You don't need a massive marketing budget to grow a home service business. You just need to find opportunities your competitors are missing.
Jack Carr sits down with Sam Preston of Service Scalers to break down low-cost marketing strategies for growing a home service company. From Nextdoor and Facebook groups to yard signs, local partnerships, and community events, they share practical ways to generate leads without spending a fortune.
They also cover how one company generated over $500K in leads from Nextdoor, how yard signs helped grow an $8M plumbing business, and why getting creative with local marketing can give smaller operators an advantage over larger competitors.
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In This Episode:
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• Where to spend your first marketing dollars
• Generating leads without expensive advertising
• Nextdoor, Facebook groups, and Google Business Profile
• How yard signs helped grow an $8M plumbing business
• Building local partnerships and referral networks
• Marketing expenses to avoid early on
• Competing with larger companies on a smaller budget
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Sponsors
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Quick Staffers
Hire trained HVAC and plumbing CSRs without the overhead of traditional hiring. Save $500 on your first placement with Quick Staffers: https://www.quickstaffers.com/
Catalyst | May 3–5 | Akron, Ohio
100+ home service owners and operators. Three days of tactical sessions, real conversations, and learning from great operators.
Grab your seat: https://www.ownedandoperated.com/catalyst
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Connect
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Jack Carr
https://x.com/thehvacjack
Sam Preston
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-preston-a682103b6/
More Ways To Connect with OAO
John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
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Early marketing in business. So where are you spending? Where's your first channel?
I'm going as hard as I can on getting as many reviews. I'm calling all my friends, and I'm like, yo, lead me a review. I did that personally for a very, very long time. Second thing I'm doing, I'm looking at next door, Facebook groups, TikTok dances. If it hits, I think you should do it. I really like to see you do some TikTok dances.
I really think this is the next move for you.
All right, that mentality is how we've been able to grow to be an $8 million plus business. There's so many other things that we haven't even thought of. Things to not do.
You have another episode with Jack and Sam. Owned and Operated, a top hundred podcast in the home service space, talking about my and John Wilson, who's not here, HVAC Plumbing, Electrical, all the home service businesses. Um, Sam here is our awesome in-house. Well, he doesn't work for owned and operated and or in-house meeting friend of the business. Yeah. Service scalers. So he runs a marketing agency. And today uh we had a unique idea. We want to talk about early marketing in business. So as you start to come on to a business, you start to either you start working for a company or you buy a company. Uh the early days in marketing can be a grind. Yeah. Um, and I wanted to go through with you today some of the ways that uh you have seen big wins either from clients or from anybody really um that have worked for you and will deep dive some of those items. Let's do it. Sweet. So, or maybe I can give you some of mine and you can just review and tell them, Jack. That's terrible. Um so the one of the hardest uh and why we run the Breaking Five Conference, Sam, is because uh it's a grind. Like it really is. You don't have enough money to spend on marketing like you should, but you need the money to spend on marketing so that you can grow. Like it is owner's hell, just like you don't have it, but you need it, but you don't have it. Um so if you're a new buyer and you're in my shoes, you just bought an electrical company and you need to get scrappy. Where is the first place that you, Sam, the marketer expert, is going?
How much money do I have? Like, what's my marketing budget?
Dude, you're paycheck to paycheck on the business so you don't lose your house. Yeah. So how like what I don't want to call it gorilla marketing techniques, but like, where are some of the early ways that you could see big wins come out from people with just essentially little capital? I mean, if it's a if it's 10,000 because that really drives, then that's 10,000. But I think that the idea here is more so about performance, less so about like the exact cost.
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing before we get into that specifically is like be careful putting your money into agencies, right? Like, I think that's the damn I know you own an agency. No, like I want to do your marketing. Come, please. I want to partner with you and help you grow. But the problem with that is like if I only have call it $10,000 and your agency fees get are three, well, then you only have seven to work with. Yeah. Like, is that actually getting you enough return to make it worth it? And so, like, just be careful with that. You have only a certain amount of capital. We want that to go as far as possible. And I think some people make the mistake of getting in there like, I want to do, you know, LSA and Google Ads and meta-ads. And it's like, bro, like, find one channel that's gonna work and push your money to that.
That's a really good option. So I'm not saying don't test, and I don't think Sam's saying don't test channels here. I'm saying use limited budget to test channels, find one or two, maybe three channels, and go all in because we've talked about on the podcast, we talk about in breaking five. Um, each channel that you run is gonna require a different set of circumstances, SOPs, people to actually work that channel. So a Google LSA channel, for example, uh, really easy to run. Calls come in, you answer the call, you have an SOP for how you answer calls, your call takers answer calls are usually all urgent calls, easy to book, boom, great. Like LSA is great. Everybody should be running some level of LSA, in my opinion. Yep. Uh, but versus a lead ag like uh Angie's, you have to call out a lot of the times. You have to do it fast because there's other contractors trying to call that same job. So there's an outbounding feature. It's not, you know, sometimes it's project related. So there's a higher level of like, how do I get this person to commit to a booking or at least us coming out and getting on site, and then our sale team on site needs to actually generate some sort of revenue by convincing him that he should move forward with you as a company, not necessarily that it's just urgent and we need somebody to fix our toilet now. Yeah. So two great examples of two different marketing channels. Um, but back to the original prompt is where are you spending? Where's your first channel?
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Man, I think the in so uh we've set up LSA, we've set up Google uh Google Business Profile, as much as that can spin. Let's go. All the free stuff, right? Do free easy first, yes. Uh, and then I'm going as hard as I can on getting as many reviews. And so like I'm calling all my friends and I'm like, yo, leave me a review. Anytime I'm out, I'm trying to figure out somebody that if I can like trade reviews with somebody, I'm gonna push as much as I can in that. I mean, ethically, right? I didn't say that cool. Yeah. Uh for people you actually worked with for sure. Um, but like so. Here's a yeah, we're walking five.
I know, I know. As someone who actually has Google business profiles, but a fun way that I have seen uh it actually wasn't even home services, it's outside the home service industry, which is where it worked better because it had a retail space. But I had a friend who it had retail space, and what he did for 30 days, so Google uses a few um like metrics to uh train its algorithm to see if you're right. And one of those for retail is how many times somebody asks you for directions, right? Um, I'm that was actually a question to you. I'm pretty sure that's one of the like one of the features of the algorithm is like how many times are is directions requested to your address if you own a retail spot. So not so not so great in home services because Google knows, hey, like you're a home service company, you shouldn't be getting these requests. I'm not gonna give you any any value to it. Um, but he would Uber every day to work and home from work and have the Uber driver enter an address that's amazing on both locations. Uh and I think like his second location was his home. Like he had a loft above his uh above his shop or whatever, um, or above the store. And every time with every Uber driver, he asked them for a review. And so in 30 days, he's driving 60 reviews to a retail location and getting driving directions. So again, ethically, probably Google it's against how will I say this? It's against Google's terms of service in some probably in some way. Uh that being said, very unique way of driving multiple signals to the Google algorithm to start um uh actually pushing his business more.
Yep.
So um second thing I'm doing is I'm looking at nextdoor, I'm looking at Facebook groups, and I'm looking at Reddit. So um uh we'll name names, but I know a guy who uh had was logged into his wife's account on Nextdoor and his account. And anytime somebody would mention uh either in Nextdoor or Reddit, uh, does anybody know a good HVAC company nearby? He would use his wife's account to then go and say, Oh, my husband has a great HVAC company in this area. Go to that.
I don't actually think that's below bar at all. I think that's a wonderful idea. If you are uh sub three million, like you should be doing that. I did that personally for a very, very long time. I can be your friend here. Yeah. Um but because right, that's it's a great opportunity. And then the way the Nextdoor algorithm works is if you comment on I'm looking for plumbing or I'm looking for HVAC, they will feed you all of the I'm looking for HVAC leads in that location. So you can respond to those and nextdoor really presents that to you so that it sees you as a commenter on those sections and provides you those more and more. I would probably say over the last four years, we've driven over half a million dollars in in nextdoor only leads. Okay. Uh we don't do it as much anymore just because it's not scalable. But from a value perspective, it's free, it's easy, uh, you can turn on notifications so you can do that, and and it builds your brand very early on in a community. Uh, it could also snap back the other direction. Luckily, we've never had that on Nextdoor, but I have seen people go the other direction and get screamed. Um, but that's the same for Facebook, right? I think it's the same. Uh join some contractor groups, join some Facebook groups new to Nashville was one that we we were in for a very long time. So new people moving into Nashville probably don't have an HVAC company. Uh, we would say, hey, you're new to Nashville, you just moved in from California or New York or Florida. Yep. Like we'd love to be your HVAC company. We'll offer you free maintenance. Yep. And that drove a decent amount of leads. Again, not scalable in the long term, but one of those small things that you can do early on for very, very little uh that will drive meaningful business.
Well, the good thing about it not being scalable is that at some point, as you get bigger, you can't do it anymore. And so there is like that opportunity that's always coming up in a market that somebody else can go and take market shit.
Yeah. Yeah. So because we don't do it anymore because we're too big, like it builds room for somebody else to actually do it, which is an interesting thought. Now I'm gonna go back and do it just so that nobody else can do it. Just out of slightly. This is actually like it's like me defending versus attacking. Yeah, exactly. But uh, it's a great, it's a great method. It really is. I've seen businesses built probably up to two to three million on that idea alone. Yeah. Like next door referrals, Facebook referrals, and contractors' groups with a little bit of like BI. Yeah.
So uh in uh in April, I decided I wanted to see if I could build a little home service business uh without trying too hard.
And so me and just like a cool pastime while you're you're having you just had a kid like, yeah, well, I'm just gonna like, hey, for funsies, build out an HVAC or a home service company. Yeah.
Uh so tree removal and and land clearing, just because it's high ticket. I don't need a bunch of them. I'm not really trying to make a ton of money in this. I just wanted to see, like, could me and Claude do something fun? Yeah. Uh so built out a website, uh, got my little Google business profile. Thanks, bro. Um, got my uh Google business profile up. Um and uh just those two alone, I'm driving around 10 to 15 leads a month, uh, and we're subcontracting everything. Yeah, um, and we just got a $300,000 demolition job uh opportunity that we're we're in the building on uh bidding on. And it's just because I had leads coming in and I don't have any photos on my website still because I don't have any before and afters, and I'm just ripping it. And so those two things have been able to drive a handful of leads, and you have an unfair advantage in this sector, just saying as somebody who runs an agency and knows about all of this.
Unfair, unfair advantage starting off and doing that versus like your average land clearing guy. Yeah, um, but that's a cool one. I think I'll I'll give one. I've recently seen, and shout out to these guys if they're listening, because I know they're listeners of the show. There's a plumbing company near here in Ohio that did their first $8 million in revenue. Let's go. Yard signs. No way. Yard signs. No way, spamming yard signs everywhere.
I love it.
Yeah, and then they bought a blimp. I don't know about the blimp idea. It was like it's not like a full-size blimp, but it was like a medium blimp. Like I asked him, I was like, How big is it? He's like 50 foot. That's a big blimp. That's still a big blimp. Um, for like in-person events and everything. But um that's so cool. I mean, I think from starting, like if you're if you can legally do yard signs in your community, we unfortunately can't, but if you can, I do think it's a powerful tool. Yeah, like corners people's yards. Um, you could do some really cool stuff off the back end of like, hey, if you have your yard sign up when we drive by your house, you get into a drawing and you can make you know win this prize. Like, there's a lot of cool things that you can do, and it allows you to brand for free, or not free, but generally pretty cheap. Yeah, like if you were to do a billboard, you're paying $15, $2,000, $3,000 in a major highway, but you can own a neighborhood with yard signs. They don't have to go on the highway and they're there every day all the time. Yeah. So things to not do, truck wrap.
Things to not do, branding, heavy expense branding jobs. I was just talking to a company um and they're doing $15k a month in revenue. And I was like, cool, love that. Um, I'm gonna talk you on, like, hey, like, don't go with me. You need to put that money somewhere else. He's like, Yeah, I just spent 50 grand on truck wraps, so I don't have a lot of capital to put into this. I'm like, oh my gosh, dude. That's a lot of yard signs.
Um, that's a lot of yard signs. That's a lot of yard signs. Because that's that's the that's the thing I always get, is there's a there's a professionalization, which is a real thing. It's like, hey, your business looks more professional, you're able to recruit better. Like there, there's some there's some real stuff, but that's never what anybody touts to me. They're always, it's a mark, my my car is a billboard. It's like it's not. No, it's really not. And if you were if that is your goal is to billboardize and do some branding and like some visual branding, there is much, much better avenues than that. You could get away with stickering further in early on. Um, but again, like yard signs, like 50k in yard signs at a hundred bucks a pop is five thousand yard signs, like that would drive, I think, significantly better than 50k in wraps.
In breaking five, I'm talking to a guy that his best lead source is stickers, literally puts a sticker on every every every uh unit he sells, and they he has such like people just call that. So, like his whole pina colada heating and cooling, because I I get that.
There's somebody who made Pina Colada heating and cooling, great branding.
That's so good, like very memorable. Yeah. Um, so his whole thing is like drive net new Google ads or like search intent leads in there on the back and put a freaking sticker on it because he knows they're gonna call him. Yeah, um, and so you know, as you're doing jobs, like not a bad idea.
Yeah, yeah. The the problem, the one problem with stickers that we see is that the time in between stickering and the actual call is is a very long lead, right? So you you sticker when you install water heaters, for example, construction companies try this all the time, and it's very hard to do. So I'll have a guy in construction, new construction come up to me and say, Hey Jack, I'm installing 10,000 water heaters a year. Like I can run a service business, I have all those leads, yeah, and we're stickering all the units and dah-da-da. And I said, Well, when do you get your first call? Like on average. And the lead time is like four years, five years before you get the first call that anything goes wrong with that water heater. Yeah. Uh, you could try and push for flushes, but again, it's a one-year water heater. Like the value is is generally it's it's a long-term game, but when they do start, like the payoff is real once it does come to fruition. I like I know Adam's uh plumbing because the sticker is on my garbage disposal from like 1998. The business isn't even in business anymore in Nashville. Um, but it's but I've seen the sticker, so like it works, it's just there's long lead times on between when it actually fails and needs replacement.
But here's the thing like people uh again, I sell Google, right? Like that's my whole job. I talk to so many five million dollar companies.
You're underselling, sell Google, but uh you've spent years and years understanding Google, which is how you can sell Google, and Google is a beast.
Yeah, and it it does help you and it does make it play on easy mode in comparison to just like doing the hard mode of doing it. But like you can get around Google and still grow a five million dollar company.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, people are surprised when they hear today that um like I we only have a few wraps on our we have four wraps, five wraps maybe on our fleet of 27, 26 vehicles. Like again, you can get around some of these things that people think are integral to a business just by like, hey, there's other ways to do this. And that's why I love this conversation. I'm very big on the gorilla marketing technique. Okay, so we we have yard signs, we have uh next door, which we've utilized, like that's a great one. I'd say um posting into social media groups, huge, tick tock dances. I'm gonna that actually I'm just saying. I was about to just absolutely shit on that idea, but I have recently seen exactly what you're talking about, and it has like 1.5 million views.
And now TikTok has a local button. Yeah, you seen that? Yep. You push local and you can see all the stuff in your local area. Just saying. Yeah, there's potential.
I think I would I would categorize that differently as than TikTok dances. That that's like West Coast decks. Like there, there's a branding aspect, it's like personal, it's personal branding or like localized business branding, but from a um like a perspective of uh of like video marketing and trends, very, very powerful. Uh, and if you can do that, if you want to do that, uh more power too. I think it's one of it is extremely strong. It's a great way to build a local brand that everybody knows about with very, very little. It's essentially free, right? You're posting and something hits. It's a bit of a lottery ticket system. Yeah. Uh, but if it hits, I think you should do it. I'd really like to see you do some TikTok dances.
I really think this is the next move for you.
All right. I'm actually gonna start up an agency that that works on the trends on TikTok. My wife would just absolutely kill me. She'd love me watching TikTok all day. No, I'm trying to figure out trends that 18-year-old kids are doing so that I can start my agency.
He will personally come out to your shop and teach you how to dance, quarry round. Yeah, and it's gonna be great. Any others that you've seen have worked.
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If I'm super small, or when I was, I mean, I was really small. We were some million. We were, I think the big one was we were doing the the next door. We did all the LSA, Google, uh, we figured it out. Like you said, it's a beast to learn. It is a beast to learn. Man, trying to, I'm trying to keep away from like the big go-to's. I mean, they're go-to's for a reason because they they obviously work, but I do think that there's optionality in smaller ones, stickering units. I think that there's a here's a good one. I think that there's a value in the community that's undersold. And I if people have been listening to this podcast, they've probably heard this pitch to John before, and I haven't done it fully. I haven't committed it all in. But I think that there is an avenue that you can go hyper local and win. And I think you can win extremely deep in a market, which is which is rare. So if you actually do this, I think that there's the value kind of transcends beyond the traditional marketing types. But the the answer that I'm beating around the bushes is like hyper-localized marketing, uh, in the sense of how do you show up at your high school football game for your community, sponsor your high school football team, and then do events on the field at halftime. Yeah. How do you work with the local HOAs for this neighborhood you want to be in to sponsor the pool party opening or to buy them a new bench for $50? Or here's one that I'm trying to sell to my HOA is like, hey, you guys need this new thing, this new thing, and this new thing. It's gonna cost $150. Sell the rights to the Wi-Fi password at the pool, the community pool. So they have to type in anytime somebody goes to the pool and wants to type in the password, they have to do Rapid response is the greatest, like just the most obnoxious, like long password. But but point being is like there's some there's some there's some community focused auxiliary things that you can do uh to win big because when you're working with the community like that at that extent and you're providing value to that community, a little bit of dollars goes uh a much farther way. Yeah. Um I bet you could do that at local like coffee shops as well. Um so we did that. That was one of the ones we did early on. Was that a setup? Like, did you do you remember when I so early on what we did is we went onto our Facebook groups, we said free coffee day, or it was like free coffee morning. Uh, but we went to the free coffee shop we went to was one that was like its location is very interesting because it's located essentially in a residential community, and the residential community comes and kind of congregates there in the morning. So we did a four-hour free coffee and we left our cards, comp coffee by rapid response. We I think we got like three or four jobs out of like installs out of that, not jobs, installs from free coffee. If you go back on my Twitter, you can find the outcome to that. Let's go. It ROI'd heavy. I love that. Um, but again, community focused, free coffee. I stayed there the whole time. I talked to 20 or 30 people. They're like, hey, thanks for the coffee, man. We appreciate it. Yeah, like doctors, lawyers are coming in. Like it worked out really, really well. I I should pull that back up and repost that. That was a cool experiment. I love that. I love that. Um, but yeah, that extends on and it and it's extremely um open, right? Like, how do you impact your community with whatever events are going on in your community? It really depends on the community and what it looks like. Um, but the answer is like, hey, sponsor the local pool party. Yeah, sponsor this neighborhood, Santa Drive, go down to your your small town center for the parade and put up a booth, uh, put up a you know a board with some holes in it, free maintenance if you can throw the ball through this hole. You know, it doesn't matter. The point's that you're out there talking to the community and you're working with them and you're building that rapport, and that's how you grow a really big deep. And I keep talking about deep because a lot of times what contractors want to do is they want to go wide early on. Like, I can't get any more leads, so I expand my service area. Yep. Like I add another zip code. And yeah, you might get a few more leads in that zip code, but you're also driving 30 more minutes, 45 more minutes.
Yeah.
And it's it's not necessarily the best thing. Whereas if you could do those same leads for probably even a lesser cost in that same community, then efficiency, drive time, window, like it's a huge win across the board.
Yeah, I think the other thing that you um you can think of is uh I used to do marketing for a commercial office furniture company. And our big thing was like, how do you find center of influences? Um, and not just like, because there's just so only so many people that are searching for like commercial office furniture. And like we we owned the entire Google search for Houston and I could barely spend like $500. Um, and so it's like, okay, how do we go find like designers or how do we go find um um architects that are actually building out these office spaces and like connect with them? I think you do the same thing from a commercial standpoint, just finding those real estate agents and connecting with them, taking them out to to lunch because like they're the ones that are connecting with home buyers all the time. Um, and so you find one that has good connections, like, yo, I want to be your HVAC person. I'll give your clients a good deal, I'll I'll service them. Like, that's what they need is to know that they can refer to somebody they trust.
Yeah. Um, so we see a lot of small businesses grow like that, is they have one or two really good marketers, like or top uh real estate agents in the area, and they get on their good side and they can drive high amounts of leads. Um, there's some interesting stuff that people are doing around that on the other side of like um new to neighborhood as people start to move into neighborhoods, getting targeted, working with as like a center of influence, not working with the real estate agent. But what I've seen recently, which I was really intrigued by, and I'm giving the sauce away here on this one because I would try this, is they work with the moving companies. Oh so, like who better to work with than the people that are actually moving them into the house? Yeah. And all they're doing, uh, and I have another one that's kind of similar to this, is they were giving out the moving company was providing a small list of preferred vendors. Like, hey, if you want to give us a review, uh great, we appreciate the ability to earn your business. And then, like, here's for you. This is a list of vendors that we've historically known in the area that are awesome people to work with. They've offered some discounts, some coupons, whatever. Uh, and so now you're new in the house, you've just moved in, you're in boxes, and like, oh, your AC goes out, you don't know the area. You can go on Google, like it's not working, or like, oh, dude, didn't they drop the vendor's list when they moved in? Yeah, they did. You pick up the vendor's list 20% off for rapid response to get out to do your you know, your service call or free for a service call. Like, you're calling that company, yeah. Uh, and they put it on their fridge, it's a magnet, like it's a whole thing, very effective. Yeah, uh, we were gonna we probably we might try that at some point here in the near future. We've called some of the moving companies. The hard part is getting that that sphere of influence to do the SOP that you want them to do because they don't work for you, yeah, which is where we ran into trouble. But if you can do it, huge. Yeah, the other one, um, and I think Isaac's been uh Zimmerman out of Chicago has been very open about this. He used to like tie um like uh tie flyers or like have flyers. He bought the boxes for a pizza company. He said, Hey, you have this is your expense line item, I will buy you the boxes, and he put his flyer on top of the box. So as everybody got received their pizza, they also got a flyer for plumbing work. I'm not sure how well that worked. He probably has more information public about how well it worked.
Yeah.
But I do think that's interesting is like this dynamic of um connecting businesses that have uh like similar wants or needs or outcomes, uh, that that could actually be a very effective thing. We tried after it, it didn't work out because again, the hard part of this, the strategies are actually getting a company that's not yours to do something you want to do. Um yeah, we tried to work with the local YMCA. And again, we wanted to go deep in our community. And it's like this is the YMCA that everybody goes to in Brentwood. And we wanted to buy the sleeves for their coffee cups because they give away free coffee. Like, hey, how do we buy the sleeves for this for you guys? Yeah, how do we buy the cups? I will buy the all your coffee for like six months. How do we let me in? Uh, they got pushed to their purchaser and just like they go to me. But point being was like, still as a as a strategy, I think it would have been an extremely effective strategy because when I go to the YMCA in in my local Brentwood, in my local community, I drink coffee, I take it home, it sits in my center console until the next day when I throw it away or whenever. Yeah. Um, but like there, there's like a if I'm if I'm gonna spend $3,000 on a billboard, or I'm gonna spend $3,000 on 3,000 coffee cups, like a billboard might have people driving by all day long, yeah, not paying attention. I feel like you and again, not proven. Maybe someone disagrees with me. I think you would get better ROI from 3,000 coffee cups that have your name on it. Like, is this is this too hot? So is your home. A rapid response to plumbing heating and cooling. You know what I mean? Like some some some funny kind of branded thing that people just remember and then they they see you a couple times, and now you're them. Yeah. Like you stick for everyone at YMCA in Brentwood that drinks coffee, and that's almost everyone there.
I wonder if you could do that similarly to like um like office like co-working spaces. Because then you have people that are using like a shared like coffee cup section where it's like they're coming in, they have to see it every day for work, and you know, it's probably a little bit more easier to get into there than you know, home. I'm just thinking of like my wife seeing that, like I put in there, she's like, Yeah, that's that coffee cup's not staying there. Yeah. Um, but like an office co-working space, like that'd be well.
It wasn't like a hard coffee cup, but it it was more so like if you can buy a sleeve for a coffee, like a like a disposable coffee cup is oh, got it, got it, got it, got it, yeah, is two cents, three cents. Branded is probably 15, 20, 30 cents. And so for a thousand dollars, I can buy what?
Oh gosh, public math, three thousand sleeves.
So for a thousand dollars, I can get in front of three thousand people, yeah, and not only in front of three thousand people, but like at a regular cadence that they can't avoid. Yeah. If they drink coffee and they're using sleeve, like you'll see it. Yeah, it's there. Um and I think it's interesting. Like I think it's the point of this exercise to me is how do you think outside the box to fish in a pond where no one else is? Yeah, you can try to continue to fish in ponds where everybody's trying to play. And I mean, you've talked about Facebook on different episodes. I don't do Facebook not because of lead issues, I don't do Facebook because I don't want to compete with 60,000 other vendors on it, and I don't have the time to do the copy necessary to stand out. Yeah. Um, and so that's where I feel like my strength is is I want to work in areas where I want to fish in ponds where I'm the only one fishing. And if you ever fish in a pond where you're the only one that's ever fished, it's yeah, it's just easy. It's easy to go. And that I think that's the key. That's how we've been able to grow like that mentality is how we've been able to grow to be an eight million dollar plus business in four years from sub 100, sub one million, is because we focus on being scrappy, and part of being scrappy is fishing where others don't. If we try to go on radio, we can't go up against a hundred million dollar PE back conglomerate. Like they can outradio us. Yeah. That they their their budget for radio is probably more at multiple points in time, more than my entire revenue on my business, but yet we're still able to take customers from them because they have trouble being in the community. Yeah. Like they have trouble being a member of the like a valuable member of the community. They can buy the slot on the morning news, but they're not at your local high school cheering on the same team. And I think that's more powerful.
Yeah.
I've got this idea for um my own kind of version of that for marketing, is uh, you know what a Raspberry Pi is? Yeah, a little computer. Yeah. And so I want to buy just like a bunch of those and just load in like some sort of like job board or something like that inside of that so they can just connect it to the computer and automatically connects to their job board and just can display on their TV. Um, and so I'm playing around with this idea. Wait, for for who though? For uh for me, so like home service company. So anybody that I'm like, oh, I want to target that person uh and get it from like just shipping it to them. And it's like, hey, I got you something.
Yeah. So I was joking, I was joking about quick staffers the other day. You'll get it, you'll get a and this is a good example of it. I I'm not going to do it. No, no, no, no. Yeah, but now the idea is hilarious. And I I told my buddy, I said, hey, we were messing around about just silly ideas like this. I said, I'm gonna start sending people weights, 45-pound weights, like just the most obnoxious size possible that they have to deal with. Like you get a 45-pound weight in the mail. What are you doing with it? It's a lot to ship and it costs a lot to buy. But and it's a let me take some weight off your back or let me take some weight off hiring. Like the ability to uh and the same actually principle I've seen is like they send somebody a shoe, they buy like cheap, cheap, cheap shoes, and they they send them one shoe and they said, now that we have the foot in the door, yeah. Uh another version of this is they send people one cent or two cents. Can I give you my two cents? And they find them on Venmo because it's super hard to find people on like Twitter or or uh LinkedIn or Facebook, like you can't get a hold of these people, but your Venmo is like oddly personal. And so if they find you on Venmo and they start sending you two, like spamming you with two cents, again, not recommended, but definitely fishing in a pond where people aren't. Yes, like you're sending people money for funsies to try and talk to them. Yeah.
Um my uh my friend Alex, he was on Shark Tank uh for the potato message. Do you remember this? Yeah, yeah. So he actually he's the one that created that idea. Um, and so people would uh basically buy a potato, tell him what message to write. He'd write it on and ship it to people. Yeah, and they got a lot of responses from that.
So we did we did a campaign. This is a real campaign we did. I I think I posted pictures on my my Twitter as well. Um, we did a campaign for plumbing where we dropped off uh we bought plumbers off Alib, yeah, plungers off Alibaba for a dollar fifteen. And when we had some downtime with our team, we printed out and laminated cards that we drilled holes in the the plunger, tied it to them, and we left it in front of like these McMansions in Brentwood because they had the the gates that would open up, like you have to type in the code and it would open, and we left plungers in front of people's gates so they would have to get out of their car to remove the plunger to like drive into the house. Yes, and um didn't work very well. Sample size in my defense sample size was 30 or like 50. Um we got some complaints that people did. It's like the weight thing, man. Like it definitely made some people mad. I think we got like one job from it. It's two jobs. Um, somebody, some some people found it funny. It was also like wrong people to do that to. Like, there's a group that would find that funny, like, but uh a lot of these people had like full housing man, like we were going after people who have house managers, like like Dolly Parton's mansion, like that's who we're going after. And it was probably the yeah, the wrong move. Um but I think I do think that the idea again, back to the idea, is like there's versions of this that aren't as obnoxious. Yes. I my mind goes to like this giant obnoxious, like outlandish you can't ignore. Yeah, but there's versions of this that aren't that like there's versions of it that that work, and I think that are um actually would work really well in small businesses where you buy you know 50 or 100 or 200 of this really small item, and then with the correct messaging, correct copy and placement, you can actually drive meaningful leads from groups of people.
So there's a lot. I mean, like we've mentioned probably a a dozen or so right here, but like there's so many other things that we haven't even thought of on ways you can get in front of people that is actually helpful, they appreciate.
Um that's uh do you like my my both sides of my spectrum? One's like, hey, help out the community, like local pool parties buying the nets and being the Wi-Fi.
The other side's like, send somebody off and they can't ignore.
The poor woman can't even bring in her house because uh it just you'd have to get a freaking truck to drop it off. Um but that's too funny. I love it, man.
Any any last ones before we close out? Oh man, I think that's all my good ideas. I have no others. That's sweet.
Um, I think that the the point of this that I wanted to drive home, if there's any kind of like end-all good morale thing, uh, a good theme to this is is fish in ponds where people aren't. Get creative, try out some channels. I think that there's some fun channels out there. There's some channels that are easier, like localized uh you know, groups. There's some non-local, there's some localized being in the community. Um but the the key is to the the benefit to your size at one to five is you can be scrappy and you can do these things. Yeah. Because you're so agile and small, and it actually makes a difference. The big companies can't.
Yeah.
So this is where you win, and this is how you can win in some markets some of the time. So those are my ideas. I hope you guys had fun with that. If you like what you heard, if you have some wacky ideas that you've done or thought of, post them in the comments below. We read them, we have some fun with it. Um, and maybe we'll even try one out and do some live reviews. So uh, see you next time.
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