Transcript:
Welcome back to another episode of the Service Legend Podcast. Guys, I have an absolute legend here today. So when I look up to good friends with and just inspired by David Carroll with Dope Marketing, welcome to the podcast.
Man, My man. You’re going to make me blush for the intro and shit. I appreciate you having me, man.
Yeah, man, thanks for being here. For the three people in the in the US that don’t know Dave or Dope, he runs dope marketing, which is a direct mail automation software that is absolutely changing the entire landscape of home service. But he also is a home service business owner himself. He’s been there, done that, and he really just loves data and he loves direct mail. And the one question I want to open up with that everyone seems to ask me in the digital space is direct mail is dead. Is that true, bro?
Fortunately, it’s not true at all. The old way of doing direct mail is dead, spending $10,000 to send out one mailer to spray all over town and pray that you get results. I could not agree more. That is as dead as a doornail. Like with most things in life, you know, the learning, testing, implementation of best practices, you know, technology is our friend and success leaves clues. And so we just look at direct mail a little bit differently. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll go. I love that a little bit.
Know I love that. Yeah, I love that. And we’ll dive into that. What’s funny, man, is I got into digital marketing maybe five years ago, something like that. And I remember everyone. There’s all these newbie marketers when we first started, right? And they were like, like there was like, this. Like this big wave of hating on old school offline marketing. It was like billboards suck, TV sucks, radio sucks, direct mail sucks, Home magazine sucks. All this stuff sucks. Only do Facebook ads only do Instagram, all this stuff. And I think through mentorship of like Tommy and Jeff and all these different guys that I know that run eight and nine figure companies, these guys have a completely different story where it’s like, Dude, who gives a crap about if offline isn’t as good as this thing or this channel and it’s more about being omnipresent. Could you speak just real quick before we go into your background? Can you speak real quick in terms of the landscape of like offline versus online and how like how one is not better than the other and how they’re all actually beneficial to the the success of the actual company?
Yeah. So when you look at like what I was just success leaves clues, right? You get to learn from people that are we can all I think we can all agree that there are people that no matter what you do for a living have already done it better than you will ever do it like someone has already hit the utmost success of garage floor coatings, window cleaning, power, washing, roofing, solar, whatever it is, someone has done that better than we in our lifetime will ever do that. And so when you think about, like learning from those people, the idea is when you can. Harvard. Harvard did a study. We’ll start there. You’re a Harvard alumni, too, also, right, Brian? Like me.
Oh, yeah.
So at Harvard, they did a study and it said that a consumer, it takes 7 to 11 touches to get a consumer to remember a brand. And we’re moving, shaking, shaking, shaking hands, kissing babies, saving cats from trees, all that all that stuff during the day. And in order to remember a brand, you’ve got to get them in front of them. And so touches in marketing have value. Looking at a website, seeing a truck rep, seeing a yard sign, seeing a Facebook ad, seeing a door hanger, and it goes to where like the best companies that have systems in place just have these. Some of them are manual touches. You have to manually put a door hanger on someone’s door for them to physically take that off the door, Facebook ads or Instagram or TikTok, LinkedIn, any of that stuff can be automated a little bit more. So when you look at like the minutes you have during the day, you want to focus on those 8 hours. You have your employees for eight, nine, 10 hours, whatever it is. Yeah. Where are these touches happening and where are you focusing these touches? So the importance is not like I got to be the biggest, baddest company in town today. Instead, look at the data. Look at the dope, the data on previous engagement. That’ll tell you I’m doing work in these neighborhoods. I should probably be focusing on getting more touches.
Like when you think about omnichannel, cross channel, multi touch marketing. Fair to say that everyone that’s watching this live or the replay is in business today and they’re going to be in business tomorrow. That’s the plan. Right? And you’re doing things in your business that is working right now. And so the idea is how do you take what you’re doing good and add those other touches. You’re doing good door knocking, running Facebook ads, getting referrals because you were the man in high school and everyone uses your roofing company, whatever the case is, look at that good shit that you’re doing and then look at the touches that aren’t happening and just focus those in the neighborhoods you’re already working. And that’s what’s really important. I think it’s so easy to get like shiny object syndrome, especially when you’re getting into those growth years, like two year, three, year four, you’re phasing yourself out of the work. You’re not having to answer the phones and do the office shit and do like all the stuff, but you want to grow so fast. And I see a lot of business owners not focusing on the things they’re doing right, but trying to add additional things. Focus on the things you’re doing right and add those additional marketing touches so you get the same or similar customers coming into your business.
Man That’s that’s gold, man. Love that. For those of you that are actually live, if you could type in the comments, hashtag live. Let us know who’s live. But also if you’re on replay, type in the comments. Hashtag replay. Let us know that you are watching this on the replay. It kind of gives us an idea of who’s live, who’s not. And sometimes we might need to change the time or the day to get more people involved. So that feedback is amazing. Also, if you can let us know where you’re tuning in from, whether it’s a state, city, etc.. Love that, John. Glad to see you here, bro. And so what I want to do next, Dave, is actually go into your background because I think there are so many marketing companies that I mean, it’s so prevalent. It’s incredible where they just pick a random niche, right? They’re like, Oh, I’m going to serve roofing. And it’s like, Dude, you have no effing clue about roofing. And so I love that. Number one, you’re an amazing dude, an amazing father, husband, everything you’re doing with your health, but you actually no home service. And so the things that you’re doing with dope marketing in the software, it’s not just some random tech guy from San Francisco. Yeah. If you could speak to your your background in terms of the Home Service company, how you got started in home service and things like that.
So I was an ex knucklehead. I went to nine high schools. I took out three student loans to not do productive things with, didn’t really get very far in college, got in some trouble, got out of trouble when I was 25. And I, I had never had a job in my life. When I was in a halfway house transitioning out of I did four years in prison from when I was 21 to 25. And when I got out, the only job I had ever had was at a window cleaning company when I was in the halfway house. And so I went back to the same lifestyle for about a year and was like, what they say in treatment and sobriety, like sick and tired of being sick and tired. And so I was like, I don’t want to keep living like this. This is insanity. My wife was pregnant with my now ten year old daughter and I was just like, Man, we got to do something. What are we going to do? It’s like we’re going to start a window cleaning company. And so I get my timeline. It’s actually 13 years ago getting old. Wow. And it took for any of that I’ve ever carried a ladder before. It took four of us to carry a 24 foot ladder out of Home Depot. If that shows you that we had no fucking clue what we were doing at all and started the window cleaning company, I was doing the labor, cleaning gutters, washing windows, all the stuff.
And I saw in year three, it’s just like, like I been fortunate to like, be scaling the business pretty fast. Right? Similar to what you were doing with Cardinal, right? Like I was a young guy, kind of like moving and shaking, watching what was going on and was was got some success pretty quickly. And I started I had the opportunity to start speaking at some of the the window cleaning and the power washing events and that type of stuff. And as I was growing my business, I was just looking at like I was saying, as everyone else, right, I want to get off the truck. I don’t want to do the work. I want to make 100 grand a month. I want to crack $1,000,000, I want to do all these things. And I’m very impatient. It’s not like what I wanted to focus my whole life on doing. And so what I did was I got in a spot where I was just scaling very, very quickly. I ran that company for about seven years. I’ve the company’s been open 13 years. I’ve been removed from it now for six years. I haven’t set foot. I don’t know the names of the people that work there. I don’t know the jobs it goes.
I don’t I don’t even run our marketing over there like we we have an account rep at dope marketing that does our direct mail. And I have an agency that runs our Facebook ads and shit like that. I literally have no clue what’s going on, but I get a check. I pay myself like six figures a year from that business because that like to me, you know, I think that you can make an amazing living in any home service business. And for me it just wasn’t like my focus, it wasn’t my passion. I’m not a technician. I’m also not good at the day to day of running a business at all. I’m like a visionary, like a real one to a fault. And so I put the right people in the right places, was taking shitty loans, getting vehicles I couldn’t afford, buying equipment that was really shiny that we didn’t have a use case for yet. Like, I did it all. And what I learned was it was fascinating over the past couple of years with the COVID and all that shit was like. Home Service is the one tried and true thing in the fucking world because 10 to 30000 people buy a home every single day. In the United States, there’s 85 million homeowners, nine out of ten Americans, the biggest purchase they will ever make in their life is their home. And the second, third or fourth biggest purchase they’ll ever make is not education.
It’s not a car, It’s not a vacation. It is maintenance improvement or upkeep to that property. And then you think of like how long people live in their house. It’s 5 to 7 years. So when you’re looking at like what businesses are going to be tried and true, we know people that have had the utmost success. Our boy, Tommy, Tommy is fucking going to do $1,000,000,000 in garage doors. One of the tiniest niches that you could ever hear of. Like, anything’s possible in this space and you can make an amazing living, not have a job, get to spend more time with your kids, just not have. I’m not saying you’re not. Your hairline is not going to look like my business because it will. But it’s like having the ability to really, like, have your own destiny and your own dream. For me, Home Service gave me that stepping stone. I’m a fucking nerd. I like data and spreadsheets and analytics and automations and all that shit. But if it wouldn’t have been for my foundation and understanding, like truly understanding home service businesses, what they are, the systems that have to be in place to get them to operate correctly, I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t be at where I’m at today and I haven’t done anything special yet, but I’m working on it.
Yeah, man, it’s incredible, man. Like, literally, like it’s incredible what you’ve done, what you’ve built. I mean, it’s absolutely incredible. And if you guys are listening and you’re wondering, how do I get off the truck? How do I get out of the field? How do I put $1,000,000 in my bank account or 5000? Whatever’s next for you? Just know that it starts with understanding the journey and appreciating the journey. And that’s one thing that I really love about you, is that you love the journey. And I think sometimes as, as, as a home service entrepreneurs, we get so caught up in the and in the end result, you know, and I’m guilty of this obviously as well we’re like, you know, I’m going to sell cardinal for X and that’s and that’s going to be the thing. But what I’ve learned is like the journey to get there is more exciting than the actual thing itself. So I love I love that you love the journey and I love that you’ve kind of accepted that the journey is the thing, not the end result is the thing.
Gary checked me. I was out at I was out at Gary V’s office at the beginning of this year doing that four DS thing. And I was like, I think we’re building a business that we want to sell for $1,000,000,000 in this amount of time. He’s like, That scares me, dude. I was like, Why? He’s like, Because it’s like, it’s one thing to set a goal as something to work towards, but you’re why is never going to be a monetary goal. It seems like that. It seems like life will be better and you can do these things. You can move and shake out a fucking zero. The problems are still the same with everything. Remember in your business when like $500 was a big expense and then $1,500 of big expense and then 5000 was a big expense. And now something comes across your plate and you can be anyone watching this. You could be in any form of this. But I promise you. As you continue to grow your business, these invoices, these numbers on these things that you’re spending, it all becomes relative because you’re just operating in a next. And it’s almost like. The stress is what you make it, you know, like like you put you put things on your plate so you can’t complain when it’s full. And so when you look at like the beauty of the journey, even when you set a goal and meet the goal, it’s not the ringing the bell of the goal. It’s reflecting on the journey of what got you there, because it just comes down to with everything, whether it’s your home service business, you’re running a B2B Cosmos company like we do or whatever, dude, it’s about helping people. Like people need help. You started a business to help. And so when it’s like when you approach it from that side, it is the journey that matters because you put yourself in a spot to just be able to help more people.
Yeah, I love that man. I remember I met Tommy two years ago in January of last year, almost two years ago, and I showed up. I had a BMW and I had a Rolex on and I was like, Oh, you know, hey, I’m going to put myself together here for Tommy and Tommy. Like, Dude, this is when he before he bought his new Nissan Titan. It was an old five Nissan.
Deserve a beta forever. I remember. I wouldn’t get it.
He was driving me around, showing me the tent shop and the fab shop, all this stuff. Right? And I can’t tell you I felt like an idiot. I’m like, like, what am I doing? Right? And he told me he goes, He goes, He goes, Ryan, I pride myself on on this truck. And I think that anybody that makes some money or that focuses on that before the journey or before serving their team members and etc., is just an absolute fool. And so I love that you love the journey. I love that you speak to the realness of what is going on here versus the shiny stuff. So let’s transition real quick into dope. How did you start dope? So from home service, owning the window thing, doing your thing, learning everything in life, kind of really like elevating yourself. Like how did dope start? And then kind of what is dope doing now?
So what happened was I’ll keep this pretty short, but like I started a software company three years into my window, cleaning company couldn’t even spell the word software, but we had some wins. We signed up like 400 people for 40 bucks a month, and I was like, Shit, this is easy. Then we try to turn it into a CRM. And I ended up in a lawsuit with the staffing company from Canada. It was nasty, learn some lumps, whatever. And through that I got exposed to the world of data. So and that’s really like my superpower or my fascination. If I bring anything to the table like audience targeting that, you know, that’s my jam. And I opened a data company of brokering lists so we can get like residential lists, commercial lists, like all that stuff. And I’ve been in that business for about ten years and I saw that we were selling a lot of direct mail lists at the same time I was growing my cleaning company. We’re sending around 100,000 pieces of direct mail every single month to grow the Home Service business. And I started seeing all this stuff and I’m like, Man, this direct mail shit is fucking hard. Like, you got to get a list. You got to clean the list up and hygiene it. Then you got to deal with a designer and go through jump through the hoops of your ex girlfriend, sister or some person off fiber or something like that.
And that’s taken a couple of weeks. And then it’s like, you got to deal with this print shop and set up your tracking and your QR codes and your thing and whatever. I’m like, Dude, all I want to do is send a postcard. The shit has taken like six weeks. And so I looked at we had a lot of experience with print shops just brokering direct mail because we’d sell a mailing list and then I’d have to deal with the print shop. I’m just like, People are dinosaurs, dude. It’s like a bunch of 70 year old fat dudes who suck at golf whose kids don’t want to work for them running these print shops. And that industry has just changed so much. And so I was like, It’s got to be an easier way because I grew my business sending direct mail along with other cross-channel marketing stuff. But direct mail is a big part of it because the targeting, you can get so focused and you’re actually in control of it. So I was sent a lot of mail. I saw how hard it was and like, you know, dude, like again, real entrepreneur here to a fault and like, like, man, fuck it, Let’s build this tool, let’s make this happen. And so my plan was, I’m going to build this tool that’s going to send mail and I’m going to connect it with these print shops and I’m going to generate the orders and they’re going to send the mail and I build the tool before I ask permission from any of the print shops because I’m an idiot.
And I’m like, okay, here’s what we’re going to do. They’re like, No, it’s not possible. You can’t send direct mail with no minimum order to the neighbors of jobs connected to a CRM to do this shit. And I’m like, Oh, really? I can’t watch. And so we saw that printers are just big computers and they have manuals and we know how to read and hire people. So I was like, If you would’ve told me three years ago, Ryan, that I own a print shop, I tell you, you were fucking crazy. That was not the plan at all. But when I started trying to even get with these printers and some younger guys around our age that could do this, I was like, Thank you, whoever said that. So I was talking to these printers and I’m like, OC, I want to send you jobs to put this together so we can make this work. And I got a printer or two to agree with me. But then, like they’d sit on the jobs for two weeks and not print them every day and not go through it.
I’m like, This is not how the world works. So I bought a print shop. And we put it together and now don’t marketing. We built the software from scratch that you can log in, connect your CRM and based off like triggers in your business, job approved work scheduled, work completed, whatever. Send postcards, handwritten cards, cookies, whatever to those people. At no minimum order we batch every day. We print them all. Here in Minnesota, we have a marketing team. We do all our advertising and videos internally. We don’t offer those services, so don’t ask us. We don’t run Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn. We want to build your website. We don’t do none of that shit. Direct mail and print is our game. So we do the software in house, we do the print in house, we set up your automations, we do the design in house. So all those little check boxes of like those things that would take six weeks. We can get a client onboarded now. And believe me, this has been painful. There are going to be people watching this. Like Dave, I signed up with you six months ago. It took three weeks. You guys fucking suck. Like, I promise you, that happened to people that are watching this. I guarantee it. Right now, we can have a client come on, connect their CRM, get their design set up in less than five days, and have automatic direct mail happening based off instances in their business.
We want to find the dope, the data on previous engagement, the things that are working in your business. Our job is to add direct mail because these things it’s fucking postcards flying all over my desk everywhere. These are tiny little billboards. So like, imagine that you’re working in a neighborhood and based on the cycles of your jobs, whether you’re doing garage door floors, window cleaning, solar roofing, HVAC, it doesn’t matter. Humans are relative creatures and we like to do what makes us comfortable. We might not hang out with your neighbor. Your kids might not play every weekend. But guess what? I’ll bet you this. You’re around the same age you make around the same amount of money. Your lifestyle is relatively the same. But more important, that structure that you call your home where the heart is, it was built around the same year of the same materials of the people that live next door to you. So would you rather go across town to go get some rando ass job, go through any of that? Like, here’s the deal. You have the ability to get more touches and more work from the neighbors by implementing cross channel marketing to the neighborhoods you’re currently working in. And we just happen to focus on the direct mail side.
Yeah, I love all of this. And the cool thing is actually we were just talking with Tanner Mullan of Drip Jobs. Siobhan Yeah. Tanner If you’re not using drip jobs, then you’re probably homeless. But yeah, Tanner Is something amazing going on with drip drops. But I believe you guys just had an integration. And the cool thing is, is what they’re using high level service, tighten, drip jobs, house call, pro, etc. You can actually send direct mail automated based on where the customer is. Customer is in the deal, right?
Any single inter integration, any single one you can literally take. We do it for you. We have the guys. If you’re a nerd like me and you want to set this stuff up yourself, I promise We have the videos and the documentation. You can do it. Or if you’re just like, Hey, I’m busy running my business and I want you to connect with my CRM. I want to pick a templated industry proven post card that works for that part of your job cycle and connect that so it goes out automatically. We can do that in a matter of days for your business.
Yeah, it’s incredible because I think previously it was like you were saying earlier, it’s so manual to like send direct mail or deal with this company and literally you can go into drip jobs or high level or whatever and move somebody from install scheduled or whatever to customer and literally, boom, direct mail goes out to hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands potentially of people. So it’s it’s absolutely incredible. Now, you don’t only do direct mail, though, right? Because I actually bought like 100 or 400 yard signs from you guys, double sided. And I think it was like $4 each when we were normally paying like eight, $10 for one sided from a local spot. And I, I got with you guys, I ordered with you guys and I had it within, I don’t know, a couple of weeks, maybe maybe two weeks. I had the yard signs in our office using them and the quality was, I mean, amazing. And our team was like, Dude, how did you get these here so fast? And I was like, Dope, I guess it’s dope, you know? So if you can speak to that to you about the other things that you guys offer.
So the idea is like, again, you would have told me I was running. I’m sitting in our print shop. You just told me I would be sitting here a couple of years ago. I probably would not have believed you, but what came along with having all the equipment to do the postcards as we do everything else, yard signs, door hangers, business cards, depending on when you guys are watching this for the replay. We got a bunch of end of the year deals right now with free shipping and all that type of stuff. But like. The idea is you want all your marketing to look the same. You think of a business like Home Depot and like we all know who that is, right? But you go through this buyer journey of those touches where like you drive by Home Depot, you see the sign, you open the newspaper, you see the ad, you drive by the thing, you see the billboard as you’re getting off the exit. You look in your mailbox, you’ve got a Home Depot postcard. You look on TV when your kids are watching Blip and there’s a Home Depot ad for the parents, you log on to your phone and there’s a Home Depot thing following you around and you’re like, I trust you. It’s been created. I have that feeling like I know that I can go to Home Depot and get what I need. He used to take $10 Million to do that, like to run a successful cross-channel marketing campaign in any big market.
And now when it’s like when your website looks like your Facebook ad looks like your truck rep looks like your door hanger looks like your business card, just imagine if you are focusing your efforts in specific areas where you are already doing work and all of that stuff look the same. The reason that we offer all these additional print items is we can make we call it a business bundle. We can put together a bundle of all this stuff just looks uniform. Just show us your website, show us your uniform, show us your truck wrap will make all that shit look exactly the same. So you’re having that consistency in your branding and it’s like a lot of people just don’t focus enough on traditional marketing. And the thing is, there are great leads online. If you type in garage floor coatings and you get cardinal and you click on that and I live in Phoenix, I’m probably a pretty hot lead for Ryan and his business. What if you had a postcard going out to the neighbors of your jobs where the 25 neighbors know my neighbor just scheduled their garage floor coatings, pardon the dust, pardon the noise and the grinding sound. We’re working in the neighborhood. Check out this project we just finished. Then a handwritten note goes out to the homeowner. I don’t know. You tell me, Do you think you’d be getting more jobs in those neighborhoods if that’s what was going on in your business? I know what we’re.
Doing right now, 100%.
So we just try to make that shit easy. That’s our goal. You got again, you’ve got 100 problems during the day. Don’t marketing solvers, all four of them, direct mail, automation, design and anything you need printed. That’s what we focus on.
Yeah, I love that man. And also too, you did not just build a direct mail company that helps do all of these things, make companies more money, make it easier. But you actually built like an online platform where the owner can actually go in and do a lot of these things themselves without having to deal with, you know, X, Y, Z person from Z, X, Y, Z company and wait two weeks to get an e mail back. But if you could talk to like the the user friendly software that you guys have developed and kind of why you guys developed that versus, you know, emails and stuff like that.
So when I think about like my home service background, I still feel like I have the calluses from climbing the ladders and shit. Like when you think about the tech savviness of US home service grunt laborers, you know, whatever. We didn’t go to school to figure out how to run our business. Usually we have a rule with our software that if my ten year old daughter can’t log on and use the functionality, we don’t release it. That’s how easy it has to be. Rounded corners. Very simple. Guided. We have some tools like our neighborhood blitz, where you can go in, draw shape on a map and then actually filter out. You can be like, I only want I want to draw a shape, but I only want to send mail to people in this shape that I have a house built more than ten years ago, over 4000 square feet. That’s worth more than a half a million bucks or so. We actually just released this in our neighborhood blitz stuff. But like there’s functionalities you can go in and build like the like we do a lot with the handwritten direct mail stuff like this.
I love that I’ve seen the robot like doing that stuff.
Heller And I got 30 of these things, like all 30 of my ex girlfriends I dislike.
Can that be used for like and I’ll let you go on here, but like, if you could use that for, like, your past customers, like a Christmas card, could you do something like that?
Well, we would you send out like 200,000 Christmas cards in the past two weeks in increments of like 150 for people going, you.
Could automate this for even your personal family probably.
Well, you could go on like technically, yes, you could. I’ve seen that happen in the program. I’ve, like, messed around and sent my mom some shit before through the program because we have like, there’s a whole Ed, you can go on there and build this stuff and get through it. We have a full design team so you’re not required to do. I saw someone in the comments talking about the design and how that’s a pain in the ass. You’re right, guys. Look, I love all of my employees equally. They’re all very important to me, but I wish I didn’t have to have a design team. We do it for you guys. I promise. It’s not for me and my health, because design is is a heavy process. Now, that said, so many things in the world can be templates sized when it comes to like automating things or looking at what you can get in. So our goal, yes, you can log in to our platform and you can fire shit off one off, get in there, do it. You just you just did a bid in Scottsdale and you saw these ballers live over there and you want to draw a shape and that cul de sac and send them a post. Every week for six weeks. You can set that up in 30 seconds on our platform. Our goal right away is to get connected with your CRM. So whether you’re going to send fives, 20 fives, fifties, whatever, it goes back to our integration with Tanner over at Drip Jobs, These guys have done such a good job of setting up like a predefined workflow for specific industries, like, I know, like painting, roofing, solar, these industries where Tanner already got this shit figured out.
When you think about the cycle of any job, who needs to be notified about something? Is it the homeowner or is it the neighbors? Maybe when you mark a job scheduled, but you know it’s not scheduled for a week. A postcard is going to go out. Here’s what we want you to prep for. We’re going to have booties on. We’re going to tape up the windows and the frames, and we’re going to do the thing and whatever. Here’s what you’re going to experience. Here’s what we need for you. Put the dog in the kennel, put the kids in their room, make sure you have the glasses and the expensive shit put away or whatever it is. When you think about your business, you want to be average or do you want to be great? Like who? No one is going to answer. Like, I’m pretty good just being average. I kind of enjoy being a C player. No, we want to be great. And so when you think about like that experience that you want to deliver, you think of lead comes in. Estimate is given, estimate is approved, work is scheduled, work is started, work is completed, work is paid for. Now, I’m going to follow up. I’m going to remind them, I’m going to ask for a review, a referral.
I’m going to send them a postcard every couple of months, like setting that up so it’s all automated to deliver that million dollar experience or whatever you want to call it, like who doesn’t want their customers to just have that warm feeling after they get done working of a handwritten note going out thinking, Hey, Janet, I just want to write you a note and say thank you for using our business. Cardinal Contracting is a local company. We really appreciate it. We live off reviews. If you can scan this QR code and just tell the world the experience you had, that intimacy that gets created, you know, the people that always talk about like I run my business off only referrals. How do you do that? You do that by by providing Usually those are smaller businesses that are doing that and nothing wrong with it, but they’re providing that crazy, intimate experience of like you could call Dave at 11 p.m. and will answer his phone during the job because that’s how they’re getting those referrals, like they’re putting that work in. Right? But if you could automate that feeling of that brand love and loyalty by just delivering that experience using a thing like drip jobs where you’re doing the emails, the texts now, the postcards, the handwritten cards, like all these different things that get put together. Our job as a business owner is creating this amazing experience. And so like, Dude, I just want to make that shit easier for people.
Yeah, yeah, man. And the crazy thing is, it’s really not that hard to do. Like, that’s the crazy thing is I think a lot of times to contractors, you know, we are not I mean, I’m not a contractor, but I mean, I own a home service company. I get it. And, you know, most contractors, what we do is we don’t want to do things that are hard or technical and we want to run our businesses. Right. So I think what you’ve done is made the complicated, very, very easy for the regular contractor that’s running his production, might have five employees or may have 500. Even Tommy. Tommy couldn’t do any of this. Right. And Tommy, if you listen, I’m sorry, but, like, you know, you wouldn’t set this up, Tommy, right? Maybe Jim. Or maybe. Maybe Adam could, but. But so making this super easy and simplified for the average contractor doing 500 to $1000000 a year, I think you made it really, really easy to kind of implement this into the business. If you could talk to the listeners here, we have about 17 live or maybe a couple more, but if you could talk to them about like how to get started with dope, like how does it work with dope if I’m like, Hey, I’m Bob from Bob’s Coatings or Bob’s painting, how do I get started? And what’s that process like over maybe like the first couple of months?
Yeah. So the first thing we need to do is get connected with our team so we can just do a quick intake survey. What industry are you in? How long have you been in business? How many jobs are you doing a week? What CRM are you’re using? Our priority is getting connected with your CRM because then we can do the automations. We can also show you our ROI, match back reports, and I’ll get into that in a second. But basically you come in through whatever avenue you see us talking to someone awesome like Ryan, you see me doing public speaking, you see our ads online, whatever. You connect with our team and we just have a quick download. We go through like, What’s your business? Who are you? What’s going on and who, what, where, why? What’s the one thing you want to get from us? You heard of us, You like us, you know, whatever. What’s the one thing that you want? And we really try to focus on that right away. I want to send handwritten thank you cards. I want the neighbors to get jobs. I want to send cookies after a 5000 job, whatever it is. We look at that one thing. Design is the biggest part. But through the course of this year, man, we’ve made that really simple. Like we’re releasing our new design tool builder with the templates.
We’ve collected a bunch of data and we actually, if anyone’s on our email list, you’ll see the campaigns coming out about this. We’ve done like a 2022 end of year with Delp, where we’ve taken all the things we’ve learned from our best clients and we’re just we got permission to share it. Like what campaigns are they running? What automations do they have set up? What do they have going on in their business? Because we don’t make this hard. Success leaves clues, remember? So we want to take the things that are working. Just give them to everybody. And so when you come in and you work with our team, you talk with our sales team, you get set up on the right package. You get with our our onboarding team, which will take you through the design and the automation process. And again, it’s I’m not going to say this was all perfect. We started like really, really scaling about 18 months ago and there has been some pain. We grew this thing way too fast and we’ve learned a lot from that. And so now bringing people into our universe, whether we’ve worked with people before, you’ve never heard of us and you’re just coming in. Crm connection, doing design, setting up automations. If the other person on the other end were both in the same car trying to get to the same place, and if we have rational communication, business owners are busy and we understand that we can get all this set up in like five days, fully automated setup and moving.
And it goes to where like, you know, as a business owner it’s like, what’s the ROI? Dave Great. You talk fast. This is fucking exciting. What? But what is actually going to happen? Well, what we do is it takes about 90 days, but we connect with your CRM and we’re collecting data so your job’s coming in. You have different lead statuses, right? Go back to that. Lead comes in, estimate is given, estimates approved, like you have these statuses in your business, right? So we connect dope with your CRM, we see all the different leads that are coming in and those have addresses and usually estimates or approvals have prices associated. We have the addresses of everywhere we set mail, so we’re not ever going to say your business is only growing because you connected with us. But what we can say is as you’re mailing and setting up these automations, we have a dashboard that can show you and it usually takes about 90 days to ramp up. Yeah, there’s low hanging fruit, I promise.
But as we really get it ramped up, it’s like how many cards are going out and what addresses that ended in jobs were in this post card sequence or automation, because I want to give it credit. If you put something in my hand, it’s not just that I’m going to scan this QR code. The first postcard I ever get, I’m sold. Give it to me. All of it, Everything. No, it’s like you’re doing those 7 to 11 touches to give credit where credit’s due. And a true marketer understands or a true entrepreneur understands. You have five fingers on your hand for a reason. Four things you’re supposed to be doing all the time. One thing that’s disposable that can be replaced at any time, and direct mail is always within one of those four because they’re tiny little billboards that look like everything else that you’re doing in the right mailboxes every single week to build brand trust. Because what success is a world of clichés. Who do people buy from people they know like or trust? Is it fair to say, Ryan, that if me and you had never connected before but I sent you a postcard for four weeks in a row. That’s a dope marketing. It had my face on it. You would know me better than you did four weeks ago.
100%.
So what business does that not work for?
And then I saw you on Facebook ads in your email, and then I saw you at the truck, drove by.
I saw you at the gas station in your poll. I saw yard sign. I’m like, Holy shit, Home Depot, I trust you. Take my money, like, give me what you have.
Yeah, I mean, I did it with green mango pest control. They’re doing like 45 million this year out. Something like that are huge here in Phoenix, and they’ve expanded. But I mean, I know they’re the most expensive, but I’m like, Dude, I see these guys everywhere. Let me see what they got right. And when my rack had an issue during summer here in Phoenix, I’m like, Dude, I know Ken’s expensive, but and I know but let me just see what they got, you know? And they get here and it’s like, dude, world class experience. I mean, world class. So, yeah, I love all of this also, too, you know, I was thinking even when like, like a, like a digital marketing company, if you onboard a new account and we can actually send direct mail to all of their existing customer base. Right. Like and reactivate because I think we talk about our reactivation campaigns online, right. Like through email and text.
But email, text, whatever.
Yeah, but let’s reactivate direct mail too. And I just thought about this right now. Has that something like is that something that you guys are doing or so.
Think about, think about it like this, right? So Dave, Ryan and Ben, how do you digest content? Ben likes to read the book. Ryan likes to listen to the audio, Dave likes to watch the video. You have to give your customers every option to engage or to interact with you so when you’re sending out texts. Some people love that shit. They want to be on to doing that. Bah bah bah bah bah bah, whatever. Some people want a phone call, some people want to email, some people want to get a card in the in the mailbox every month. And they choose when they’re going to schedule that service. Like my home service business, we do gutter cleaning, window washing, power, washing, driveway cleaning, roof cleaning, holiday lighting. You better believe that I am in my customer’s mailbox twice a month. What up? Because what’s the stat we live off data, right? What’s the stat? It is ten times cheaper to get someone to swipe their credit card again as opposed to the first time. So when you look at your current customer base, nine out of ten companies that we talked to are not sending direct mail to their customers at least quarterly.
And it’s fucking insane. Like, that’s it because these people have already bought from you and it’s not just, Hey, buy this offer right here. It’s like, Dude. Give me a review. Give me a referral. Do you know anyone that needs. Here’s a bullet point list of what we do. Just staying top of mind. The direct mail is never going to be the one thing that grows. Dave, I want to send 1000 postcards one time. What’s going to happen? I don’t know, dude. Probably fucking nothing. Like, you might get a couple jobs. I have no clue. But if you are to focus on the right neighborhood and have a cross channel marketing strategy that includes all this stuff, what’s going to happen if you try something for 90 days, 180 days, a whole year? Like anything, dude, anything that breeds success is boring and consistent. And that’s what direct mail is like over and over and over and over. Just staying in front of someone to build that awareness and trust.
Yeah, man, I love that. So what else can dope do? I mean, I mean, I think we’ve kind of exposed the the juice, if you will, of dope here. What else does dope do and what other value do you think that dope can provide to the industry? And again, I think with the boom, if you will, of Facebook ads and Instagram ads and Tik Tok now and YouTube ads or Nextdoor or Yelp, I think that it seems like to me that the only companies that are doing like a hardcore offline marketing is these larger eight figure and nine figure companies. And I think the smaller ones that are maybe a high six figures or low to mid six low to mid seven figures aren’t doing as much direct mail. And I mean, obviously I’m guilty of that with Kardinal as well. But if you could speak to to that specifically and just give us some feedback on that.
So here’s what makes us very, very different from any other Minuteman Press, Kinko’s, any of these online vista prints, whoever walk into one of theirs or hit them online and ask them if you can send direct mail with no minimum order tomorrow.
Because they’re like, Yeah, you’re going to need 100,000 units.
Exactly. Or whatever it is some crazy shit. And it’s just like, I don’t know, man, I’m a bit of a rebel. We just broke the fucking rules. Like, I just did not adhere to what That as we get into, let’s call it what it is, right? Scarier times, economies tightening up, shit’s getting fucked up. We gave away too much money to whoever, right? And things are whatever. Yeah. When you can truly focus on what’s working well in your business, we’ve already proven that home Service is going to stay tried and true. Like whatever happens with elections, economy, any of this shit that’s out of all of our controls, right? Unless you’re bored, I think our friend Tommy can affect any of these things. But I joke with success and political influence and that type of shit because it’s like, Look. You live in a world of unsolvable problems and the future of the economy and politics in that shape we aren’t in control of. You know what you are in control of. Focusing on the things that are working in your business. So what can dope do any more than we’ve talked about on the call? Nothing. Nothing at all. We do automated direct mail with no minimum order for home service businesses. That’s our shit. But when you look at like things kind of tightening up, one thing we just put in our system is you can upload your customer list into this secure portal. We’ll never sell it, touch it, resell it, look at it, Nothing.
Any of that. Right. We pinpoint by zip code and by a pin drop where your jobs are. And it kind of gives you some insight with a heat map of where you should be focusing attention. So one gem I always like to drop for anyone watching live or the replay, here’s an exercise you can do in your business to figure out as things get tighter, where to focus your marketing dollars. Because this is really important. If you go into your service, tighten house, call pro drip jobs, whatever you’re using, download your customer list from last year, put it into a spreadsheet. There’s a little diamond on the top of Excel in the upper left hand corner in between the A and the one click that motherfucker. It will highlight the whole spreadsheet. Go to data. Go to sort and say sort by zip code. Remember, third grade math mean median mode. You’re going to take and make a tally on a sheet of what zip codes you did the most work in. And you take your top three zip codes that you did work in last year. That’s where you should be focusing your marketing dollars. That’s where you want to spend money because for whatever reason, you are doing something good there. You’re advertising, you’re parking your truck in a driveway, the people know you. You did a lot of doorknock, whatever it was. Who fucking cares? It doesn’t matter what it was that you did.
The data will always tell a story. We built this tool into dope. You can sign up for a free account right now on Dope 360 today. Pay us nothing. Load your list in and use this tool to kind of see the heat map. Because when you think of a marketing dollar, you always want to go, What’s my ROI? What’s my ROI? I’m going to buy signs, I’m going to buy mail, I’m going to run Facebook ads, I’m going to give Ryan $1,000,000. Ryan, what are you going to be back? What’s my ROI? What business owners don’t realize is that $0.70 out of that dollar at a fucking minimum is spent on raising awareness and trust of your brand to make those conversions stronger. You don’t want to just do straight lead gen for some shitty low end offer for a bunch of bad customers. You’re just going to be complaining. But if you focus on raising the branding and awareness with that marketing dollar looking and breaking that motherfucker up into dimes or whatever it is, when you truly look at the return on spend for marketing, you need to be disciplined. You have to do what we’re all so great at, which is being patient and say, I am going to invest in people trusting me and recognizing my brand. Because back to that Home Depot story where I used to take $10 Million. Did you spend fucking two grand in a neighborhood and be the fucking man if you only spent that money in that neighborhood and took 100 homes and put door hangers on their doors every, every fucking week, you had a yard sign on the stop sign coming out of their neighborhood.
You were sending mail, you were running Facebook ads to a go pin. You’re driving your rap truck through the neighborhood. Those people, if you stay consistent with that for 90 days, you will be the biggest company in your service area in that neighborhood. I guarantee it. But no one wants to be patient. So I go back to. I digress. What can dope do for your business? We can take the traditional marketing off of your plate and make it automated so you have a one stop shop for the direct mail, the print all in one spot. And again, Ryan, to your point, we’re not some fly by night software company that threw a dart board at a vertical and was like, all this shit is relative. Home service is very relative. You’re running labor, you’re running specialty where you’re doing a little bit of sales or you’re running equipment. But that job flow, that work process is all really the same. And so what we truly, truly try to focus on is identifying that CRM, setting up the automations, getting the design set up so that all this shit is happening while you’re sleeping without lifting a finger because you’re busy doing other shit running your business.
Yeah, I love that man and service legend. We’re all about providing more profit, more freedom and more impact in these businesses, Right? And if you guys want to learn more about dope, go to dope marketing dot com. They make direct mail dope, right? No minimum orders automated from your CRM. And the really cool thing about working with dope is. The actual customized like service, right? So again, it’s not some random company that got into home service to cash out. He actually owns a home service company. So I love that. I really love that about it. Just like tan a drip jobs or, you know, Tommy with home service freedom, I really love people that actually know what they’re talking about. So anyways, what I want to do as well for those clients that are actually active with Service Legend, we have what’s called the Service Legend Academy, and this is a place where we have trainings on lead conversion sales, master classes on customer service, hiring, profitability. We’re actually doing a profitability, a webinar, I believe, next Friday with my accountant on a five pillar framework to be massively profitable in a home service company. And these are all free trainings included in your your, your program or service legend. But what’s really, really cool is we also have a place where we have vendors, we have a manufacture, where we have big discounts on branding. And Dave, I’d love to get you in there as, as one of our trusted vendors. I’m not sure if you’d be open to that.
Of course. No.
So let’s get you in there. Marco, If you’re listening, everyone looks like they’re loving this. They’re fire. So if you guys want to reach out to dope, go to dope marking dot com. Dave any final nuggets at all?
Data tells a story. Pay attention to that shit. Life is complicated enough. You don’t need to overcomplicate your business. Look at the stuff that’s working in your company. Well, you’ve been open a year or ten years or whatever. You’re going to have a service that you make the most money off of. You’re going to have another service that the most people call you about. Usually they’re not the same thing. So identifying how to create the best experience for your company. People have 100 problems during the day. Your company solves a couple of them perfectly. Focus on telling that story, identifying the pain of where your customers are at and just providing a solution.
It’s really love it, man. Well, I appreciate you being here. And again, guys, next week we’re going to do the profitability webinar with my accountant all about how to be profitable for a home service company. So don’t miss out on that. Outside of that, guys, have a fantastic weekend and we’ll talk to you guys soon. See you later.
