The Home Service Expert Podcast - Why Home Service Owners Lose Customers Before They Ever Pick Up the Phone

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://homeservicefreedom.com/ Senja Spellman is a fractional CMO who has spent over a decade inside the marketing departments of companies like Tundra Land ($100M), Leaf Home, Bath Works, and Home Genius Exteriors. She took Bath Works from $12M to $25M in one year — now pacing $52M. Today she shares exactly how home service companies can build brand trust, track TV attribution, grow with zero ad spend, and disrupt in a market where everyone looks the same. In this episode: ▸ Why 66% of customers pick by trust — and only 7% by price ▸ The TV attribution model that ties every spot to a lead ▸ How to use ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to audit your brand visibility right now ▸ Brand vs. direct response — which one your business actually needs ▸ The 97% rule: why branding matters more than most owners think ▸ Omnichannel data strategy: how to hit the right person across mail and CTV ▸ Marketing budget benchmarks: growth (20–22%) vs. maintenance (15–18%) ▸ How cause marketing builds internal culture and external brand ▸ Why marketing is meant to disrupt — and how to stop blending in -- 🕐 TIMESTAMPS 🕐 -- 00:00 — Senja's Background 07:06 — TV Attribution Model 15:31 — LLM Brand Visibility 22:48 — Home Service Differences 30:25 — Marketing Budget Benchmarks 36:10 — The 97% Rule 41:30 — Omni-Channel Data Strategy 49:50 — Private Equity Risks 57:07 — Brand Story Process 01:03:55 — Lead Gen Quick Wins 01:12:05 — Disruption in Marketing 01:17:55 — Senja's Contact Info 🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://homeservicefreedom.com/ Check Out My Social Media: Tiktok ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello Instagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/ Facebook ⟶ https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/

And 66% of people said trust and reputation, and only 7% said price. They don't trust you to pay the expensive price. If you take an owner, put him or her on the screen, and they say, this is my reputation, this is my face, my family, I'm standing behind my product. That's how you get scrappy. I think the personal brand of the founder is more important than the company itself. Marketing is doable, no matter your size. If you're a one-man show, if you're a $500 million company, start with everything that you own.

All right, guys, welcome back to the home. expert podcast today I got Senya Spellman with me she is an expert at lead generation performance marketing brand reputation and pricing power brand story TV cTV strategy multi-channel marketing PR and community campaigns board sponsorships CRM and first party data based out of Wisconsin she's a fractional CMO basically that knows everything about home service the episode thesis is marketing feels daunting to most home service owners it doesn't have to be. Even a one-man operation has tools available to them right now. Referrals,

reviews, brand storytelling, and smart channel strategy. Sanya has spent the years inside of the marketing departments of companies like Tunderland, $100 million revenue, leaf home seven brands, bathworks, and home genius exterior delivering 10x increase in TV leads and moving set rates from 12% to 34%. Now she embeds inside of companies as a fractional operator showing them the marketing is more accessible than I think and that their reputation is directly tied to their pricing power and that telling their brand story is the right way to change everything. This episode makes marketing feel achievable, not overwhelming.

It's great to have you here. Yeah, I'm so happy to be here reading off that whole list. I'm like, wow, there's a lot of stuff that I've done, so I'm excited. I love this stuff, and it's perfect timing because we're like diving deep into marketing at the company right now. Yeah. And we're doing all the way above. We do a lot of TV, a lot of CTV, a lot of radio.

So a lot of display ads, a ton of money on PPC, multi-channel GMB strategy. Let's just jump in. Yeah, let's do it. You graduated with a marketing degree, moved from Peru to teach English, came back and started at a dental office. Yep. How did you end up as a VP of marketing help drive home? Oh, gosh.

Well, my entire career, my goal is always to fill seats. And so whether I started in private equity dental, which is a dentist has X amount of patients that they can see a day. Let's get those chairs filled, move to disaster restoration. Same thing. We have crews that need to have jobs to do. So let's get those in the door. And then it was a pretty natural transition to home improvement. I actually started at Tundra Land Home Improvements with Brian Gottlieb and Amy Zimmerman two super huge powerhouses in the space. You can see them a lot in Cloud remodeler and speaking at these other events. And as soon as I met Amy, I saw this beautiful, powerful, blonde woman. Like, I'm a

you work in home improvement? Like when I think of home improvement before I was in the industry, I thought overalls, maybe some cocking on there, you know, some tears and riffs, but it really is an industry that's so lucrative and has so much potential if you know how to do it the right way. So I went to Tundraland on site. Brian Gottlieb is the most magnetic person in the world. He sat me down. He's like, what can we do to get you on the team, whatever you want? He's all over the place and super exuberant. And so I said, well, this is where I need to be. And we were acquired by Leaf Home after that at Tundraland. And so Amy and I had the opportunity to replicate this amazing funnel metrics that we were doing at Tundra Land at Leaf Home for the acquisitions.

So after that, it was just kind of kind of organic. We had a great time managing those brands. I felt like I kind of wanted to have more autonomy and really help a brand have super huge revenue growth and scale. So we took Bathworks when I was a CMO there from 12 million to 25 million in about a year. And now they're pacing for 52. I just got a text from the owner actually this morning saying, you set up these great systems to help us keep thriving. So it was kind of a natural transition to just stay in the space. It's fast pace. It's aggressive.

And you just have to be scrappy. And if you're scrappy and creative, you can make it in this industry. Yeah. No, marketing is the lifeblood. You know, I got a buddy of mine that I was asked, what's more important marketing or sales? What do you think? I'm going to say an answer that the marketers won't like. I think the marketer's job is support the sales.

Yeah. So I think that one can't work without the other, of course, right? If the sales team isn't closing, well, I have no marketing budget to spend. But if I don't have a really strong brand, well, then that salesperson in the home has to fight 10 times harder than the other guys that might be a renewal by Anderson, a coaler, what have you. So one goes without the other, but I think when sales does really well, I'm stealing this line from Eric Peschke, the CMO is in techs. But when sales does really well, doesn't mean that marketing is doing well. But when marketing is doing really well, it doesn't mean that sales is doing really well. So they all have to kind of work together.

Yeah. So Bradley says if you got 10 of the best salesmen, so you got 10 salespeople. And they're sitting around combing their hair waiting for leads. Yep. But you got 10 of the best marketing people. The leads are flowing. I think the main thing, marketing tends to get blamed for everything. I need more leads.

I need more leads. Yes, we do. But they're not, the booking rate's horrible. Yep. The conversion rates crap. The average ticket sucks. And obviously sales are the lifeblood because usually you're taking a comm. You're taking a percentage of revenue.

100%. 100%. And I think the way that you can actually make it work is by having a really great relationship with your sales leader. Whenever I'm in an organization, I love having really open rapport, sitting down with my sales leader on a weekly basis saying, hey, I'm seeing this source, let's say website, for example, that normally has a close rate of 75%. Right now you guys are closing at 30%.

What's happening? Are you hearing something that's consistent in these appointments that maybe they're saying, oh, I thought I was signing up for free windows or, oh, I thought that I was getting X amount off and you're only giving me Y. And that type of conversation, I think, is what makes that dynamic with marketing and sales works. Like you're all taking ownership for your part of the puzzle. Yeah, 100%. And they got to work really, really close.

Marketing and sales is everything. You said home improvement is a $500 billion industry that most marketers overlook. Mm-hmm. It's such a big industry. It's huge. Yeah. It's huge. I feel embarrassed to say that when I graduate with my undergrad, I thought I want to work for

Lulu Lemon. I want to work for an Apple. I want to work for Nike, some of these brands that are flashy that were relevant to me in my generation. And I never would have thought I was here. But then I realized this industry, we actually do so much more than some of these other brands when it comes to the bottom line and making every dollar count. I just got done consulting with one of my clients.

They're a $240 million flooring company, and they've been tremendously successful. But one thing that we're focusing on now is what is the dollar actually doing? These companies, they'll spend money on TV, on direct mail, on this and that, but there's no tracking, there's no attribution. It's hard to get, how do you get attribution?

CTV's easy, but with TV radio, I guess the main thing is you're looking at all your other sources, looking at Google searches, how's matter performing, how's your mailers enhanced? Yeah. I mean, what do you do to actually get attribution for TV and radio?

I have a really cool model for TV, actually. And I don't want to talk over everyone's head because I know that there's different levels of folks listening to this. So I'll just kind of simplify it here. You're familiar with TV. And in TV and broadcast, you have these things called clearance reports. That's basically saying the time that your TV spot ran. You can request those from the station at the end of the month.

And if you have a CRM that collects a data of when the lead came in from the time to the second, you can actually match that within the time that the TV spot ran. So I have a window model that if it ran within 10 minutes of the spot airing, I give that spot 100% attribution if it came from a source where they would have to know the brand to get to us. So things like direct website traffic, organic social, branded paid search, because you're not just going to somehow miraculously think of the name, you know, Bathworks without seeing an ad ad for it. And then I have a secondary window of 11 to 20 minutes after the spot ran where I gave it 50% because obviously sometimes it takes folks a while to act on it. And then everything else is just the halo effect,

right? Is it lifting our sales rate? Is it lifting our set rate in other areas? But that model has worked actually really well for me. And I ran it with, I can't just close the company, but a really large company that's privately held pacing over $500 million. And we saw 35% growth in the lead flow actually month over month when we were running this TV. campaign and they had never ran TV before. So it's like if we can do these direct attribution leads and it's increasing by 35 percent, well, then something's happening with the TV. No, 100 percent. I feel like do you think all TV and radio should be primarily direct response with a good offer? There's a great book by Dan Kennedy, no BS about direct marketing.

And you can get leads. I've always used it more to enhance the brand and really stand out in a crowded market for, you know, the Roy Williams. trying to make sure like tell a story and don't necessarily make an offer. I think it depends on the position that you're in. So if you're a company that needs leads immediately and you're really hurting with your cost of marketing, you don't have maybe the extra profitability to put towards a branding marketing campaign, then go with a more direct response approach and you can do it. But if you're looking to create a legacy brand like A1 did, I think you guys did exactly

what I would recommend for a legacy brand building, which is telling you your story and telling it a way that resonates with people. However, what I've been doing now with folks that are in like the 10 to 30 million spot that want to be that legacy brand, but also can't necessarily afford to only do branding, we do a combination. Yeah. So we'll run a 30 second spot that's storytelling and then a 30 second spot that has really strong offers and we'll serve it to the same audience on CTV. So they get to hear the story and they say, wow, I really like this company. They seem honest and genuine. They're local. This guy has a kid on my little league team, like all of that connection.

Oh, and now I also get half off installation. That sounds like a great deal to me. No, killer. Yeah. I love that. And I like the, you know, what's crazy is I watch a lot of Fox News. I'll watch CNN. I'll just, and I watch all the commercials.

And Leaf Fitter is freaking nutty. I mean, they're on every other. Yeah. And then I see Anderson. Both of them are like, and I'll catch one of mine probably for every 15 of theirs. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I do take a grain of salt when I get feedback from people that are able to lean on really strong brands to talk about their metrics. So at Qualify Remodler, we have a lot of

people that speak that are Kohler dealers or jacuzzi dealers, exactly like you mentioned, Leaf Filter Renewable by Anderson, and they say, well, our set rate is 35%. So then the little guys that have no brand name, they think, well, what are we doing wrong? We suck. We're not at 35%. We're at 20. Well, you don't have a hundred year old brand to lean and be able to use it. that. So how do you get scrappy? You know? Well, how do you get scrappy? I love storytelling. I love putting the owners on camera. I think that's a huge win, especially because this industry has so much distrust. There was this stat that I was reading the other day from the Better Business Bureau, and they were asking people when it comes to home improvement, home services, what do they

care about the most? And 66% of people said trust and reputation, and only 7% said price. And in our space all the time, we say, well, it's too expensive. It's too expensive. They just don't trust you. They don't trust you to pay the expensive price. They don't trust that you're worth the amount that you're putting out there. So if you take an owner, put him or her on the screen and they say, this is my reputation. This is my face, my family. I'm standing behind my product. That's how you get scrappy. The large companies, they can't do that. They're so far removed from the communities that they're serving because they have a headquarters and who knows where. And all these little, areas around that they haven't even probably been there since they acquired it, you know? Do you think that the small guy has a chance with AI and where we're headed? I do. I think they have a chance because there's so much ability to learn on your own time and with your with your own self-commitment. So right now we live in a day of technology where you can learn literally anything, anything you want. But just like just like fitness, you have to actually put the in work and energy in to make it happen. You can't just say, oh, I bought the creatine, I bought the

protein and I got my gym memberships. Now I'm 12% body fat. No, you have to show up and do the work. Same with learning AI. Take a day every day for 15 minutes and just learn, dive in, ask it questions and it'll tell you one of my, like that same flooring client that I work with, the owner is huge in AI and he's actually creating courses for his team and having every single person sign up and do these Claude AI courses so that they can all be good at the program too. Yeah, you know, a lot of companies are making their team use a certain amount of tokens. And if they don't, they're no longer on the team. They're just getting uncomfortable with it.

Yeah. That's what service saying does. That's a really good idea. You know, PPC is getting, I just got a report that our PBC campaigns are 35% down on volume and about 40% higher. And that's just this last month. Yeah. And I said, how in the hell could we be paying this much for our own keywords? Yeah.

We're paying more than generic keywords. Like garage door. For your branded? Yeah. Well, then you guys are doing something really great with your brand. It's annoying, though. It is annoying. Because we're, everyone's bidding on our keywords.

We became the roto router of garage drawers, especially in our big markets like Phoenix. And I'm like, how could we be, because our quality scores through the roof. Yeah. How is that even possible? Well, I have a question. Are is your lead flow down by having this PPC channel down? Are you guys suffering in that sense? Well, we're in 40 markets. Yeah, but overall your revenue is growing and your leads are everything's good. We got five markets that are down that we need leads. Yeah. There's no room.

The only thing we could do is doing a lot of CTV, a lot more mailers, and then we're doing PMAX. Yeah, maybe this is a hot take, but I feel like that means that you guys made it. If your branded keyword is so high, I think you're in the space now where even with the sponsored messages of people saying, well, what about this garage or company instead or this one? They're scrolling down past those sponsored of other people and going to you organically. So we're going to do a test to only do the LSA and make sure we're popping up there but not do the paid PPC. Well, and you know, chat GPT as of two weeks ago, just released advertising with them.

Yeah, that's 100 grand a month, right? It's five grand minimum that you have to commit to. I don't know depending on maybe your service area, but I know that Angie is advertising with them right now. I've been doing some research there and obviously generating, they're generating leads to their own verticals. So maybe that could be a pivot because people are no longer looking for their information just on Google.

100%. And we've been really focused. We actually did a huge study on how we're coming up on the LLMs. Oh, awesome. And we've, you know, it's a mix of PR and winning a order. And there's a lot. I mean, what helps on perplexity is obviously we got a lot of backlinks for answering a lot of questions. I'm looking for every single opportunity right now. And you know, you think, man, that those guys are big. They're spending $5 million a month or whatever. It's close to that. And I'm like, man, I still feel like we're struggling.

I still feel like there's so many opportunities. There is. And one thing I wanted to do when we were talking about filming this podcast is give people actionable takeaways that they can do no matter what revenue size they might be if they're a business. I would encourage everyone right now, go on Claude, go on Gemini, go on chat GBT, the big three and ask them about your business. Tell me every single place that you can find A1 garage reviews, every single place that you can find someone talking about A1 garage experience and make sure that you're actually taking what you need to do to make those third-party review channels be really strong and robust.

I know in our space we hate Yelp. I hate Yelp, no offense to Yelp, but it's hard, it's hard to do. And right now, chat, at GBT is primarily pulling from Yelp. So you're getting fed these reviews that they're saying your business is 2.1 stars, but maybe on Google you have 4.9 because Google for a long time was the only thing that you had to care about. So I would encourage every single person takes two seconds, go on each platform, copy and paste

it and see where your brand actually is and see if you even know that it exists. It's huge. What do you feel about Reddit? Oh my gosh. I feel like Reddit is, anecdotally, Reddit is where I go now for feedback. because I have so much distrust in the AI models and the search. I feel like there's something there. I just want to figure out how it's scalable.

And if there is a software that makes it scalable, without having to manually go in and have responses to where your companies mentioned. So if anyone's listening, that knows about a scalable program that does that. I would love to know. You know, Joy Hawkins is working with me on some things with Sterling Sky. Okay. On really how to pop and Reddit.

But she's like, we're going to take your purse. brand and then apply that to the company. Yeah. And I've heard there's this questions database. I forget what the name of it is, but you should name your name of your company as your Reddit user and then go in and answer every question you could find on your subject. And if you do it correctly, that'll really help. So that's something we're going to focus on.

I mean, I love that. That's one thing for people that are just starting. I always encourage them to join their local Facebook groups and have your company be the thought leader and the helpful hand in these different Facebook groups saying like, hi guys, my sink is leaking, if you're in plumbing, my sink is leaking really bad and I don't know what the cause is. Here are some pictures. Be that person that lends a hand and says, hey, I think it's this. If you need some help, give me a call. And it's a great way to build trust on a smaller scale, of course. You know, I don't like BNI

anymore even though we still go to B&I groups and I don't like Facebook groups because it's a race to the bottom. Yeah. People on there was like, you got to garage your guy and everybody's like, I'll do it for less, I'll do it for less. My kind of cheat code in that is everyone's posting 100 names of companies. All I do is message the person to say, I want to earn your business. So the person that asks. Yeah. And they always respond and they're like, you're the only one that reached out.

Yeah, you were putting the ownership on the individual to make the action. It's actually the complete inverse of what we do with when we get leads. We're calling them. We're outbound dialing them. But that's a great point. And the Facebook space, we're waiting for them. You know, marketing is, there's, a lot of opportunities. I mean, there's so many things we're testing right now. I just feel like we could be doing so much more. It's hard to pick right now with the age of technology and AI of what to focus on. You get a little bit of decision paralysis. What I've found as I'm

consulting with some of my clients is don't lose sight of the fundamentals. I think we get so excited by the flashiness of the potential of AI and new way to reach people that we're not even focusing on the people that we actually have that want to hear from us. and be in contact with us. So I think that for me, that's the first thing I go into to say, okay, you're generating X meta leads. You keep telling me you need more, more, more, but what have you done with the ones that you already generated? Yeah. And that's what I'm paying attention to, even meta, like everyone's asking for quotes now. And we're getting so much through Messenger. And we're not closing a lot of those. Yeah. And it's a different type of lead,

and you almost need a sales crew that specialize in the lead source. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to me because like PBC's easy. Those leads are easy, but they're super expensive. Like something's broke, they clicked on the first ad, they want us out there today. Yeah. That's easy for us. The hard ones are like the price shoppers that are like, I'm getting three estimates, especially on new doors.

It's like they're just gonna go. Typically, if you can prove the quality and you get the financing dial then it's good, but yeah. Do you feel like that is more prevalent in your newer locations than is your legacy brands? Legacy locations? Well, what's interesting, if you look at Google Trend nine four percent of people are looking for repair six percent are looking for new equipment

and we're good at taking a service call and selling new equipment yeah but it seems like some of our meta campaigns are just really getting people shopping for doors and that's not our bread of butter yeah but yeah you're right i mean in our newer markets it's a lot harder it's harder to hire too yeah it's interesting the more tv radio ctv all that stuff that we do the better we could recruit in that market yes definitely people need to start treating recruiting like lead generation. I would hound this into every single company that I work with. When you get someone that fills out an application says they're interested in a role, that is a lead. You need to be calling them in multiple different ways, outbound calling them, texting them, emailing them,

even serving them recruiting ads if you have the bandwidth for it. That's actually something that I'm doing with one of my clients' top home. The gentleman Lakota that owns it and is his co-owner, Derek. They're both really great honest young guys and people want to be a part of that. It's magnetic. So it's like put his face out there, share, this is the individual that you'd be working alongside and make people excited like a lead would. I love that. So how many clients do you work with? Well, it depends on the need for each individual. My fractional CMO work, I like to keep that a little bit more limited because it is pretty intensive. So on a rotating basis, I'll work with anywhere from three to four folks. I also don't like competing

against myself. And this is a hot take. I don't like competing against it against. myself, even if it's a different vertical, because I feel like everyone's competing for home improvement dollars in my space. So if you have a floor that's ugly and a bath that's ugly, you're not usually going to get both done in the same year. You have to pick which one we're competing for home improvement dollars. So if I have a business that serves all of Michigan and maybe they do windows and baths, but I have a flooring company that says, hey, Sanya, I'd love to get your help to generate leads. Well, then I'm still going to be taking a little bit away from myself. Yeah, that's my mentality. So,

That's what I work with on the fractional side, but my TV side with the broadcast that we talked about in CTV, I actually do full creative process, full storyboarding, scripting, filming, and then the buy and the attribution. And right now I work with seven folks in that space, but I have six proposals to send out and to keep growing that. But we take a lot of pride and being on site, getting a lot of really great scripted film and B-roll. So the lift at the beginning is kind of a lot, but we have enough footage to last us for six months to a year at that beginning and then have it be seasonally relevant as well for the TV. That's amazing. So what do you know about home service versus home improvement? What are your thoughts? Well, so I've dabbled in home service with folks that have done like insect repellent, lawn care, things like that.

I would say one of the biggest advantages of home services has is the seasonality and the customer. life cycle where obviously if you're an HVAC, if you're in lawn care and moving, the amount of times that someone will use you is much more frequent than in home improvement. And I think that, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like home services is a little less price dependent because in home improvement. Yes. And in home improvement, we have tickets that can be upwards of $60,000 depending on your vertical. And that's a huge commitment. So, but I also will say in home services, I think there's a lot more competition because it's a more accessible specialty and craft to get into. Whereas with home improvement, there's so many moving parts with subcontractors and

material. Exactly. There's a lot more to it. And, you know, I'm jealous of home improvement because my blended average ticket is under 1200 bucks. Okay. So we generate 34,000 leads a month. Okay. And it's a machine and I'm like, man, if I was in home improvement, I mean, people are like, yeah, but the leads are way easier. I'm like, well, not necessarily. We still spend, what I, What I'm jealous about home improvement is they go out and get the demand. Yeah. They go out to home shows. There's people that do 500 home shows a year in one market. Yep. They go out there. They're at every home show. They're at every single football game. And then they also have the door to door side and they also have the outbound call center.

So they get to create their own demand. I think I've kind of become lazy because I get so many inbound calls. We haven't been focused on the LTV getting back out to the customers each year. And I think there's just a massive amount of money just sitting here. Everywhere I look, there's bags of cash in the business. I love it. It's those fundamentals again, right? It's so easy in the moment to kind of sit on your hands when you're reaping the benefits of your reward because you work so hard to build up the brand. Now you're getting this residual effects from it. But success is rented, not bought, right? So we have to do those fundamentals every single day. And what I will say is when we're talking about home services versus home improvement, a lead is a lead is a lead. I can generate leads for med spas. I can generate leads for dental office. I can do for restoration for home improvement for home services. It's all the fundamentals of making sure when you generate that lead, you're getting in contact with them the way that they want to contact you, whether that's SMS, outbound call, email,

and then when you do get in contact with them, that you're selling them on the vision. The value of the visit is the same no matter what industry you're in. If I'm going in to see if I want to get a tummy tuck, that's the value of the visit. You're educating me. If I have an appointment for Windows, you're coming and educating me about the way

the windows that I should get in line. You got to get that appointment. The face-to-face appointment. Yes, exactly. And that's, as long as you can get in the home, then that's everything that you can use market. Now you're on the sales guys. Yeah.

So, and it's also knowing your customer. I mean, one thing that I love doing, again, with having great communication with my sales team is asking, what are people talking about in the home? What type of questions are they asking before you even get into your demo? What are they excited about? What are their pain points? What do you hear right now? that's really common that people are saying, oh, I really hate this about my bathroom and I wish I

could fix it. And then let's be proactive in our marketing and utilize that ahead of time so that people can say, oh, wait, that's me. That's me. I also feel like my grab bars are super unstable and I got them from Home Depot because they were 60 bucks and I don't feel like they're actually going to hold my weight. And then create marketing material for that and resonate with your audience. It's very powerful. And you got to have that whole chain of communication. You have to. And it's tough. It's tough for you because even when you're working in four businesses, it's a lot to take on. Why wouldn't you, you know, I know there's Matt Esler is doing $1.3 billion. I mean, that guy with Anderson. He's like the goat.

Yeah. And he's like, dude, I got to figure it out. I mean, he just does. But why not go to just big companies that can spend a lot of money? I mean, it sounds like you work with all a range. I think I have a really big soft spot for the smaller company and their commitment to their community. One thing I'll say is when we went through an acquisition with Leaf Home from Tundraland, I felt like there was a lot of really great benefits and there was also just some downsides that I didn't experience in a smaller organization. So, for example, the red tape and decision making. When you're in a smaller organization, you can move a lot quicker and I am a very high downside. and very high C, so I want things done and I want them done right very quickly.

And when you work with large organizations, you're having meetings with 12 different people because one person does this and one person does that. Instead of these smaller companies where they're like, this is the marketing guy. He does everything from PPC to canvassing to call center. You can move a lot quicker. I would say cybersecurity is a big concern when you get bigger. And just the way, I mean, I've had unfortunately with our CFO, who's absolutely phenomenal. but we need to make sure that if we're gonna sign a contract,

that there's T's are crossed, eyes are dotted, and they're like, we go do a vigorous background. They got any access to CRM or any APIs. And they all need that if you're gonna have full transparency, 360 type data getting back to them. And it's complicated. It is. And we make people jump through a lot of hoops.

So now I like, if there's somebody that wants to talk to about marketing, I'm like, just make sure you're compliant on all these things or we can have this conversation. Yeah, and you have to protect your business, which I totally understand. And so it's not that I look at that as a negative. Just look at it is not something that helps me be the most effective. And I would say when it comes to legality and mutually exclusive non-disclosure agreements,

of course, like I always abide by those regardless of who I'm working with because that's my reputation and very important to me. But I will also say, I think the smaller companies outside of being able to move quickly is that they have so much more potential for growth and really great revenue scaling. So for example, I have that company again at Top Home Improvement in Michigan and the gentleman kind of trusted me just to come in and start tearing apart and building their processes. And it was hard because for two months, we actually were at 19% cost of marketing and 20% cost of marketing.

They came only from door knocking. That's it. And they built it to 11 million, I believe. And they wanted to add in pay leads. They wanted to add in digital, all this stuff that takes a lot more fostering through the funnel. And so I took their best call center rep off the phones, who was also their call center manager, because I said, we need 10 of him.

We can't just have one of him on the phones and then everyone else is just kind of hanging out going by. So we had two rough months of him not hitting or of us not hitting our cost of marketing because we took them on the phones. And then for four months in a row, Tommy, we had 200% revenue growth under 16% cost of marketing. And now their goal originally was 18 million. Now we're pacing for $24 million for this year for 2026. And so I love that.

I love the potential. And I think in these smaller organizations where you're at that $10, $15 million plateau, because you can get to $10 million, but knocking doors, easy. But I don't think that that will take you to $20 million, especially if you're not expanding your markets. So you have to start reaching people in different ways. And it's been great so far. Where do you, where do you think a comm should come in?

Like what's a good comm and then what's a growth com? GrowthCom, I would say, is anywhere from 20 to 22%. So if you're really having extreme revenue growth and you're looking to build long term, I would say that you're investing in these higher ticket channels like TV, radio, CTV, that costs more direct mail. But once you have established yourself and you just want to do like maybe a 15 to 20% revenue growth year over year, I think you can be anywhere from 15 to 18% as long as you have the right people in seats.

I mean, it's interesting. I look back at my times at Tundraland, and when I was there, we were setting leads at 45% mixed, everything, all in modernize, Angie. And we were closing at 50, 50% on down there. So you're added up with 22.5% of the leads closed. Yeah. Which that's unheard of in home service. It's really great in home improvement. It's the best.

Yeah. And what's nuts is most of people listening are home service. Okay. And they're probably laughing going, I'm spending 4%. You know, I don't know as much about, I spoke at Remodeling. Yeah, yeah. And I know the guys that you're talking about really, really well. I mean, in our industry, we say 15 is a really healthy number, 15% profit.

I'm trying to get a 30. Wow. But then again, I got all these economies of scale. Yeah. And, you know, it's crazy. I got 70 guys training this month. 70 brand new techs. Yeah.

And what sucks is, can you imagine you got 70 new guys going all the different markets and you got to get them three to four leads a day the day they start? No, I cannot imagine that. I cannot imagine that. You can't get them one. That's, yeah, 210. 210 leads right at the, you know, there's weekends. I cannot imagine that.

But there's capacity planning is the hardest thing in this industry. Well, and also because I'm sure it's the same in home services, if you set out an appointment more than three days, the. Oh, it's got to be same day. Yeah, it's going to cancel. It's going to cancel. So it's like, how do you generate? That's amazing.

How do you generate? 210 qualified leads that's set the same day. I'll show you my formula. I think you'll dig it. Okay, so I take the revenue goal and then I divide this by the booking rate. By the way, it's a contact center. Yeah, yeah. So it could be a form fill, could be an Angie, it could be a text, could be an email,

could be an on-site lead. So your booking rate minus your cancel rate. Yep. And then I divide that by your conversion rate. That's face-to-face. Divide that by your average ticket. Mm-hmm. And then you times this by your CPL.

And then this is your marketing budget. I love that. And it works perfectly. Yeah, I love that. And this is how I buy companies too. Yeah. I basically take all these numbers and I say they're usually beating me on cost per lead because they've been there for 40 years. Yeah, of course.

And then I plug my numbers in if I'm paying 12x, when I fix all this stuff, I'm actually paying 5x. I love that. See, I do a very similar model when it comes to an established business, but when it comes to determining how many leads we need to buy at the beginning of the month. So I reverse engineer it. I say, okay, we need X amount of net closes. is we're closing at this percent on the demo we're going from issue to demo at this percent so just basically the same model but building it up but i love uh integrating the cpL there for the cost of marketing and having that budget built out i really like that i've never heard anyone do that before

well the other thing that i've kind of figured out is we've got such a strong recruiting and training team that i'm like how do we take every effing lead we could get yeah like if we could get let's think about exhausting every lead channel and how many people would we need and then also i have two and a a half million people in my database. Yeah. So then how do I kind of capitalize the database? Yes. And what's nice about the databases, they don't necessarily need me out today. So I can say, hey, listen, I've got a, I've got Margaret, she's 89 years old.

She's in an emergency. Can we move this to Thursday? Yeah. And they're fine with it because they don't do this out. So there's a lot more flexibility in the database leads. Yeah. One thing that I always talked to people about when I first start as I asked them, do you have a retargeting program and a rehash program?

Because that's money just sitting there. You've already paid it for these people. You might as well utilize them. It's shocking to me how little we look at that existing data in home improvement and home services. We see a lead that came in. They didn't set in, let's say, 14 days we stopped. I would never stop calling out to 14 days, but hypothetically, we say, okay, that leads dead. It's gone.

Bye, bye. And it's like they still wanted to buy. They're still ready. Maybe they just weren't ready right then. So let's stay in front of them, top of mind. Yeah, there's a great company called Champion Group that sends a piece of mail to their members. Yeah. Once a month.

Yeah. And we did the cost of what that would cost and it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think we need to test it in a market. That's what's nice about being in so many markets as we could test things very easily. Yeah. I would say that rehashing in home service is harder for repairs because if you've got a leaky, if your water heater's leaking, you're getting that replaced.

Our new equipment, maybe. Yeah. I would agree. Working in a disaster restoration, it was the same concept, of course. If you had a flood, you're not going to be waiting 10 days to make a decision. You're just going to go with whoever can help dry out your basement faster. But what I will say in maybe like the seasonal part of home services and especially in home improvement, there was a study, I'm all about studies and data that I read that out

of every single person that you're serving your ad to, 5% of those people will actually be ready for it, regardless of what the product is. The other 95% will not be ready. And it's actually even a smaller percentage in home improvement because our customer lifecycle is so long. So it'll be about 3% of people are actually ready and 97% of people are not in that moment, which even makes branding so much more powerful and important because you have this huge base that's not ready for you yet.

That's getting served your ad. But only 3% are going to need it now. Why not be proactive at least somewhat and tell your story so that when these 97% of people start moving into that 3%? They think of you over other people. That's the old wizard of ads mentality. He's like his mental, this is crazy to me. Yeah.

But he goes, my job is to hit half of the population in a metro. Doesn't matter if they're kids, how old they are, everybody, half of them and own that channel. And I think he said it's like 60 cents to own that person a year. But they, I'm talking crazy amounts of radio. Yeah. He believes radio is the number one thing still. But he's like, you want to own that station. Like you're 27 ads a day in that station.

And I think that's the problem with a lot of small businesses, they spray and pray. And they don't own the channel. You are preaching to the choir right now. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I go into a business and they say, yeah, we've been buying TV. We've been spending 35 grand a month and it's not working. I said, okay, let me see your buys. And you're spreading it out between seven or eight TV channels. So the people that are seeing your ad, maybe they're seeing it once a month.

I have the same exact mentality as the Wizard of Ads, which I only focus on one. station, one broadcast station in that DMA, and if we have an insane budget, then we'll do two. Even with Tundraland, being a hundred million dollar company, we primarily spent with two stations, that's it. And what market? In the Wisconsin market. So we had, yep, we own the entire state of Wisconsin. We only did one expansion under the Tundraland name, which was in Minnesota, and that was

about eight months before we sold. And then we did have a jacuzzi bathroom model dealer in, um, jacuzzi, excuse me, in Florida that we also owned, but a primary share of our revenue came from the state of Wisconsin alone because we owned that state. We did every single thing we could, exactly like you mentioned, to have every single person know our name. And when I said that I was going to work there, my family is from Wisconsin. They said to me, oh, yeah, I've seen that guy, Brian on TV, right? Because they remember the owner. They remember the face. I love that. I think I want to have you come in and look at some stuff. I would love to. I'm actually, we'll go talk to my marketing team after this.

I love doing podcasts because one out of 40, I'll tend to like hire somebody. It's just weird how that works. I love it. Well, I mean, from what you guys are doing here, I want to give you compliments before I got here. What I think you're doing is so great because even though this isn't necessarily for lead generation, this is still branding. This is still you. These videos are going to go out. They're going to have the A1 garage name. When people are looking you up and seeing if they believe in you as an organization, they're going to hear your podcast and say, okay, wow, this guy is someone that's here for the long haul.

and I want to do business with him. So I think the personal brand of the founder is more important than the company. I completely agree. I can't agree. And if people don't understand that, we've done a lot of studies on this stuff and I always talk about this is like, we're making a lot of content. And what I'm trying to do is push some of my content back to A1, but also still blow up my personal brand. No other reason than to grow A1. Yep.

I mean, it opens up a lot of other doors. It's funny, I talked to Alex Ramosey last weekend. Oh, yeah. And he goes, did I don't know being famous is there. cool but one thing it does do is gives me access people to yeah yeah totally and so I'm reaching out to Walmart I got a big meeting with home Depot and Atlanta and now I got access to answer my calls yeah it's it's kind of like how our space and home service and home improvement is so incestuous everyone knows everyone and it's so small that your reputation is the

most important thing that you have in this business with your peers but it's also the most important thing that you have with your with your clients and the people that you serve like home improvement home services it's so intimate you You're going to a spot that people live where they raise their children, where they wake up, where they shower, where they eat their breakfast. And they want to have the people that come to see them to be people that they would want in their home, that they feel comfortable. So 100%.

You have to have this type of aura about you that people can feel that they're like, yes, I'm comfortable with them. I want to work with them. It's so important. And I think getting in the garage is a little easier, but still, I had one of my texts out yesterday at my house. his wife and they pull out our Valpack and we've got a double it's like a bigger one than everyone else's is she goes you know Tommy she's like you don't have background check you don't have certified you don't

have that they went through this training program she goes I'm at home alone yeah most of the time yeah she goes I want somebody that I could trust and I know your guys I could trust every one of them because all the vigorous stuff you guys do but it's not on here totally and so russell brunson you familiar with him yeah I am yeah so russell was like dude I think you need to work on getting people off the print onto your site. Then you can retarget them. Then you can craft the message. But when they're going through mailers and there's five other companies, you're competing

on a table. But if you could get them to go to your stuff and educate them, then it changes everything. Oh, Tommy, I just had an on-site with a siding company and decking company where they were going through all of their print material. And every single piece that they had sending out was in a mass of competitors. And again, because I don't see competitors just as are vertical and whole. I see it as all home improvement dollars. I'm like, you're advertising in this magazine where the entire thing is home improvement.

Why not? This is what I have done with my folks I do direct mail. So I take four years of historic sales data and I give it to a data analytics company. And they build out the perfect audience that actually wants to buy from us in demographic segmentation, which for folks listening, so I don't do too much jargon, that's basically education, gender, household income, house, home value, all that good quantitative stuff. And they also do psychographic segmentation. So what does this person like to do on the weekends?

Do they have kids? Do they like to eat at restaurants? Are they a big spender? Yes, all those things. And then we take that data set that they sell us back of the perfect customer. And that's who we target to because those people actually want to buy from us right now with direct mail. And it just makes sense.

And then using that same data set, we have. targeting that we do for CTV so we hit them in in both places we do the direct mail that's static to tell them about the offer exactly like you mentioned the certifications all that fun stuff and then we use CTV to tell the story and get the emotional appeal because it's not just one-dimensional marketing is so exactly 100 it's it's complicated and I think this could be overwhelming to a lot of people I always say this you know one of my good buddies he works with me at the family office he did 12 million dollars almost a decade ago in HVAC by himself

That's amazing. It's amazing. That what's crazy is, you know, he made a million bucks that year. Oh. But I'm like, man, when you got, especially in A-Jack plumbing electrical, if you got guys out there that are doing all this marketing, but they're average guys only hitting a million, two million bucks, which is actually a home run for most companies. I'm like, but this guy said in 12, my buddy Tom Howard, who's coming into town, this top guy

to 20 million, and one guy, one year. Wow. And when you see the sales numbers, and I'm like, in most industries, they go like this. So they pay about three grand for a unit. Their average sale is about 27,000. That's a nine times what it costs. I can't charge nine times what a garage room. No, you can tell me not.

But there's a reason outside we got garage door freedom. We got 100 garage door companies coming here. Oh, amazing. We're trying to raise the industry. Yeah. Like guys, let's start, we can't buy billboards because we don't charge enough. So we can't compete because we're going against the dollars to an A-TAC, but we're marketing against these people because a billboard is a billboard, right?

And a TV add, if it's A-track or roofing or garage doors, it's the same of money almost you know that's a really interesting mindset I really like that where even if it's people that technically you'd be competitors of oh they're in all of our market yeah by lifting by lifting the average ticket it's lifting everyone exactly like I got I had my CFO because I'm gonna be on stage tomorrow and Friday in front of these guys and I'm like you know we spent six million dollars a year on insurance we spend seven million dollars on our trucks we spend this this this yeah and I'm like you know unfortunately the facts are the

client needs to pay for it at McDonald's you got to add in all the costs yeah exactly the every single thing that your business wants to grow if you got full-time recruiters full-time trainers full-time software we're running 25 softwares in the background these have costs yeah but we're efficient we're out there the same day you know where our clients want they want somebody that's background check they want a great warranty they want the work done right they want to fix the right way not the easy way and they also want someone they could trust yep and they want it done now yeah my clients the the perfect avatar not like i'm gonna shop around i want to get this done in the next two weeks. The ones that I want, they say, come now, get this done. Yep.

And, you know, most of these companies that don't spend the money in marketing, they're not able to get out there right away. They don't have guys work until 10. No. They don't got guys working on the weekends. They don't got guys working on holidays. Yeah. And that's why there's tickets. People are like, how do you get a bigger average ticket? I'm like, I'm not going after the client you're going after. I'm not on Craigslist. Exactly. And then the model that they're using in the home and the sales process, I'd imagine since they're not doing the one call clothes and people are saying, let me shop around. And well, they already interacted with a Google search ad.

They already interacted with a Facebook ad. So now they're in the algorithm. Now they're getting served A1 ads and they're like, oh, let me shop around and you guys are closing them in the home. They're ready right now. So it's like I think it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy where again, you don't have the fundamentals to make this work with the one call close, then your revenue is not going to be able to grow.

It's the same concept between marketing and sales. They both have to be functioning the right way. You know, it's funny because I talked, you talked to what, 18 million. company. You know what the owner usually goes? We're good. We're fine. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Let me tell you the problem with that. You know, I'm going to do $410 million this year. Amazing. And I'm like, F that. That sucks. We need to grow faster. We need to be bigger. I'm annoyed. Yeah. You get a founder that's content. You got people in your company that are like, we need to grow. Those guys are leaving. Those girls are leaving. So now you got everybody. Now you got a company morale in this

culture that's just like, we're fine where we're at. And I'm going to be talking about that a lot on stages. You're the problem. You're the bottom. Thank you. Get the hell out of the way. You are. The founder is usually the biggest issue. They want to be involved the whole time.

Yeah, we could try that, but really, we're fine right now. And I'm like, this is your number one. This is your children and your children's children. This is your grandkids. This is your legacy. You put everything into this and you're treating it like a lifestyle business. Yeah. And they just extract money out of this bank account.

And I'm like, why not grow it? Build it to sell it. Yeah. I completely agree. I think the one reason, why the people that I work with I work with so well is because they execute. There's no such thing as risk aversion. There's no such thing as fear of making a decision.

In my opinion, the loss that you're taking by not making a decision is so much worse than taking a quote unquote gamble in their eyes of a $5,000, $10,000 campaign to see what happens because all of that time, your competitors are doing exactly that. They're investing in their brand. They're investing in lead flow and they're making something happen. And it boggles my mind that people, People don't understand that just because today you're hitting X amount in revenue, that doesn't mean that you're going to be getting that tomorrow.

Again, you have to earn it. It is continuous. It is rent. It's not just like you mentioned. You guys did a great job building your brand. You have all these inbound leads flowing your way. But now you're thinking, well, I still want the outbound. I still want to be able to chase people down.

And so it all has to be continuous. And I don't know what it is about marketing specifically. But I feel like people think I launched one campaign. That's enough to suffice. But it's an everyday thing. 100%. And I think you should double down on most people don't have, they don't have UTM parameters. They don't really know where the money's coming from.

And the thing is, once you figure out where the money's coming in, you double down on that. Exactly. And you just, I mean, I am like going all in. And I'm telling my team right now, I'm like, let's fail fast. Yep. I'm like right now, Facebook's at about a 17% com meta. And I'm like, how do we spend a million dollars instead of 400,000? Yeah.

But the thing is, I keep breaking it. And it keeps the comp keeps going up because they're like, well, we agree too fast. We need more creative. We need this. We need that. And I'm like, I will work all weekend. Let's do as much creative as we can do. Yep.

And that's why you have to at least, at least consult with someone for an hour that's done this before in the space that knows your industry. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people say, oh, well, we worked with the local, you know, TV agency here or the local marketing agency. and they don't know our industry. They don't know what people care about. They don't know what people are asking. And they give them all of this money.

And maybe it's even a better deal than if you'd work with an expert in the space. But it doesn't have the results. And I love what you said about making a decision and fail fast. I believe it was Brian Gottlie, but he said, you can be wrong, but don't be wrong for long. And that's exactly the mentality that I have too. It's like every single thing that I do in marketing, even if it quote unquote fails, it teaches me something. It's like, okay, that failed because. that messaging just didn't resonate with people.

They didn't like that promotion. It wasn't strong enough. Maybe we said $1,200 off the project and they think, well, if it's $1,200 off, how much is it to start out with? So let's pivot. But by not doing anything, you're staying complacent and you're opening yourself up to competitors that take your revenue share. Well, I had a buddy of mine.

There are a couple hundred million dollar garage drug company. He's the CEO. He goes, I got to hire a CMO. And I go, good luck. I'm like, you're not going to find anybody that understands a business piece. So hard. Yeah. I'm like, if you knew, I've got a CMO, but I'm like, it all reports up to me.

Yeah. And I'm the decision maker and I make decisions quickly. Yeah. And I move $450,000 this month of TV radio all over to direct response into PPC and LSA. I max out LSA, but a lot of mailers. Yeah. Because I'm like, we're taking $450 out of the million and a half we spend. And I'm like, they're booked out eight days.

Yeah. I don't need this right now. Yeah. But like let's figure out the capacity issues. move the money to the five markets we need leads, especially because there are big markets. But you're fortunate enough to know marketing. There's a lot of business owners that that don't. They have to. Yeah. That's one thing at Lee V time me is know your numbers. Yep. Like the CFO, yep.

Know those numbers and never let marketing go. Yep. Never. And marketing is recruiting. So I'm in charge of recruiting and marketing. And I'm in charge like the numbers all fall on me. So I ask a lot of questions. That's what I've been really good at. I get out of the way. But like my CFO and my CFO are sitting in the office today. I go, I want these four. departments I want to see I want to see the salaries of all four departments and I want to see that as a percentage of revenue that they bring that I love that and my CEO is sitting there and he's going dude you're not going to like this we've got to make some drastic changes on next week it's not a bad thing I'm like the crazy thing is I used to be fighting for my life at like 3% net yeah now I'm like now I'm like I'm not like I'm not like

struggling but I'm like there's a huge opportunity yeah and I'm acting like my life depends on it. Yeah. I made a post on LinkedIn the other day and I said there is no secret to being a really good marketer. The only secret is curiosity. Asking why for every single thing, why did it work? Why did it fail? Why is it not scalable? Why is it not growing? And there is no question, I firmly believe this. There's no question this day and age that you can't get an answer to of the why. And there's no such thing as we can't do that. I go into business all the time and we were talking about attribution earlier. It's so important to me to know where the bottom line is and I'll say, oh, I need to know how many leads came from this direct mail piece.

Oh, well, we can't do that. Well, why not? Have you done a specific tracking number for that direct mail? Have you done a QR code? Have you done a specific landing pay? Well, no, that's too much work. It's too much work to know where your money is making the most impact. So I don't accept that.

And most of the answers that I get aren't usually from business owners like that. It's from middle managers that either they don't feel empowered to to search for that answer or maybe it's just general laziness. But what I will say is any single thing that you have a question, too, of why and how it's possible in the age of technology. Oh, 100%. It's a lot of work. I agree with that. And, you know, but here's the deal. When you work with your vendors, I force my vendors to do the majority of the work.

I'm like, if you want my business, you've got great graphic designers. I don't know why companies decide I'm going to pick up three graphic designers. Yeah. Every business you work with, if they're a good vendor and a good business. partner they're gonna have and they're gonna get it done yeah and I think a lot of businesses like we need I walked in an office one day of an HVAC company they had 18 people working creating an ad they were all working on a video and I'm like my guys edit the video yeah yeah they'll come shoot it and they do a great job I

was like how do you guys make money how important is brand brand is everything brand is everything and brand doesn't have to be huge brand doesn't have to be a million dollar investment brand is you brand is how you you show up. Brand is how you walk into the door. Brand is how you talk to the customer on the phone. Brand. Yeah. Brand is the before. So the white old truck with the lettering. Brand is we got our cover. We got the truck on every mail piece we do because people see there's 90 of them in Phoenix. So they go, oh, I know those trucks. Yeah. My neighbor it all the time. Exactly. Consistency. Brand is consistency. Brand is you. I say to people when they are first starting out, there's

so many ways to build your brand. It sounds daunting, but it's not. Set up a location on Google My business that people know you're real set up a location on Facebook so that people can see that you're a human company there start having everything that you have a touchpoint have your brand exactly like you guys did wrap trucks polos yard signs door hangers if you have a guy doing an install and he has a couple extra time give him some door hangers three just put around the neighborhood that's brand it doesn't have to be a hundred thousand dollar a month TV investment it's just showing up consistently in the same way and having that be

a process across your entire organization. Well, how do you, when you sit down with an owner and you want to go over their brand story, actually I talked to Donald Miller two weeks ago. Great guy. The story brand. I don't know if you ever heard of the book. I haven't asked to read it. That sounds like a good one. But how do you start out with the story? Like, what are you trying to pull out of them? What's the process? Normally I ask what got them into this business to begin with. I found that a lot of people kind of found themselves here on accident, whether exactly, I don't know if you did as well, but, yep. So they found themselves here on accident and then diving into, okay, well, what made you stay?

What made you love it? What feeling do you get when you know that you made an impact for a homeowner? Why do you get that feeling? What type of job can you think of off top of your head that really resonated with you that you did something different? You made an impact for someone. What do you want your people to go home feeling at the end of the day that work with you? What do you want them to know about why you're in this space? And kind of getting into those more emotional questions, and it's hard for some people because

it's a male-dominated industry. And sometimes you guys are hard to get emotions out of, depending on the person. But I think that when you kind of dig into a little bit more of the why, the why, the why, it does a really great job telling your story. And that's how I try to do my scripting and storyboarding for TV to be authentic to the person. Because, of course, if you put them on TV and you're giving them some script that doesn't feel natural, they're not going to come across the right way and people are going to feed on that. We just did a TV shoot the other day with a business owner who we started his business in his

mom's garage. So we went to his mom's garage and we started filming there. And we said, this is where the business started seven years ago. And then we went to the warehouse and said, and now here's where it is now. We still have that same mom's garage mentality, but just a much bigger garage. That's so good. The origin story. My mom's in a lot of our commercials because she used to work for us. We just replaced her door and I just saw the ad yes two days ago. Oh, cool. And I'm like, my mom had a really bad contractor door. We replaced it. Yeah. And it was kind of, it's kind of fluffy, but I want to see it. I'm sure I love it. I mean, and also, again, when you're telling your story, know who your customer is, know what they care about. That kind of goes back to the

to the data. And you don't have to have a huge data set. Just talk to your sales people. Talk to them, understand what they are thinking in the home and what people are asking about and then curate your brand storytelling to fit what they care about too because I think a lot of times when we do TV at the beginning a lot of ego comes into play of for example let's say there's multiple equity holders in a business and they all want to be on TV okay well that's that's not going to work we just need to have the best person come and present themselves and telling your story and your brand isn't about you it's about how you make people feel and I think that's important to remember. Yeah, no, that's really, really true.

It's weird. We got a really strong Facebook company we use. It took us like eight different companies to find this one. And they're like, Tommy, you need to be in every one of these because you perform four times better. Yeah. And I don't have any ego attached. No, it just is what it's watching. Yeah. That wasn't good. Yeah. But I've gotten so comfortable on camera. Well, you know what I'll say? Usually the people that are the best on camera are the ones that couldn't care less about being on camera. Yeah. And I think there's something to say about that. That is true. I'm like, guys, I'll do whatever I need to do. But it's interesting because we try these other ads and they just don't perform.

Yeah. And by the way, I think testing stuff on meta and YouTube is probably the most important thing before you go tested on TV. Yeah. Because you can tell a lot. You get a lot more attribution on that than you would. And once you get, you could try 10 ads, find the killer one and then run that on TV. Much lower stakes. Yeah.

And as long as your audience that you're serving at two is one for one, then for sure. One thing that I really love doing is running my CTV with Mountain. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's MNTN and my team, that's actually a service that we offer to people to run their CTV ads. And the type of targeting you can get is super granular. You can get all the way down to any demographic, psychographic, and that you also can turn it on and off within minutes.

So if I'm running an ad that's not working and I can see real-time attribution with CTV, I can turn it off like that and make a change to the the budget, it's all manually done. And their CPM is about $18 to $20. And for the people listening, CPM is cost per thousand. And normally when it comes to streaming TV, you're pretty high. You're usually like $35 to $40. But because they have such a high amount of folks like buying through them, they can offer lower CPMs and you have more autonomy. But you have to do the whole lift yourself. So that's interesting because was it Ryan Reynolds was advertising something and then you've God. That's his company. So Ryan, so we were doing that and we're getting it a third of the

price now. Oh, lower than 18? Way lower. Yeah. It's through Comcast. And you can have that same type of, you know what? And then what's the one that Kevin O'Leary does? They build these things. Oh, yeah, I know. It's what you're talking about. But it's just, yeah, we'll talk about those. Yeah, I want to, I want to pick your brain on that. For me, it's always about the control. Like, I don't really care if I'm getting a $10 CPM if I don't have. have control to turn it on and off if I'm locked into a contract. I always feel like lead generation is like the stock market. You're trading all the time.

Some things are working. Some things aren't. And I need the ability to move quickly. You know what? We'll sit down with Waltz and Chase and talk about, talk about some of our strategies. And so Lauren with search kings was the one that really said this is a huge opportunity that you'll get a lot of control still.

But you'll pay it way less. Okay. Good to know. Look, I'm not in the weeds on that stuff. Yeah. I can speak generally about it, but. Well, one thing that I always want to do in any capacity is learn. Now that I'm doing consulting, of course, I'm bringing my own expertise to people, but

I'm not receiving as much expertise from other people that are doing things really well, because usually people call me. It's because they need help with their marketing not because they're killing it. So I love having conversations like this where you can kind of bring me in the loop of things that you guys had the opportunity to try. It's so important. Like, I'm sending all my marketing. guys to events all the time. Yeah, yeah. Learning about the latest strategies. I talk to CMOs all the time.

Yeah. And I want to get the introductions and I probably have too many meetings. Yeah. And my team is like, dude, you got lined up 10 this week. Yeah. And I'm like, well, we're going to try everything. Yeah. And most of the stuff's not going to work, but we're going to give it a healthy chance of 90 days. And learn something from it. And if we do find, well, but one home run in marketing is worth a thousand RBI. I completely agree. I just signed up for an on campus class actually at Harvard, that's generative AI and marketing campaigns because I truly believe that that's going to be the biggest thing in the TV space, the creative space, help us pivot very quickly, the degenerative. So I'm a firm believer as well to continue to learn.

I have to, at where I'm at right now in my career, I'm so busy that I have to force myself to schedule an on campus, very expensive class. So I show up and have a time for it. But I want to hear all about that. Yeah. What are some things somebody should be doing? Like I tell everybody on stages, I'm like, first thing, search your business. You see the Google My Business.

Make sure your hours are 24-7, including weekends. That's a quick, easy win. Always. Make sure you're getting pictures in your reviews. Those count more. The review stuff has changed in April. I never pay my people to get reviews. It's on their scorecard, but you're not even allowed to anymore.

Oh, okay. So for your KPI's you're saying that's part of like the- It's part of their score card, but I never give them an incentive pay because that's just when it gets the rules. And there's all kinds of stuff I'm learning, like, when to send the review link. Yeah. Yeah. It's just interesting all these things and how the review, like if you send a review link

to Yelp, it won't work. You gotta have them search organically on Yelp, find your business click on it or they get filtered. See, I use Taptile. So I have all of the installers, have this little tile. It costs like eight bucks to get. And you know when you do Apple Pay with your phone, you tap Alpay? It's exactly like that. So you tap and you can change the thing virtually where it lands.

And so like, let's say you're, it's called tap tile. Yeah. So tap cars, I've seen those. Yeah, it's awesome. If they lose it, okay, they lose it. It's $8. Like, it's not the end of the world. Yes, exactly.

It's just the one time. You can change where it lands. So if we're really needing reviews on Yelp, we change it to Yelp. And obviously, they're asking for reviews in the home. So it's an easier process to educate people if they don't know how to how to navigate Yelp. And that's also part of their job. I've seen both. Obviously, not anymore.

We don't, like you mentioned, for incentivizing reviews. But I always have it be part of the installer's scorecard. and if you have in-house installers, because that is the best way that people feel that type of emotional buy-in. It's so good picture of the before-hangers. Yes, totally. I love that. So I'm paying five of my installers right now. They got all these camera gears and everything they upload every week.

I'm paying them a lot more money, but that's going to be all the raw footage that we put videos together. I love that. And then a little testimonial at the end. Cute, yeah. And I think like a lot of times people don't want to ask their installers to take photos or videos because they think they're not capable. But installers are incredibly vigilant with what they do. They're very detail-oriented.

If you give them an example of saying, hey, this is kind of the angle and the content that we're looking for. We love for you guys to take it like this. They'll execute. It's just- They're just not very- Compared to like a technician, they're not as cordial with clients. Yeah.

There's not as much candor there. They don't necessarily like conversations. A little more introverted. Yeah. Which is fine. Yeah. I love installers that are little that'll go the extra mile. They'll talk to the client, but it's, it's just a rare breed.

They're high seas usually. Yeah. So what else do I want to ask you? What are some of the quick ones? I did ask you that. What else should people be doing if they're just, they're like, I need more leads. And I don't know where to get started. I would say, so we talked about Google My Business profile, having that be active.

We talked about kind of going into, personally, the Facebook groups. if you have the bandwidth for it and if it's your customer reaching out to those folks in the groups directly, like you had mentioned. I would also say actually creating a comprehensive referral program. A lot of times they'll say to people, yeah, if you have a friend and need something, here's my card, like having given a call. You've referred pro. Yes, but, but oh, refer probably like that. I just get the referral as well. Okay.

And some of those programs, some of those programs are still too expensive for people and it might not, might not work. But if you're able to have an incentivizing, structure on referrals, you're going to get a lot more referrals. And people get apprehensive. They're like, well, I don't know if I can do $100 for a referral. Do 8%? Do 10%. Yeah. Well, could you do $100 for a demo? Like when the when the lead goes all the way through the funnel, it's right now in home improvement, a demo is $950. So to have a $100 demo is a win-win, a no-brainer to me. So yeah, like when we were going through the numbers, reverse engineer, what it can cost you to make sense, make it the most enticing. And those leads are going to be winners because

there's such high quality and already have a buy-in from the person saying I had a great experience. So I would say that's another great one. I would also say organic social. It's so easy. Take pictures of what your team is doing. Take pictures of the work. Post it on Facebook for free, literally for free. And you know your service area.

You know the age of your people. Go in, throw $5 at it, throw $10 at it as a boosted post for a couple days and get more people to see your stuff. Have it be a little bit of a call to action. And like this week only, we're filling our schedule for lawn care. And we're giving $100 off to the first people for, or $50 off whatever it looks like, for the first people that sign up for this summer's lawn cut. It's that easy.

It is. You know, the business that backs up the leads are, I think, where most people fail. You know, I want to talk a little bit about PR because I know quite a bit about Beth. Beth's the Brave. And, you know, I was talking to Brian quite a bit about this. And it's absolutely phenomenal. Like I'm going to start putting a lot like a couple of million dollars of my own money a year out of the charitable trust into PR. Yeah, I love that.

Because I just think the right causes, the stuff that I'm really passionate about. Like anything military, I obviously love dogs. I love dogs and I love about make a wish. Yeah. We do shop with a cop. We do all these different things. But I don't, it's probably like the same as maybe, I don't know if I should be spraying and praying on the PR side or just go after one major thing that we stand out. and create our own. So what do you think?

Yeah. We've, in my experience, I feel like really owning one cause that speaks to your entire company's core values as the best approach because also you can really give a lot then to that cause. A lot of these nonprofits really, really need our funding desperately. And so while it's amazing to give a thousand here, a thousand there, if you can give an organization 20 grand, that can can change the trajectory of someone's life. And I also think that when you're choosing something that is important as an organization, it has to be really special and really particular because obviously there's a lot of emotion that goes into different organizations that things people are passionate about.

So almost I would feel like it's hard to spray and prey because there's not so many that would align with everything that you're going towards. But I would say like, for example, the Basfer of the Brave Initiative, it's a really good start point for people that are in the bath space that want to do something in PR because you already have the lift from our team that's doing everything to make it happen. They're giving you all of the SOPs, the training documents. We're doing all of the best practices and these kickoff meetings. And all you need to do is show up and do great work for a veteran.

And it really does reverberate throughout your entire organization. I always say that the cause marketing is great for brand. branding, great for the customer, but where it really is great for is internal marketing and recruiting. Because now your people know that they're a part of something bigger. They're not just installing a garage store. They're contributing to the $2 million donation that A1 garage has made to our veterans in need, to a child that has cancer. Like that is so much more powerful than just thinking, well, I'm just working day to day for the bottom line. I'm doing something more. And if I could, I would love to just take this moment.

Anyone that's listening that knows anyone in the Bass space or is in the Bass space, please reach out to Bass for the Brave.com. We're accepting participants. And our goal this year is to get to all 50 states. So far, we have 35 states that have registered. It's our biggest year by far. Bass for the Brave has grown exponentially over the last five years. And I feel so fortunate that Brian Gottlieb, trust me to be the person funding it, or not funding,

excuse me, running it. And he's still funding it out of his own pocket. That says a lot about who he is as a person. He's such a great man. Yeah. I love Brian. Yeah. What else do we need to talk about?

So at LeadsCon, you said marketing is meant to disrupt. If you're doing the same thing as everyone else because you're getting your ideas from an AI model, then what are you disrupting? Can you just unpack that a little bit? Yeah. I would say when it comes to storytelling and when it comes to creative and copy and messaging, we need to disrupt. if we're doing the same promotions as everyone else,

if we're talking about the same warranties, the same financing, there's not really a big differentiator. So for me, it's all about how do you disrupt in that creative space. I think the processes work, the fundamentals work the way that they are, but where we need to disrupt is how we're getting people's attention. So kind of when we were talking about TV right now, one thing that again, I love to do is do things a little different with the owners, have them in different situations,

humanize them because right now in home improvement a lot is here's a before project here's an after project we have great warranties and financing give us a call it's like we need to do something a little different to get the attention 100% Ryan Holliday talks about that yeah get different be way different like I did my billboards upside down for a year oh I love that it was crazy how many people came into the office and they're like you only had one job yeah but we meant to do that I I kind of gauge if a TV campaign is working by how many people send me angry Facebook messages sometimes.

At Tundraland, we had a really great, really cheesy rapport after the acquisition with the president at the time, Paul Lukowski. And then we actually hired a influencer, Alex Worley, that was an influencer in Wisconsin. And they had a really cute banter back and forth. And we got a lot of mad messages from older people saying, it's funny. We get some that say, the woman is talking over that man all the time. She's so rude. She's interrupting him.

And then we would get messages saying, that man is so. rude to that woman the way that he's belittling her. And meanwhile, they're they're both just adults joking. But people are paying attention and they're they're passionate enough about what we put out to send us a message. That's meaning something. My buddy Aaron Gaynor is out of Ohio and he gets hate messages. He just got into town. They're like, dude, your voice is so annoying. He's like, he reads them all day and it's so funny because he's just, he's attacking. He's working with Roy Williams. Oh, and they just attack. Yeah. And it's crazy how many ads they put out. But it's like, you're going to remember I do spokesperson work occasionally and I get it too.

I get, why is that that woman so stuffy, a blonde bimbo, what does she know? And I'm like, well, you listened. You took the time to give me a message. So it must have made you feel something. It's like, lose that girl, the blonde chick that does the bathroom stuff. Oh, Christina Haw? Yes. Yeah.

Oh, so I, when I was working with jacuzzi, all the folks at jacuzzi are so amazing and I'm really close with all of them. We've shared feedback that people will say her sweater was too purple. That's one of my favorites. Her sweater was too purple. Don't know what that means, but people always have something to say. And I think when you're a smaller business and you get that kind of feedback, you get really scared because you think, oh, no, I'm ticking off all of my audience. No one's going to work with me.

That's not the case. They're remembering you. Yeah. Unless you're doing something, I mean, horrible and hurting a group of people. That's a different conversation. But if you're just being annoying, if you're just irritating people, they're still remembering you. 100%. Yeah.

Parker and Sons will do 300 million in Phoenix. And they used to have Melvin the bad guy. And it shows butt crack when he's working and everything. But he was like the bad plumber. Yeah. And they created this whole character around it. And that's kind of what you got to do is really get good at those type of things. I have a friend that owns a door company in Dallas and he's working with the Wizard of Ads.

And they've created such a fun campaign where he's the doorman. And so he's like opening up the door. Oh yeah, Billy. Yeah. You see, you know, Billy. I didn't know if you guys were in contact. He comes over my house all the time. It makes sense.

You guys are both, I see the vibe. You're both like the similar characters. But yeah, when he told me this, we were working together briefly at the beginning. And he mentioned to me what he wants to do and some of these ideas. And I'm not going to lie to you. Sometimes I'm like, that's crazy. You are actually insane. But I think you can do this.

But our business is so our kick and everyone's doing the same thing all the time. Someone has to give it a shot. So I'm excited for him. Get different. I love it. Yeah. You know, Bill Ryan Holiday is like, what he'd go do is like spray paint his old billboards with like spray. and then the news would pick it up. Oh, I love it.

Which is like, and then he'd say, yeah, we've got all these people kind of covering up our ads and they get the home show, draw something on the van and park it out front. Oh, smart. That's one thing that I want to focus on just parking in the right areas. That's another thing that I haven't been able to do yet is parking at like a Costco up front for two days. That's a really good idea. Yeah, parking. Yeah, parking. There you go.

One thing that I was really fortunate to experience at Tungerlane with Brian is his group, and marketing ideas were insane. One time he had us take a mobile design unit and bring it to a diner and give old people a free, because it's a blue plate special, so a lot of senior citizens were there, give them a free dessert coupon with a demo and people were excited and they wanted to do it. So, and who else would think of that besides that? You know, that's why being the CEO and founder, I just kind of like sometimes wish I could just straight do marketing. Yeah, it's so fun. Just go be creative, but there's so many markets too. It's like we're in 24 states now.

Yeah. One thing I'll say is right now with my business, I get a little fomo because when I go in and work with people, I implement what I know is going to work and what's going to generate leads very quickly. And that's not always the most creative and the fun approach. Now it works and it's great. It gets you to where you need to go to a certain extent. But I really want to start doing some fun stuff too.

And you're inspiring me that some of my people in the space that I know have the bandwidth to do some crazy stuff. I'm going to text them after this and be like, hey, what about parking a truck at the Costco? Yeah, but I want to get like a big floaty on top of it. Yeah, totally. So the other day they were like, we couldn't afford the, or we didn't have time to get this,

so I'm flailing in the front. We got a video on it. That's awesome. So how do people get a hold of you, Senia, if they want to reach out and just get your take on a few things? Yeah. LinkedIn is always the best for me. So send me a request on LinkedIn, send me a message.

Otherwise you can email me Senya S-E-N-J-A at C-S-S-S-I-S-U. Synergy, S-Y-N-E-R-G-Y.com. And I would love to help folks out. Right now, I can definitely help people with TV and storytelling if they need any assistance. Otherwise, if people just have a quick question, I'd be more than happy to help. I am 99.9% sure I'm going to be at Qualified Remodeler this November. So if anyone in the home services or home improvement or home services, quite frankly, because we all have a lot of the same practices, want to go to an event. That's really great, great inspiration. I'll be there as well. So we'd love to have it in-person conversation. Is there any books that change your life for marketing? Yes. I'll shout out again

Lakota Tid, the owner of Top Home Improvement, Who Not How? I am a control freak. Dr. Benzgen-Harting is a good buddy. Yeah. Oh, is he really? Wow, amazing. I would love to meet him some days. Really powerful works. I would love that. I am a control freak. And again, with high D and high C, I have high expectations. I want things done quickly and I want them done right. And that kind of hindered me from growing at certain parts of my career. And And when I wouldn't allow people early on, when I wouldn't allow people to really try things, because I wasn't sure it was going to work and I was so concerned about the bottom line. I think I might have missed out on some opportunity of new ideas, even from outside industries.

So in terms of a marketing standpoint, that really helped me that I brought these people on for a reason. I have these people on my team for a reason. I need to let them shine and do their thing. I love this stuff. I am so excited when I get somebody that's creative. I just when I've taken notes like this is because I'm just like we got to go. We got to do some stuff. Mutually beneficial because I wish that I would have had a pen and paper in front of me after all this. I'm going to take pictures of those after because it's like you have you have an amazing brain. That's awesome. I want to go sit down with the marketing real quick. But give us some final

close out thoughts. Final close out thoughts. Marketing is doable no matter your size. If you're a one-man show if you're a $500 million company, no matter what you have the capacity to do marketing, start with everything that you own, start with everything that you have the accessibility to take, like social, like your team's apparel, everything like that. And then also don't lose side of the fundamentals. Don't lose side of the fundamentals. The leads that you are generating, they want to talk to you. They're not dead after a day. Reach out to them, get in contact with them. And basically, the ultimate marketing is a great experience. I love it. I got one quick shout up to my guys at kick charge.

They created my brand. They've done case studies in every brand and they're typically 500% increase. Amazing. And profitability. You've got to stand out in a busy world. And if you just got lettering in a white truck, you're not going to stand out. In my anecdotal experience, I now kind of can identify their style being in the space for so long. And there's a couple, two businesses where I live that have used them and I always see their vehicles.

They look amazing. I'm in Grand Rapids now in Grand Rapids, Michigan from Wisconsin. That's okay. I'm heart of Wisconsin. I know everything about Grand Rapids. Yeah. Oh, do you? I go there all the time. Oh, amazing.

We're in Grand Rapids and we're going into Kalamazoo. Yeah, my sister lives in Whitefish Bay. Oh, amazing. Yeah, we'll have a lot to talk about after this. But yeah, they do great work. Hey, listen, it's been a pleasure to have you on and I'm sure there'll be a lot of people reaching out. I appreciate you making it down here. Yeah, thanks Tommy. Thanks much for having me.

This is super fun. I appreciate it.