The Home Service Expert Podcast - Connecting Digital with Traditional Marketing For Maximum Results

Episode Date: February 7, 2019

Mike Davis is the CEO of Valpak, a direct marketing company specializing in print, mobile and online advertising solutions and coupons. He has had over 20 years of experience in leadership and growing companies across various industries, from music to ecommerce to marketing. In this episode, we talked about direct marketing, growth hacking, consumer behavior...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. 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. Hey there, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. I'm your host, Tommy Mello, and today

I have Mike Davis. Let me tell you a little bit about Mike Davis. I had the luckiness, or whatever you want to call it. He walked into my office. He's the CEO right now of Valpak, which is a monster mailing company. But a little bit about him, he knows a lot about direct marketing and growth hacking. He's the CEO of Valpak since June of 2017, so a couple years now. He also was the CEO at Napster, and he also was a board member. He's an advisor for TBG Capital, the chief commercial officer of Group EVP. He's the Alliance Entertainment CEO. That was a couple of years. He did Universal Music Group. He was the executive vice president. And basically, he's got more than 20 years

experience in leadership and growing companies. And he's held senior management positions in sales, marketing, sales operations, new product development, media. I mean, Mike, you've got a huge, huge buyout here of everything you've done in the past. I mean, they're all amazing. Anyway, you're in Florida half the time and California half the time. I'd just like you to just welcome you on the show. And I'm excited for everybody to listen to this. Everybody's going to get a ton out of this podcast.

Thanks for having me, Tommy. And I'm much younger than all that experience would make me look. Well, you look like a young guy. Hey, you walked in here. You came in to my office here in phoenix i'm actually in tempe and it was amazing just to sit down and and shoot the shit with you for a little bit about what's working and what's not out there and we got we got to know each other and uh i'm really excited we got to meet because there's so many things out there that i think people miss

when it comes to marketing we're going to be able to explore those on here but tell me about you know it's funny because you mentioned napster. Just tell me a little bit about your history and what brought you to the spot you're at today. Sure. Thanks. Yeah. Same feelings. It was such an incredible opportunity to run into. Your energy, your experience, your success was invigorating for me. So glad we crossed paths. And yeah, I'll give you a quick... Sort of stumbled into the music business while going to college, part-time job, didn't realize there was actually this big business behind the local record store, which I visited frequently. In Universal, through Universal, covered every functional group,

rose to the ranks in sales, marketing, finance, legal, HR, etc. Great platform for just executive management. After that, when I joined Alliance, I joined the private equity world. And since leaving Universal, all of these experiences have been somewhat related to private equity, which, if you don't know, was essentially investing in companies and looking for opportunities to make them better, faster, stronger, in a host of different ways. So through my first experience leaving Universal was a group called Platinum Equity. They are currently owners of Valpak. So that's the direct connection to where I'm at today. But as you mentioned, a road of variety of marketing, customer acquisition,

and media has been my primary background. Wow, that's crazy. I love what you do with that. You know, I was just talking about this earlier. Pretty Woman. You remember that movie with uh richard gear of course isn't that what he does he goes in and basically fires all the guys at the top because they're they're overpaid and it kind of fixes all the problems and then resells the business right it's similar or you know the craze now is all the fixer-up shows, the home improvement. I look at it,

you go into a company like a house and you go, is it kitchen or marketing? Is it the bathroom or sales? And you look for the rooms that need improving. One of the phenomenal things about Platinum, which sets them apart from some private equity is they have a strong operation. And along with obviously fixing what may be wrong with the company financially, they have incredible rigor and discipline around operations and really, truly leave companies better off than when they acquire them. So I want to understand that because this is really interesting. This will bring it back to home service because ValPak is very successful in the home service.

I got started with ValPak. I actually started in 2006 or 2007. I don't remember when my first ValPak was, but it was 10 zones. Each zone is 10,000. And you guys kind of made it over the digital leap because you guys have ValPak online. And tell me a little bit about how ValPak relates to what you did. Before you put the music and the PE and all this stuff. Well, so much... Most companies, Tommy, from our experience, my experience, are made of three things. Products.

So you're selling a product or a service. A technology, how you touch, how you talk to, how you manage. And people. So StartValPak, I think, aligns perfectly with phenomenal technology, best in class distribution, facility, logistics, printing, all of that. so really and you address the people and the product and i think most companies you start with a brand you know you have a clean simple message on what you're selling and some interest in driving awareness of that product whether it's music at universal whether it it's your Ecommerce service that you provided Alliance. It is where we started here.

I feel like my... Our nomination to you as a client, Tommy, is OpenRate. So the brand, just like you have a brand with music, we, Valpak, have a brand. My obligation with the marketing staff and the content people hear is to make Valpak interesting. So every time it's touched in a mailbox, there is a demand to open it. Because obviously, if we get open rates at a certain rate, then the trickle down and the productivity and the ROI for our clients will be there. So demand creating, brand awareness, pretty much runs through every business that sells a product or service. Let me ask you something. This is just a random thought, but to increase demand, what are some out of the box ways that you guys thought about getting a higher opener rate? I mean, I know Valpak is very, I think you said how many people actually recognize the brand, and it's super high.

But other than that, then the brand itself, which is super people are loyal to it. It's been around a long time. Tell me a little bit about outside-of-the-box ways to increase demand. Yeah, there is a 91% household awareness of ValPak. So a tremendous amount of the US population knows the name ValPak or sometimes called ValuePak. It's been around 50 years. One of the outside-of-the-box ideas we did this year that we're very proud of from a company and a cause is we partnered with Susan G. Komen. If you don't know, one of the leading cause-related organizations around breast cancer. So our October envelope was dedicated to Susan G. Komen. It had the beautiful pink

ribbon and our clients could participate and donate to Susan G. Komen and have a pink border around their advertising. And the Susan G. Komen success, the client awareness, the prospecting around it, and the clients that came to us after it were phenomenal. The results were tremendous. Obviously, the company felt incredibly proud. So the employees are also reinvigorated, which is a key part of driving success at a company. So Susan G. Komen in a good cause. So congratulations on that. I sometimes find that the smaller home service companies and small business, I believe, it's 25 million and under. So most people listening are typically small business and there's nothing wrong with that. It's actually a good thing because there's a lot that can be

changed faster with a smaller business. But we get these titles, CEO, CFO, CTO, COO. And, you know, you got the CEO, which is the executive officer. And then you've got the operations officer. And then you've got the technology officer. And then you might have a finance CFO. And, you know, I think we all have these people. I just call it my accountants.

I call it my general managers, my operations. So to bring it down to back down to earth here, where most people understand it is we've got all these people around us that basically have, they're not as fancy titles, but I kind of wanted to ask you, you've been at a lot of companies, you've been the CEO, or you could be the president, the founder, the owner. There's so many different terms for different things, depending on you're a publicly traded company, so it's different. But for a small business, can you go through each role and how you think it pertains to a home service company

and what those roles look like and why they're important? Yeah, definitely. I know that probably caught you off guard, but you just, you got a lot of experience. Sometimes we wear multiple hats. So there's not, you know, this isn't right or wrong. I just want, from your perspective, since you've worked at some really large companies to kind of define it and try to bring it back down to a home service niche.

Well, they are, all are incredibly vital and play different roles and are the check and balance in creative ideas, constructive ideas, productive ideas, because they can all lead you astray. Along those lines, and right before I answer it, one thing that I've witnessed looking at 50, 60 companies to acquire over the last 6 or 7 years and meeting with a plethora of all the C-suite. The one thing that I've seen, Tommy, that's really vital, especially in the early stages, is stick to your core. When you are doing a service, really master that service before you start adding other accoutrements to that service. And one of the things I think a great C-suite, or as you said,

operations, account, etc., is to keep you grounded and keep the check and balance in your core. A CEO, an entrepreneur like yourself, I'm guessing, has a lot of ideas daily, right? What if? How come? Why? And one of the great things a great CFO does is says, timeout. How big is this, Tommy? Is this a million-dollar idea? 5 million idea? And I think organically helps you prioritize what to chase. Same thing with an operating executive. You're an entrepreneur. I'm guessing you send 25 emails a night on, what if, and what if we did this in the garage stores, and this and that, and faster.

And I think an operations, a great operations person also does the same and says, Hey, we do this. And what about this? And the timing of this, we're trying to expand here. So I believe they all play a very organic role in prioritization of key goals of the company, balance of those goals financially, balance of those goals from a throughput, and managing oftentimes a leader that is filled with how and why and let's grow, which is what makes a company thrive and become a company, but sometimes can be, I think, the distraction and train wreck if not managed by a great group of executives around you. Yeah, I've really come to that realization in the last 60 days. And there's a book called Rocket Fuel. And it discusses a visionary versus an implementer and the VI relationship. And Simon Sennett talks about it too. And this is not the author, that's the finding your why.

But there's such a true meaning behind the fact that as a true entrepreneur and visionary, yeah, I have 50 ideas. The train's never moving fast enough. I'm distracted easily. I have a hard time with accountability. I have a hard time with time management. And here's the thing. Every person that I've seen read this book, I'll say, well, I'm both. I'm an implementer and a visionary. You know, I'm a Pisces. I'm not a Leo. I'm not a Libra. I'm right-handed, not left-handed. I have brown eyes, not blue eyes. I can't have it all. So I think the biggest thing is identifying who you are and dealing with the good and the bad and surrounding yourself around people. Feel your weaknesses and focus on your strengths and make sure that you give people the allowance to be able to tell you no. And you know, it was a lot easier

for me to say, I'm going to do this at 8 million. I'm going to do this at 15 million. It's getting a lot harder because I need the whole team. And I know now that I just got to say no to myself and say, is this going to really, really help? Or is this going to distract us? And I think you're absolutely 100% on the marker to say so many businesses, they just say they're going to go out and get a boat or go out and buy some real estate. And I'm like, wait a minute, you do HVAC and you just decided you're going to be a real estate investor. Like if you just stay the course for five more years,

just reinvest into your company and what you're good at and focus on that and have a niche or really, you know, there's a company I know called zoom and they focus on just specific drain cleaning. So plumbers refer them when they don't want to do the drains and they put this scope down there and they got specialized tools to build trenches and they absolutely kill it. And because they specialize and they know what they're good at and they stayed the course and they focus. So you're absolutely dead on. And that's so funny because you just spoke to my heart when you said that, because that's me. I'm that guy that has a million things that's sending out emails. Let's do it. Come on, come on, come on.

So my pen, I know that firsthand my pen has never moved so fast as the hour I spend with you. And Mike and what and data and lead gen and growth and acquisition. Yeah, I've seen your mind work. Yeah. You got to have someone to slow me down and get me back onto the planet earth. But you know, at the end of the day, there's so many opportunities and it's just, it's realizing that Walt Disney was a visionary. Okay. But he had Roy behind him to help him. Henry Ford, same thing. Steve Jobs, same thing. And if you don't think Steve Jobs was in there saying better, faster, stronger,

what can we do better every single day, that's who he was. A hundred percent. But if he had everything his way, it probably wouldn't have been the company it is. You had to have somebody that's very strong to say no, and here's why. And if they can't say no, here's why. They're probably not a good fit for the visionary, right? Absolutely. So that's just an interesting topic because I think there's a lot of people out there that maybe have a job that decided to be an owner and their why is only because they don't want to work for somebody else. And that's not a strong enough why in my opinion. I mean, what's the vision of Alpac?

Our why is to deliver A, value for our clients like home service, and B, deliver value for end consumers that are managing a personal budget and give them the opportunity to have and secure and own and invest and fix the products in their house that they've worked hard for. So we love delivering value to our immediate client, home service businesses. And we have an extreme why and passion for having leads generated, calls generated, and people walking in your store or service is our why. And a byproduct of that is the end consumer getting a great value for the services and products that our clients provide.

So what do you say? There's a lot of home service experts and businesses that are listening that might say, ValPak, I don't even open my mail. I don't ever open. I don't care what it is. I'm not really going through coupons. What do you say to those people? What's your first response? It's unequivocally not true that we have metrics around call tracking and website attribution. And we have testimonials every day from 50 years of clients being in our envelope. We have clients, Tommy, that have been with us 30 plus years. Those people don't

surrender their marketing budgets because we don't work. It's day in and day out. In most cases, people want more distribution from us and ask, how can we get... You're our number one lead generator. I want more. Are there more envelopes to be in? What else can we do on top of what we do? So the whole perception around open rate is just simply not true. We just completed a readership survey specifically asking, do you get ValPak? Do you know about ValPak? And nearly 90% of people that are aware of ValPak and get it at their home open it. 80% of those people look through it in totality, every single offer. And on average, 4 to 5 inserts are taken out per envelope to be used on whatever product or service. And again, forget all that readership.

I can tell you case by case by case through different clients around the world. From, again, some of the biggest home service to we have national clients, we have giant banks, we have giant e-commerce companies. And these are companies that have extreme discipline around marketing metrics and we work for them. I agree. And it does work. And I'm a living proof of that. So I'm just saying, you know, I wanted to give the listeners kind of that so i'm just saying you know i wanted to give the listeners kind of a SWOT analysis if you will of the good and you know certain things it doesn't work for and here's why because you didn't give it a long enough shot to work and your ad

probably sucked so let's talk a little bit about the ad copy on there because i've seen people that they want to put the size of all their the age age of their kids, their shoe sizes, you know, and you look at it and I believe as a franchise owner, there needs to be some type of accountability to not let the person put an ad in there. But sometimes the businesses insist, but tell me a little bit about what makes a great ad in your opinion and how to build a good quality winning ad in the Valdeck. It's interesting. You just brought up the franchise piece and that they have some obligation. Just last night, I received a call

from a disgruntled person that wanted to be in our envelope. And we were having conflicts on ad copy. And we went back and said, we feel like that ad that you're going to run will not deliver the results. And we decided that they were not a great partner for Valpak because we are conscious and aware

of what works and doesn't work. And we did not want to take their money knowing that their ad would not deliver. So it's funny you say that. It's very timely. Yes, we have, again, years of knowledge on best offer by category. And this is all well known and documented within Valpak. So we would say Italian restaurant, these are the offers. We know that we're Roofer. Hey, these are the offers. HVAC, these are the offers. We know that we're Roofer. Hey, these are the offers. HVAC, these are the offers. So we know tips on color, art design, images, the exact offer.

And again, along with image and offer, we also have incredible history on right size buy, buy category that we know if you're in this kind of city and this kind of product that you should buy this many homes. And we also know length of buy that it takes X amount of time and this amount of homes to start delivering the results. So right amount of homes, right amount of time, and the right offer. And if you do that right, 95% of the time you will work in valpack and see the results you want so that's interesting to me because part of the thing we talked about when you came out here is that you'll allow me to make different offers for per zone which is 10 000 so what i find and i'm giving away some secrets here but that's what I do on the podcast.

You can change your add up to match your demographic that you're targeting. So for example, I'll use Maricopa County because that's where I'm at is what works in Scottsdale and putting a nice picture of a city or possibly even a landmark for Scottsdale and put Scottsdale's best garage door company will work a lot better than putting just a simple garage door repair up top. And then having a lot of times in ValPak, I see three, four or five numbers. And if they're in a big area like Atlanta or Detroit or anywhere LA, there is different area codes. So people like to call them different branches. But if you'll allow everyone to change their per 10,000, I don't understand why people do that. What's the purpose of putting it all on one ad, one size fits all? We do fight that. Obviously, you do it

first class and top notch. We do have quite a few clients that actually incorporate in the different cities. So they can, you know, City A HVAC, City B HVAC, City C HVAC. So they have caught on to people like and trust and feel comfortable with local. So like you, we strongly encourage versioning. I'm not sure. It's a great question, honestly, Tommy. And I'm not sure why some people... Maybe... I think the majority of humans today are time bankrupt. And I think sometimes it's time bankruptcy or lazy marketing thinking that ends up creating those simple one myopic ads. But we strongly encourage... As you said, we have over 4,000, 10,000 home increments. We ship 40 million homes in the US a month. And we can do versioning in every 10,000. And there is a product. It's a little bit more boutique and kid glove, but we can actually do four versions within a Tommy, you may get $500 off this bank and your neighbor may get 300

because they were or were not a client, et cetera. So it's pretty sophisticated from a targeting perspective and your ability to version. So what separates you other than you said, it's a huge, everybody knows Valpec, but there's a lot of mailers out there from the magazines, which are Home Mad Clipper. There's Welcome Home, You and Your Home. There's so many of them. And then their whole claim to fame is it's got a longer shelf life. What separates you from some of these other companies and what, obviously, I believe in you guys and you guys do have the biggest brand out there. But other than that, what's another? Obviously, I've never heard of somebody doing four in one zone until I talked to results. So the brand is obviously part of it. But behind that is our household selection. And we have a very sophisticated research group

that helps our franchisees in the markets that we own select those 4 million homes. And those 4 million homes are the most desirable home service homes we believe in America, meaning single home dwelling, education, income, everything that you would need around home service we have built. And some of our owners have gone house by house on Google Maps and literally Tommy picked every 10,000 home in their NTAs. So they know 100% when you come to them and you select this 10,000 homes, they are delivering primo quality potential buyers for you. Wow. That's crazy. I love that. That's massive. You know, I hear a lot now that I'm really up to times when it comes to websites, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media. And what's the best way to connect digital with the mail? Well, we do have both franchise business pages. So we run a lot of different web pages for our clients.

And we also have a ValPak app. And so speaking of ValPak digital, we do have an app that complements the in-home envelope and we also have websites. It does work better for some categories. The app works particularly well for dining and entertainment. We have home service clients on it. But I don't know if you're headed this way, but obviously, a combination of a digital strategy with a print strategy drives the premium results. And I think you do it as well as anybody. Maybe you could spend a second on how the two digital and physical relate.

And a lot of the attribution, you may lose if you're a home you may not see specifically because if somebody goes to valpac insert and reads home lawn care.com backslash valpac the majority of consumer behavior is not to put in that backslash so they'll go to home lawn care.com you may lose the attribution but from the studies we've seen, the clients we use that do both, clearly there is a correlation between consumers looking at print and then going and making that digital conversion or that digital touch with the client. So there is an incredible relationship in both the print world and the digital world. Yeah, I would add on to that. The fact is Google gets credit for everything. Google and Bing, and Bing is not really a competitor.

They are, but they're not. Google owns the majority market share of online searches. And Facebook is coming around with their few things, and Amazon's got some good things going as well. But most of the traffic gets attributed to Google, and the attribution is tough because you're right. They want to go look and how's your company rated? So they might call the Yelp number, although they found you in ValPak. And what I found is most TV, radio billboards, when you're doing the stuff that's going to grow your brand, the attribution always goes to Google. And what I found as well as when you do a TV, radio, or billboard and you say,

look for us in your local ValPak, ValPak goes up significantly. So the radio didn't get the attribution for the mailer. It didn't get it for the radio that came through the mail. So what you've got to look at is it at a whole, and if you don't look at it holistically, you're making a mistake in your marketing, but you want to make sure to keep an eye on your marketing that if you're getting some type of response and mine is usually one, you know, I try to one in five, which is 20%. So if I'm spending 5,000, I try to get 25,000 and it hit those numbers. Yeah. You gotta be good at sales. And I'll tell you something else real quick that you, you know, Mike, you gave me the podium here, but most people that do sales,

they don't know where they come up with their pricing. So they need to add their marketing. They need to add their indirect costs. They need to add a very comfortable salary for themselves and their staff. And then they need to add in their widgets or their labor hours, and then divide that into the widgets that they sell with a nice, comfortable profit, which is 15%, 10%, 20%, wherever you're at. And that's how you come up with your pricing. And if you can't charge that pricing, you shouldn't be in business. So I find that most people that don't, that say ValPak might not work is because they're not charging the right prices to make money and be able to pay for that piece. The only thing they can make money on is home advisor or a Groupon deal or a word of mouth.

And hey, look, if these people are happy with that, they're probably not the right customer for ValPak anyway, because they can't handle any more business and they're not scalable and they're working in the business every day. I heard a weird stat the other day on a podcast, 95% of all plumbers fail within the first year. And 97% of those actually never make it out of their truck, Meaning they're never in an office, they're riding, doing their own toilet repairs, hot water heaters, drain plugs, whatever. So you want to work with real businesses that have an office that you could go to that are actually working on the business all the time, that have a call center that answers their calls. And most of the business you get thrown in front of, especially your reps, which would be the franchisee reps, probably find it hard to find people that are sophisticated in strategy of marketing as well as measuring of marketing.

So yeah, we run the gamut. It's interesting. One of the things you said is fascinating that we try to... We published a white paper on is call center, vernacular, dialogue, closing that oftentimes when somebody comes to us, especially in home service and says ValPak isn't working, we record every single call tracking opportunity. So we go back and listen. And we have found some great opportunities to improve our clients' call center activity. It's vital once you get

somebody on the phone that you are knowledgeable, kind, exude confidence, and first-class. Today, I'm sure you know this better than I do. Consumers expect best-in-class service, period. And if you're not delivering that right away, you should be concerned for your business. Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you got to deliver amazing service. And most people don't take the time to leave a good review unless they witness exceptional service. And I like to leave a little something in the front of them to say, just so you know, Mr. Smith or Mr. Davis, whoever you're speaking with, we expect five out of five service. And if anytime you fall below this amount of service, I want you to let me know. And what that does is

stays in the lever review and exceptional service. So I think that this new day and age, and I think a lot of people don't like me when I go into a new city and they, they hate me actually, because they were, they were the yellow book guy. They were the guy that for the last 40 years, they owned it. They got the double or triple truck. And then they go, who the hell is this guy that comes in? He's still in our employees. He's out marketing us. He's showing up in nicer wrap trucks and he's charging way more than us. And he's ripping people off, but they don't understand that my prices come from a simple formula that says we need to make money. And the old yellow book days are dead and they still don't have a website or use it very often. And it's a scary thing for them. But once they meet me, they're like,

you're not so bad. I'm like, I know, but i know but we're coming in to be job providers and we're innovative and if someone does if i do it if i don't do it somebody will right and like and like you said you build the price up and you know that you have to deliver five out of five service which means you have to hire the best technicians which means you have to pay more which means you have to pay more, which means you have to give them insurance. So your price may be high, but it's high around marketing and quality of product. Yeah. It is high, but at the end of the day, it's real cost. And so, yeah. So I totally agree. The thing is, is that price is really, really relative when you're really thinking about it. I used to hire off a Craigslist all the time. And I realize now that I probably would never will hire off a Craigslist again, just because the service is so bad that they always got to come back. There's always an issue.

I had my roof leak and there's all these issues that come out of it. And it's just, I'd rather pay the right amount from the right company that actually shows up when they say they will. There's a difference between a ripoff company and one that charges a good amount for what they do. Because you want it done fast, you want it done correctly, and you want it done at a reasonable value for what you pay. And those are the companies that can deliver, I want it first to be fast and I want to do it right. Those are my main two. Because that's the avatar I want as a customer. Somebody that wants it done today. Yeah.

If you're comfortable getting it done at a good price, really good quality, but don't need it done right away and you want to wait a month for your garage to get fixed. Great. Wait a month for that guy. And when he goes out of town, wait for him to come back on vacation. And when it breaks in the middle of the night, wait for him to get up the next day because he's not going to do that. He already worked a 12 hour day. So you can't have all three. You got to raise the price

a little bit. And that's what we decided. We don't want the price shoppers as much as we want the people that want it done now. And they want it done right. You know, we have something similar. We often have price versus value conversations that, you know, Some of our competitors may come in and try to undercut us on price. So we are sitting down with a client and they're like, well, competitor Y is cheaper than you. And we immediately try to shift the conversation

to value. What is your return? What are you looking for? How many calls do you want? So what? They're $500 and we're $1,000. If we deliver 2x the calls, we're more valuable, correct? So our pricing scenario, we deal in price and value quite often ourselves. And when we can shift a client to value thinking instead of dollar thinking, we generally win. Yeah, that's a tough conversation to have.

And most people have a tough time delivering that. But it really shows you got to analyze the results. And if you're not making money in whatever it is, then don't do it. But here's my biggest issue too is the reason why you get good employees is the one number one thing is, am I going to stay busy with you? Am I going to have enough work to stay busy, to be able to make the money I need to make? Because if I'm sitting around most of the day, I know you can't pay me a big salary. And if it's piecework, I need to have enough pieces to make a good amount of money. And if it's hourly work, I need enough hours to make, you know, so a lot of times that these businesses, yeah, they might be doing good for

two or three guys, but if they want to get to five, 10, 15 employees in one city for that niche, they need to go to the next level and they need to spend a little bit more on acquisition. Now, if they're doing that, they're going to get a lot happier employees. And you know, there's low hanging food out there. Like I said, Groupon, there's Living Social, there's all kinds, there's Yelp deals, there's Angela's deals, you know, that stuff works to a certain extent, but that's only going to get you busy enough. And I'll tell you what, Valpak typically is not, people say they're price shoppers, but I don't, price shoppers are really Craigslist and, um, living social and group on a really big price shoppers.

Val pack is very, very good customer. And I mean, what I find with Val pack is they typically want it done, right. And they're typically not all the time, but usually they're, they're like in the baby boomer age, you know, not, but, but that's homeowners in general, right? There's not millennials. Last year was the first year ever that more millennials bought a house than baby boomers. So what is your kind of information on the analytics on who's reading it? And cause for me, I mean, I think anybody out there would say an experienced customer who owns a home has equity in the home and want stuff done right is probably the best client versus a 26-year-old kid

that just bought a house and never had anything fixed in his life. It's just a different scenario. And I'm not saying they're not good customers as well. I'm just saying the experienced ones tend to spend more money because they want it done the right way. We have the baby boomers, but it's interesting.

We're seeing the Gen X and millennials from our readership surveys, which again, it was just finished, I think two days ago. Our latest one, I'll send you Tommy, just personally, I think you'll find it interesting, but are using and love coupons. And I think it actually goes to a book I read a couple years ago called Trading Up, which is the Gen X and millennials like experiences. They like fine dining and great wines and travel. So to do that, they're very focused on where to save to afford those things. They're okay with buying an outfit at Target, which used to be maybe below their brand value, if it means they can buy the Viking stove or take the trip to Italy, they're okay with that trade-off. So with all the research from

some stuff that recently or last year was done by USPS and our readership survey is, yes, of course, the baby boomers are most entrenched in homeowning and in that spot of repairs. But make no mistake that Gen X and millennials are using discounts and specifically physical print offers. Yeah, that's interesting data. I'm curious to look at that. For me, it's a culmination of everything that works together. And it's really, I like specifics to like the book traction gives you own a vertical and there's certain verticals that I recommend. Like if you listen, there's a guy, his name is Tom Shane, and he's part of this group called the Shane company. And he's the owner and he specializes in radio, but he owns radio. I mean, literally you hear it if I, and I don't

watch, I don't listen to the radio very often, but then there's people that own TV and there's people that own Google. And I started out, I own, I did a lot of Elpac. I mean, it started out, I went to the Phoenix wide, the whole market. And I remember you guys added some zones, took some away here and there over the last 10, 12 years. But it really does work and it gets a good opening. And they're good customers. They really are. And I truly believe that Valpak does really, really well. And it's really about...

And I think there's a lot to be said, Mike, because setting a person up for success and following up is so important on your guys' end. And saying that your ad has to have a compelling offer for them to make a move today. It can't just be, and you do it. You have a lot of great reps. I mean, you don't oversee every single sales rep the franchisees do. So it's the franchise's responsibility and it's the owner's responsibility to go out and find things like you guys and understand, you know, the more that they do, the better the price gets, especially if you're in multiple markets. But, uh, it is, it's one of those things where it can make a lot of money to the right people. But what I find is thinking outside of the box and coming up with really, really good offers and a few tips is find

out who else is in the mailer. The simple thing is you call one of Mike's franchises up and tell them you want to see last month's mailer. And then go through there, take a look, find out the mailers, find out if you're competitive with the coupons they have. And I would say you do want to be competitive with those, maybe even a little better if you're just getting into them. Make sure to have your offer along the right side of it because people go with their thumb and look at the right side first. And make sure your number is super visible. And make sure you got something concise to where it's not jumbled. And it looks like a higher end company. You don't need to have a Taj Mahal $2 million house on there. You want to have a house

that's similar to the area. If you're showing a house or if you're showing anything, make it similar. Like if you're showing a bedroom, don't show one at the White House, show one of like a neighborhood that would be around there. If you're showing like shampooing their carpets. And these are little things people miss, aren't they, Mike? Oh, for sure. Because right away, again, humans being time bankrupt right now, you make that split second decision of, oh, that's too expensive for me. I wouldn't have furniture like that. They must want a fortune. Really super smart. And the other thing I can say, Tommy, with confidence is our sales force is looking for longtime clients. They know so much about the space. So if you're new,

absolutely, like you said, ask for an old ad and sit down with one of our sales reps and they will give you the path to win. So if you'll listen, be patient, ask the right questions. We are looking for our clients that stay with us. I forgot this exact stat, but if you stay with us over five months, the likelihood of you being with us 10 years or plus is a staggering number. It's like, once you give it a legitimate try, you're a lifer. It works. And listening to the consultants and the sales reps show you the right size, buy the right cetera, uh, will set you up. Yeah, no, that's true. I talked to a lot of people that the people that have success with ValPack, they just, they're definitely a better business. I mean, they understand how important

it is to book the phone call. So a lot of times you get people that just don't a simple thing. I mean, you know, I'll be out there in two, what is it? Less than two weeks to talk to you guys out in Florida. And one of the things that I would set up is, is a rollover line to a nationwide company. Like we did that after it rings three or four times, it goes to a nationwide inbound and they simple, simply get the information of the client and say, we'll be back with you in the next hour, whatever you might want to do. But my company's not answering the phone. If I'm looking for a garage repair or a roof repair or an air conditioning repair or a plumbing repair, I'm going down the list. I'm going to my

next coupon, right? I'm going through there. And if I can't find it there, I'll go through my next coupon in the newspaper. I'm going to go online or whatever it might be. But chances are you might get a little bit better because they got that coupon and they'll call back later. But still, don't take the chance. Answer the phones, number one. Number two, book the phone call. And it's a lot of people miss these things. A lot of them do. And I've got a lot of things to run by you when we're out there. but simple little things that make a lot of money that most companies aren't doing. And I'm glad a lot of the people listening, I mean, I just got a message just now via email. It says, Hey, I love what you're doing. I listened to your

podcast and you mentioned a text messaging software. I'm very interested in the next step, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's stuff that I always say, build rapport with the customer, educate the customer and follow up ref R E F. And so many times we don't do that. We don't do the follow-up. So it's hard for you to be successful as the L pack. If the business owner is not booking the phone calls and not selling the jobs and not doing follow-up. Am I right? ABC, always be closing. Yeah, yeah. Copies for closers, right? Yeah, exactly.

And again, that is some stuff. And along with obviously being an advertising expert that ValPack is, but we do have white papers on call centers and do a lot of stuff to try to help our clients pull those leads through. Yeah, it's astounding. It's very hard to be successful if you're not focused on your metrics. And what do you find in common with some of these more successful companies? Well, I do actually believe, like you just said, if you can't measure it, you can't fix it. So it is... I love that you said that. We are rigorous about measuring, obviously, all of our analytics around delivering right envelope, right day, right mailbox, etc. Because that's... We've never in 50 years missed a mail date when we say it's going to be in a market it's

delivered in common i think again it sounds a little cliche and something i said earlier tommy is just details and focus on the core i think a is an executive and b as a company, I think what delineates people from being rock stars and the rest of the pack are details. People that focus on every last customer service detail, the tone of the verbiage, every last nuance matters in consumers. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's really taking the time to understand what's best for that consumer. Well, you know, I want to, I know that time's running out for you. You're a busy guy. Your employment's all the time.

If someone wants to get a hold of you, I've got a spot, homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash ValPack. I set that up because you helped contribute to the book. Great chapter, by the way, when you talk about just mail is not dead. It's still very, very powerful. If someone that's listening just wants to find out more, that's a spot they could go. Where else can they go to possibly get to the next level and give ValPak a shot? Well, ValPak.com obviously will send you here. We also have landing pages in every city. So it's ValPak.com backslash advertising, but you can also, there's, we have 140 markets. So you can also look up ValPak Rochester, ValPak Phoenix, ValPAC Los Angeles, etc. If you want to find a local representative, or you could reach out to me,

mike-davis at valpac.com. And I sincerely love hearing from our clients. So if you are a client or you're a prospective client, I'd love to hear from you. But again, also ValPAC.com backslash advertising to get to corporate or we also have 140 markets that are excited to take your call. Yeah, that's great. And I want to remind people that micro-targeting is the key. And get your stuff correct. You know, first thing I do, if I'm going to consult a client is say, how do you know your booking rate? I say, how do you know your conversion rate? And they got all these assumptions, but it's so simple just to get on the most basic CRM to grab some of these analytics. And those are so key to getting to knowing if

you're getting better or not. I mean, it's basically going to, it's taking your temperature all the time to make sure you're healthy. What is something, so you talked about trading up. Uh, is there a couple other books that you recommend that the listeners check out that talk about, it could be anything from marketing to business. Oh boy, that kind of caught me off guard. I should send you a list of names and authors there's great books on if you're an entrepreneur on leadership and delineating leadership from management and there's elephants can dance is a great book on breaking business models there's tons of great books on just leadership good to grade and stuff like that.

But that kind of caught me off guard about directly, specifically the space we're in. But don't feel bad. I mean, elephants, elephants can dance. Is that what it's can't dance? Can dance. It's an old book on IBM and how they completely unraveled their old business model and reinvented themselves as one that stood out as sort of an eye-opener for myself. there's endless lists. One of the great things about obviously the internet today is especially at year end, there's just phenomenal resources on advertising,

marketing, AdWords, direct mail, leadership, growth, entrepreneurship. So endless resources to find a great book that fits your current need. I think there's actually one,

I'm trying to remember the exact name I read about six, seven years ago, to find a great book that fits your current need. I think there's actually one, I'm trying to remember the exact name I read about six, seven years ago, I think called Focus on the Core, which also goes back to companies' history of time unraveling when they lost their focus and the hot dog maker decided to make buns and the jacket maker decided to make gloves. And once they lost their way,

businesses unraveled. So again, I can't stress enough, focus on what you're really good at. Yeah. I always give mixed signals because people listening, there's an acquisition cost you paid to be at that house. So if you've got something like, you know, we use angle iron to put up headers, right. To put up, it's called the backhang on a garage door. So we're good at finding the board up in the drywall, right? So what else has to do that? Garage door storage solutions. We can hold them in the truck and do it, but you don't want to take away from your core. But at the same time, it's a quick upsell and you're doing the customer a favor by doing it. So there's certain ones that make a lot of sense in business, like decorative hardware in a garage where they're magnetic, everybody

carries a set. It doesn't take away from the core. And there's a lot of them that's like, what the hell were you thinking? You know, one of the guys I was talking to the other day real quick, I'll finish up here, but he said, Hey Tommy, why aren't you manufacturing your own garage door parts? And we do a little bit, we work with China and a couple companies there but I said hey you know I'm thinking about going into shoemaking too and then possibly glasses he goes why shoes and glasses I said because all my technicians have shoes and a lot of people wear glasses I said what else maybe I'll go into chewing gum because I got a couple guys that chew gum and cigarettes because I'm like look at what point do you say this is what I do I'm'm not in the inventory business. I shouldn't be in the warehouse business, which I'm actually getting out of.

And I thought, shit, I'll order 500 of these because I got them for 10 cents cheaper. And then it just sits around. So I do agree. There's so many things that I've taken on that have been a mistake. In hindsight, it's 2020, right? To say, wow, I thought I would make so much more money by producing that in-house, but now I'm just, it's amazing how many, how much money you pay of indirect costs. And I just wish people would understand, even when you got a warehouse, you're paying for the stuff for the stuff to sit on the shelving units. You're paying for the lights, the air conditioning, you're paying for the theft insurance. Oh yeah. I was going to say insurance gets a lot of people. Yeah. And then you're paying for the alarm system and then you've

got a guy running to get parts, which you're paying taxes on that guy. You're giving him hopefully insurance of some sort. You're paying for the gas in that vehicle, the vehicle, the insurance on that vehicle, you add it all up and then you're paying for the damage and the shrinkage. So I was just going to add shrinkage that a lot of companies miss that two percent three percent shrinkage depending on what you sell uh once you have inventory in a warehouse that goes up tremendously well you got the what do they call that the five finger uh i forget it's the five finger discount when people still in crap all the time and you know but it's called creative justification of why they take it.

Like I get a free keypad at a certain time of the year with my openers. And I guarantee you there's someone out there that said to themselves, you know, I just drove an hour in the wrong direction and my grandma needs a keypad. This is the least the company could do is give me this when they didn't pay for it. And boom, just like that, they condone it in their own mind. They took it and they really didn't believe they did anything wrong. But at the end of the day, it's neither here nor there,

but it goes back to that point that you really should understand your true costs. And I love focus on the core because that just makes a lot of sense. So Mike, I'm looking forward to seeing you send me that report and I can't tell you how much it means for you to come on this call. It means a lot to me and I think a lot to the listeners. Thank you. I feel the same. It's been a pleasure getting to know you this year and we're excited to have you in a couple of weeks. All right, my friend. Well, I appreciate it. Have a great day and a great weekend. Thank you. Take care. Hey guys, I really appreciate you tuning into the podcast.

I want to let you know that my book is available right now on Amazon. It's called The Home Service Millionaire. That's homeservicemillionaire.com. Just go to the website. It'll show you exactly where and how to buy the book. I poured two years of knowledge into this book, and I had 12 contributors. Everybody from the COO at HomeAdvisor to the CEO of Valpak, and of course, Ara, the CEO of ServiceTitan. It tells you how to have the right mindset and become a millionaire and think like a millionaire. It goes into exactly how to turn on lead generation.

Have those phones ringing off the hook for the customers that you want to be calling where you can make money and get great reviews. It also goes into simple things like how to attract A players. Listen, if you want a great apple pie, you need to buy good apples and you need to know where to buy those apples. And it also talks about simple things like knowing how to keep the score. You should have your financial check every week. You should know exactly what's coming in and out of your account.

You should know when to cut advertising that's not working. And more than anything, you should know how to cut employees that aren't making it for you. Listen, you might have a big heart, but this book is going to show you how to make decisions built on numbers. I hope you pick up the book, and I really appreciate everything. I hope you're having a great day. Tune in next week. Thank you.