2025-12-01-discovery_bo_steven

Meeting Title: Brainforge x ABC Home: Discovery Onsite Date: Dec 1 Meeting participants: Bo Jenkins, Steven Meyer

Transcript:

Me: Think Bobby’s more on board than us. I think we were just talking about this morning a little bit, actually. Had some pest meetings. Talk a little about marketing. Obviously, we’ve talked about a lot of things with you in cross selling this. That’s what makes AUC center so much opportunity. But I think kind of talking about both sides of my mouth, on one hand, we get lost in everything, and then the other side. We just keep doing the same thing we are doing. There’s so much potential. I think that’s kind of bootstrapped us at times because it’s like, do we jump to social media? Do we advertise for either way? So I think right now, I think one of the biggest things like talking about less. Leaving is what we would call is get up. You said the playbook or roadmap of what we’re doing now. And figure out what’s working and what’s not working. So we know you’re not a marketing guy. You’ve got some experience on that ecommerce flow, but you’re not going to tell us how to market. Right now. Has 90 plus percent of the knowledge of our market. We don’t really know what. It’ll be interesting once you meet with him. I think he’s tried. To map it out and show us give us as much dependence as possible going forward. But the problem bow has a little frustration as well. Bobby’s total use of his urgency in his less gave him probably six or eight months notice that he’s leaving at the end of who he ended February. But we’re still here, and we don’t have any prospect at all. So I think a big decision will be more of an agency. Go with more. With a more firm. I think that’s kind of what I mean. That will push someone out, but we still have to have one person that’s here kind of managing everything. That person is basically, we want to hire that person right now and pay them a salary. That salary is for the next six months to really get cut out. Our hope is that at end of this, we know we’re not going to have everything solved, but we give them a playbook. Say, here’s what we’ve been doing, here’s what’s working here, what we’ve saved. Them time. And now instead of hiring them for four to six months of trying to figure things out, we’ve given them. We’ve saved them three to five months. Basically, the cost about equals. One guy to figure out. We do this in four to six weeks. Figuring out. And also, look, even if you’re going to evaluate an agency, a person, this is exactly what you want to hand them is like, here’s our, here’s our expectations. Yes. So we know a little, because right now, if we just. Try to go hire someone, we kind of just be handing them the reins. And we have. And. And I would say anyone who accepts that it’s also a risk. Yes. Because they’re over either they’re over prom. There’s they’re going to be over promising. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So again. You know? Yeah, you hire someone, that’s big marketing legacy. You know that. But. But again, if we don’t even know what we’re currently doing, We got. Bobby’s obviously very hands on. He wants to know be involved in the direction forever. But like trusted less. Less is on his thing. He’s done a great job. But again, like we were talking about this morning. I feel like less is that Bobby was saying? He’s like, there’s been surprise. Aless. No. Really asked for more. Manpower, more help than I can really think. This is more than just his 178 million dollar company. We have basically one guy running all the marketing. That gets really more than one main job. And the fact is that he has an S for other people, probably because he’s just done the same thing he knows that he’s comfortable with. Obviously there’s a lot of things change with Google. And he’s good at some of that. But I think that’s why we have a brand shop and other things. He just has so much. It’s also good for you guys to understand. Like, one thing we want to start to try to arrive at is, like, what is our accepted, you know, understanding of, like, our true customer acquisition costs and our true ltv. That is what’s going to really allow you to start to set budget. And so the biggest thing for the marketing team is to set a budget not only on spend. But on people and tools. You know, one thing I’ve always said, we can hire different opinions and sometimes Matt and Bobby are even Bo. But, you know, San Antonio is different and that San Antonio. So Austin had a huge head start and path. I mean, they own the market share pets before they really broke in these other other pieces of business. So in Austin, Pass is still probably. 45ish percent of the 40 to 50%. And I’ve done the math. I’ve come back and looked, and I started in 2017. Past, I think as a company wide was like 50, 52% of all revenue. And now it’s down to about 40% of total revenue passes by far highest margin. And so you know my opinion. We should have a target of. Look, we should be at 40% past 20, you know, whatever. And that should. Taylor. Hey, man, our pest has gotten too low to hit the margins we need. We need to push more money to passively grow it. Coming out San Antonio, we’re about 30% past. 30% lawn, 30% mechanical. 10% home improvement. Again. We’re not going to have a perfect. I should know. We know the past has the most profitable. So this year, when we’re struggling with profitability, Should we go after a mechanical? That’s a big revenue. You spend a bunch of money to get one air conditioning unit installed. Could be 20,000 revenue, but it might only be $500 a p r o f i t . O r 10 p es t c u s t o m er mi g h t o n l y b e 10, 000 in r e v e n u e . B u t 2000 p r o f i t . B u tt hi s i s a l so w h er ey o u s h o u l d u n d er s t an d l ik e, o k a y, a r e p eo pl e g e tt in g t h e a c ? A n d t ha t^{'} s a w a y in t os t a r t se l l in g p es t . S o w h e n y o u s t a r tt o l oo k a t cr ossse l l in g an d y o u s t a r tt o l oo k a t s k u mi x, y o u^{'} r e ba s i c a l l y t r y in g t o l oo k a t o k a y, b ec a u se t ha t A C i s g e n er a l l y j u s t a o n e t im e p u r c ha se . T h e n y o ug o tt o k ee p s p e n d in g m o n ey t o g e tt ha t . W e t r y t o t u r nin t o am p s, w hi c hi so u r main t e nan ce pl an t oco m ec h ec k u ni t s tw i ce a y e a r . S o w e ha v e n^{'} t d o n e a g r e a t j o ba tt ha t . B u t y o u k n o w, p es t s, w e^{'} r e t o u c hin g t h e m s i x t im es a y e a r . O pp or t u ni t i es t o t r y . T ocr ossse l l . S o, a g ain, t h er e^{'} so b v i o u s l y a l o tt ha t g oes in t o i t, b u tt ha t^{'} s b ee n o n eo f m y s t r ug g l e a tt h e t im e . O k a y, I k n o w L es ha s abi g s t r a t e g y an d h e ha s h er e^{'} s h o w m u c hm o n ey, b u t i t^{'} s l ik e, w h y i s t ha t ? O r s h o u l d w e n o tp u t m or e m o n ey ? A n d I^{'} v e a s k e d himb e f or e, I^{'} m l ik e, w ha t ? I s t h e w e k n o w h o w m u c hm o n ey i t cos t s u s t o g e t a l e a d or p a ss, b u t, l ik e, h o w m u c h . H o w m u c hm o n ey d o w e ha v e t o p u t inama r k e t in g t o g e tt hi s m u c hin v a l u e ? I s i t b e tt er t os p e n d$ 100 on marketing? On air conditioning because we’re going to get this much revenue out of it, or $100 a p a ss, t ha tw e k n o w t hi s m u c h r e v e n u e . B u tt h e n w ec an cr ossse l l t hi s, cr ossse l l t ha tp r o f i t a g ain . I t hink so m e t im es w e f oc u s a l i ttl e t oo m u c h o n t h er e v e n u e a s w e l l . S o t h e p r o f i t b ec a u seo u r r e v e n u e n u mb er o n H B A C sy s t e m co u l d b e 15,$ 20,000. But. But. And it’ll look like a win. But yeah. Whereas the lifetime value of this pest customer. Way more than that because we turn into. So, yeah, those are a lot of. The, the areas I think we’ve lacked in is some of that strategy of why are we doing what we’re doing. I think now we. Matt basically gives less of budget. Here’s your $4 mi l l i o n t o pl a y w i t h . C o mm er c ia l . I s l e a d s . W e^{'} v e a l w a y s, f r o m t h e g e t g o, j u s t b ee n v er y m u c h d e p e n d e n t o n l e a d s . A s f a r a so u r s a l es t e am . A n d i t^{'} s a l w a y s u p u n t i l ab o u t 2021. I t^{'} s a l w a y s j u s t b ee n w or k . L e a d s a r e g r o w in g . L e a d s a r e g r o w in g . L e a d s a r e g r o w in g, w hi c hha s a l w a y s b ee nni ce . T h e l e a d g r o w t hha s l e d t os a l es g r o w t h, w hi c h t h e n l e a d s t o b u s in ess g r o w t h . W a s t h er e anin f l ec t i o n ? I t^{'} s j u s t b ee n s t e a d y k in d o f t h r o ug h o u t . I^{'} d s a y a g ain, I^{'} v e b ee nh er es in ce 2014 an d a l w a y s, i t j u s t see m s l ik e w e a l w a y sr es p o n d an d w e g r o w, w es l o w l y g r o w . N o w 2020. W e b oo m e d l ik ecr a z y . B i g g es tC o v i d K in d o f m esse d . N o, I m e an, i tw a sr e a l l y g oo d t o u s, b u t a l so k in d o f s k e w sy o u r d a t aan d y o u r n u mb er s, r i g h t ? P eo pl e w er e h o m e, an d p eo pl e a l l o f a s u dd e n g o t anin f l ux o f c a s h . A n d p eo pl e w er e n^{'} t s p e n d in g m o n ey o n t hin g s t ha tt h ey u s u a l l y w o u l d ha v e . S o t h ey ha d m or ec a s h t han I t hink t h es t im u l u s ha s h e l p e d . J u s t soy o u ha v er e a l q u i c k t o ba c k u p . U n l essy o u t e l l y o u m or e . T y p i c a l l y, o u r ma r k e t in g s p e n d i s 4$ 40 per person. Was like 30 by five people in the. Right. Yeah, whatever. So that just means. Yes. Antonio’s got the most opportunity, and they’re growing at the highest right now. So Austin, College Station, then San. So you think College Station, like. Okay, let me just Thinking. Okay. Austin, color station, San Antonio. So then tell me about, I guess before, because I’ll have a bunch of questions about San Antonio. Like, how do you guys see College Station in Corpus, like, for the next few years? Like what? College Station is positioned to grow. And they’ve got heavy pest. Heavy pests, Good lawn. And then all the other services are really small. So they have a big opportunity to grow. Their mechanical and their home improvement. And there is a branch manager okay for that, okay? Corpus heavy pest. Decent lawn. Gecko struggle there. They bought a company, five or six, seven plus their mechanical hasn’t taken off that well. And then their home improvement side is also very small. The different market is probably. The you know, San Antonio always kind of split in half. You got the top. Austin’s has more leg same way you have more people. Also probably has more money. Overall concentrations of similar demographic to Austin. San Antonio’s kind of split and that, you know, north side similar to Austin’s south side’s more like corpse Christian. Corpus Christi probably has the, you know, the lowest income. Yeah. Probably the worst market. Call station has a very rock solid middle class. Not that great of an upper class, but a very, very strong middle class. And San Antonio’s upper class is real strong and a good middle class, and Austin’s just huge. Corpus probably has. They seem to compete on price a lot more. At least that’s what their sales have. Even if you look at the population, Austin, San Antonio, College Station, populations expected to grow over the next Corpus is not. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so that’s like corporate. Count on tank and market share away versus Austin. That’s not Obama’s struggle. Frustration in Austin is we already have a huge market share but market is growing so we just maintain that same market share growing with it. You should be growing in a growing market with an advert and we still have a lot to go on the market share, right? That we haven’t captured. And are there plans to open new branches? At the moment. No, I think our plate is pretty full right now. The one I had over to this hill country. Fredericksburg Harbor. So that’d be more like a satellite to San Antonio. San Antonio could have, like, a Bernie office, like, satellite office, or like Hill Country Curve. But there’s no. Okay. We love that. If we could find if a pest control company wanted us to buy them tomorrow, probably look pretty serious at it. Okay. Family hill country area. But certainly I think what’s clear is that, yeah, San Antonio is the biggest opportunity when you’re. Now, I guess my question is, going to be when you’re doing marketing or sales budgeting, are you aligning it with like, hey, we want to take San Antonio from 30 to 50 in x amount of years, and we have like the 4% budget. We need to sort of, we’ve been talking about doing that and be like, hey, what sales goals do you guys. Sales budgets do you guys have. They’ve given a little more sand to. You know, the problem is, you know, you got this large beast in Austin, you got to keep feeding. You can’t just take everything. Because I’m, you know, awesome. Totally. But it’s not a. It’s not either. It’s not an either. Yeah, exactly. It’s a. It’s a both. They have taken some money, and I feel like you can’t. If otherwise you’re. You’re competing, when in fact. At Matt’s level. He says, great, we want to spend X amount of money, but you need to align marketing with where the growth is. Like we said, Antonio is growing really nicely. Why not get a throttle? Yes. Right. Versus. So that’s sort of the. The conversations we want to drive towards. It’s like where we talk about managing it. You just go, all right, hey, we’re going to dedicate more money. You guys need to be able to hire training mode. Another thing we noticed in Austin, Austin proper is flatlined. Actually down this year, but Austin areas is growing. San Marcos, Georgetown, safe. So you kind of see the same as those versus San Antonio. A lot of people from California, people from whatever moving. Yeah, yeah. Georgetown. But do you. But I guess my point is more of like, do you think those can go from 1 to 5 or do you think or what’s okay? Because of the whole offering. Great. It’d be real interesting. And we’ve never done this with a saddle. I see how much has passed, how much is what is the breakdown of each of those? That’s what I talked to you about. Doing kind of some heat mapping. You know, I’ve seen in San Antonio a lot of this San Antonio is always actually started in San Antonio, back kind of on the east side. Wind progress. So we have a ton of density right there. Even though I would not say that’s our if you were just looking San Antonio, brand new, brand new company coming. To San Antonio, they wouldn’t choose the Wind Crest area. If they want to choose a bunch of customers, you choose. There’s Album Heights in the central, and then you choose kind of the northwest side of North Sideburn, you know, whatever. In our penetration there, especially if very minimal because we don’t have a whole lot of presence out there, okay? It’s I think, same with Austin, though. I think if you look at some of the surrounding Dripping Springs, in those areas that are growing, we don’t have where are the new customers coming from? Right. When you go, all right, let’s just focus there, because one thing that kind of, I mean, it gives us potential. You know, when you, you run revenue numbers, we have tons of revenue. But then we look at it for the big ones that stood out recently is Holly Lights and pool. For San Antonio pool, we have like, we have seven or eight pool guys, and we have. But when you boil down, you know, so revenue, you’re like, oh, we do. A million dollars in revenue. That sounds awesome. We have, like, 330 pools in San Antonio. Yeah. You know, there’s probably 30,000. So if I give you an example. So one of our earliest customers, a pool. It’s a pool ecommerce product called Pool Parts Ago. They’re. One of the largest pool pool like equipment providers, but they actually have an exclusive license with Black and Decker on heat pumps. And we did so much work in pool, so pools is probably the only service I have to have a lot of understanding. One thing we did for them is I basically found a way to scrape every person. With a pool like in certain jurisdictions. And they’re extremely geo concentrated, so they sell all across the U.S. but New York, Arizona, Texas, California, and very early April and closing, opening and closing. Right. So very well defined business to do really marketed things during those periods around opening and closing. But also those are all subscription maintenance type things. So that’s also like. I think I can show you guys all the work we’ve done on pools and with holiday lights. Like, we do 2 million plus dollars of revenue, but it’s like 1400 total customers over. We look at lawn care, and we’re like, we got a nice lawn care. Business, but nobody likes. How many total customers? 1, 200. We’re like, that’s it. Each month we’re like, should at least be 5,000. Well, I guess, Bo, I guess. How are you also thinking about. Are you thinking about? Maybe if we could talk a little bit about customer segmentation. Right. So for. We talked a little bit about branching, and so we have these large branches, we have the smaller ones and we have, like, satellites. How do you think about customer segmentation? Like, when you think about a lead, are you prioritizing? The ones that are bigger but the sales cycle is lower. You probably tries a smaller one. Like, how are you thinking about that? The main thing with us and we, we pretty much close about almost 70% of our leads. Okay, great. So that’s where we’re we keep that number closely watched. I’d say by the month. We kind of evaluate everyone, and that’s where we look at the average and then really also the variance between that, so, yeah. We from a lead standpoint, we don’t really prioritize them. I mean, I’m sure the sales guys do, but for us, it’s like we try to always watch the schedules to see how far our booked out we are. Knowing that somebody calls in, we’re five days booked out, they might call somebody else. So we try to keep it because we also don’t know what’s going to come in. Is it going to be long loaning? It’s going to be window cleaning going to be passed. Because really, the high season for us is all of our services except for, like, Christmas lights, which is. Sometimes we’ll try to prioritize lease on a local basis of, like, you know, a rodent in the attic. That’s an urgent but you know, so we’ll try and hey, I’ll tell our sales hey, look, if you got a road in two days out, you better be calling them now and trying to pull that forward because those during during termite swarm season, we’ll try to free up the schedules a lot more and try to, you know, hey, if someone’s finding termite swarm at their house and they call, we need to make sure that they don’t wait three, four days. So we’ll try to get out there sooner, but we’ve been trying to keep the schedules pretty free. We watched that by the week to see, hey, are we, you know, three days booked out, two days. Do we need to flex more people here so we can have better coverage? Because that was a big thing that we did probably about two years ago. Was really divided the area and make sure we have, you know, five people in this quadrant, four people here, three people. Three people. Just based off where the demand is. Okay, Yeah. And is that conversion rate change at all? Like, by the couple. And sort of one thing I’m going to talk a little bit about is like, dimensions. Right. So the columns. Now that we’re sort of thinking about a branch, we’re thinking service line are the conversion. Do you. How do you know if the conversion rates are quite dramatically different across any of those lawn mowing like power washing. I’ve never pulled that data but I mean we should. I would no holiday lights is a little lower Holiday I probably more like 50%. Holly likes such a. You’re such a focus on that during the six week time period. So we know a little more about how I like to be. I turn the other season. I think Mark Johnson, because I’ve said it before. You know, you have one sales guy that’s really good at selling rodent. He has an 80% closing rate on rodeo, but a 40% closing rate on Window Washington Power Washing. Like, hey, that’s. You’d also have to see. How does this compare for everybody. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever pulled that dream. Rode it and faster. Be our highest closing rate. It wouldn’t shock me, but yeah, we have no holiday lights. Overall, we’re around 70%. Holiday lights is closer to 50%. I would hope everybody’s. You know, just so your background info as well. So our. A week before our sales team. A lot of times we have a residential sales team. They could sell the Pest. All of our lawn services except for. Well, tree has a specific person. Sales Tree, landscape design and digital landscape designers. Residential guys can sail past lawn mowing, lawn care. Window washing, power washing, pool and crystal slides, Christmas lights. They’re kind of like the maintenance. Yeah. I mean, if that group is selling really well, that’s kind of like handyman, special SSL handyman stuff. Tree specialist, landscape specialist. H Vac specialist. That’s held just H back and water quality, Water quality, et cetera. Water softeners. Do you think 70. Do you think 70% is too high? Too high of a clothes. Yeah. I don’t know, because I think a lot of these leads are. I mean, I love it at 100%, but again, if it was just, like, bogus leagues. Yeah, these are pretty damn good leads. Really look at, you know, they’re calling us with issues, all of them. And with our branding that we have here in all our markets. Yeah. I’d be comfortable at 70%. Like. I guess my first inclination is to say, like, do you think you’re underpriced? No. Okay. No. Okay? Yeah. If we were underpriced. I think it’d be closer to, like, 80, 90%. Okay. Yeah. And then how are you guys determined? Benchmark ourselves first competition. Okay. Okay. So I guess that’s my next sort of phase is like, how are you guys thinking about pricing? And, like, pricing adjustments across services or across again? Across both of those dimensions. I’d say in every category, we’re on the higher side. Okay. You know, it depends how much higher than the question, but, yeah, I don’t. I don’t think we have any service line. I don’t know of that. We say no. We went in. Cheap. No, as they wrote in a pastor probably most competitive with because again, Pest special is a lower price. You might be off percentage wise, but it’s only five or ten dollars. So air conditioning, I’d say, is the one that we get some pushback on pricing. Plumbing. Feel like we’re. Probably in line. It’s just expensive these days. Mechanical. I would say they’re probably bigger. Pushback handyman I say sometimes we’re but there’s just not a lot of companies that can do what we do. So it doesn’t seem to be a major. We’re the only real legit handyman business in all of our markets. Pool. We’re high. Well. We’ll work on the right. We’re not cheaper than everybody. Lawn were definitely high. Landscape. We’re definitely high. Tree. I think we’re close to the market. Irrigation. I think we’re close to the market, but the decisions around high are low. Are they made sort of just looking at the market, or are they. Are they. Look, it’s all internal, what kind of margin we want to make, what pay the guys. And then compared to the markets, just the after the fact. Okay. Yeah, okay. How flexible? Like again, thinking about things like discounting, bundling, like how are you guys thinking about those when you’re thinking about pricing? Like for example, you may competitively price in one service in order to start increasing penetration. Or hey, we, we noticed that customers always buy these two things together, so we should make that convenient. Like, talk to me about those. I guess about two years ago, we really had the idea. We were kind of in a panic that, hey, this call volume is not going up. And really, we kind of said we really need to think about how do we do more with what we have. So that’s when we really came up with, you know, sales guys would always say, yeah, I sell multiple things, but we could never verify. Yeah, you could never really track the agreements that had multiple services on there. Why not? Like, was it the technology issue? I’d say it was probably that. I mean, I’m. Sure it was in there. We just didn’t know how to calculate it. And then so then we basically rely on them to report their own numbers, add ons. Great. Sold Pest plus robin or pest wood lawn mowing. To add on. It was not that hard. But honestly, that was kind of. That wasn’t even on the main purpose of it, but it ended up being one of the best things that we could made a bundle for our purpose was we had to have a different bundle to sell up for special pricing. But because we had that bundle, now we don’t have any bundles are being sold after the fact. We’re back at home. Now, we can track, you can manage it, and we can measure it. So, yeah, we pretty much just took. So we have nr, CRM, we have all of our services that we sell. So, like pest control, lawn mowing, lawn care, pool cleaning. And then we just made a copy of all those in the pricing and just added the word bundle under that second column. So we can just say, count, how many services did we sell that had the word bundled in front of it? So that’s how we’re able to track every week how many bundles do have we sold. Okay, now with those bundle offers, then the next part was, well, how do we come up with an easy offer to our customers that’s aggressive. And yet we’re not going to do anything crazy that we need to reinvent the wheel for. So what we came up with was for most services, like a free month after their first month. Yeah. So talk to me about the offer creation process. Like, yeah, we tried to come up what was the easiest thing we could come up with, and we just said, well, Everybody. We want everyone on a monthly auto charge. That. That was one thing that we knew. So we said, all right. Well, to get the maintenance, you know, we have to have a main service, and then you have as many bundles as you want. And we just said, all right, the offer is going to be we want an easy consistent in case they buy multiple things, and let’s just keep it at a free month. So, yeah. If you signed up for pool cleaning today, you’d get this whole month at your regular initial price, and then the first maintenance month completely free, correct? Yeah. Is there. It also wanted something that was easy to explain because you didn’t want to have a whole bunch of different offers for different walls. Yeah, yeah. Let’s keep it easy to explain. Is there a pricing sheet or is there, like, one concise. Oh, yeah, yeah. Pricing spreadsheet, that whole pricing guidelines. Okay. Great. It’s on Google Sheet. We can share. Okay. So I’d say most of the pricing that we do in residential, we use a pricing matrix for most of pest control, for rodent, for pool, for power washing. A lot of it is formula driven for pricing. Okay. Yeah, we don’t like and again, for our residents, or that’s the biggest group that we have at sells the most. There’s about 40 guys in that division. So to have. I didn’t want 40 different people coming up with Time in Motion themselves. You’ll get 40 different answers. So we’ve tried to standardize pricing, but we did that years ago. Okay. It’s just been easy. Yeah. So then also now talk to me about commercial versus residential. I guess the next sort of dimension. Like, how are you guys thinking about that? So commercial. We’re trying to have that mirror the residential team as much as we can. Okay. You know, they sell a lot of on leads, they sell a lot of referrals. And trying to get creative. Business has been a big push. But also with that group, we were then comfortable cross selling all the different services. So big goal next year is to take the concept of bundling on residential and do the same thing on commercial. And what is like, what is the current state of both of those, like, in terms of percentages? Oh, on commercial, it’s heavy. Pass. So we have an I guess even as a percentage of total revenue between both of those. I was split between ABC. Yeah, we’re 80% resident, okay. Yeah. Commercial. The only thing we don’t. We don’t do our big commercial hvac. Yeah. These are the only baby. Commercial stuff. We don’t do yet commercial or heavily test. S good size lawn. We don’t do a ton of pool or any man. We do a little bit of window. Anyway, it’s mainly we’re a passing lawn mower and then we randomly do some plumbing. And a little bit of landscape and a little bit of window. But, yeah, commercial is a big frontier for us. Yeah. So a lot of opportunity. So talk to talk about, like, what? The kind of history of, like, commercial. And, like, has it always been the case where it’s been sort of that we just thought, this is kind of how it’s always, okay, heavy passed in the ghetto. And that’s just because we can do any type of commercial pass. Right. That’s what we. There’s no limitations there. Lawn mowing kind of the same. There are no limitations there, but the sales motion is definitely different. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So then can you talk about that? Like, what is the sales motion right now for commercial? And, like, how does that impact. How did that impact pricing or the services you’re offering? Yeah, I’d say for commercial, that one’s harder. That one. We actually do give the guys time and motion, just because two different commercial facilities are going to be very different, whereas a residential home would be the same. So commercial is a lot of time in motion is kind of how they come up with the pricing. It’s got a lot of devices because you’ve got a lot of different facilities. Right. The needs of a hospital is going to be a lot different than the needs of an office like here. So it’s kind of knowing the different specialties, knowing what they need as far as if they’re audited, that’s a big thing. A commercial kitchen is going to be a lot different than a daycare. Are you dividing up by customer type at all in those kind of categories or. So when we price an agreement now, we have it all built up by, like, multifamily commercial kitchen, hospital, hotel. So we try to segment it out so it’s a little bit more appealing to them. Great. Okay, so you do have. Okay, that makes sense. Commercial pest is the only one that really split out to track. Your commercial passes their own department, so we track their revenue. Everything else just gets split into what goes along. All on those. So I don’t really know how much, what percentage of unknowing is a commercial pass has their own dedicated team, their own dedicated service technicians. They only do commercial primarily due to the size yeah. And we’ve probably said commercial lawns getting to that point right now. Bush, a lot of Austin does have their own team, but it’s not you. You have. You can run some reports, but we don’t get it. We never say that. Do you know the, like, contract values for commercial. Oh, gosh. Those and the. And the terms. Oh, yeah. You could get commercial law contract. It’s 30 grand. Or even a small one. Could be five, six grand. I mean, it knows they stick pretty much for a year. They’re good contracts to get. But similarly like what what we find in a lot of businesses, like we support especially that are like that are doing both B to C and like B to B is even in our business. The enterprise sales motion is much different than what we also go after. Smbe but consumer right? It’s completely different. Like how are you, I guess, for example, like 5 to 30k years. Quite a lot of those residentials. How are you thinking about the 80, 20? Like, is that. Is there a goal to. To shift. To shift that and, and yeah. Maybe I’ll just start there. I think we realize there’s a lot of potential in commercial now, is there? We don’t have any metrics like, oh, we want to get to 30% grants, we want to grow commercial, but we know there’s a lot of potential there. As far as the sales process, you know, we, our course sales guys. We don’t have any targeted commercial advertising, I would say. Okay, so that’s my question. Is commercial has benefited from the residential advertising. Brand awareness, obviously, is there, but we don’t have any targeted commercial. Advertising or marketing. We rely on our sales guys to go out and sell them, do a good job. Some n But that’s kind of our marketing spin. That’s our sales guys saying, hey, I’ll need to go out there and business. But yeah, we don’t have any targeted commercial advertising that I would 100% agree. Yeah, we don’t run a. A tv ad. I don’t think we run any Google Ads. I think we barely even do any email blasts for commercial. So to give you the reason why commercial marketing is often sometimes easier and better is one like the LTVs on those can be really large. Contract values are huge. Also, all of their emails and stuff is really accessible. Really? Yeah. Like if you, if you own a business. Like, it’s easy to get your email. You can also do which I get hit up all the time. You can also do post. There’s a lot of. It’s just a different. But it is a different motion. And of course, like, what you’re playing with there is like, how do you qualify faster. Versus because, again, they’re not gonna. They may or may not make a decision of that size in, like, one or one call. Right. You know, and that’s the thing that we also know is that, you know, on a residential lead, we can close the data. Yeah, we close every single lead we have today. We close about 50% on the spot. Okay. And the rest of his work from follow ups in a couple days out. Yeah, I’d be curious. You know, Less might have a different answer. He might say we do some, but as far as I know, you know, I can’t believe anything that we specifically do for commercial again. Brand awareness. Yeah. Commercial holdings, pets and whatever. But to specifically target commercial clients. I can’t think of any. But with that sales process, commercial, we know that could take a month to six months. Okay. Okay, Yeah. But as long as we have a pipeline full, yeah. Way higher. Are you guys expanding within, like, any commercial accounts? Like, this is the other nuance. It’s like you come into a commercial account and you can look, you can go after franchises or, like, do you, do you, do you know what? Like, has there been measurement around expansion into. Into those customers or even understanding of like, okay, who are we targeting? But if there hasn’t been any marketing targeting, then it’s just been. I mean, we’ve learned, like, this past year, like, school districts have been really good. Yeah. So we’ve been making a big focus through, like, hey, let’s really focus on going into school district. Yeah. So is there one person that you’re, like, own the strategy around school districts or, like, no charge? All of them, too. You know. You know, there should. I mean, there should be. The other nice thing is in commercial, it’s actually very easy to go segment all the commercial properties. I hadn’t thought about that. It’s very easy to say, these are all the school districts, here’s how they laddered to like one budget. Center. So one thing that could be helpful is to one do well, we’ll go through and look at the CRM of like what are the concentrations in what industries? The makeup of different yeah, Interesting to have one person and all they manage is school district. Yeah, one person. We’re all they man. The reason I’M saying as the buying. The buying cycle can be different and speak the Ringo. Yeah. And they tend to just all know each other in those industries like hotel and school will be very different. But once you meet one hotel owner. If. And you can give that sales guy good targets. They can go run like a whole, like a hotel playbook. You know, and so a lot of especially. And then this is the other thing is to look at what are the opportunities where you may come into one hotel group and then sort of branch versus like if you just go after single. So part of this is also. It’s like just about segment. It’s like. Our guys don’t really know what to target. Yeah, especially when we tell, like, go join an association. So this is the thing you want to you will quickly hit capacity. So at that point, it’s like, what are the highest odds of conversion and revenue? And so then you can start saying, cool, we’re going to just put a bunch of these. We’re going. This is one of the ones that we’re not prioritizing. Right. And here are the ones that we want to focus on that allows you to go after. And then for you, you can say, cool. Once we’ve attacked, we have a playbook. Now I can understand if I were to hire another salesperson to attack that. Here’s the expansion. The other thing is for those residential. I can get a list of that. Like super, super easy and really measure your penetration. Much easier than residential, you know, but it, but the sales cycles are longer, but the ACVs are way higher. True that. Yeah. All right. Yeah, but it also. But again, it also depend. I also want to look at what the. Of that of the current revenue coming from commercial, who it’s coming from when those people were signed. And if there is concentration right now. And if you could look, if you should, hotels don’t leave y’all. Yeah. When you do it on the pool stuff, did they target commercial? They’re mainly going after pool guys. For us? Well, they’re going after pool guys and pool groups. They, they did have some concentration, but for the most part, they want to be. They also are going after consumer because the reason that consumers like them is you can go install your pool heater. They give you all the instructions, they’ll come deliver it. And so it was an interesting sort of market. But they also do they. We saw concentration in pool guys that were buying from them and things like that. So that I’ll. I give you guys all that data on we have on pools, but certainly like pool to us, as long as the pools take care of that customer. Is not going to switch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s no way. They’re never going to go take care of that. No. But even in residential, they rarely switch residential work because they’re like, I’m a cool survivor. But see, this is what, you know what you should do, you should look at all your active residential customers. Cross that with all the people that have pools in Austin so you can get a great data set, Right? And then you should be like, hey, we offer a pool. Like, what are you guys doing? How much are you paying? We should go with us target 12 month campaign on that. Yeah, but then sometimes we’ll do that. I think we don’t stick with npo. But that’s the. The reason. No, but the reason I’m saying is you. Before doing it, we need to know, is it worth doing versus X? It may seem sexy because it’s like it’s just a big number, but if it’s, if that’s moving pool from 1 to 2 million, when you can move something, then that’s you. That’s the decision making, right? Don’t do that. Don’t do that and say we. Say, oh, let’s go after pool. We’ll save one marketing flyer out to every new pool home owner. Oh, no, it’s down. A better decision. Or is this so we want to get to the quadrant of things that are the easiest to do and the highest ROI. Right. Pool is easy, but is it the one that’s going to get 5 million. You know, you don’t. And what. And what time frame? So, like, what you just said, like the roi, you would expect it to be easier with us. We’re not just like a random company starting from scratch with a list. It’s like, yes, you can just. Easily work with the you would assume the low hanging fruit is our existing customer. So this you could even segment to Our existing customers already have multiple servers. But it’s also the thing to consider is the operational complexity. Right? So what is the operational complexity of ideating, executing, measuring and then iterating on that campaign? And how much capacity for campaigns do you have? That is the, that is the thing that we are going to look at. Again, I think go back to pool because it already gets more complex because what customers more likely to do more service, you know, one time H Vac customer, I think is less likely. Yes. To all of our services versus Pest over there every month or pool that we’re there every single week and they see us all. It seems like pool. Pool has most touch of any customer. So every single week or you run the customers that leave positive reviews. Yeah, right. But, but, but again, the unique thing about pool is it’s. Very timely. Right. You can basically catch the seasons, and there’s just mainly two of them, and oftentimes they’re opening their pool. Or the moving season. Right. Yeah. Moving is a big thing. We’ve never been great at it. We know. We. Yeah, so that’s. I was going to ask that later, but like, how are you now that you have this concentration in these geos there is moving. Probably in and out, but also between, like, has there been anything done on, like, are there address change requests and, like, things or, like, when people cancel, are they like, I’m moving? And there’s like, there is objection handling for that. The only thing that we do is we try to handle that call really well and we track the moves when we put in the cancellation request. Okay, so we have all that data as far as who has moved. Yeah, yeah. So that’s a. That’s the other thing I think maybe we can talk about is, like, all the reasons for Churn and doing true, like, Churn segmentation. Do you guys have like a. Yeah. There’s like 14, 15 different reasons there. When somebody. The problem is or come into play. We don’t always trust the best accurate reason. Sometimes that’s just the easy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Happy with service. Yeah. So that’s the one thing because they don’t want. To tell us something else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yet I, I still, everybody always brings it up. And I’ve done the exercise where I’ve gone through the cancellation, just randomly spot. I checked them all, but I’ve spot checked and it’s like, yeah, all these are moves. Yeah, true moves. Yeah, but are then, are they, are they in. Stay out of state. Right, right. What is the, what’s the data that they say of how many people move within market? It’s like 60, 70%. They don’t move within the city. I have said that I think. Real estate slowing down indirectly impacts us quite. You know, with Covid, some people are moving to buy new houses. I think with app slowing down, that hurt our business. Anytime someone moves, it’s a new opportunity for them. But, like, why don’t you? But still you can. For all this stuff happening here in eastside, you could sell the multifamily. And there’s huge apartment. Right. So that’s the thing is like, the lovely thing here is there are ways to still monetize in those areas. But this is where if you’re 80% res and 20% commercial, then it is really it makes it a lot of pressure versus okay, well, yes, we this is where you can hedge. Yes, maybe real estate is slowing down, but, like, one bedrooms and these large commercial apartment buildings are still going up like crazy in Austin. What is our plan? Like, what is our penetration right now? And how do we sell to those targeted first? Apartment to it, because obviously if someone moved from one house to the house similar area, they’re going to use who and they had been using probably what people that are brand new in their home don’t know anything about them. Yeah, but this is again, can you go in through an hoa? Can you go in? Through the group? Can you go in through a realtor? So what is the go to market around, like first time home buyer. Right. And so that’s why for us to segment the buying, like in what moments do people buy and what moments do people cancel? And then how do we, how do we identify and then get in front of them in that moment. Some things will be harder to identify, but the conversion rate will be very high. Okay, so it’s worth us invest. Some things will be very easy to identify, but that means there’s a ton of competition or it’s the pricing pressure is tough. So everything for me looks like this, like two quadrant thing where you’re just trying to. For us, the biggest thing is to always go towards that top right, which is the easiest and the highest ROI first. Everything else we ditch. And so most of our challenge in this month is going to be saying no to a lot. Of things and understanding truly, do we? What is our true, like, marketing campaign capacity? Can we even run two things end to end? And if that is, it’s only two. Fine. And you will. And then we isolate. Okay, in the manufacturing process of a marketing campaign, where are the roadblocks? And that’s how you guys should think about. That’s how we tell our clients to think about. You want to be running more experiments, but you need to have an understanding what it even takes to run one of them and not do the thing, which is like, run 10, then everybody gets burned and we don’t end up knowing ever comes back and say right. But it’s very painful because you a lot of these will look like very low hanging fruit and we will get there to action on them, but without establishing truly the manufacturing process of a campaign end to end. Like, which includes measurement, which includes. Here’s the analysis. Which includes here as a next decision. That could be three months. Okay, then we just do that, right? So it’s like sort of like start slow, and then once we run an end to end one, it’ll be so obvious. How do we make that 50% faster? Right? Or like, who do we have internally that can start to run? So we increase. The amount of tests that we can run. And so, ideally, and this is what all of the, you know, in a world of digital for these software companies, because their whole goal is to run as many experiments as possible in a short, in a short of a time as possible. It’s very similar here. Like, we are going to see how many can we take on and what, at what point do we have some significance to then make a decision to lean in or out? And that’s what I want to arrive. That is the sort of framework around experimentation, you know, because for nowadays, we’re not going to know until we try. Until you say, well, we’re going to test selling a segment of a bundle to these people. But like, if, if for the ABC team, we only have the capacity to run one of those at a time, truly, and take it seriously, then we should only do one. Because to re. Because you will risk. You, you will risk trying a bunch of these never really arriving approach. And that’s what we do. We do a lot of these based off feeling and, oh, the leads are kind of, let’s try something, but it’s not a. It’s not a campaign. It’s tough. It’s just reactionary of, oh, let’s try this. So we say we tried something. Just to. Because, yeah, there’s no. We don’t ever sit down and have these kind of meetings, say, okay, why are we trying? It is I like your friend with me. Is that the best, ROI? Because sometimes it’s going to be. Yeah, we got to feed the employees. We got to build that up for sure, the best roi. But when all else equal, like, okay, what is the best decision on how to push money? Because that’s where we’re going to bust. Yeah. Like, you may find one division is sort of at its, like, peak, or every additional dollar is getting closer to just like, maybe a dollar out. But you may find another industry. Wow. We’re getting five out. Pump. Push. Right. And so we do this for a lot of people where a lot of some of the companies we work with are running out. They need to spend, they’re trying to spend more and they don’t. They like, we, we, like, we are running, we need to basically expend a channel and at what point do we get to the point where, like, we spend, spend, spend, and then there’s a plateau of. Of efficiency. So this is called mer, which is just like a marketing efficiency. So I’m worried that’s where we might be, but you want to find out. Okay, like, for every incremental dollar, what? Are we getting out? And are we happy with that return on the market? You know. Yeah, I’ve asked the last step before can we spend a dollar on H Vac? You have a load of clothes or Great. Less leads. But that one lead we do get is worth 1. I’ll get you five more. He’s not going to say no, but oftentimes they don’t have the story and there’s a couple of boogeyman. They’ll blame the tools, they’ll blame the agency, they’ll just blame like, oh, it’s always changing. Or there’s algorithm change. This is just like. This has been my whole career talking about this. Stuff. So that stuff is like everybody else. Yeah, but I don’t blame them because it is sort of the narrative in that industry. However, it’s completely not right. So this is a lot of the stuff that we work with is helping these folks. And even if you were to measure a subset, you can always extrapolate we’re just looking for a directional understanding. We’re not looking for every single person. We know exactly where they came from. But you’ll be able to get, like, above 50%, for sure, attribution, and so that’s what we’ll go for. So that’s a lot of the work we do for a lot of clients. Is pure. How do we increase our attribution so that we giving the marketing and the spend team where to put dollars. And so this is where oftentimes the reason data teams don’t work well is nobody ever explains to them this. They’re like, hey, we’re coming in because you’re spending willy nilly and we’re going to cut your budgets. For me, I’m actually on there. I’m like, no, you actually probably are underserved or you’re not budgeting properly, so you don’t have this ROI lens. It’s actually, I think at the end of this, you’ll probably get more money. We could probably convince them to give 6% if they knew that. Hey, you get a really high return on this. There are going to be a little bit more conscious way. Yes, but so in marketing, this will be where it’s actually a lot more like what tooling is in place. So what are you guys using for web analytics? Is there already attribution going on on the website? From the phone calls. And I know in the phone calls this could be something that definitely we could ask the team to start to implement some sort of questions. But also certainly it’s super easy to implement attribution on the site and do a pre purchase post service surveys. What made you call us today? Yeah. So that is, I think, a huge, that is like the biggest linchpin. And even understanding any of our ROI by channel, you may find that people are coming from places that are free. You never really optimize. You may find that you’re spending a lot of money on ott and there’s not many people come from linear, but one thing about marketing is everybody will take your money. And so you guys have to really, you guys have to really push the people that are spending to adhere to these guidelines, especially the agencies. We just work with so many marketing agencies. Every time there’s some type of digital advertising. Yeah, but they’re taking. Yeah. Anyway. Yes. So this is a tough part about marketing. Which you just have to set. You have to set expectations super, super clear. But again, what you can do is you can always cycle, you can always find new agencies and things like that, but you always have to have a measurement mentality. Marketing is the easiest way to just get really ramp your spend. So I think that’s probably a lot of kind of questions. I guess that’s probably a lot of the questions I had was just about individual things, like, what are we doing on SEO search, paid ads. We haven’t done anything on. Well, I guess you’ll also hear from Les. We do a lot of different things, right. And that’s what I’ve always worried. It’s like too many channels. Well, it’s like. It’s almost like we safeguard it to where we can put our head in the sand. Well, we do so many different things that we don’t know what. Works. And he talks about layering. One of our arguments for a while is do we try and advertise multiple things on one commercial? He likes to just go one commercial. But we see how much can you put in one versus but it’s also look like running a TV campaign is much more operational complex than putting up a Facebook ad and the amount of testing and targeting you could do, it’s like script writing, the producing, and it’s quite expensive. Like we did a lot of when I worked at Flow Code. It’s like this QR code company. We did a tons of TV stuff, so I’m well aware. Of the cost to run local prime time, all the different stuff, and they don’t provide you any data. It’s really crap. Sales propositions is that we can do everything for you. So it’s like, do we need to advert? We don’t really advertise. They’ll do anything for. You focus groups where people say that is attractive to us. But you may find the one thing is, I think people really underestimate how good the targeting has been in digital. You guys will can target new home buyers, you can target new people with commercial X and there will be a price for it has a narrow targeting but again, price only matters if you know the return. The targeting is absolutely out of this world, right? Especially for us. We look at it right, especially if we get good, stay good at bundling once we’re there, right? You take what might have been $100 l e a d w h er e w e^{'} r ese l l in g s i x d i f f er e n t co n t r a c t s t ha t^{'} so u r co m p e t i t i v e a d v an t a g e i s t ha tP es t c u s t o m er c a n^{'} tp a y a s hi g ha s w ec anb ec a u se t h ey c an o n l y se l l o na P es t, r i g h t ? Y es . T h e y^{'} r e$ 75. We can sell at three different services. That customer is worth this much time. That much. That’s where you also say, well, we know that we’re really good at selling lawn on the backs of pass. Yeah. Shouldn’t we throttle moral pests? If that’s achieved, yes. Or vice versa. On lawn or H Vac, right? It’s like, okay, that’s cheaper lead, and we can get more conversions there and then sell the other stuff. As far as strategy, You could work it that way. Yeah, but the other thing with Facebook is, like, the retargeting is really great. So you want people who search up ABC on their phone to, when they go on Instagram, they get an ABC ad. Yeah. And, like, if that’s not happening today, that has to happen, you know? Because it is. But then again, but a lot of this is like, are we just doing 10% of what? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like, well, hey, cut the yellow page spending and pull it more towards Facebook. Yeah, yeah. When was, like, can you tell me the history of, like, monkey boy and, like, how that relationship got involved and, like, what are they? What is their scope right now? I’ll ask. Yeah, they’ve been our website developers since day one. Okay. So I think that goes back to, like, 2004. 2002, maybe. And they’re here in Austin. We’ve had a good relationship with them. I know Les loves them. Matt and Bobby love them. Seem like good guys. I think, yeah. They? Any tweak we want to make with a website, they make it pretty good. Okay. Yeah. So maybe I can. After I talked to the last, I can talk to them like what test they were in. They’re super easy to work. Okay. Yeah, they’re good guys. Say we’re one of their longest clients. Cool. So, yeah, they’re always open. Do you know what the web? Anything about how it’s hosted, the website or anything? Okay. I’ve probably heard of it before, but I forgot it. Were they also the Quick Divide? They also did the Click to buy. Quick Divide are online purchases. We haven’t done anything like sms. What do you mean? Like either tested marketing or purchase funnels, like through text. It’s been a big topic of conversation due to legalities of can you do that or not? But we’ve been told different things. There is texting of internal customers we will try to cross sell within them. There is legality around opt in and how many texts you can send if you go with one. Of the big like. For example, attentive is like one of the big SMS platforms. You go with one of the big ones, they’ll handle all the regulation for you. But there is now ways to say, for example, imagine you’re checking out on abc. Do you want to finish this over text? Or once you put a number in. You can now start to say, hey, we saw you left your cart. You could totally finish this over text. We probably put it in about a year ago. In a Vanden cart. Somebody monitors that once a day. And so for these types of tests, like abandoned cart or another really common thing is doing like an offer or something like are this all monkey boy implementation or are they doing the ideation to they give us the data, then are texting team once, twice a day. They jump out there and see who. Who’s on the abandoned cart, go ahead and reach out to them, okay? That conversion is pretty high. Yeah. Okay, that’s another one. Where? I think we’ll look at Clickbank. Say, man, this thing is complicated. It just seems like a lot of click. Yeah. Clicks, clicks, clicks. You did it once. You show us that. But then also worry about it again when we talk about, you know, really, like, value. I don’t feel good about Clicked Buy as far as buying the service. I don’t know if our customers really understand what they’re buying. And then I worry, what’s the cancellation rate of people on Click to Buy? Yeah. Also look at it again. When we talk about bundling and adding all these different services. It’s like with that click to buy a point. Been better served as just booking an appointment with an inspector. And then we get there and sell multiple services. Or is it better to just go the clicked buy route? And just leave it where they should. But you have to just do routing. You have to route the customers to the right approach based on some input fields. Right. And so whether, like, for example, you may find that, like, if it’s a commercial customer, Probably get them on the phone. Get them to the phone. Versus if it’s like the lowest, cheapest option, book it there so you’re not wasting somebody’s time. This is where I have a hard time because I feel like we just push click to black. Yeah. I’m like, I don’t. Know if that was the best way to. No, there’s certain things that you can’t. You’re not. You don’t want them to buy online because you actually may sell them the wrong thing or they may not. They’re saying, I couldn’t get a hold of someone anyways, you know? I feel like we stub our toe locked. So that that form, which I’ve gone through a couple of times. Is that, like, you guys are deciding what. What they are in monkey buys. Implementing. Implementing it, or you’re like, just push click to buy. Like, what’s been there, developed, clicked by, and I think we were one of the first clients. Okay, okay. Okay? So that’s one thing that we can go through and basically look at that whole process. Okay? Do you know, like, what the. What the percentages are for. Click to buy. Versus phone. Or very low. Yeah. But basically no, like, operational expense or for those, you know, like. Yeah, yeah, it’s a low cost. Okay? That feels like it’s tough because some of these you should be. Especially the lower cost residential. Like, they should all go through, you know, click to buy and you can totally drive purchase conversion towards that. Where I think about, I’m like, okay, but then we just sold one 75 mosquito hat on to it? Okay. So we do prepare. Well, we did it for lawn care, like for grubs. And chinch bugs. We’ve done that. As far as we look at on our maintenance ones, what are easy add ons, we can do those. And do you think they’re only doing one? Because that’s like. It would just get too complicated to start the layer on more. No, it’s just. Those are just the only. Again, we probably. Those are the only two that we’ve done that we’ve just tested and it’s worked really well. Those always confirm really well. But, yeah, we haven’t looked at. What else can we do? Are there other like non so but apart from the newsletter, there’s no other sales or marketing related emails going or text. Okay? On the ongoing maintenance now. In order to get upsells. Or like. Like take the tree, for example. When our tree business is starting to slow down, our leads are thin. We will. Pull. All right, give us everyone from, you know, 18 months on who’s done tree work with us. Let’s reach out to them, try to reengage, see if they’d like a tree estimate again. Yes. Okay. But that’s usually more of a use that when we’re slow. We haven’t kept it. Now, we do have a schedule put together for next year. Let me flip that. Yeah, basically, you know, our lead line program, our guys out there in the field, when they do the service, they’re supposed to be trying to. Cross sell. Tailwind customers about our other services, but, yeah, the weekly, every Thursday, we send an email blast out with a different coupon. And do you know what that’s done through? Like, what application? We use front. Okay. For email blast, we use green rope. Okay? Yeah. Text them. Use pro. So. Yeah, like for in total when you put together a schedule. So, like in January, we’ll reach out to our pest customers for rodent estimate. Then in March we’ll do a termite estimate. Then we’ll do tree trimming and tree care for our long three pool clean. Yeah. So this is something where, like, there’s definitely opportunity for you to set, like, rule based, like, sort of marketing notifications, like, three months after this, six months after this. You kind of want to have a constant with our campaigns. Yeah. As far as being diligent with them. And so who. Who on your team? Would manage that. Like, who are we rolling? Whitney. Our whole. The lead line team and the texting team’s kind of grown amongst her. I can ask her kind of what she thinks. Yes. Okay, great. Yeah, that is, like, also a really easy thing for you guys to get more messaging out to active customers about other services and things like that. And everyone can unsubscribe or whatever, but. Right, right, right. Oh, they. We got a bunch of people. Safe style. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s. Okay. That makes sense. Cool. We talked about that. And then maybe we can talk about the rewards programs. Like, kind of. What’s the story behind that horrible job with that? It’s basically a sales tax. You know, they get points for every dollar who owns that right now, the whole thing. Julie. Julie’s got all that. That’s funny. We don’t even know how people get points. Honestly, we’re. We were at a. We’re selling this customer. Tell them all the benefits of ABC and say, yeah. You also get rewards, points that you can use for other service. And the customer goes, let me stop you right there. There are two types of companies with rewards points. Those that do it really well and those that don’t at all. Just like, what kind are you? We don’t do it really well. Ma’am. But why? Like, I guess we’ve never done anything with that. Why even do it at all? We had the vision. That one. He does help with some sales because basically they get points already spend but it’s different per dollar pest as into that dollar an hvac obviously. So we don’t even know the point. Is there assist? Is there a system that’s managed? There’s a formula, but it’s like hidden behind the curtain. Every person can see how many points of customer had we do a good job. At the software puts it out where every technician can see how many rewards points customer have. Rarely do we get someone to call in and say, hey, I’ve got a bunch of rewards points I want. Everybody. It’s like gift cards. This is why gift cards are views points. It’s from a sales guy being adelita existing customer and saying, Ooh. They’ve got a $20 cr e d i t o f p o in t s . I c ana ppl y . A n d t h e n t h ey b r in g i t u pt o t h ec u s t o m er, p a y$ 200 window cleaning. Mine is 70 points. Yeah, so that’s usually how the transaction goes with points. We’ve always said we would love it. If we could somehow use that point data, do something with it. You know, ones that work. You know, Chipotle Chickfila works really well. This is why gift cards are really big in retail, because nobody ever spends the gift cards. But it’s. And it’s a. It’s a. But also what they. Basically do is they. They. Yeah, they take the money and it’s just like. It’s great. And everybody puts it in their socks. What percentage gift cards go one used? Most of them. Yeah, Most of them. It’s like a complete. Yeah. Most of them go unused. Yeah. Most of the dollars like on. Yeah, yeah. It’s like extremely high Martin margin. It’s just like free money for if you try to get upfront loan with no interest. Why not ever even use it? Yeah. There could be something around rewards for us to look at. I mean, I want to see, like, yeah, all the people that have used rewards, like, what is the impact on retention or their overall spend? Like that. That was my. That’ll be. I was like, man, for all these high ticket items that were like competing with other companies like specifically Landscaping and hvac. I was like, we should have an ABC gift card put in there. But they hopefully won’t ever use. They feel good they picked us because they get this gift card that comes with it. Yeah. And we couldn’t get that off the ground. Yeah, because. Yeah, I got the idea for, like. Because we’re a Costco dealer, so. Oh, really? Yeah. So. Oh, great. On the exit aisle, we’re one of the. Like, you can buy an hvac system through Costco with us. How did that channel come about like those through Linux, because Linux has the contract and then Linux. Because we’re a Linux dealer. Okay. Should we do it for all sim? Goes for water quality. Just another P. That’s basically our marketing spin for hvac. A lot of it is petty Costco. We get a lot in San Antonio. Like over 50% of our revenue. Total HVAC revenue is through Costco. So we pay them for that, though, obviously. But a big thing with Costco is that with you buy it, you get a 10% shop card back. Which that’s a big, big driving point for customers in Costco probably looks. But do you know how much like sales is being driven? Through Costco. Yeah. Oh, yeah, we could. What would you say? How much. How much is being driven through? That’s. That Costco resell. Oh, damn. Okay. San Antonio. Yeah. Costco probably accounts for over half of our totalback revenue. We don’t think. We don’t think the same. We don’t. Make that because we have to pay for part of the shop called. The fees are so high. You have to pay for the lead, you have to pay for the shop card. And work with it. So are they. Do they know it’s abc or they think it’s Linux? Or, like, what is that? Do you own the customer? Yeah. The customer journey is there’s two ways most of them go online. Or Costco’s website. So they’ll go online and say, I want to get an hvac replacement. I want to do it through Costco, knowing that it’s a benefit of a customer that they get points back. So then that comes to us. Then we schedule some H Vac inspector out there. They go over it. They put together the price. They’re wearing NBC uniforms. It’s our normal ABC employee. So they know. Yeah, we’re the partner. At what point do you pay those guys? Like after the sales. Oh, okay. Yeah, they all pay through us, right? Pay abc and then we then turn and pay Costco. But you have the agreement where you can’t transition that to like an ABC owned speak. They watch that customer. Customer can ask a weekend on initiate that or something. What about other what about additional services? That’s why that’s also kind of why we stay with it. We go, well, this now lets us sell all the other. What are those? You still have to give them a big offer. Okay. So that’s where we’re like, did we become their service provider for H Vac Problem? But, yeah, the upfront, we cannot. And is that in all Costco’s, like, in these areas? Austin, San Antonio, College Station. Doesn’t have a cost code. Now if NC owns all the insane with water quality water softeners, the same deal. Okay. All the San Antonio and Austin area Costco. Great. But like this. We pay a brand ambassador to sand in Costco to try and. That’s what we didn’t get to. A lot of weeds come online, but we also pay people to stand at the end. Okay. Yeah, I see those guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Turn in many leads. No, it’s all. Yeah. Usually people are fed up after being that store. Exactly. Thousand years. Why are they. Why were they the only ones that pay for brand ambassadors? Oh, okay. So the cost. So the Costco, whoever, the Costco rep is probably like, you guys should play for brand ambassadors. Costco really wants us to have brand ambassadors? There. There’s also road shows, which those do seem more productive when we actually get to put a display out in the store somewhere around the Nick’s product or whatever. Those seem to be a little more productive. Did the Costco’s use you guys for commercial? No, I don’t think so. Okay. Good question. That’s a good question. Comes out great out of this. Yeah. No, but they care about their customers and. But it’s all about reputation. We see. You know we can when we sell an H vac deal. Costco trusts us to them. If we have. If one of their members has a bad experience like we have to show up on the escalation like the House is. On fire. Wow. They are probably the most demanding vendor that we’ve worked with. Interesting. You talk to any other, like, large box retailers that also do this? Like, other. Are there any others? Lowe’s is who we’re in conversation with. Costco’s just got that. The. The gold because, like, they’re members, like. Yeah. And they spend a ton on the car through Costco stuff. Like, you are a. If you buy everything crude cost. Yeah. And that’s why we’re like, look at the offer. I really, really amazing warranties and discounts and stuff like that. Yeah. So. That’s the other part with it where they’re like, hey, you know, the whole mantra of Costco, it’s the. The best, best product at the best price. So that’s why they’re, like, very stringent on us to be like, you have to do a good job with these. We are. Handing you like very good customers. Background. Okay, great. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. But so they go and they go through online and they come into the. Coming through the phone. Not through the phone. We’re like, how is the. They. They’re going through. They’re all lined through Costco, online, through Costco, but then they just get booked. For an inspection, then I think the lead comes to us. Yeah. We have an online portal, and it goes on there. Okay. We reach out. They have their own. There’s like an embedded portal or something. They have their own portal. That way they can track how many leads that they’re sending to us, because I think. They charge us per lead. And then. So then we take those leads, call the customer, book the appointment. And then. Then we have to track it all in there. CRM. Okay, so now there’s three kind of funnels. Then there’s like, there’s the website, there’s phone, and then there’s, like, Kasar. Any other, like, significant ones? It’d be big, like rfps. Yeah. Are you doing rfps, or is there a big, like, referral? S. I don’t think we get many. Of them. The biggest funnels, phone Web requests, Costco. Levi, you’re not doing any other B2B partnerships? I would say our own internal lead. Ing. So we’ve got lead line. So when a technician’s at a house and they notice trees touching the roof, They can talk to the customer about trimming the trees back and turning a lead. That one we generate. 2,500 leads a month, maybe. Okay, yeah. I mean, RFPs for me. I don’t know who all. We have a commercial sales manager that kind of helps set that up. We have a guy, as always, to pick the guy. That’s supposed to be getting all of, you know, government and city contract work. Yeah, yeah. Has that ever. Has anything happened, municipal or government? Like school districts are great. We do some city work. Is that all really sticky? Yeah. Once you got it, you got it. So that’s where it’s really nice. And then. Problem is, sometimes they might put it up for renewal and you might lose it just because someone might put up the loan so much on pricing. Okay. Yeah. It’s really great to have till it goes out to bid. Yeah, a lot more. We get a lot of lawn mowing. That’s where it’s hard to compete. Commercially on lawn mowing companies that pay their guys 3,000 customer value versus any other customer. That was 500, but less than. I debate this a lot. I take Steiner Ranch. Take, not take the neighborhood. See, I firmly believe that there are certain neighborhoods that can afford every one of our services. They’re having somebody do. We can see it everything we do, okay? So the question is, do you lead with in my mind because I have our customers tell me this a lot. The thought of having one provider take care of everything. The feedback I anecdotally and yet personally receive is that’s why they like doing business with us. I got one company and the value of one company versus three, four, five, six or seven. Is compelling. And so to your point. Why? Why not market? Yeah, we should come up with an offer value is that we can do it all. And I agree, though, we only do that in the air, in the neighborhoods that can afford all of our services. That was my whole thought on doing this. We just haven’t even remotely executed. But I think that message you can still broadcast that message after you’ve captured the customer before they bought. Right. You can leave with a pest ad and then during that customer journey, before they buy, then you can market all the things that we do. That’s true. Or you lead with the fact that we do these other things. And the convenience of having one provider. That’s the question. Les would say, no, people aren’t going to call you for this until they have a need. I’m like, I’m not sure that’s the case. Also, thing we need to be putting QR codes on our TV ads. Got lots of experience. That’s a new one, because then you’re making calls. Pretty darn convenient. You’re making a call to action while they’re watching the TV instead of just branding. But even taking this example, though, if we wanted to test what is the capacity for us to actually operationalize a test NGO around? That that’s also what I’m thinking about here. It’s not only like I think we have even today we’ve talked about all these ideas that have been somewhat tested or there was a discussion about. Or maybe we went the distance on. So one is understanding what happened. All the second is like, how many can we genuinely take? You know, there are going to be all these things that we constantly do. You’re going to always do awareness. But you. If we want to test, okay, we want to sell services in Steiner Ranch to just these folks, okay, like, how much effort does it take for ABC to get around that, like. Can we do that in two months? Can we. Do we have enough people to do that? Do we have enough measurement capability? So that’s part of the infrastructure of, like, what is our capability to actually run these experiments? And then what are the backlogs of tests that we want to do that we haven’t? Done, but we have belief that they’re going to work. And then what are the opportunity size? You know, that’s, that’s how we’re thinking about it. Because even in our commerce, we’ve probably talked 30 or 40 different experiments like that that we totally should. We’re sort of sitting on. Running. But for me, it’s actually not the fact that, like, you just pick one and go. Those need to be like. You need to reliably get to the end of that and be like that. Work that didn’t work. Here’s how we adjust, okay? That is now a process we maintain going forward. Or. Okay, move on to the next experiment. You know, and how do we get David support? How do we get the CRM team support? How do we get the website support? So all of that has to come into play when you’re going to market with an offer like this. But we also talked about just some other things, like, for example, click to buy. Right now. Click to buy. An inspector doesn’t go out. Well, my question was why? Like, who? Who loses by an inspector not going out? Yes. Maybe they come in and you still have a payment intent, like put a card down. But one of the things that Bo mentioned is we don’t have the opportunity to sell additional services that they just bought. The one the inspector doesn’t come out. So why not still send the inspector? Kind of merge the two or the calendars and just book the inspector? Not so much the service. And the other risk is that not many people are clicked to buy right now. So you that is an open area to test where you’re not like risking a whole lot. And so there’s, those are things that affect every service. Right. You know, and so there’s, there’s some things that are going to be very specific tasks. There’s some things that are going to be just improve the general flow of, of online buying and other things like that. You know, click to buy. Click to book. But I guess who it doesn’t, I don’t, I don’t think the customer necessarily understands, may not understand the buying journey of residential home services. So they, they may have said schedule for past, but if an inspector comes, you said this is our process and that’s where you can have all the different services that you’re interested in while we’re at your home. So that’s an example of, like, okay, what would it take for us as a team, who needs to be involved in that experiment? How do we test that? Like, what are the results we’re expecting? Okay, there has to be some type of website change. Somehow we need to make sure we measure Click to buy piece two. Just real quick. I apologize. No, no. It’s like. Is Matt McCarty the only one who can do that? Make actual verbiage changes and things like that. It doesn’t have to be that. No, that’s what it is today. I mean, we went WordPress because it was. My understanding is that we. I know. Less. Can easily make changes to it. Less skinny? Oh, yeah. Oh, no. Less. Okay, then why is it always so hard to get things changed? Less would say he doesn’t get copy from the dms. Less doesn’t know, you know, what particular changes to make. It’s got to be supplied to him by the experts in the service area. Classic marketing guys, Right? And the point is, he’s not proactively looking at things. Again, I’M not critical of less. I think it’s more of a matter that we don’t have enough horsepower there. If somebody was in charge, we get Matt McCarty and I love Matt, but he’s not. There is no proactive in our website or in our social media. It’s what I said this morning. We can take dollars. Yes. No. It’s what we’re going to have to do. Areas of labor. And reallocation. I don’t think we have enough horsepower. Unless it’s groove. Because some of these things, somebody who’s doing it, somebody should be looking at it. And that’s my only point. Unless someone’s responsibility maps is over here. I don’t think less makes any changes to the website. Maybe he does that I don’t know about, but the preponderance of them, I think you would agree. Is it done by Matt McCartney and Matt McCarty is responding to needs to change? Yeah, I think if Less has supplied the copy directly from the GM and it’s pretty easy to do, I think he does it well, then what does Matt McCarty do? If you’re telling less, does it? Then why do I have Matt McCarthy? Why don’t. We just talk to Les? Yeah, but again, I think Matt does what he’s instructed to do. But there’s no one proactively looking at it as the point. I just don’t think. Yes, I wish power over there. There’s not enough to do the things in the horsepower. We have got enough to keep doing what we’ve been doing. But even for you guys to. Even for you guys to consider increasing budget, you have to still have a goal of what KPI gets moved here in order to provide or what responsibility areas get covered that weren’t we got to get more phone calls into this building. Okay. And what happens is we are pretty good. At converting a phone call into a service. Right? We’re good at that. We’re good. But right now our phone call generation is below. Good for us. It’s below historic numbers by a significant amount. So therein lies the road. Is that because of increased competition? Is it because of lack of effective marketing? Is it because of what I’m combination of everything? Sure. Yeah. But at least we’ve never really tracked a KPI for marketing. Right. We’ve just said it’s the call volume, but I think that’s why I’m unhappy. That’s an up here. Yes, it is. I think we can granular between rubber and page conversions. And again, even on social media, there’s no KPI there. Have we driven up followers? Have we driven up engagement? But I think you can build a KPI. Around market to get free. Yeah, I can’t. I know less is medication in the past that once they enter the funnel, that is call us. Sometimes we phone call. Yeah, but that is. That is also like maybe, but is it at an acceptable rate? So then it doesn’t matter if it’s a phone call. Yeah. And so but this. Is the thing. This is where. This is where you play. You kind of play a game of tag, which is very common, where because you have different people in different parts of the funnel, if nobody knows the answer, then it’s just put. There’s not. There’s no risk in pushing it the other side. This. Is just a very common dynamic. And so like you have to have some clear articulate where both parties agree this is the number we’re measured it and then it’ll be very obvious. But it also doesn’t mean marketing like marketing what I mentioned can often feel threatened that like, oh, if we start to measure. I’m gonna lose budget. I’m gonna lose control. It’s actually, it builds their case for more budget to go after, more channels to get, you know, if they’re, if it’s actually as effective. Commonly when we work with marketing teams that’s. They always get nervous when we try to work with them, but for the most part, I’m actually trying to get them to prove because we’re probably being brought in because it’s not clear what the ROI is and dollars. And so we typically, when we work with them, we help them show what channels are working and also sometimes say no to channels. That, like, maybe they don’t want to test on. And so that’s how, like, I’ll be approaching conversation with Les is like, this is an opportunity to show actually what is working really, really clearly and then drive a case for budget or allocating. But right now, a flat budget with no clear, like, channel. Allocation is tough because there are so many different areas. For example, if I have to ask, hey, what is how much marketing dollars is going towards San Antonio growth and what are the revenue numbers we’re trying to hit there and does that match the amount we’re trying to spend? And if that doesn’t, then there’s no way you’re going to get there. Right. So those are the types of questions to match the revenue opportunity with not only the marketing spend, but. Okay, where are we going to run the bulk of our experiments? Where are we going to spend our brain power? Towards where the prize is the highest. Right. And that’s like, sort of what we’re talking about. So you’re talking about, you know, we have spent a certain amount of money just to stay flat and keep our electrician. All right? Now we have this chunk of money for Grove. The wearer is the best roi. We talked about pool maybe pool is great lead in where they’re each week it’s a higher, you know, yearly value, but we don’t know now is that the best ROI? If you go $1 ina p oo l, y o ug e t$ 3 out or you get $10 o u t or y o u p u t a d o l l a r in t oH V A C, d oy o ug e t$ 1 out or 1,300 for residential field person. Collectivize, like, 450 bucks. That’s a pretty big gap up sale. No, a lot of this what happens that is because there’s only more than one thing. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It’s because Mark led this and you supported him on this because how efficient it is to our cost to sell on, click to buy or on the phone is. Considerably less than the cost to sell if I send someone out there. Totally of what we do, you know, just the cost for sale and then the cost to not sell when you send someone out there is really high. Yes, right. So I’ve always said there’s nothing worse than an unsold lead. Where we pay to get them to pick up the phone. They called us, we went out there. We didn’t sell anything. 70%. And that’s why I said, we’re good. When we get there, we convert? Well, no, I think this tweak in the process, I think we’ll see a nice return. One of the other things. Once we’ve got the customer for one or two services. Again, how do we market to get other services? Certainly the email seems to have lost a little allure. But what about texting? What are opportunities we got apparently, I don’t know, direct mail involved in that. There’s a lot of that. Basically. There has to be. You have to have some type of drip campaign on upsell for sure. So we will map out the different customer journeys and certainly I asked a question. Apart from the weekly newsletter, what messaging goes out to people in between their subscribed services? There may not be anything and so that is a huge opportunity, but it’s actually less about okay, let’s go ahead and write emails. This needs to be something that the sales team or whoever’s job it is to move the upsell KPI can go in and configure easily. So we have to pick a platform that supports that. You have to have some type of training and basically say, cool. We have a clear map of when a new customer signs up for us. Here’s the email touch points. It’s sort of what we call non functional. Like things like not related to appointment booking, not related to logistics. True. Like, hey, here we. Thank you so much for booking this with us. We just wanted to share you this. And there’s sort of a little bit of a drip, more targeted drip around. To say. Well, once you capture the customer, you’re doing a couple things for them. That you can profile what that customer does in terms of social media. Yeah, totally. Totally. So maybe that’s how you do a drip too. If you know this person is an avid Facebook user in this neighborhood, that’s the method you like, what a lot of the doorknockers will do before they go hit. Up a neighborhood, they will target it digitally for like a full week before. So by the time you knock, you’ve probably seen one or two of their ads already. Well, just talking to the active guy, the marketing director, they pre do it with a lot of direct mail, and then they send in the door knockers. So they soften it, build some brand awareness with direct mail or other techniques. But then they send the guy on the door. It’d be interesting. Once you get that customer, you do. If you serve whatever, you kind of realize this is what this customer, this is their profile. Yes. Instagram person, or they’re a TikTok person, or they’re whatever, which you have zero presence on. Certain ones and it’s just hard to again. And I’m asking well, how heavy is a lift to have multiple presents on multiple of these kinds of channels, I. E. TikTok and Facebook, Instagram. You’ve got X number of ones and can you. But aren’t those relatively cheap? But see but my go to would be maximize. This is just what we see. You maximize Facebook 800 gorilla still. So you maximize Facebook first. That’s what tell you everyone who spends quite a bit of money in digital, they have the most sophisticated targeting. And so you want to make sure is the one that’s growing on Instagram. Yes. Okay, so meta. But TikTok is the fastest. So there is six. But again it’s the sort of size you have to just size the buy out of it as a younger to size. Like okay, what are the ads? We’re running. Like, who are we targeting? But again, this is also where if there’s no significant marketing to B2B and commercial is only 20% of the business. But the ACVs are way higher, it’s way stickier. There’s opportunities to sell, to make one sale, but then sell into like a network. Okay, we need to consider part of that 4%. What part of that budget is directed towards just commercial. And the B2B sales and marketing is significantly different. And so that’s another. That’s a question I’m having, is like, how are we allocating the budget towards the growth opportunities? There is a maintenance level formula historically has been we’re going to spend 4 to 6% on advertising. And when you add everything in there, you start to push that. And our expected historical rate of growth from that investment has been about 12 to 13%. Now those numbers have gotten smaller. As I would commit, our marketing has become slightly less effective. Yeah, but it is interesting to say most all of our advertising is directed at. Homeowner, no question. Yet. Our growth area right now as a percentage is commercial. Yeah. And there is the potential and there is actually what I’m spending the commercial on. Typically, I do give my commercial salespeople or have passed more of a base salary because one there pays a little more. Inconsistent. Because, you know, I hit a home on this plan. I struck out and I hit a single. So their pay has been a little more inconsistent, so we always carry them a little bit. Which we’re carrying them less now. They have no salary now, right after the first year. So if you say that, that I’m not carrying them at all. Then I’m really growing a lot and not spending anything on advertising. That right? There you go. That’s a really good form. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. In order to say, can I, can I make an investment there? Yes. Yeah. Would really pay off. Did you see even more if you spend a dollar there and you get two or three dollars back or not. Yeah. Those are the kind of people you have to have to make decisions. Now, we do spend money joining organizations, being members. Of things, donating to those kind of things, but it’s pretty small potatoes compared with small for the size of the business, right? Yeah. So right now, there’s going to be opportunities where you can get 5 to 10x return on your dollar. And so that’s our job, to find those and to shift or to consider putting funds there. Right. But they’re also going to be areas where there is no marketing and you’re still seeing that sales are getting done. And so your job is to take what’s working when they’re getting the phone call and translate that to digital, translate that to these lower cost ways of advertising. And in B to B, you can easily find everybody, target them, get something in front of them, direct mail, email, it’s much easier in consumer actually to get all that information, find out all the school districts, finding all the buyers, things like that. The sales cycle is different and longer, but there is a finite amount, so you just touch that. Is that a marketing function or a sales function? I would say it’s like whoever owns the KPI, like whoever owns the metric, like who is judged on if commercial grows from X to Y or as a percentage of business grows. It’s also who is capable of moving it. Are the sales staff capable of doing the market? Capable of moving? Are they capable of doing the marketing? Sales guys are capable of moving. They sell a lot. But can they do the marketing rounds for him? I don’t know if they’re right. That’s what I’m getting at. Well, that’s why you’re joining organizations, getting known, doing whatever. And that’s softening that. We talk about pulling lists and then running campaign. We’re about direct marketing to the decision maker at that hospital nursing home at that whatever it is the campaign’s being run, it needs to be by the market. Yeah, probably so. Well, again, that would be a disaster. But that then speaks to horsepower and the marketing team. That’s a whole. But it has to be arranged. Not as like, okay, we just need three new markers. It’s like we’re bringing someone who has experience selling commercial service. Contract marketing. Yeah, commercial marketing understands the various channels, understands how to break into your top. Segments, which whatever they are, hotel, whatever, and they know the buyers. Maybe they bring some with them. They know how to speak to those people and they can take what’s working on the phones and move it into more scalable marketing. That’s what their job needs to be. But that person owns the okay, we’re going to start, we need to drive X amount of leads. From marketing sources. Right. So outside of phone calls, marketing sourced leads, typically they call like MQLs, like marketing qualified leads. They’re being driven from the marketing department. And that’s what that person owns. Right. But sales still has to close them. And then it’s very similar to residential now. You still have these two groups that work together again. And I’m good with that. And that makes sense to me. I just. Way back in the day, the sales guy is the guy. Who joined the group. He’s the guy who. I mean, I did it for a time myself. I go find the hospital administrator. Find who’s in charge of a housekeeping. Find it. The sales guy. Did the research, then he made the call. Is a lot more is available and easier to get. Now, I still think your salespeople can do a fair amount of that. There still is going to be some amount of like, hey, can we just give some of this data so they can still go. But to achieve some type of scale and to deploy around the opportunity, which is like every hotel, whatever, some of this can’t be done. You’ll just have to hire a ton of salespeople. Right. So my thought just off the surface, I don’t want to go into the leads here, but it is that it’s a marking function to get to obtain the list. And then maybe there is an appointment setter who speaks the language, who calls and gets the appointment with Mr. Jones for Bo Jenkins to come out to do an inspection. It’s common. I mean, we get hit up with those calls. Hey, Bob, you got a minute. And a lot of times, I mean, there are firms that do all that, right, where they get the lead, and then once it’s qualified and ready, then they hand it over to you. Yes, but what you’ll find with, like, these are just like lead setting firms that, I mean, you just don’t know the quality they charge you per lead. And also, this is something that your marketers should own. They should know your customers, and they should have a really good understanding what part of the sales pitch is working. And how do I now scale that messaging across channels? Like, how do I use direct mail? How do I do that in the trade journals? Can we target these commercial owners on Facebook? He’s also looking at our current customers. What is our best customer? Right? What do we get the highest return on? And the marketer, their genius is say, okay, hotels and hotels is a huge segment for us. Where are hotel serve commercial service buyers making their decisions? They have to think creatively. You want the marketer to think about that. How do I craft a campaign that I can test? You want them. That’s what their genius is. They can utilize sales guys if they’re where needed direction. How do we brand ABC as the number one partner for hotels, for commercial services? So thinking about so that is their art. That’s what you need them to do. And you need the mechanism for there to run these tests and you need the salespeople to close those leads. That’s how the delineation is so they own making sure that leads are coming in. Yes. I think before there was just a lot less to manage and you couldn’t have to be this creative. But because there’s just less competition. But now there’s more competition. You have to really think about branding ABC as the go to partner for these industries and finding like, okay, what’s working like oh, does the hotels. They’re not that price sensitive. There’s a lot of them. You can buy one and sell it to a bunch. So what are these opportunities? It’s a different way of thinking for us. Well, it is. And it is. Yes. It’s sharpening and getting it tweaked more into focus. Right. Segmenting your client base is just. Is 101. Right. And, you know, we’re just an anomaly because we do so much. And we’re residential and commercial. I mean, Good or bad, right? Because you can make the case. You know, you’re all things to all people. Right. And. Okay, it’s just harder to manage that. And that’s where our challenge has been. And that’s sort of the challenge has been for less, but not increase the horsepower over there. And so he. Can’t zero in on hotels. He’s never thought about zeroing in on nursing homes. Okay, that’s never crossed his mind. Okay. But where should Whose mind should that cross? Right. And historically, it was the sales manager. That’s why I’ve got John Arnold. Okay. As to get a commercial sales manager who thinks about what are the segments that we want to go after? The school district thought process, all of those. That’s the way we’ve historically done it. This is the tweak. Here. Is that instead of having it now, Jim, you go call on that school district. No, we’re going to market to all of those and get more lines in the water instead of a line at a time, right? You’re throwing a whole bunch of lines, and now you’re pulling the ones and you get some. Basically now it’s like once you figure it out, school, you have a playbook, you have an industry go to market playbook that you can now you run the next one. But it is that it is pairing that sales owner with that marketing owner. They both execute a strategy. That’s the thing that we’re talking about now here. That’s a tweet from way we’ve historically thought about things. Commercial we do feel like. And the numbers bear it out this year. We take it with the Pest Group, we’re growing a lot faster in commercial right now than we are in residential as a percentage. You look at the number of customers that’s run out, a whole lot more customers. Those customers are just worth a lot. Prosperous, obviously, huge commercials that our numbers for this whole year, we would start up, boost our numbers 10% each month almost for a whole year based on that one account. Same with Colleen School District. But look, if you’ve spent. No. Without a marketing. Correct. If you’ve only spent sales dollars there, then you’re already cheaper than residential. Right. In that. For that. For those dollars. Coming in. No cost of acquisition. And so that should scream, okay, we should put some more. But again, it’s also like, how many of these do we have? And what are the hottest ones that we know that it’s just like, okay, no brainer. And then how can we actually get around building a motion towards this, but there are also things like commercial. It’s very different customer and sales process and residential. So there may not be a lot we can take over. So what is our complexity that we’re willing to handle? Again, I would submit that the value proposition of us being able to handle multiple services for that commercial establishment has X amount of value, right? I got the same company, so I got them. That’s taking care of my pests. They’re doing fertilizing the lawn. They’re doing. They’re mowing the lawn. If it’s a hotel, they’re cleaning the pool. They can do the windows. They can do the plumbing for the drains. I mean, there’s things that we’ve got to do better. We did our first really thoughtful step into bundling on residential this year, and it’s paid off. But we’ve not really bundled and talked about bundling commercial. But I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. No. And that’s why we said our goal for the first part of 2026 is get commercial bundling going. Right. Something different, but, yes, that’s our primary objective. And I think again, I struggle with. What’s that value prop. To me and the people I talk to, commercial or residential, the single source provider is valuable. Because I got to pay to have these services done anyway. It’s never been viewed as a negative. It is always something positive by the customer. Right. We don’t tout that. We don’t market that. If we did it really well, customers wouldn’t be surprised when we bring it up to them that we have a service that can take care of that. When we find a problem and you’ve got an adv says that, I don’t think we run it. We don’t run the ad very often. I saw it a couple weeks ago. Did you? Which one? You had a different color hair. Brownie. It was an old ad, but it was the one where you’re on your phone or whatever. Flip phone. Was that click to buy. I think that was clicked to buy. It was sitting out in that back patio. We do multiple services. Well, we’ve done a couple of those. Like that later. That cuts my hair. Since you saw a commercial, you’re talking about different services. We did one where I’m writing them down. I’m sending Esslers breakfast table painting. I said, sometimes I get all confused. Suffice it to say, if you need something done, just call. Abs, I think that’s the one. Yell at you. But my point is, less does not buy off on the value proposition. Of leading with that. His thought is, lead with the problem they have and then work to convert them. Okay, just a different thought. The question is, how powerful is it? That you’re the only. And I’ve always been taught you maximize your own link. Well, we’re the only one who can do all of that, period. The N. Nobody else can offer as many services. You got to test them both to a degree. You run the everything ad or the QR code, then you run the single service ads with a QR code, and that’s where you can see the call to action. Who’s got the higher performance does tout for mechanical solutions. So does Fox. Yes, they do. Radiant, right? And you’re marketing multiple things. And B, I only got to call one company for those three things. We can take it three steps wider. But that’s the debate. And when you’re marketing director doesn’t buy off on it, what ads actually get run? It’s probably more the single source which ads do get run. I mean, we don’t know. I will tell you. No, we do. We need to get that. Everybody should be want to. Because I will tell you, I get a lot. Saw you on tv. See, on TV all the time. That’s at the same group. Okay, that’s probably the KXAN 10 o’clock news. Right. And we’re probably on there. On a regular basis and there’s certain places and that’s all we’re reaching frequency and all of that. But I know that because I always joke about it, say, thank God someone’s seeing those, because we spent a lot of money. Which ones? We don’t watch the news. That’s the other part about. Can we find out how effectively what is the roi? That’s what we want to find out all we want to look at all the spend today and map out what is happening. What is the channel? Roi. One way to view it. Is the TV stations have all that data. And the TV stations will tell you what your reach is with that add at that time. So that’s where you balance the number of ads versus that’s the frequency and the reach is the number of people that see it. And my point is. The point is that that information is there, and we’re making our bodies based on that. Now. Yes. You don’t? I don’t see them. Right. The only ads I ever see. And I record every CBS Sunday Morning. Well, that’s the only show other than sports. That I watch live. Or the kxan news from 4:30 to 6. That’s the only time I’m seeing live tv. And I’ll tell you that I see a lot of our competitors. At those times right early because it’s cheaper, so the reach is narrower, but you can bang them over the head with frequency. But we are getting people seeing our stuff. But that’s why it’s so much harder today. Is because there’s so many different choices for people’s viewing habits. And that’s where the OTT piece is, a big lever that we’ve not thrown all the way down. We just kind of tested it. But it’s like, well, if you’re telling me that’s what I can do, why don’t we do a whole bunch more of this is what I’m talking to last. Last week is my frustration. I said, I’ve been talking about this neighborhood thought for two years now, right? And new homeowner thought, right? These are the things that, like, I know all those people can afford it. I know that guy who bought a new house has got to get services. Taken care. Those are the two things that I know. And we. I don’t. And he’s telling me because. Remember in Steiner Ranch we had billboards on 620 leaving in the Steiner range. We got a lot of comments about those. Boom, boom, boom, boom. It was like. You’ll remember this. Back in the day, we used bus ads, bed channels back in San Antonio. Back in the day, you owned the bench at. You couldn’t go anywhere in San Antonio without seeing a bus bench. You had with ABC on it. It was a. It was a unique and very effective marketing tool for us. But if we can do OTT and I can go into that neighborhood. And make it on whatever the street. I return buyer. No. Then I can get that information. Why aren’t we doing that? Only it’s like what we say. That’s the throttle down if you know it’s a good return. I don’t need to do broadcast. On anything. And I’m talking out loud now, real quick. If what we have said, and I think this is right, what we want to put our money is and I think I’m paraphrasing what you’re saying, I want to put my money into the customer. That is the highest lifetime yield. Right? Well, the one who is. It’s these houses that are over a million dollars in these neighborhoods, right, that can afford every service. They either have them already. Whatever it is, that’s who can afford us. Or the new home buyer, right? Who’s got to get X things done. And you only go after those, so you take all the money that you’re spending. On broadcast and just funnel it into the two most high highest likely to use multiple services customers. A, they can afford it and B, they need it. And that needs to be part of what the thinking is, I believe so. The question I would have is like, the reason do we not do that because we are keeping several other channels going. Or is there another reason? Because ideally, you should say, cool, we’re going to shift from areas we don’t have insight into who we’re targeting, or we’re shifting from places that the ROI is not nearly as high into that. Right. We do the broadcast. We are talking to the masses. Historically, when we’re a single service provider. Well, that makes sense. Right? Because once I got you, I got you, right? Now, once I get you, I can get you and get you and get you and get you right for more and more services. So broadcast. When that was our model, that was. That’s fine because I got to get to the masses, right? And I’ve got an income category that’s mid level all the way. Up. Right. But what I’m saying is, no, to buy all of our services, it’s got to be this higher one all the way up. And I’m willing to invest more to get those because the return is higher, because of the likelihood and possibility of getting more services. And that’s kind of the shift in my thinking that’s been happening the last couple years, and we just haven’t executed a lot of our newer services in Tom. Are probably geared more toward that higher end, right? So back in the day, in particular, everybody needed pest control, you felt like. So that’s why. Hence the bus benches in San Antonio, because typically you have people riding on a bus ain’t going to buy any of our services. They’re probably going to bypass control. And then from there, things like air conditioning, obviously, you know, maybe that’s a little bit generic, too, because everybody needs an air conditioner. But the high end Linux system? Probably not, but certainly lawn care, lawyer, landscape, window cleaning, garbage bin. Those are all geared toward that $750,000 home and higher, probably higher than that in Austin right now. Overall, 750 for an well, and that’s the best use of our marketing dollars to get the highest return too. And historically, people will tell you because again, our thought, excuse me, was also that once I get in for past, I can cheaply market my other services to that customer. Maybe we’re losing effectiveness. Also getting them as a new homeowner because that’s when you know you might get an offer pass. But if they love their pool guy already, it’s hard to get on switch when they’re just moving into the house. That’s when they’re open. The one that we have completely gapped. Is every month. Every new homeowner, we’re not in front of them. We lost a great opportunity. Maybe someday they’ll find us. But the fact that we’re not first on their doorstep, and whatever former fashion that is, that’s the missed opportunity right now, in the sense of a postcard. And then they’re also seeing us on an OTT ad, right. Versus a digital campaign. By that time, they’re shopping for all of our circles, typically with every first two or three months. And they think they’re rich because they just bought a new home. They want to spend their money on there biggest asset. They just buy take care of it. Exactly. Well, again, this is all the conversation, you know, we’re going to have. You know, it’s going to be a challenge for us. We’ll be able to tell you what we’ve done. You’re not going to be able to tell you what we’re going to do. He’s not going to be here. Yeah. So, you know, we’ve got to figure what that. And as I meet everybody, for me it’s also important to like, what is what are we capable of doing well and seeing end to end where this group can. We can try something and we’re all like, okay, we tried something. This is what we got out of it. Now we’re like, here’s what the next thing we’re going to try is. Right. And we’ll come already out of today. We have a ton of different opportunities. But for me, that’s not like, I’m still like, that is not great, because there’s too much to try. So I don’t have a prioritization. I don’t know how to prioritize. We soon will be able to prioritize based on impact. But until I meet everybody and learn the systems, then I’ll understand, like, what is actually. What can this crew take care of? And then it’s up. It’s up to us to say, okay, do we need infrastructure? Do we need people? Or is it budget. What is it and what are some short term things that with the crew we have, we can go after, you know. But I was just telling them like we had a long time customer that was in their pool parts business. Large one of larger ecommerce pool companies have done a lot in pool. I know it’s. A smaller segment, but there’s stuff to try there. There’s definitely a lot in commercial. That’s a huge opportunity. And then similarly, I think because you have these geographical concentrations, there is opportunity to do a lot of digital targeting in parts of San Antonio or in those areas where you’ll get a lot of bang for your buck. And the thing that wave out channels is you want to prioritize channels where you get the data. Back fast, right like you want to. If you’re spending a lot on TV with a data shoddy or all they tell you I know what Nielsen and folks will tell you. Just like you roughly hit this many set top boxes, you may find that like Facebook will tell you the person that came and you’ll be able to see how what far they went through the website and all this information. Okay, what is the trade off between that. And it’s not an either or. Right. I want to lay out the opportunities to then agree on, okay, what is the budget and what do we think the budget for marketing can buy us in terms of dollars? That’s the way to set the budget, you know, and that’s what I want to drive us. Towards is the budget is to drive that outcome, you know? That’s a real good conversation. And yet, you know, this business has a pro forma and a model that this is what our target is for labor. This is what our target is for health insurance. This is what our target Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Here’s our marketing and advertising. There’s only X can go there. Okay, so that at the bottom. There is something left at the bottom. Yes. Right. So that model is how we’ve operated the business. For a long time. We’ve always been consistent. That’s why our brand is so well known, is because when people say, I always joke, I said, well, we spent millions and millions and millions of dollars for you to know we do this and we have. Right. It’s not just this year. It’s what we spent the last 10 years saying the same damn thing. What you said. Steven. His family just moved out. Further to west San Antonio, down up to Spring Branch area. Borde. So they met a lot of people out there that are our prime customers. And all the way from Spring Branch in Bordeaux over to Bernie. And you said several of these people you met. Haven’t even heard of us. Most of the same thing. That’s kind of scary that they are, but the difference is less likely to know than you all see. Yeah. There was one day I met, like, three different people that never even heard of abc, didn’t know where they were. One was courtier at ranch, which was like one of nice. Neighborhoods. But how long have they been in the market? So she had been there for a while. They were seven or eight years. But then the next day I went to the Heart Walk, and almost everyone that came by our table had heard of us. But that’s more local San Antonio area. Well, that’s been what I’ve been saying for the last two to three years. Is that the new people who’ve been moving here? Done us and there’s a lot and they don’t know all the things that we do out Scarny Stone. It’s like I agree with that. Going after a particular neighborhood and you inundate, I guess where? I’m philosophically thinking I’m less about this. And more about this. Maybe not that, but more about this. And spending all the same dollars get to this. As long as this is a better return than this, which I’m submitting intuitively does not definitively pains to prove your to prove. Test it, prove it. If it works, throttle down. So that’s helpful. If the budget is fixed, then the game is optimized, is driving towards. And that’s kind of where we are, right? We’ve got a number. We’re doing the budgets. We will have a budget that will show about 8 to 10% growth. For 26 and you’ll show about a 4% of gross revenues dollars available for marketing. So that money we will commit to spend because if the formula works right, we don’t get killed in health insurance that will give us a bottom line. Of again pre tax 8 to 10%. So that’s the model for us. So you’ll know we try to operate the business toward the rule of 23. The rule of 23. We walked into this. Never mind. But that’s the formulas. We lowered it to 21. That’s kind of where we are. I think that’s kind of what I just quoted. We’re at the rule of two right now. It ain’t good. So there’s a real sense of urgency is the point. That’s why, quite frankly, if business was all hunky dory and we’re rocking along and we’re at that number. We wouldn’t be sitting here. Of course. Right. Of course. That’s the fact. We got to do something. And that’s what I said. We got to do something different than what we’re doing. If we want to get different results, which we’ve got to get. We’ll do surprise increases to help offset some things which we need to do. But like Bobby said, we’re typically going to be in that same dollar range. Increased a little bit every year, but less typically does what he’s doing right now. I told him, at least for the first two quarters. 2.7% this year, whatever. So I said, keep the dollars the same, leave it right as I told them, same thing. And then we can raise it based on discussions and whatever we want to do, right? But some of what he’s doing. And that’s why I wanted to get on this now. Sure. Right. That’s why didn’t hesitate the other day. So let me think about it. I said let’s get it done. It’s because I do have a sense of urgency before all of these. Other commitments. I don’t want to have this group come up with this path, and we’re going back on the path that we’ve been on all along. Because less is going to do the path that he’s been on all along. Goes one way. Well, but in fairness to him, he’s tweaked a lot over the years to be we’ve evolved. And again, but not. Well, you said you’ve all. We also don’t have the data to determine. Yeah, we’re not yellow pages like we used to be all the time. No, that’s the definition. We call what Yellow paints are digital. Okay, I still see. What is the return on this? Yeah, that’s actually really good. Well again. How to show us? How do we know? And that’s our malt. But some of those are individual phone calls that come to a separate number. That’s true. Prove it. I’ll be interested in your findings from last because we’ll get you our input. And he probably has some different mics. Got a lot of answers. He does. Even when I was explaining, he said, well, a lot of information. I mean, Google Analytics can give you. Tons of stuff. Are we using it, though? Yeah, that’s the question. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Cool. Cool. George, I think that’s. That’s sort of how much the marketing meeting. Okay. Next week, so next 1/10. I invited. The small range manager, Mike and Steven.

Brainforge Knowledge

Explorer

2025-12-01-discovery_bo_steven_transcript

Graph View