a good customer. People say, who's your avatar? I said, someone that owns a garage door. And what I'm learning now is we're at the higher end. I'd rather have half the customers charge double the prices than have half the work. Because certain customers, they just don't want to fiddle faddle dilly dally around. They're just like, look, I want it done right. I want the best

value, but this is an investment. I'm looking for a company that's going to clean up after themselves, be safer on my family, do it when they say they're going to do it. And there's those people that are penny pinchers. And I'm realizing that I'm almost to the point now that I'm not ready to be a coupon guy anymore. And I'm looking at this going, to the point now that I'm not ready to be a coupon guy anymore. And I'm looking at this going, I don't know if I want to have a value savings on here, except for I might be a better warranty. I might put upgrade to this and get a better warranty, but that doesn't really cost you anything. It's future work possibly. But so I go into these with this grassroots mentality, guerrilla marketing. And I'm like, I used to post ads on Craigslist every day. I used to go to B&I groups. And I'm going into

new markets with that same mentality again, going, go ahead and be on living social. Because I'm just trying to see... I always tell people this, if you're broke today, making 30, 40 grand a year, you're going to be broke making 200 grand a year. And what I mean by that is if you can't write a ticket of a group on or a living social, if you can't get an Angie's List or a home advisor job to spend money, you're not going to do it with a billboard. You're not going to do it with a radio. You're not going to do it with PR because no matter what you do,

if you're not building trust, looking at the customer in the eye and stand by your word, it doesn't matter. So I try to build with these more affordable jobs. They're much more affordable. Groupon, you don't pay unless they buy the deal. A lot of these places are built like that. I've got performance deals works across the country, pay for performance with Gannett. And what's interesting is I go back to my grassroots strategy and I say, guys, these leads are going to be okay, but you will, you show me what you can do with these. I'll move up to the next level. And I've got three level of lead tiers. And I think you're right though. PR needs to play a role because it's not like he just turned

it on one day. It's like, all of a sudden I had three news stations out here at five in the morning for a blood drive. And I was dressed like Dracula. And they loved it because it was during COVID and we were raising blood. It was a great cause. And we made charity and understanding the charitable giving just part of the culture here in every single market. And here's what we also do.

If you've got a baseball, a kid in T-ball, we're going to sponsor his team for 500 bucks and pay for something. And they put a nice little tarp out there with our name on it. But what do you say to somebody that just says, I got a really limited budget for incorporating PR into their marketing strategy? What should they focus on first? How do they go about that? Yeah. If somebody has a limited budget, which happens all the time, I get those calls a lot. No big deal. What I do is I work with them on their growth plans and ask a lot of questions about where they are now,

where they want to be in 12 months, 24 months, and so on. And I'll put together a plan for them where we kind of come and go. So we might do a campaign for them in September and then not do anything until February. We'll come back in April and do something else. It just really depends. Not all of our clients are on a month-to-month retainer. We do a lot of project work and have those clients come back repeatedly. And we just hit the media. We call it a four-week blitz where we'll do a PSA of some kind, carbon monoxide detector check or something like that. And then we'll hit the media.

And then we'll pull back for a few months, let them grow. And then they come back. Either they have another newsworthy item to announce or we create one for them. So let's talk about that, Heather. By the way, I said hi. I took a screenshot. So we've got two things here. You said either a newsworthy, explain to me what would be newsworthy. And I can give you a lot of things that I think I'll just throw a couple out there. If you do something, for example, I've got a PR gal I work with here just locally. I've got different people across the country.

But she said, hey, Tommy, this little old lady got taken advantage of by a garage door company. They disappeared with her check. They can't get ahold of them. The check was cashed. And she said, would you mind going in and installing a brand new door for this lady?

She goes, the news might pick it up. I go, yeah, give me your number right now. now we'll handle it and this was like the biggest thing since sliced bread i mean it got every major news network picked it up and it was just the smallest thing in the world for us i mean we spent about 1500 we went out there the lady gave me a big hug she was happy but that's newsworthy because that stuff taking advantage of elders, that gets a lot of coverage. And if you look at the news, it can either be good or bad. A lot of times they like thought, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They like crap. But a lot of times they'll say, you know, the mailman saved the cat out of the tree. That's the old thing. But what are some

that as a business, we could really start thinking about? And then what do you guys do from a PR standpoint to create one? Yeah, well, we have kind of calendars throughout the year where we have some what we call evergreen topics. They might not be evergreen, meaning every single month. It's a newsworthy topic, but sometimes it is water quality. If our plumbing clients do any kind of water testing, we can do some PSA kind of announcements on water quality in the community. Have to be careful of that. You want to be sensitive to your, not burn any bridges with

your government officials. Some other things are like August is a lot of people are taking vacations. So how do you prepare your home to be away for a week or two on vacation? And so we'll pitch our clients to do a walk and talk throughout the house. So they'll go in with the reporter. They'll show the water heater. It may or may not have a vacation mode. They'll walk through the house and kind of talk about how you can make your home safe for when you return. Freezing pipes or something, the first freeze of the year, we can reach out and say, hey, we have an expert for you to talk to. There are things like that that are kind of evergreen. And then we have opportunities where there's a law change or rebates that are kind of confusing. We can have an

expert talk about tax rebates. Anything in the news that's trending, I don't know if you were paying attention during COVID, but the fatbergs kind of became a story again in plumbing where people were flushing all these wipes that say they're flushable and they're not flushable. And they create basically this big, huge cement problem for the city because it backs up and creates major pipe issues. So there's a lot of things like that where we can take something that's already in the news and either bring it locally and have a local expert comment on it, or we can just create something with National Electrical Safety Month. You know, how to properly install Christmas lights, things like that, to keep your home safe.

Yeah, you know, I got one out there for grass-fed insulation, talking about, hey, it's a DIY product. You can go get it it but it means a hell of a lot different in arizona in the summer when you're west facing i mean the thing puts off 140 degrees inside that garage versus 100 degrees if you got insulation and and you know a lot of people wouldn't think of that as wow newsworthy but you'd be surprised they go on the news there's 50 people that hit me up but more importantly importantly, I set up a media kit. I make sure they give me the backlink. So that marries, I make sure it's a good link

that's going right to my site and the SEO qualities there. And then you do another PR and you start writing articles about it. And then it's like, holy cow, people start picking it up. And sometimes the littlest things sometimes go viral. And you never know exactly, but you could always put a little bit more steroids into it to make it go crazy, right? Yes. So, you know, what are your thoughts on automation?

I mean, is there some stuff that we could be looking for? Like, I know Google will allow me to do any single article that comes out with A1 Garage. It'll send me a link right through my Gmail. If there's somebody that says anything about garage installation or garage doors, there's certain things that are auto posts. There's things that will syndicate all over different PR newsworthy sites. There's HARO. What is technology doing to PR and how can we leverage it?

Yeah, that's a difficult question to answer because it's constantly changing. We tell our clients to be careful with automation. We have clients who put out a newsletter and pull some of those articles and they want to be seen as an expert, not just pushing their own content out, but pushing relevant content out. So we do have some clients that will automatically pull articles that are written for certain keywords or something. But we recommend against that because sometimes you could be pushing out a competitor link or confusing topic or something that's wrong. So one of the things that we usually recommend our clients, whether we do it or not, is to have a blog on the website. Talk about your expertise.

You don't have to tell your customers how to do it themselves, but just show that you're credible, that you know what you're doing. Have a small call to action at the end, and then push that out on your social media and other platforms. And that way you own the content and you know it's relevant and credible. You know, what's interesting is you could actually create videos and 1500 word articles on garage door companies or HVAC companies or companies that have went out of business. So when people Google that sticker, if you find businesses that are no longer a business, have somebody go through the yellow book and find all the businesses, find the people that are not answering and create a video on a landing page for them. So if they got a sticker, they search for you. Boom. There's a lot of things

that you could do thinking outside of the box. And when you're small, it's kind of the David and Goliath. You could do those things. I used to write about competitors parts that I think are inferior, but I didn't put a lot of that in there. I found a manufacturer that was out of business and they happened to be monster 25 years ago. And I wrote a whole article about them and I must've got a thousand jobs over the last 10 years on those. And there's some easy things that's low hanging fruit that people just don't think of, you know?

Yeah. At Clockwork, one of the things that we told our franchise owners to do was make friends with your local Yellow Page person. And if it isn't, we try to buy it. Certain numbers are worth it, but I know certain guys have gotten lucky and they get three calls a day because of it. Yeah, it can pay off. So what do you do when you're qualifying a PR agency? Because there's a lot of them out there and all of them, some of them charge you $150, $200 an hour. Some of them charge you by the project. It's really hard because in the beginning, you mentioned it's really hard to say what this is going to do. So they can't say, I will make you the best. There's really no claim. So when looking at the accolades of a PR company, what are you looking for? Yeah. And I'll tell you from experience because I've been on the side

where I hired PR agencies and interviewed them and chose one. And then I've worked for two other agencies prior to starting my own. So rather than tell you what I recommend our clients do, I'll just tell you from experience. I think that you have to find somebody that you get along with, that you really like, and that can be an extension of your team. Because ultimately, your PR agency is kind of like having an attorney. You need to know that you can trust them with sensitive information and tell them everything. Because we need to know what's going on in the business. And we need to know that something could potentially be a crisis so that we can prepare and be ready if it does hit the media. So having a trustworthy kind of friendship, if you will, with our clients is important.

We do ask that we have an open, honest relationship with our clients. And another thing is just how much education are you going to need to do with your agency? We're in Tennessee, but we represent clients all over the country. We have clients in Australia and Israel that we've never met in person because of the results that we get. So it's not as important nowadays to hire an

agency that's in your market. It's important to hire an agency that you don't have to educate about your business. We've had some clients come to us that had another agency, but they just felt like they had to educate them on all the terminology. And the home service industry is far beyond what people who don't know the industry think about when you run a business. It's complex. You've got CSRs and dispatch and technicians and just any agency out there might not understand the complexities of running a home service business. So having somebody that's been in a shop and seen it and has done ride-alongs and all of that stuff is important because then they can come up with story ideas

that are proactive. You don't want to have to always tell your PR agency what to do. You want them to bring you ideas as well. Yeah, it's amazing what happens when you get involved with the logo community. You can go to your favorite restaurant, especially during COVID,

and you can say, guys, here's what we're going to do. We are going to give $10 for every customer that calls us up for this, to this restaurant. If you love this restaurant like we do, then go ahead, call through this number is tracked and we're going to give $10 to them. But what's crazy about that is that then you get the restaurant sharing it all over.

They put their signs all over the place, use this company. And it's not necessarily PR, but then maybe a local news station says, look at this company donating to companies that are barely staying in business to try to keep their doors open because of all the workers here. This company did not let any of their workers go. They supported them through the downturn of the worst of the pandemic.

And it's ideas that are literally just not necessarily a business owner might not think of them. We don't have time as business owners to sit around and think of the next big PR. We're trying to say, how do we get two more CSRs, two more dispatchers, and get five more techs, and make the phone ring, and make sure the tax man's happy, and make sure... There's a lot more going on. And I definitely agree that it's not always the easiest thing to just hire or to not

hire somebody. I think it's better off that you find somebody you can trust, they can focus on the outside of it. So if somebody's really trying to get ahold of you, they're interested in hiring you, they want to just reach out and talk to Heather about her book. What's the best way to do that, Heather? Yeah, they can email me at hripley,

just like Ripley's, believe it or not. It's R-I-P-L-E-Y. H Ripley at ripleypr.com. Or they can call. The phone number for the agency is 865-977-1973. Those are the best ways to reach me. And I'm pretty much checking my emails all the time if I'm awake. So emails pass in the office as well. Okay.

And I always ask this, but are there three books that you'd recommend that maybe could help the listeners out? Oh, gosh. Narrowing it down is hard, but I'd say my favorites right now are Traction, Great by Choice. And, you know, I'm reading the E-Myth again for probably the fourth time. So that's top of mind. So I'll just say that one. I love it. I love it. Traction, what I like about Traction is he does say you pick the best outlets and you focus on becoming the best in those before you just go all of them. So you can literally pick Google. I think Google is a must personally. Google's God when it comes to home service, at least that's my

point of view. And they've got four algorithms. They've got the pay-per-click, you've got your LSA, your Google Guarantee Ad, you've got your GMB, and then you've got organic. And I think it's important to try to rank in all those. What are your thoughts on that? Yes, definitely. I think that you've got to be where the people are and people are searching online, whether it's on a desktop or their phone. So yeah, I agree.

All right. And let's see here. The last question I kind of do here is this really, we talked about a lot of things. You're a PR expert. I recommend everybody read your book, Next Level Now, PR Secrets to Have Explosive Growth for Your Home Service Business. And if someone wants to, like I said, hire you, I think it's amazing. They should be reaching out to you and at least give you a test trial and go for it. Because if you guys aren't doing PR right now, you're making a mistake.

I'm sure you're going to get a lot of calls from this podcast, but we probably didn't talk about some stuff that we might've, should've talked about. And I want to give you an opportunity to take a few minutes here and close this out and talk about maybe a take action now step or just maybe something we left out

or just a final we left out or just a final thought for the audience. Good. Final thought. Just try to think differently about your business. And there's a quote, I don't know who said it, but what got you here won't get you there. When you're trying to grow your business and you keep doing the same things every year, you're probably going to grow a little bit. But if you really want to take your business a leap different, like 5 million to 10 million or 10 to 20 or 20 to 50, you've got to start doing some things differently.

And the reason I named my book Next Level now is because really PR can get you to that next level. No matter what level it is, whether that's revenue growth or more trucks on the road. PR is something that you're probably not doing that you easily implement at a level that is right for your business. And it's just an easy win to help you get there. So yeah, definitely check out my book. It's on Amazon. And I am available for questions. Any home service business wants to reach out and ask a question or just run some ideas by me. I love talking to you guys. So I'll make myself available as much as I can with my schedule.

Okay, Heather. Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming on. What I want to do is I'm going to reach out with an email. I'd love for you to look at a few things we're working on too, and see if you could assist. So thank you very, very much for coming on today. And I'll be reaching out here shortly. Thank you, Tommy. I appreciate it. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast from the bottom of my heart means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really

helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review, make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com

forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.