The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Use Data to Maximize Your Marketing Results

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

David Carroll is the serial entrepreneur who conceptualized the automated Direct Mail marketing tool Dope360. He is the founder of DOPE Marketing, a marketing business that provides data and advertising services for small and medium-sized businesses. In 2011, he opened Lions Share Maintenance, a company specializing in exterior cleaning and restoration for residential and commercial properties. In this episode, we talked about direct mail marketing, market research, email marketing, audience targeting...

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 Expert. My name is Tommy Mello, and today I'm with my homeboy, Dave Carroll. I met this guy through this guy Anthony's roofing convention. He had a huge convention in town. My buddy Josh Parker, or Josh Kelly with Parker and Son. Yes, yes, yes. So Josh Kelly with Parker and Son says you've got to meet this guy, Dave Carroll. So Dave's an expert in direct mail marketing

market research real estate marketing email marketing audience targeting and marketing lists he's based out of afton minnesota he's visiting the shop here um he's come to town a couple times kicking at the apartment yeah uh he owns a company called Dope Marketing. He's the CEO of Dope Marketing. He's also the CEO of A-Type Data. Dope Marketing 360, or Dope 360 Marketing. That's our, we'll talk about it. It's our software product for Dope Marketing. And then Lion's Share Maintenance, which is a...

Exterior cleaning, home service. That's where we really cut our teeth in our entrepreneurial journey. First business I started was LionShare. Cool. So, like I said, he knows everything about marketing. He started his first business when he was 24, which is now 15 employees and about $1.2 million in sales per year. And after that, he started his first data compiling business in 2015. A-Type Data provides business and consumer data lists, including postal, telemarketing, email, information systems to businesses that want to market their services to new customers. He started Dope Marketing after seeing that data businesses needed a front-facing marketing business to go with.

He's passionate about direct mail, data, and true automation of traditional marketing. Tell everybody how you really got into the business of direct mail. You do yard signs for me. You do a lot of stuff. So why don't you just tell us your entrepreneurial journey. So what happened for me was like most of us getting started out in our early 20s or whatever. I remember when I started our cleaning company, it was me and four guys to carry a 24-foot ladder out of Home Depot to my mom's house to start our window cleaning business. We had no clue what we were doing.

And like most people, this was in the days like Facebook was just getting going, but it was a lot of the forums and stuff like that. Some of the old school guys, the dinosaurs. And what I saw very quickly was just like, you don't need to reinvent the wheel with business. It's like you look at the guys who are in a position that you want to be in and steal like an artist you know look at someone that someone like tommy is doing right how can i put my spin on it and apply my definition of success to you know whatever vertical i'm in so in lion's share i saw very quickly that it was just like being aggressive and pushing hard i'm not the first guy to invent a cleaning

business so it was like i knew i didn't have to reinvent the wheel, but the ability to see, you know, I I'm risk adverse. I'm aggressive. I like to market. I like to advertise, like to push. If you told me that you had a good idea and it cost me money, I didn't have that money. I'm gonna go sell a kidney. Like I'm gonna go figure it out how to make that happen. And so like, for me, where I had an epiphany, we talk about, you know, fast forward, we talk about fast forward. We have a local business. We got to figure out how to market, right? How to generate leads, how to hire people, how to do all this basic stuff. And for me, it was like I had an epiphany when I saw the Facebook targeting that was available, right?

Ten years ago, we were getting into this. It was the same data that you could buy on a mailing list. You know, homeowners with a home value with a certain number of kids. And it hit me that it was like best practices now is combining traditional advertising with digital advertising and be able to like put your customers on that journey to take them by. What are we trying to do? I want to take you by the hand, Tommy. I want to walk you down this path. You get to just wipe your credit card. And the way to do that is to establish trust. And how do you establish trust? You put something nice and shiny

that feels good in someone's hands. Maybe they see a yard sign. Maybe they see a Facebook ad. So we go to like best practices nowadays. What hit me in the face right away in my entrepreneurial journey was like, I need to apply best practices in cross-channel marketing to create trust with customers. because then the business you're in is kind of relative right you create that trust and the journey is kind of all the same but perception outweighs reality a first impression lasts forever and if you look like a million you talk like a million you smell like a million and you show up and you do what you're supposed to somebody signed that check for a million bucks well i love it well i'll tell you

what cleaning houses is a tough business. I mean, it's not a big ticket item. Either is garage doors for that matter. But it is scalable. I've seen some guys do it. But you kind of figured out that you really wanted to be more on the marketing side. So I've heard from people that direct marketing is dying. I've also heard that cash was going to be gone in 2000.

So, you know, talk to me about the naysayers of direct mail and yard signs and business analytics that help you really focus on the right avatar for direct marketing. Yeah, so, like, we talk about this a lot in private. It's like customer acquisition costs, right? You have all the leads in the world, but what do they cost you, and what is that lead bringing home? And what I found is that watching some some people that were very successful before we got into anything we were doing we started very quickly in our business

sending about you know first it was ten thousand and twenty five thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand pieces of direct mail every month when we would look at you know the cost to do that it was one of our highest invoices right stamps aren't cheap. Printing isn't cheap, especially when you compare it to something like Facebook. But the whole thing for me was like understanding that our best customers would come from the areas we would target consistently with direct mail. And it's not a one and done.

I'm going to send out one postcard campaign. It's going to work or it's not. If it didn't work, it's not for me and I'm not about it. It was like watching the guys that were previously successful. One of the things I would see is they were consistently marketing to targeted areas in their service area. Whether you have one location or multiple locations, you can drill down on these zip codes and use the mail to really focus on them.

And so for me, it was like being able to understand and recognize, I expedited a little bit, you know, we might've spent a little bit more than most in their second, third, fourth year when I look back at scaling that cleaning business. But it was like, when I could see month over month, our best, most high paying customers were coming from direct mail. It wasn't my favorite invoice to pay every month until I saw it was that, that it was the highest and my most favorite invoice to pay every month. You know, when I think about people that really are still looking at their mail, it's probably a little bit older demographic. I don't think it's a 22 year old.

Correct. And they have money and they like things fixed correctly. They like things done right. They've been burned in the past. So I think that's a great point. You know, tell me, there's a lot of pros to direct marketing. What are some of the drawbacks that you see? It's, I mean, it's expensive. If you're just getting started off or maybe like you don't have the biggest marketing budget, or maybe your business has been like traditionally based a lot off of referrals or things like that. And you're looking for new ways to advertise. If you're to line up every single possible way, right? You can go put out flyers or have kids in college go knocked or, you know, whatever. It's relatively cost effective. Maybe you can run Facebook or Instagram ads, or maybe you have

another method. You're getting on next door. Like we were talking about the other night, but it's like direct mail. One of the downfalls is the cost. You know, it's not going to be this magic one. We talk about this a lot in advertising, right? It's not some magic thing where you're like, I'm going to run an advertising campaign tomorrow. Now my business is going to change forever. That's not necessarily the case. The thing to know or understand about direct marketing, specifically direct mail, is like you're going to have to do this a couple times to build up your audience, to build up the trust because good marketing creates trust.

And if you can establish trust with a customer, it might be a little bit more expensive to do that for direct mail. So that's what I would see if one of the downfalls. You know, you got to start somewhere. So even if it's just sending 5,000 pieces a month versus 50,000 pieces a month, having that plan or that progression to get it there, if you're as impatient as I am, and you're watching this, because the last thing I ever want to do is wait for anything to happen.

It's like direct mail. You might have to plant some seeds, water those seeds, talk to them in the morning, get them to grow a little bit. But if you're patient enough and take the time, it'll work. But I'd say that's one of the, one of the biggest downfalls or negatives is the cost and the time that it takes to see it come to fruition. So most people don't realize how detailed you could get. I mean you could go age, male, female. You could even find out basically anything you could find out from Google Analytics or Facebook. You could find out and mail to these people.

So tell me some of the narrowed down lists. Explain to us a little bit how you can get segmented. Yeah. Yeah. So lists are cool. And like I'm the biggest nerd you guys have ever met. I mean when it comes to lists and the spreadsheets. So it's like when you go to how you can target people, let's go to something pretty simple, right?

Value of the home, age of the homeowner maybe how long they've lived you can even do if they just refinanced like we would know that month to date new movers new home buyers are really cool buyers we've talked about that a lot those type of campaigns are really powerful um being able to put a list by zip code of every person that purchased a home in that zip code and And that list happens every month. New moms. Square feet. Square footages.

You'll note they have two air conditioning units, three air conditioning, by the square feet. Oh, for the HVAC guys, that's huge. Yeah. The square footage of the home. Cause what is it? 3,500 square feet, 4,000 square feet. That's a double.

You have another unit. Sometimes that's a mini split they have. Yeah. Multi-unit versus single family going after property owners, like absentee owners oh you're getting really big you know i got the real estate business there you go you're really getting big on your little secret here i'm gonna let it out of the bag is the the google street view oh man that's some powerful stuff so we're able to take a list of let's say tommy gives us a list

of addresses of 10 000 addresses we can give you back about 90% of the image of the front of that home. And we can put that on an envelope or, you know, you see like your bills come every month. They have the window. We could put an insert with the front of the home in the insert with like a custom, a custom bid, like another really cool thing we do, a variable printing. So let's say you have your customer list, like a spreadsheet, right? Let's just use an example. Let's say it's like, you guys are huge in a pest control down here in Arizona. Everyone's got a spray for scorpions or whatever. So let's say you have a quarter acre, a half acre or a full acre, and you know, your cost that you're going to charge that person or enough to give them an offer on a postcard. If you gave us a spreadsheet, you know, first name,

last name, address, city, state, zip. And you could us a spreadsheet, you know, first name, last name, address, city, state, zip. And you could help. In the last, yeah, we can help do all that. But in the last column, let's say you put the price for each individual person. We could put that price dynamically on individual postcards. So everyone's got like a unique or a custom offer type of thing. So you're more, as we talked about yesterday at the bowling alley, was you're really specializing and really making a very particular message, like a very focused message. So here's a question I have. And this is, you've got a few different variables here. You could do a postcard or you could have a mail piece that people open.

And then you could have, see, I don't open anything if it looks if it's not handwritten and it's it but i'll look at a postcard obviously so you guys are doing cool stuff with that handwritten well yeah we'll try some stuff out yeah so talk to me a little bit about do postcards work what's the best postcard are they big are they jumbo are they small what's on them is there anything handwritten because you could print that looks like handwriting correct so tell me what is the secret about giving an amazing postcard like what is it an 8x11 or what's the right size so the idea where you want to start when you look at like any marketing campaign is like like the the omni touch the cross channel approach right You want to make your postcards look like your website, look like your door hangers, look like your business cards. So the

idea with direct mail is you want to mail at least once a month, at least once a month when you have your targeted list or your targeted area. And then you want to switch it up a little bit. So I like to start off with either a six by nine or an eight and a half by 11 postcard. Just something that's kind of that handshake, that first touch, establishing that branding. I'll send a postcard like that two to three times once a month. So let's say, let's use even numbers. Once a month for three months. So we're going to

send three postcards that are basically the same. The only thing we're really changing up Tommy is the offer. We want to see if an offer, whether it's, you know, maintenance plan for 19 bucks, a hundred bucks off multiple services, or combine this and get that. We want to give a different offer to see what the audience in that area is responding to. Because if I'm going to send Tommy a postcard once a month for three months, one of those cards he's probably going to respond to. So after three months, I can see what offer was claimed the most by my audience. And then from there, I'm going to use that data, you know, use what happened. And then I I'm gonna use that offer that stuck the best and keep using

variation which is a be testing exactly so I was on a podcast about two weeks ago and a guy stayed afterwards with me and he gave me a big secret he said the best ads that work are the get a new garage or get a new ac unit get a new roof and it's a crazy financing deal over like 10 years so it's the financing the arp it's what look who spends the most out of anybody i'd say it's either car dealerships or furniture stores okay and that you know that's what they're doing you see like looking at who's in your mailbox like who's but but the offers are always for little down and a small payment. Yeah.

So, you know, you're a big data guy. I've got a lot of questions here about a lot of stuff. But data scares a lot of people. And data is very, very powerful when used right. My biggest thing is don't think getting the right clients work if you don't have the trained technicians to show up. Amen. So, so many people spend a fortune on marketing and they go, I need customers that convert better with higher tickets. You need to train your employees more. So that's a big misconception,

but I want to talk about data. Talk to me about the biggest misconceptions when it comes to data. That it's perfect. That when you buy a list, it's going to be a hundred percent accurate. It doesn't matter where you get your list. It could be from one of the big shops, right? Info USA, a Melissa data all the way down to Dave or Tommy, the data broker. Your list is never going to be perfect. Like every phone number is not going to be accurate. Every email isn't going to be deliverable because things change and it all goes back to the power of the source right if let's go to a business list we sell a lot of lists like property managers and facility managers and people that want to get in front of more commercial work well the thing is

if if dave worked at mcdonald's and dave got let go three weeks ago when did mcdonald's update their database maybe it happens every three months maybe Maybe it happens every year. And so it's like understanding that when you purchase a list, you never want to buy your data from the cheapest source because more likely than not, that's going to mean it's like outdated or it's old. It's been sold a hundred times or whatever. Buying a list is simply expediting the fact of you building a list yourself. Now that doesn't mean that guys like me and you that have data are going to scrape Google or something and just getting all the Google my business listings and putting them on a list and selling them to someone. We license databases so like big aggregators of

data we go find them we pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year so we can internalize put that stuff together and then resell it to people and kind of give them a path to use it. So one of the biggest misconceptions of data is that I bought a list and some of the phone numbers aren't valid and I got screwed over. It's like, that's not the case. You want to have a good rapport with your data vendor. So you can ask, Hey Dave, I bought this list of property managers. I'm like, Tommy, those phone numbers are going to be about 80% valid. You know, property managers, turnover as much as fast food restaurants. You know, these people leave positions or jump ship. There was a better offer, right?

You've had technicians in your garage door. Go to greener pack, you know, whatever they thought was a better. Same thing in every vertical. So data is never perfect, but it's also like you can't buy a list and try one thing. Well, I bought a list of emails. I sent out one email. It didn't work, so I don't buy lists anymore. That doesn't work.

Hold on here. You said something important, and you're going to introduce me to this guy. We're not going to go into details, but let's talk about getting emails into the inbox so they get viewed and clicked through. Yeah. That's a tough thing. That's a job. That's a job in itself. Now, the best thing to do if you are a small or medium-sized business, right?

You're going to buy a couple thousand contacts or something like that. The worst thing you can do is, like, dump those into MailChimp, sell them out. And, like, no, you're gonna break down everything exactly the best thing you can do is treat this thing like your favorite ex-girlfriend before she broke up with you like very gentle very delicate take her on a date one-to-one i want to sit down with this email list and i'm gonna set i'm gonna if i buy an email list today of a thousand people you're sending out five a day i'm gonna go through and i and I'm going to cherry pick the top businesses I know, the ones I've wanted to work for, that building I drive by everywhere on my way to the office.

I'm like, I want to get that thing. I'm going to pick those things out of the list and I'm going to target those specifically. Something very intimate. I'm going to bring them flowers. I'm going to wine them and dine them. I'm going to hypothetically, right? I'm going to send a, I'm going to send a personalized email, reaching out, introducing myself, then I'm going to send them a piece of mail that I'm going to call them and ask them if they got the piece of mail that I sent them. It's figuring out like where the value is. But anytime that I'm

working with a list and any of my businesses, I like to take the top 10, 20, 30%, and I get intimate with it. I mean, I massage it. I warm it up. I get it ready. Now, the other part of the list where it's like, let's use an analogy that I'm pretty familiar with. Like gutter cleaning season is coming up in the Twin Cities, right? We do a couple hundred grand in gutter cleaning a year. What's my job with a list of property managers?

Hey, Karen, you got gutters? I'm Dave. We can provide a bid in 48 hours. We don't need to come out. You never need to talk to me. You have a hundred problems during the day. I can solve seven of them perfectly, Karen. Let me clean your stuff. Like that email, just going out direct, that's where you can get into like some broader email. We talked about getting you with my buddy, you know, the big email delivery where it's a broad message and you don't care as much if a couple go to spam or a couple don't hit the inbox. But when I look at that list and I got my winners, the hot chicks at the party type of thing, I want to spend my time on those girls. I'm going to, I'm going to come bring them, bring them a drink, say hi, introduce myself to

their friend, like all that stuff. Same deal. So warm it up where it's valuable but the other ones when we go into email delivery it's like you want to pick the people that you make sure the emails get me in box so you've got email marketing so when i talked to you when you were this is three trips ago now um you said you hit people from a multiple angles so talk to me a little bit about getting on not just a direct mail, but hitting them with a Facebook message, then hitting them with, tell me the different ways to hit people. Yeah. So one of my favorite strategies, it's a cross channel marketing campaign. What I like to do is I get some stuff printed. Let's say I'm going to do folders to

property managers. So I'm going to get those printed first. What I'm going to do is record a video and I'm going to put that on Facebook. It's going to be a video of me holding the folder. I'm going to upload the list of property managers into Facebook. So I'm showing them the ads. Hey, this is Dave over at LionShare Maintenance. You might be getting this in the mail in the next couple of weeks. Check this in. I'm holding it. I'm playing with it. I'm talking about it. I'm warming them up. I'm building awareness. Then I'm going to send them the folder. They're going to get that in the mail. I'm going to track it. I know I'm, you know, I'm the mail house. I know when that postcard gets to Tommy, the property manager's office, when I see that delivery, you know what I'm going to

do the next day and pick up the phone. Hey, can I talk to Tommy? Tommy, did you get that folder I sent over? You know what, Dave, I've been seeing your Facebook ads, and I got that folder. You're a pretty slick guy. I should probably give you my business. Like, it's kind of that easy. What about text message marketing? Because this is something that we dabble with, you know, and I just know I'm too big now. I think it was Midas that got hit with like millions of millions of dollars. I know a couple of big businesses that got hit with some fines, million dollar fines

because of this stuff. I also know beady eyed weirdos that have been doing this stuff for years that just happen to not get in trouble. So we don't advise that. But the idea with text message marketing is there are some laws and the laws exist because you know, we can't, you can't steal from people. It's not allowed. You go to jail. And so what happens, if Tommy's a broke guy with a prepaid cell phone,

and Dave, the savvy marketer, gets a hold of Tommy's cell phone number, and every time Tommy gets a text message, it costs him a quarter off his prepaid cell phone plan. If I send Tommy a text message that he did not opt in for, he didn't fill out a form, he didn't ask for more info, he didn't want anything to do with me, and I send him a text message, and it costs him a quarter. I just robbed Tommy as a marketer. That's why people are getting in trouble. That's why these laws exist. And so text message marketing, it's very good for communication on an opted in list. If we're going to play totally by the rules here, it's like, you got to get,, you know when you go to websites and say,

do you agree to my cookies, privacy policy, share your location, all these indications we've been getting all of 2020 because all these laws have been updated recently. You're saying, I agree. And if you say, I agree on your website, my website, whatever, you're opening up the possibility to get contacted. Now, if you have a savvy marketer and they know how to take a website visitor and match their IP address and know how to pull a cell phone from that,

when you click those cookies, you made it okay for me to send you a text message. Interesting. Now, broad 101, I would not advise home service companies or any local businesses to just go get a list of cell phone numbers and start blasting out rando text messages. You know, on that note, every single person, if you're able to build forms in talked to attorneys, if I get you on the phone and I say, hey Dave, listen, is it okay to send you text messages anytime we get really good specials for our company?

Even if I own that recording, that's not... Still, isn't it? So all I would recommend, the white hat in me, the white angel, says get an opt-in, get them to click a box

or say yes and get as much meat in that bone as possible. Right. Because, you know, it's just, but texting is the best. You're an attorney away. You're one attorney away from texting a guy to end up with a million dollar

lawsuit and I don't think any of us want that to happen. So not to scare people, I just want to spend another minute on this is what certain people do is lawyers build a practice on this they literally build class-action lawsuits yep this is all they do yep it's just like when you see those commercials that say you know have you used baby power so we know how that goes but you know I'm servicing 7,000 customers a month. And if I get them to opt in, the coolest thing is it's a very, very good thing to do, but you can't abuse it.

With Direct Mail, you could do a lot. I have the same realtors. Here's what I recommend, especially with realtors, is you keep hitting the homes. You're a specialist in that neighborhood. And you hit every single month every single month you become they got they start well my neighbors are using that person so and then you show the houses that sold in your area and how much you could get per square foot one fascinating statistic with text message marketing or text messages in general yeah it was

a uh oh who the heck did this was like yoast or Unbounce. One of those. 98.9% of text messages. Get read. No, responded to. Not even read. We know we've been left on read before. I don't respond to the crap. I mean, I must get how many from, whether it's Trump or Biden or whatever. I get a million of these.

Personal text messages. So not, throw those ones out the window. Personal text. But a personal text is still I used A1 garage door three months ago and a rep texted me to ask how I was going or a new bonus or we're doing a weather stripping

whatever like that text message falls into that category. You know I like the idea of I can get phones now from Sprint for like under $20 a month and having CSRs or your dispatchers just to send out – each of them send 10 messages a day from that phone. Or just get a Google number and voice out of that one and use the app. We use RingCentral in one of our businesses.

And you're allowed – you can't do mass text messages out of RingCentral. RingCentral is the phone system that we use. But you can, once someone's in your contact and you've communicated with them, you can send them out an individual text message. So we set a reminder in RingCentral after a certain amount of time that says it hasn't been touched. It's a quick follow-up from one of our assistants doing a text message check-in. I love it.

So it's continuing the conversation text message marketing might not be the best avenue for like cold marketing you don't want to go get a list of homeowners with million dollar homes and bang on them with text message marketing but if you get these people let's say you run facebook ads to people and you got a form filled out 50 coupon if you fill out this form off your next garage door install or whatever. Well, now you've got an opt-in. Now you've got a text message. Now you have a cell phone.

Now you can communicate with them via text message, which brings me, you know, one of my favorite ways to market right now? Tell me. Ringless voicemails. Now, I just heard there's a law against that. So, I'm not a lawyer. Tommy's not a lawyer. Look this up with your attorney.

I like ringless voicemails. Ringless voicemails were still playing in a gray area. So, the last I've heard, there was some legislation in California, like there always is, right? Sorry, guys in Cali. You got to get the short end of the stick. I heard about a little something in Florida going on. But as far as I understand right now, when you send someone a ringless voicemail, and what is a ringless voicemail? It just bypasses the rings, and it leaves a voicemail, and it pops up on your phone with me.

It's Google that pops up with an email, and I listen to it. You're sending an audio recording, an MP4 file, right to the voicemail, bypassing the whole phone system. What that means is, well, we know we didn't text you, right? I didn't take your money. It doesn't cost you money to check your voicemail. I didn't violate the Do Not Call Act. And again, look this up for your area because I didn't call you. You couldn't answer the phone when it rang and get a human because it's a recording. And so what that means is there's this gray area, and we use this a lot for direct mail, Tommy.

I'll send out, let's say to Scottsdale. I'm going to send a mailing to Scottsdale, right? And I'm going to track the mailing. I know it hit homes on Tuesday. What am I doing Wednesday and Thursday? I'm going to send a ring list. Hey, this is Dave over at A1 Garage Doors. And if you checked your mailbox,

we sent you a postcard the other day for a $19 maintenance plan that we have. If you have any questions, give me a call directly at 555- blah, blah, blah. So we're putting together a cross-channel marketing campaign using a direct mail list. We're going to add cell phones. We can usually get about 60% cell phone numbers on a direct mail list. So for every 1,000 people, we can get 600 cell phone numbers something like that so we're going to send a ringless voicemail to the people that we sent the postcard to following up providing value giving a touch and solving a problem for one of these potential

customers that's pretty good stuff and then i'm buying yard signs from you yeah and you got me a killer deal and um they're very nice yard signs i I got to tell you, I'm all about quality. My whole brand is about quality. So how many people, you know, if I wanted to order a couple hundred yard signs, and how many colors, and what is the best price, what are the sizes, how do the stakes, let's go into the yard signs.

So one really cool thing, we have a yard sign playbook that I actually wrote. It's a quick guide. It's like a 10-page thing that goes over a bunch of cool strategies. We're going to give that to the audience for free. Yep, yep. We'll put the link on there. It's going to be in the link.

Absolutely. And so in the yard sign playbook, what we cover is like some of the good strategies. So for yard signs, you're going to have two types of businesses. Some of you guys, girls, might be in the middle or whatever, but two types of businesses. You're either very aggressive like me and Tommy, or maybe you're a little bit more conservative on this side. So let's talk about guys like Tommy and myself first, a little bit more aggressive. We like to push. I like to do yard signs. When you get off the freeway at the stoplight, I like to put a sign right there at the light because you know, people are stopping.

Like if you're the type of person that's not just going to put these in your customers yards, but instead you're going to get aggressive. You're going to paint the town, right? Like my guys at my cleaning company, they get bonuses. If the city's calling us complaining that there's signs all over the place, we know they're doing a good job. They're getting the word out or whatever. So the idea is first, you want to do it on freeway exits and stoplights. And if you have those freeway exits going into those good neighborhoods or good areas, do two. Because you know those lights are backed up. You're going to sit through two lights. Do one like 50 feet back and then one right at the light. Because if people will stop,

they're sitting there, oh man, my wife was telling me to get the garage door looked at because it was squeaking or maybe I needed my gutters cleaned. Whatever the case was, they're going to stop. They're going to take a photo. They're going to call you. Another great spot to put signs in the shopping centers, especially right now with everything going on in the world and the masks and the COVID or whatever, go put them in the parking lot at Target or high-end grocery stores like Whole Foods because the employees aren't going out in the parking lots. You know the stop signs inside of the parking lots? You're putting them there.

Hey, I used to get up on my six-foot ladder, and I used to put them higher than anybody could get up. You can't. Yeah, no. The harder they are to put somewhere, the harder they are for someone to take. Dude, I used to zip-tie these things to fence it. Anything you can think of. And again, everyone's going to have their level of risk adversity or how hard they want to go. But the idea is that in the most simplistic approach,

there is a couple, you know, yard signs are a blank canvas. You're going to have huge ones. You guys got the 24 by 24, which, you know, not always necessary. 18 by 24 is the most standard sign you'll ever see. 18 by 24, they have smaller signs that are like the 18 by 12s. Smaller the signs, less the cost. Excuse me, bigger the signs, the higher the cost. And the thing to remember is that shipping bigger signs is going to be more expensive. So my advice is stay with an 18 by 24. 100 signs after shipping when you get the stakes. Everything. 500, 550 bucks.

So 5, 550. Yeah, 5, 550 for 100 signs. Something like that. Like all good things in life. You buy more. The discounts go down with volume. So I'll teach everybody a secret. If you ever want to build a list for people looking to buy a house for cash.

And I felt that this is something they teach in real estate. But what they do is they write in a big magic marker. And they put on there, selling a house for $185,000 needs work. They put the phone number. Leave your voicemail. And all they're doing is collecting data of people interested in cash. They're building a list. That's all they're doing. A list of buyers. A list of buyers. That's it. Every single person looking at that sign and says, I can make money. I want to be a flipper. And they've just built a

huge list in that area. And now they're just beating on that list. And what happened? They went online afterwards, fell out of form, and now they're texting them. Yeah. Hey, look, I don't know how, I didn't, you know, I'm not, I don't know how I didn't you know I'm not I don't have time to sue somebody for this crap but I get probably ten a day and most of time each what's the universal word to get out of them stop stop stop stop yeah yeah so you said you have some software let's talk about that yeah so what our job is it don't Marketing is to make direct mail and traditional marketing easy. And so one of the things we did is we built a platform.

You know, if Tommy wants to go send a direct mail campaign today, he's got to go find a list. He's got to work with a designer. He's got to get everything printed. He's got to work with a mail house. I mean, these campaigns can take weeks, if not months, to put together. We built a software where you can send a mailing campaign out in 20 seconds, upload a list, use our custom designs, variable data, changing things out, whatever, press a button, the direct mail is getting sent. It can get to houses in five days.

We added to this. So, Tommy, you've heard of Every Door Direct Mail, EDDM before, right? So, Every Door Direct Mail, for any of you guys who are familiar, you go on, you pick a zip code, pick your postal routes that you're going to send to. Then you've got to get the cards printed. They get sent to your house or your office. You've got to go on the USPS site, pull down the facing slips, write them all out, put them in, face them, take them to the post office. I mean, this thing's a nightmare.

We used to do 100,000 of these a month. We automated EDVM in this same platform where you can upload a list or get a list from us and send mail like that. We have a partnership with the post office. You can come on, pick the carrier routes you want, upload your artwork. We print them. We drop ship them right to the post office. So it doesn't matter if we're printing in Minneapolis, drop shipping them right here down in Phoenix or whatever.

Fast, easy, trackable, every door direct mail, simple. And then the cherry on top is our neighborhood blitz. We allow you to come in, put in an address and say, I want to send 25, 50, 100, 500 cards around this area. And we let you filter by value of home, length of residence, and if they're a homeowner or a renter. So if you do a garage door job and you want to send a first-class postcard with an image of that house or with the A1 logo or whatever it is to 500 homes and the postcard's hit within five days, boom. Neighborhood Blitz. So it's always first-class.

Neighborhood Blitz is always first-class. The other mailings you have the option to go first-class or standard, but Neighborhood Blitz, because of that urgency, always first class. So, obviously, being in the window washing Christmas light, you're familiar with Josh Latimer? Yeah, of course. Good buddy. So, yeah, he's a cool dude. Josh is awesome. I have a lot of fun with him.

Awesome guy. Absolutely. Is it something like Send Jim? The only thing similar with us and Send Jim is the same thing similar with SendJim and the UPS store. We both send mail. Okay. And that's it. But as far as – we get asked that all the time because, Josh, they built a great piece of software. We do it a little bit different.

We get in more with the data and the targeting and the EDDM and the – It's cool. Every tool's got its uses. It's like that next level. Exactly. But the most similar thing – we have to answer this all the time, we're as similar to them as we are to Xerox. So you just got to beautifully use your interface to get it fulfilled.

We understand how hard that print can be. Oh, dude. I used to go to the post office. I don't, I've got killer ideas. The hard part is the harder the idea, the more it gets thrown in the backseat. Yeah. And it doesn't get done. Yeah, exactly. ideas the hard part is the harder the idea the more it gets thrown in the back seat yeah it doesn't get done so exactly yard signs are so tough and you've been dealing with my yard signs and they haven't been easy but i said it's all front loaded because absolutely i got some cool

things with my manufacturers that i'm gonna make it you gotta make it a habit you gotta make it automated the consistency and that's what i appreciate so much about what you put together because you facilitated so that every one of your locations is getting the signs they need on delivery right away. And then I figured out a way to make sure I inspect what I expect, make sure they get placed at every house. Absolutely. And that's the biggest thing is the consistency in marketing. You know, we're all running our businesses, wearing 100 hats, putting out fires, moving and shaking. When you can get these marketing campaigns systemized, and that's what we pride ourselves in at Dope Marketing is, Tommy's got a couple projects, right?

He knows he can call me and go, Dave, we've got to get this done. And whether the turnover time on the project is three days, or maybe some of them take three months, once they're done, they're done, and they're continuing. Tommy's not the type of guy that tries something once and is like, oh, maybe this didn't work or didn't, I've never tried it. There's a plan behind all this stuff to have it happen consistently because that's what breeds trust. Well, you know, the deal is the one thing you haven't mentioned,

which is my favorite thing of the world, is Google. Amen. And Google takes time, especially SEO. And you need a good site. is Google. Amen. And Google takes time, especially SEO. Yeah. And you need a good site. You know, my cousin, Rachel,

awesome chick, she found me a trainer because she's a trainer in Chicago. Yeah. And she's like, I went through a hundred of them

because, first of all, a lot of them won't come to your building so this guy comes to my shop. Yeah. But the cool thing is, she's like,

his site was amazing. It showed all of his awards and the dietician and the habits he creates. And having a good website, all that that means, if you're direct mails, it'll work a lot better. If you got a good online reputation and you got a presentable website. Because people just want to do the research. Google gets a lot of the credit for this stuff. That's why I sit like this next to so many people that want to sell me marketing. And they go, yeah, you know, the stats probably aren't that accurate.

And I'm like, wait a minute. If I can't even get a 10 to 1 ratio at least, then don't try to tell me Google's getting all the credit. You know, TV, radio, billboards are different. I don't even put my number on them. Like my number is not up. It's trending, right? It's just the, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know what we're switching to with the vans?

Is I'm switching to local numbers. I got my 844-81-GARAGE. We talked about this, the call tracking. Well, tracking is huge. 844, but 844-81-GARAGE, but people that, my clients that I love the most, the 65-year-olds. Yeah. They don't like to call an 800 number. No, they don't.

There's no intimacy. It's not personal. It's not, it's not, you're not supporting your neighborhood. Exactly. It's not the local house. We do something really cool, and this is going back to what you were asking about our software. It's another really cool thing we do with the yard signs we print. So in the Twin Cities area, we have

a bunch of different area codes. You know the first three digits in front of your phone number? Yep. So we have 651 in St. Paul. We have 612 in Minneapolis. We have 952 in the local suburbs. What do we do with our signs, Tommy? We put a tracking number of all the signs we put in St. Paul. It's a 651

number that forwards to our office. Minneapolis, it's a 612 number. You got to. You got to. And here's the big thing. I've looked at coupons, Valpac, Money Mailer, and they'll have nine freaking area codes. And it's like, if you're mailing to this area, don't you understand that you can put just the one area code for that?

That's it. Because I don't want to call this huge national company. Personally, I kind of do like to call national companies because they've got their stuff together. Yep. Stuff together. But, you know, we've gone over a lot of stuff here. And this is, like, this is a lot for the listeners. And this is the first deep dive i think on the podcast we talked about kind of everything from direct mail to postcards to uh

all postcards and yard signs so there's a lot of information here and i want to get as much from you as possible all your 10 pagers anything we can put on the website absolutely and um possibly set up a deal we We haven't done it yet, but if you go to dopemarketing.com forward slash HSM, Home Service Millionaire, we'll probably have

some cool deals for you guys. Listen, you got to just give it a shot. And the thing is, he nailed it on the head. Consistency is the key. Now let's go into the final chapter

of the podcast here. This is the fun stuff for me. If you were a porn star, I'm just kidding. I was on a podcast the other day. Actually, let's do this. They said, if you were a porn star, what would your name be? And I said, I watched Rocky the day before. I said, Nostradamus

Balboa. And I don't know where that came from. But what would you be? Cactus Jack. Cactus Jack! I'd go over my sneakers. Alright, nice. So we'll wrap it up here. First thing I ask is if anybody wants to reach out to you personally,

what's the best way to do it? DopeMarketing.com Everything's directed to our website. Facebook page, our team manages the Facebook page as well. So there's DopeMarketing, so DopeMarketing.com and then if they want to just shoot the shit page. Our team manages the Facebook page as well. So there's Dope Marketing. So dopemarketing.com. And then if they want to just shoot the shit with you, what's the best way? Yeah.

Message directly on the Facebook page. Let them know that you saw us on Tommy's podcast and my team will connect us directly. I'm not big time people. I'll get on the phone with you directly and you don't have to go through seven layers. Message the Facebook page or say, I saw Dave on Tommy's podcast. I got a question for him. The team will get you with me directly. And the next big question I have is three books. I ask every single person on the podcast, give me the three books. And I told you what you couldn't say. The E-Myth, you know, I love the E-Myth. It's my favorite business book and it's probably everybody's. It's like a go-to, but I just – that one comes up almost every podcast.

And, you know, what's cool is Michael Gerber was sitting in the same seat you're at. You can't sniff it. Can you smell the cherry? So I'd say one of the best books that I always go back to, and I actually read it with my kids now because it's like a quick two-hour read. It's called The Go-Giver. The Go-Giver. The Go-Giver. If you need a quick refresher on why you're in the position you need or just great book, quick read, The Go-Giver is amazing. A book that I've been going back to a lot lately is Dan Kennedy's Marketing to the

Affluent. Oh yeah, it's a great book. In times that we're in right now when you can understand the importance in any business of keeping a consistent message to the affluent because it doesn't matter, depression, recession, high economy, whatever. Isn't that a No BS book? No BS. No BS. No BS Guide to Marketing to the Affluent. Yep. That is one of my favorite books in the world because the gems in there you can go back in there and uh you you can

go back in there and really really dive in deep and understand that if you focus a good percentage of your time or any percentage of your time on the rich on the rich with them they will but look i've got a customer that and i know you got to have your third book and we got a time for this so i got a customer that gives me a million bucks a year why don't i just go get a couple hundred of those that's a quarter billion dollars so i understand what you're saying but i'm gonna hire a team to do that there you go and and the big thing is if you do all these things none of them get done if you're responsible for everything none get done so i was thinking about this the other day in my break room because the garbage wasn't closed and something was messy and i'm like if i have one person this is one of their sole jobs to just do this it gets done um but i

love that book too i mean literally the affluent it's the 80 20 pareto but it's just it works it works to go after the largest amount of your money comes from 20 of your clients and just pick up those zip codes right one of the easiest things you can do, or here's a little pro tip, take your customer list, export it from your CRM, service type, house call, whatever. Download your customer list. Sort it by zip code. Take your top three to five zip codes that you're already doing work. Get a list of homeowners in those zip codes and focus more on it.

Just duplicate the results. Our job as a business owner is not to go, as much as we believe it is, it's not to go out and reinvent the wheel. Figure out what you're doing well. Do more of it. And spend more time on those applications. This is what's called regression testing. And what you do is you compile all of your data.

You take the largest amount of average tickets. You find out who that avatar is. And what you're going to find out is there's significant data in the outliers that will tell you is it age is it income is it credit score is it did they refinance and as you start to put those two and two together here's the thing if you're like me you got work too much work yeah and i started turning my marketing brain into recruiting right recruiting yep now here's it you could kill two birds with one stone recruit and advertise same time hey listen we're always looking for great employees if you're always looking for great employees. If you're looking for a great job and you have a conscience and you're ethical and you're

moral, A1 is the place to go. So you can kill two birds with one stone. Every time we do that, even in the local Facebook mom groups, right? We're looking to scale up for the fall. We need some new technicians. Every time we post about the employees and hiring, you get a handful of leads from that same post. Oh, I saw you guys were hiring, and I kind of need this done at my house. You know what?

I could do this podcast all night. You know what's so fun is I'm just always thinking about cool things. And there's these – I'm not going to give this one up, but I'll give a clue to it. So you could go to groups, and there's scanners that actually scrape, and they'll pull the email so you could retarget because you can't advertise in groups. Correct. But there's ways to get around that.

They'll pick you up quick. Yes, there are. Well, there's no way. You can't serve up ads. Correct. And you're not supposed to be posting things in there that are... I got a little trick for that, too. Well, the before and after is in, like, the city of Gilbert,

but we're going to have to... Yeah, yeah, of Gilbert, but we're going to talk about that. What's your bonus episode? All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So third book. Third, I got to split. So Rage, I don't know if anyone else has a hard time getting along with humans all the time or gets upset about things. The book Rage is a great book to identify, you know, whether you, we're not saying that everyone in the world has anger issues, but you can identify some points of kind of rationalizing that like that chick

with five kids in the car with out of state plates and the Kia minivan that's all dinged up that cut you off. Like she thought she was right too today and being a little bit more compassionate about that type of thoughts. That and then negotiating like your life depends on it from the FBI guy. I don't know. That's – What's it?

I don't know. I'm not taking the outcome. That book is called – Dang it! The Yellow with the – Yeah, yeah, yeah. That book is – Oh, man.

I just freaking – Come on. I can't think of it right now. Well, now you guys got some homework to look it up. You just look up the FBI negotiator. The FBI negotiator, yeah. Yeah. He's looking it up right now um so between that

and rage it's my my third combined he's got it he's going for it there it is never split the difference all right we got it that's that's uh never split the difference is like you learn how to negotiate and there's so many key aspects to it of like you know I really like to watch negotiate is the pond stars oh dude I love it because the first thing they ask is how much we're looking for it well tell me how am I supposed to do that yeah well yeah then you ask questions here's the thing I owe I've sold I bought and sold thousands of cars yeah and the one thing I've always said is when I negotiate with somebody the first thing

I'll ask them is what you know I know the price and it's hard because you don't first thing you do is beat it up you beat it up and you go what are you looking for dad dad and I was right my dad a lot of the time like dad this thing needs tires and he's like Tommy that's not the worst yeah any CV joints it needs this it needs a windshield that needs. I'm like, Dad, this thing needs tires. And he's like, Tommy, that's not the worst. It needs CV joints, it needs this, it needs a windshield, it needs this. I'm like, Dad, how much are tires for this? He's like, 700 bucks. So I'm taking this off the bill and they're going, and I make ridiculous

offers. Like on a $4,200 truck, I'd offer 600 bucks. And I'd meet, but they'd go, yeah, right. But now, they're open more to that $ you gotta get them to where you want it it's fun that that and that book will will help if for anyone whether you do the sales in your business or the never split the difference never split the difference will give you the

the ammo you need one of my biggest funny i was just talking about splitting the difference sometimes it works out one of the biggest things that I learned from that book, one of your biggest negotiation tactics you use is like, well, tell me, how am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to do that? I like that. Tell me, you want to give me $600 for this car?

How can I do that? Well, you know what I always say is if a doctor, sell like a doctor, first of it's not like a doctor first of all you're telling a doctor I told you this because the deal is it's called malpractice if the doctor sell if they diagnose you wrong they lose their license so we they gather Intel they're learning about chart you're getting the right way here give the right prescription of the clients and you'll have clients for life and the secret is learning Give the right prescription to the clients and you'll have clients for life.

And the secret is learning with the clients that need the most prescriptions. You know what I mean? Bingo. Like the big ticket sales. Those affluent homeowners. Affluent. Affluent's a key word here. You know how many books I have? I just bought 10 books with the word affluent in them because I'm obsessed with I have too many clients.

I need less that pay more. Another thing we were talking about last night is getting that where you look at, not for you, but any business owner, right? It's like the best problem you could have is too many leads. You have a good problem to solve. Well, yeah. But now you can look at that and say, yeah, how can I identify the clients where it's the lowest cost of acquisition, but the highest profit margin and they focus on duplicating. Yeah.

Or I don't care if it's a high cost of acquisition, if I'm getting a huge return, it's all relative. It's percentages. Think percentages instead of dollars. Absolutely. You know, the last thing I do, and I got to tell you, this is the first time I think I've had somebody that can keep up with me, maybe even me as that far as energy goes I always give you the last five minutes or three minutes whatever you need is usually about taking action going out there and doing something that's gonna motivate

somebody to change yeah there's a good book that I also wanted to recommend and I'm reading it right now it's called willpower and the one thing is a lot of people have willpower and it's hard for four hours a day we all are fighting our willpower usually it's about food first yeah then it's about i guess sleep and then there's sexual things that the book talks about um i don't know anything about that um but anyways uh we'll give you the last hurrah here and i might add something at the end so go ahead and take us away take you away tommy that's big shoes to fill. So the best advice that I could give to anyone, I reflect back on, you know, me starting my first business or looking at people that they were where I wanted to be

and getting really impatient about that. Like thinking that like, you know, we all believe that we're one of the smartest people in the room. We all know that success is kind of relative because if someone's done it, we can go do it. We're all humans. Disciplining. I know for me, like disciplining myself and realizing that like the good things that I want take a little bit more time. Like they all make sense in my head, but it's the execution, the willpower, the strategy of like making something happen and making it come to fruition. One thing that I can reflect back on is like in the first couple of years of my home service business was just seeing other people that I thought, whether it was like our business is better or we provide a better service or we're more capable or we should have

this success, really identifying the things in your business that you're good at and that you're not good at and being humble enough to remove yourself or add other people in your business whether you can afford it or not but removing yourself from the things that either you're not good at it's easier to say the things you don't want to do but the self-awareness that comes from like understanding like i'm not the guy that's great in the day-to-day of a business like the monotonous operations the customer service the operations the management the patience with things messing up that i've spent you ever find yourself as a business owner you're like you get so mad when things go wrong because you're like i've spent

so much time on fixing this and it still goes wrong and i just can't believe that i have to go back and like i know for me i have to remove myself from those type of discussions or those type of situations because I don't bring the right vibe to the table when a guy who just wanted to show up and do the best that he could like everyone makes mistakes and then I find myself like not tearing someone down or yelling and swearing or being a jerk to a person, but being very hard on the company for not having the system in place that I felt like I've already invested the time in and it should work exactly like I want it to. A lot of responsibility comes with a tax ID and the ego that comes along with going to get an EIN. It's like, I think that's what the E stands for. EIN is ego.

It's like, you got to remember to remove the way you feel from the decision making. It's just business. And whether, you know, we'd all love to say it's nine to five. That's not really true. I think a lot of us are ticking all day long. But it's like really being able to understand that like it's your responsibility as a business owner to set like everything's on your shoulders. No one else messed up. The best thing you can do is take responsibility is when things go wrong. And so being able to understand in your business where you play the best role for wherever your business

is at. You could have started yesterday, 10 years ago, a hundred years ago, whatever. Understanding your role in your business, removing your ego, removing the things that may be, whether it's the things you're good at, the things you aren't good at, but coming to terms with the fact that like, we really do get to do what we want to all day. And that's my favorite thing about being a business owner is like, I get to do what I want to all day, whenever I want to, because I put myself in that position. And it's like, well all that takes time though absolutely what I would say is don't forget to add to that is build an orange

shirt and start hiring the things you hate the most right that's accounting but you wear all the hats from day one and hire them before you're ready to hire but higher on your weaknesses yeah I think the biggest thing for me was a personal assistant and more because look it it was able to amplify my time. Yeah. So, dude, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you coming on, bro. Good stuff.

Thanks for having me. So check out. We're going to have some deals. Go to dotemarketing.com forward slash HSM. See you guys later. Thanks. Hey, guys. I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, I'll see you guys later. Thanks. 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.