The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - You Can Build This $1M+ Business With No Tools and No Crew ⏐ Ep. #214

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Beehiiv is the newsletter platform I’ve used for over a year and a half because their data shows you exactly what’s working. Get 30% off three months at ⁠beehiiv.com/chris━Check out my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOPOD.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ and join my new community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOwners.com⁠⁠⁠⁠━I sat down with Wrex Lindsay to talk about one of the best opportunities I’ve seen in a while, the subcontractor model in home performance. What makes this so interesting is you don’t need a crew, a big shop, or tons of experience to get started. You can dip your toes in with simple offers, use subs to handle the work, and still land high-ticket jobs worth $10K+. Wrex breaks down how this model can scale to $1M a year, why the timing is perfect to get into this space, and how anyone can take advantage of the opportunity.Connect with Cozy Pros on Instagram at https://instagram.com/cozypros and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CozyHPS.Enjoy! ---Watch this on YouTube instead here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tkopod.co/p-yt⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ask me a question on or off the show here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-ask⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn more about me: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cjk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn about my company: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cof⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow me on Twitter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-x⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Free weekly business ideas newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-nl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Share this podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-all⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Scrape small business data: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-os⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---

Using the subcontractor model, you can make over a million dollars a year of net profit. Yes, you can. The fastest way to start making some good healthy profits is to subcontract it. Installation machine and all that. You don't even need to own that. No, they have their own equipment. It's a 30-minute install, but you can sell those for $1,200. If we focus just on every home selling a scrubber, we could sell a million a year ago.

Okay, now we're talking. There's a lot of money in duct work. It can tow in the water with duck binging, and it could branch into something where now you're looking at $10,000 tickets. Our average ticket is right around 10 grand. You're kind of selling fear a little bit. Yes. Right. Yeah. It's energy savings, comfort and indoor air quality all together. All right. You asked and I answered. Every month or so, I email out a poll to my newsletter with about 30 different niche business ideas, opportunities, etc. And I ask you guys, what should I dive deep on? What do you want to learn about? And over and over, you kept voting on vent cleaning,

insulation, duct work. I don't know why, but you guys wanted it. And so I brought it. I have a friend named Rex. He lives in Phoenix. And he has a seven figure insulation slash vent cleaning slash home performance, as he calls it, business. And if you liked my forestry mulching episode a month or two ago, you're going to like this because it's just as tactical, but a different vertical. What's his Facebook ad strategy? How much does it cost to generate a lead? What types of markets do these businesses work best in, how to find subcontractors in unique places to do all the hard work for you, what your offer should be, how you should charge, what angles you can take within the home performance industry to start a business that doesn't cost all that much money. This episode

is jam-packed with all that stuff. Please enjoy and share with a friend. Is insulation your big kind of moneymaker? So insulation removal and then obviously reinstating. I mean, we're both those services were at over a million on on the year. And then duct arrow seal, duck sealing is our third biggest. So, but naturally we're going to get up in the attic. We're going to see how old their AC unit is. And then that's when we'll come down and sometimes offer a new AC unit. Are you using like tools to see if like cool air is leaking out in the attic and like infrared stuff?

Yep. So all of ourselves have the infrared cameras. I love stuff like that because it's it provides such a perfect visual. And you're like, listen to me. Just look at the data, you know, show. them the picture of like the glowing red and yellow and they're like oh my they just see like their money like burning up yeah right so we do all every single one of ourselves guys has an infrared even our you know project managers and stuff have that we'll have them turn on the AC unit right

when we get there or the heater depending on the time of year and then we'll go get some images of the duct work we'll even pull aside some insulation and we'll see through like their cam lights and some of the areas that they're leaking in their attic will show them the thermal imaging of that as well. Okay. So they can actually see like the cold air coming up through their house, right? Or the heat coming up through their house into their attic. So help people understand how their house is leaky and how we do all rub nice and tight and

save them. Okay. So what does like an average prescription look like? You go in there, you go to an average attic, not too crazy, either direction. what do you prescribe them? What does it cost them? What does your margin look like on something like that? When we go to a home, the most common thing that we do and we push it, right,

is removing all their insulation so that we can seal the attic, right? So we'll come and seal up all the leaking areas of the attic. Once we have all the insulation remove, we're going to add R49, which is about 17 inches of insulation. Okay. And what do people usually have? How much of an upgrade is that typically? So here in Phoenix, it's the average home probably has six inches of insulation.

Pretty much every house here has old cellulose insulation, which is like made of a cardboard and newspaper. That stuff gets breaks down. So when they process that insulation, they have to add fire retardant to it. And especially here in Phoenix, that that fire retardant like activates with the heat. It starts basically disintegrating the insulation. unsettling. And so you'll get up in attic. It's super dusty. It's gross. It's impacted. So we'll remove all of that. We'll seal up their attic. We'll add a lot more insulation than what they had.

And then a lot of homes, almost every ticket that we sell has some sort of duck sealing. Most of what we do is aerosil. You've heard of aerosil, right? I haven't. No. So aerosil is, it's cool. It's a technology that you block off all the registers in the house. And then you you hook up this machine to the ductwork, and this machine turns this sealant into like an aerosol. And so you're basically, you're pressurizing the system. All the ducts, all the vents are blocked off. You're pressurizing the system. And so when you're sending that sealant to the duct duct work, it's not coating the ductwork at all,

but it's that those little air sealant particles are traveling through the air and they're going out the holes. and they start accumulating out the holes and sealing up the ducts. Interesting. So it's the best way to seal duck work. It's a lot more expensive than sealing it by hand. It's going to get all the cracks and holes and even the little holes that you can't see.

It kind of reminds me of like the fixaflat, right? You spray it in your tire and it just, Yep. 100%. Interesting. Yeah. So that's kind of a lot of people relate to the fixa flat concept. Yeah.

They have a certain. product like that to sell up a radiator. So a lot of people relate with it that way. They go, okay. So that's like the more expensive version of like manually like taping, but it's more effective as well. Correct. Yeah. And we and we really build a lot of value in aerosil. In fact, aerosil consults with us a lot because we we're kind of one of the only companies that's been able to figure out because a lot of people that sell aerosil, it's kind of an add-on service to what they're already doing like and i guess that's we kind of do that too but but we will go sell aerosil on its own it's like a main course for you guys most people treat it

like a side dish or an appetizer correct so arrow still likes to to pick up rain a lot on how how we're actually selling aerosil alone because a lot of the companies that sell it don't know how to do that do that right now so you go into an average house and what do you usually quote them for just an average job. Our average ticket is right around 10 grand. Okay. What size house might that be? 3,000 square feet?

The average one is probably about 2,000 square feet. Usually that includes removing insulation, sealing up the attic, adding R49 insulation and then sealing the duct work. And a lot of time they'll include a duck cleaning as well because we packaged that with aerosil. So 10 grand is our cash value because we use a lot of financing. And financing has fees and that added to it. And so we strip that out and we want the true cash value of that job with the fees.

We're probably closer to 11 grand. Okay. I got to think that taking all that installation out is just a pain. Use like a massive vacuum. Yeah. Just a big. Like just like this big around. It's a yeah.

I mean, you're looking at a six. Yep. Those at least six eight inchos. And, you know, the one we're using right now is a diesel vacuum. It's got tons of horsepower. I can't remember how much work it has. But yeah, I just go start sucking it out. Yeah.

Do you have to like dispose of it in a certain way? Or can you just toss it? We just take it to the landfill. Okay. And there are some landfills that, you know, don't like to take it, but we know all the ones that will take it. So when we end the job, we'll head over and dump it. And are you replacing it with blown in insulation?

Just like the snow white stuff. Yep. That's what we do. That's blown fiberglass. We can do foam, spray foam. I have some, I have my own issues with spray foam. It's a great insulation, but there's some downfalls to it too. And so most of what we sell is blown fiberglass.

So on a $10,000 job, how did the unit economics break down on your side? Like what are you allocating to overhead versus ad spend versus cogs, labor and all that? So 10% ad spend is kind of. of what we factor. Of our revenue, we want to keep at, you know, ad spending to about 10% or less. Commissions, same thing. We pay about 10%. And then overhead, we want to keep around 10% as well. So we have 50%. It's actually like 52% margins of all over our products. We want to keep 15 to 20% when that's all said and down. So 52% gross margin, 15 plus-ish net. Yeah. Our target's 20, but we're satisfied with 15.

Yeah. Yeah, because you got to pay aerosil. You got to pay for the insulation. You got to pay labor. Your insurance probably isn't, probably is substantial. It's not cheap. Insurance is not cheap ever. Yeah.

So, you know, in sales commissions with overrides and everything, we're about 12% there. That's where the 52% margin comes in when we pay out all commissions. and then, yeah, on a really bad month with our ads, we'll get eight or nine X, but on a good month, we'll get 15. Yeah. We should put your net closer to 20. Yeah.

Last month we were at 15X on our class. What is like a big job, like a really good profitable job look like for you? We've done jobs as high as 30 grand. Is it usually bigger homes or homes with more issues, more leaking? A little bit of both. Right. So single level homes like your house, that's going to probably be a pretty big ticket because it's going to have a big attic. Right. So there's more square footage to, you know, two-story homes. They don't have as big of addicts. So there's not as much square footage to remove or to replace. Where we make it up with two-story homes, though, is most of the time they have multiple AC units. So we'll get two, two-duck seals out of it rather than one. So we'll make up a little bit of that on a two-story. Some of our sales reps, they sell air scrubbers. They sell duct cleaning.

They sell H-back unit, you know, and we'll get big tickets. I mean, we've, we've had jobs where we, they've needed everything. And we've had jobs over 30 grand, 40 grand. Yeah. You know, those are those are always fun jobs to, to do. What are air scrubbers? It's a simple install. There's a lot of money that you can make in air scrubbers.

So it's a device that goes, and you can install it on the supply side or the return side. So all your AC units have a supply side and they have a return side. But it's just a little device that has like a cell that goes into it. And so as air is passing through it, it's basically ionizing or atomizing the air. And it's charging all the. And as it comes out the ducts, it goes and attaches to all the dust and pollen and allergens. So it's like an electronic air filter, like a high powering air filter. Yeah.

And I mean, it'll kill viruses. it'll kill mold, it'll kill. But you just put it into the plenum. Sealed up really good and plug it in. And it's a 30 minute install, but you can sell those for $1,200. And what's your cost on that? $400 for the product and then $50 in labor. Yeah.

Dang. Are you just plug it into the wall as long as there's an outlet up there? You can plug them into the wall. That's an option or you can just, they make these adapters that will plug into the actual area. Wow. And on that one, that's kind of like a pest control cell. You're kind of selling fear a little bit.

Yeah. Well, especially with, with, there's a lot of people out there that have asthma or, or they're just bad allergies. And so a lot of that's coming from their attic and their duct work. So by putting one of those in there, it's going to help a lot throughout their home. So I have to install in my house. How much business do you do of that per year, the air sealing? Air scrubber we have air scrubber yeah we're at year to date 56,000 thing okay is there is there a business to be out of someone just doing that like that alone driven by Facebook ads door to door what have you

I believe so yes yeah now it's a big issue a lot of people especially I mean if there was a couple if there was a good thing that came from COVID it's people's awareness awareness allergens and viruses and things like that. There's a big health push in our culture. A lot of it's fitness and food and toxins and stuff like that. And so that helps drive the need and the want and the desire for them. Air scrubbers for us is kind of an afterthought. It's kind of a side dish, a little bit of an appetizer. If we focus just on every home selling air scrubber, we could sell a million a year. Okay. Now we're talking. I don't think people are going to start caring about toxins. less, right? I see that as only growing. Have you heard of those companies that come in and they'll

diagnose your home as far as like toxins are concerned? Like they'll look at the air quality and then they'll give you like they may charge you like a few hundred bucks and then they'll give you like a laundry list of things to fix. Do you work with companies like those? Do they refer business to you or is that still pretty early? That's still pretty early. We haven't worked with any companies like that. And I don't know of any companies here in Phoenix that do that. I'm sure they're all. Yeah. I know a guy in the UK doing it really successfully. Yeah. It's a big business. Just the air purification industry is several billion dollars a year. It's like 10 billion a year just in the U.S. So, wow. There's a, there's a lot of money to be made just focusing on air quality. Can homeowners

install those themselves, like if they were handy enough or is it pretty technical? Yeah, they definitely can install themselves. So it's a simple install. If you have any sort of low, voltage electrical knowledge and you know how to cut a hole and patch it up and seal it up nice and you can install yourself. Okay. And the nice thing about that business just in the air scrubbers is there is a reoccurring revenue side of it because those sales that are in that air scrubber that'll last two years, two, three years.

So you can go and sell them a new cell every two to three years. You can sell them whatever you want every two to three years. Exactly. You get your foot back in the door every two years. Yeah. There is a good business. And I've thought about just starting a business that just focuses on ductwork. And air scrubber is going to be like a really, it was going to be one of the main courses of that business.

Yeah. All right. So for a 2,000 square foot home, 10 grand, what kind of monthly savings could the homeowner expect? Like what would their power bill go to roughly? So according to the department. of energy. If we're doing like the whole package, they can expect 25 to 30 percent. But we've had homes where, I mean, the attics are just completely, I mean, no insulation or half their attic has zero insulation, their ductworks disconnected. Those homes, we're going to, are going to

completely transform their lives, right? Yeah. We love those homes because, yeah, it's going to make a massive difference. They're going to fill it like the next 10 minutes after it's done. But 25 to 30 percent on a typical home, on a lot of the older homes, you can get probably more than that, more than that. Okay. Yeah. We don't, we obviously we focus on energy savings. That's one of the benefits of doing this. But we look at it from a holistic, hey, you want to be more comfortable. You want to have even temperatures. This is your home. invest in it live in your home be happy in your home no one wants to have a home that has a room that they don't want to use because it's uncomfortable so we're really focusing and then the health

aspects of it so it's it's energy savings comfort and indoor air quality all together and that's the value that we're selling yeah so it took me so long to flip that switch in my brain because I'm inherently cheap. And so I would like keep the AC like 77 in the summer. And then one day I was just like, what are you doing? Like this is miserable. Like you're going to spend an extra 40 bucks a month to be comfortable. Like is that I think that's worth it. Yeah. So when we first moved here to Phoenix, I tried to live that way the first year. And I'd sold my wife. I was like, if we're going to stay here in Phoenix, I'm going to pay whatever power bill I need to pay. Yeah. Yeah. Be comfortable. Yeah. I don't care. On a two, square foot home, what's an average like summer power bill in Phoenix? Four to five hundred dollars. Oh. So they could save two, two hundred, 150, 200 bucks, right? Yep. So they'll get that money back in four to six years, give or take. Yeah. There's a lot of tax rebates. And so I mean, the tax credits going away after this year. But a lot of utilities are doing rebates. So one of the utilities here in Phoenix is it's called SRP. They get $400. just for duck ceiling, and then they'll give $600 for insulation. And there's other little rebates they give as well. So we take advantage of those as well.

Yeah. All right. You know I'm always talking about data, the numbers that actually matter, because you need data to grow. And you need to grow to make real money. Beehive is the newsletter platform that I've used for over a year and a half because of their data. Well, for multiple reasons, but especially because of their data.

Yes, most platforms will tell you someone opened your email. Cool. But Beehive tells you everything. Engagement drop off. Which links people ignore and which ones they click again and again. What keeps readers scrolling? You get real-time subscriber insights, A-B testing results, even predictive analytics measures. It's like having your entire subscriber base give you feedback live.

And you can set up automated sequences, welcome emails, re-engagement campaigns, all based on that behavior because the truth is if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. And Beehive shows you what's actually happening. So head to Beehive.com slash Chris for 30% off three months. That data will change how and what you write. If we were to look at two variables, like if someone wanted to get into this industry, either vent cleaning or air quality or insulation, the two variables being like quickest path to good net cash flow per month and like bear.

to entry. If we were to take both of those into consideration, what opportunities in this space do you see for people? I think it just depends on how you want to do things, right? Because I remember when I first started this business, I wanted everything in house. I wanted to do everything in the house. I wanted to have my own cruise. I wanted the trucks. I wanted everything, right? And obviously, there's going to be a big investment because insulation machines are not cheap. If you want a good insulation machine, you're looking at 15 to 20 grand. That's just for one machine. Can you finance them?

You can. You can. Okay. That reduces the barrier to entry. And then, you know, insulation removal machines, you're looking about 10 grand for one of those machines for a good machine. And if you want to get into duck cleaning, you're looking at five to 10 grand for a machine. So that's how I used to think. I wanted everything in the house and I invested a lot into building.

all that. You know, we had over 100 employees or close to 100 employees and we were doing everything in house. I've since changed my thought process. I've since changed, you know, the way I think and the fastest way in this business to cash flow and to start making some good healthy profits is to subcontract it. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of small companies that need the work that don't invest in that marketing, that are just basically labor, and that's all they want to be. And you find the right subcontractors, they'll do whatever you need them to do. Where do you find a Facebook marketplace? The best way to find really good subs is through the suppliers.

Really? How we found good subs is go utilize our connections with the suppliers, because now we have, you know, someone that's, has firsthand, you know, knowledge and how that subs. is and the work they do and how much they're buying and just who they are as people. So that's where we've had our best success, finding subcontractors. People selling you equipment and- Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Sell them, the insulation suppliers, aerosil, you know, calling them and finding the best aerosil companies, that's the best way. But we found several subcontractors just through Google and searching online for insulation companies or we've even found we found one of them because we had a competing quote with one of our customers from them and we saw we saw what they were charging them. We're like, geez, we'll talk to these guys. We'll pay you that. We'll pay you that and we'll take this job.

Exactly. So that's how we've traditionally found our subs. It's funny because people think of starting like a home service business and they're mind immediately goes to our I need to learn how to perform this service. I need to learn everything I can about our values and insulation and all this. When really it's like you need to learn Facebook ads. Correct. Right. If you can just learn Facebook ads and you're going to be ahead of most of your

competitors and they're not going to be your competitors, they're going to be your partners. Correct. You're going to pay them to do all the work for you. Right. Yeah. And I love it. Like one thing that I always had a fear of quality, right? I always had a fear that like if we sum it out, quality is going to go down.

And we've had issues with subs and we don't, you know, we let them go or we don't send them any more work and we get it fixed. And I'm not saying that every cell contractor has been awesome to work with. But we like the small local companies that's the people we like to work with. You know, the owners usually on the job site, he cares. He wants to continue to receive our business. They're going to do a great job. And they're going to have great quality because they care about their business.

They want more work from us. And so that's one of my switches that have changed. in my brain is like quality to actually, you can make an argument that it goes up if you have the right subs. And then we always have a project manager. So we always have a project manager that's on site to deal with the homeowners. And so we're still managing the product. We're project. We're still very hands on. It's still our projects and the way we want to do it. But we just find people that already have the help and the labor and want the work. And you know, that's how we do it. So are you pretty much subbing everything out today?

Pretty much. I mean, we do some small things in house, but for the most part, we sell it all out. So on a $10,000 job, how much of that goes to your sub on average? Well, so we usually have our subs pay for the product too. That's a lot of the changes we'll make in the future as we'll procure the materials. So about 50%. Okay, 48%. It's just like, I mean, that's the tree business.

That's what we do. Yeah. We mark it up one, you know, 2x, basically. Exactly. Also, general liability goes down because you can, you know, require them to have general liability. So now you're a different type of general liability that you have to carry. And so there are a lot of savings that come with subbing it out. Also, another thing, if they step through the root or step through the ceiling, they're responsible to fix it, not us, right?

If they have a machine that breaks down, they're responsible to fix that, not us. And so there was one point when we had everything in house where just on rental equipment, we were spending 15 grand a month just because we have machines break it down or whatever. So that's a savings that we have just by subbing things out. So you don't even, you know, you talked about the insulation machine and all that. You don't even need to own that with the subcontractor model. No. They have their own equipment.

Now, insulation subs are a little harder to find than like landscaping subs. or yep but more specialized it's more specialized it's a higher investment up front but they're out there and they want to work yeah now a lot of people hesitate to hire subs because they're like oh they'll they'll take my business or they'll show up in a a different truck with a different logo i explain like the homeowner 90% of time doesn't notice or care it's a non-issue right because it's pretty commonplace and what about like stealing your business it does it just work for this because it's not really recurring thing. So you manage the payment. So we have the project manager on site. And once again, if you have a good sub, I mean, one of our main subcontractors, I mean,

we keep them super busy to where I, 90% of their businesses from us. They're not going to do anything to mess that relationship. Yeah. And it takes time to find them and to vet them, right? It probably won't be the first sub you find that's that good. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we've are bad ones, but for the most part, we haven't had any issues with that because we still control the project. I think where you have the issues is if you just like sub it out and then don't have oversight, right? We still want to control the communication. We're still there with the homeowner, walking them through the project. We're not just handing it off. And I think that works. There's a lot of big companies that just hand it off, but we don't want to do that. We like to have

a little more control over it. What is like your project manager to job ratio? Like how many jobs is your project manager overseeing at any given time? Here in Phoenix, we do about 60 jobs a month. And we have one project manager. One of our subs, the one I was just talking about, we trust him implicitly. So if that project manager is out for that day or can't make it to the job, then we don't worry about it.

And so there are those cases where, you know, calls on sick or he's on vacation. And, you know, we still are communicating with them. But we might not have a project manager on site that day. Yeah. Okay. So it's not unreasonable to assume that in one Metroplex using the subcontractor model with a good Facebook ad strategy, you can make over a million dollars a year of net profit. Right.

Yes, you can. You got dialed in systems. You're paying your salespeople. mission, Facebook ads or crank in. What types of services are you selling with your ads today? Most of our ads are targeted towards insulation and duck selling. So we'll do like a free ad of inspection. So our ads is really just to pitch a free ad of inspection. Obviously, we're bringing up some of the pain points in our ads, you know, just kind of some of the things that people might be experiencing. That kind of elicits the response to get an attic inspection. And then we'll go

do an inspection and we'll come down after we inspect the attic and some of the things that are going on up there, we'll come down, sit down with them, present the solution. That's where we'll add on, you know, if they're having allergy issues or dust issues, we'll add on air scrubbers or duck cleaning or, you know, sealing duct work is big for allergies and dust. So that's where we kind of, once we do the attic inspection. So really, our ads are really just focused on providing a free attic inspection. And once we do that, then we kind of know the solution to tailor for that homeowner. Okay. So that's been like your most successful ad offer is get your foot in the door with a free attic inspection. Ask the right questions, feel them out and see what kind of direction

you need to point them towards, right? Correct. Yep. Okay. I assume you're using mostly video ads. Yep. Usually my face in an attic or somewhere talking about insulation and to, you know, then they have a good call to action, have a good offer and you're going to go people submitting their information. Now you have, once that happens, you have to have the appointment setters and the automations in place. And that's not hard to set up. But, you know, to keep everything organized and to make sure that things aren't falling through the cracks, that's an important element of doing. What does your like tech stack look like? Are you using high level or HubSpot?

We use high level, you know, for our marketing, for our leads to come in. But I've been developing, and I think you and I've talked about this before, I've been developing my own CRM for five years now, six years. Yeah. So how's that going? It's good. I even have it connected with high level. So all the leads are coming through high level go through it. Okay.

So what about vent cleaning? Do you think there's that could be a standalone business? And if so, how could people tackle that if they wanted to? Betcline definitely can be a standalone business with Facebook ads. You want to have a big enough ticket. to make it worth it. You can be selling a cheap product or an expensive product. Your leads are going to cost roughly the same.

We spend about each lead that we get in is about $75 a lead. We need to sell a ticket. We need to sell something, a service that's going to recoup that investment, plus put some money in our pocket. You'll probably have a higher close rate with a cheaper product. So you probably able to sell more duck cleanings. your clothes rate would probably be a little better, but like a typical duck cleaning, standard 2,000 square foot home, 12 vents. You look about $800 for that.

Once you're in doing the duck cleaning, there's the additional services that you can upsell, like the air scrubber, right? You can do some duck ceiling, right? Even if you don't want to invest in the aerosil system, you can go and do manual duck sealing. Because one of the big reasons why dust is getting into the ducks in the first place is because of leaky ducks, right? And so that could be an upsell as duck cleaning or duck ceiling. And you can charge $4 to $500 on that and then just other duck services. But that duck cleaning could be the kind of the lead horse. And then you can upgrade that, you know, that service from there.

And that's kind of how we do it. I think there's a couple different words for this, but I've heard people call it like self liquidating ads. In your case, like you don't really make anything unless you close a lead, right? Like you're offering a free attic inspection, but you know that you close rate once your insight is going to be X percent. But with this model, it could be, you know, our offer is not a free attic inspection. It could be a duck cleaning for $800. That way, like when you get your foot in the door, you physically get to their house.

You've paid for the ads in N-time. You're already profitable. But then you can bring your average ticket from 800 to 1,800 because one in four people buy an air scrubber or one in four people get a $10,000 job, right? Is that kind of what you're saying? Yeah. And it averages out. Yeah. And with duck cleaning, that's something you can sell over the phone.

You don't even have to go and look at it. I mean, a duck system is duck system. You ask the right questions. You know, you could sell that over the phone without even really going and seeing, you know, the property. So that's obviously there's some savings there. And as far as converting someone to a customer. And then, yeah, like you said, the self-liquidating offer, you can come up with this like really good offer on the front end. to bank on some of the upsells.

And then when you're in the house doing the service, then you can, okay, we, we notice that your ducks are super leaky or you have a disconnected duck. You have allergy issues. Let's sell you an air scrubber. And, you know, there's a lot of things that you can do once you're there doing the service, once you've kind of sold them that, you know, you've made your money back from the ads. And that's, you'll make the profit at all the upsells. Is there enough margin with vent cleaning only to sub it all out?

or would you want to do it yourself? And if so, what kind of equipment would you need? So vent cleaning, that's, if I was just to have a vent cleaning company, I'd have that in-house. One, because you don't need a lot of, I mean, depending on the type of duct cleaning you do, so there's a couple different types of equipment you can get. There's what's called a brushing back where basically it's just long brush and there's a vacuum attached to it.

And as you're scrubbing it, it's like spins around. You really only need one guy. to do that. The downfall of the brush and back method is, you know, it's usually designed for residential and light commercial. So if you wanted to do anything bigger, you're kind of limited to just that, you know, part of the market. The other type of duct cleaning machines is it's a negative air machine.

And that's where you're blocking off the AC unit. You're connecting the vacuum up with the air handler. you use these like airwips to break up the dust. You see those in like the TikTok videos. Yeah. Because it's very visual. Yeah. They're very visual of breaking up the dust and it's, you know, it's sucking it into that

negative air machine. That is, in my opinion, it's a better duct cleaning method. But it's, you're probably going to have two guys to do that work. And that's a little bit longer setup. But the upside is you can get into bigger jobs. you can do industrial ductwork, really start to get into those types of jobs. So duct cleaning, I'm not saying you can't sub it out, but the average ticket is probably about $800 to $1,000.

There's not a lot of margin. That might be something that you want to take in house. But so for a machine, so if you're just doing a brush and back machine, a good machine that's going to last and, you know, that's going to do a good job. You're looking at about a $46,000 investment. A negative error, you're 8 to 12. There's cheaper machines out there. And it might not be a bad idea to go a little bit cheaper to start,

but you're going to probably have to upgrade, you know, later on. Where if you just kind of invest right up front into the better machines, those will last a good while and they'll do a good job for you. Yeah. Is this as good of an opportunity in culture climates or is it best in places like Phoenix? I think anywhere where there's extreme weather. I mean, the insulation is great in colder climates. In fact, usually the levels of insulation you want to install or higher, right?

So, like in Minnesota, instead of going to R49, you'd want to probably install R60. Probably get a little bit more money on that ticket, just being in the colder climates. But yeah, I think extreme weather is where you're going to get the real demand for it. In places like San Diego, there would still be a demand in San Diego. but it's the same temperature all year around for the most part you're not going to have people suffering what i think the biggest thing is like the difference people feel from winter here versus summer right winter they're pretty you know content they're you know they're like yeah life's good it feels good here and then also in the summer it comes and then they start realizing you know all the areas

that you know of their home that are not comfortable or they're not getting yeah or whatever So with that logic, like Phoenix might not even be the best market, right? Like maybe a Salt Lake or a Dallas, it gets really hot, really cold. We love Dallas because it has both extremes. Here in Phoenix, we still get a lot of winter work because we're really selling the summer. Hey, do this now so the summer's better. But in Dallas, you get a lot of pain in the winter and you get a lot of pain in the summer. Same with Salt Lake.

Same with, you know. So yeah, anywhere where you kind of have. Pretty hot summers and pretty cold winters, you're going to, you know, business is going to be good. Yeah. But in Dallas, we get like nine days of perfect weather per year. So don't dogg on it too much. Yeah. I mean, Dallas is a great market.

The only thing it sucks. And we've had this happen in Dallas is all the ice storms where we can't do anything. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to slide off the road. Is there anything that's interesting about this business that I forgot to ask you about? I don't think so. I think you asked some good questions.

what I'll say is there's a lot of things that you can do in this business in the home I call the home performance industry and there's a lot of things that that relate to others I mean you could at some point your business grow to do roofs because roofs actually it's something that come up comes up quite a bit with us hey can you fix my roof while you're doing my attic so there's a lot of areas you can branch into just starting off with whether it's insulation or duck cleaning like you know i mentioned earlier with duck cleaning you can eventually run a full-blown duct business and there's a lot of you know there's a lot of money in duct work replacing ductwork you know adding returns you know cleaning duct work new builds for yeah new builds

so you can kind of dip your total water with duck cleaning and it could branch into to something where now you're looking at 10 000 tickets 15 000 because duck work is one it's not cheap, nobody wants to do it. And there's a lot of intricacies with it. So you can really charge for it and be fair too. So that's kind of how I look at business is like, how can I get in at the, you know, the lowest barrier to entry and I grow into upsell from there. Yeah. So. Yeah. Beautiful. What, where can everyone find you, Rex, if they want to find you or your business or. So our Instagram page is, our handle is at cozy pros. Same with Facebook. C-O-Z-Y-P-R-O-S.

And my name's Rex Lindsay, so they can find me on Instagram and Facebook. Cool. Thanks, man. Yeah, thank you. Hey, guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn. You're still driving, what have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot if you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have

an interest in starting a business, it would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.