Speaker 0this is to the point of Ryan O'experience, fully one of the top home services marketing and operations podcast, cutting through the bullshit and getting to the point. Hey, what's up to the boy listeners? It's ya boy Chris. It's just going to be me. This is actually going to be a vulnerable episode from me. Now, I've done a couple of these over my journey. And I've always been pretty open and transparent about my journey. And I think this, what I share with you is probably going to be applicable to quite a few of you, whether you've been through the sale of your business, if you're thinking about going through one, if you haven't. Either which way, I think that you're going to be able to fall in line with what I'm feeling and what I'm thinking. You know, the commitment I made to myself was just to be open about my experience. Um, and and how I'm dealing with it and, uh, you know, and maybe it's in my hope is it's relatable to you. So again, this is like industry agnostic. It's like position agnostic of how we know what you're trying to do with your business. But listen, if I don't share it, then what good is it, right? It's just a complaint, you know, or it's just, you know, something I hold internally and don't get to share it to everyone in hopes that it helps you. So, um, I'm just going to let it rip now. I'll tell you what I did like so that way and I'm going to I wanted to do a podcast on being on offense versus being on defense. Now, I was talking to good rich about this a few weeks ago. When we were flying over to LA to go, look at this potential business deal that has nothing to do with home services. But I was talking to him about it. And he's like, oh, let's jump on that person and do it together, because I'd love to share his experience. Well, KG's not here on this one, so I have to do a follow-up with him. But it reassures me that this is something that's worth talking about. Um, and so all I did was I came up with a few things like I had been on my mind, you know, and because I used chat GPT 5.2, I speak to chat GPT and I asked it a bunch of questions early on to ask me so that way it learns me and how I think and my thought processes and like things that I would say and like, from my history, my background, which is a whole other thing that you, the whole other episode, Tommy Tommy that one. but I did about seven different iterations of questions to ask myself on this episode. And it turns out there's about eight segments I'm gonna go through. So I'm gonna try ahead of all in one. But if it starts to get a little bit long, then I'll probably push this into a two-part but I don't know how it's gonna go because I'm just free flow in the sucker. So, man, so I hope you like this episode. I hope some of it hits home and helps you. And please reach out to me, like this post-Rino life honestly, he's been pretty damn good. Like it's felt like I've had a massive way off my shoulder. It had been 20 years of me working in digital marketing a little bit longer. With 18 of those being specifically in home services, Man, I've seen it all, I've been through it all, I've heard it all at this point. And I thought, let's just talk through my journey. And I'm gonna do it from as I sit today. It's a free man who's still able to run this podcast and serve all of you contractors. The first one is just the straight up first question is pretty simple and it's, What does playing offense mean to me as a founder? Well, here's what I think it does to me, who is naturally a sales and marketing guy. I'm not really an operations person. I'm not even really an integrator. I should say I wasn't an integrator. But being on offense means you're driving the business forward. And you're doing that a couple of different ways. You're driving the business forward. I'm actively seeking out opportunities for us, which is part of the hunt and the fun. It's kind of like if you're into recruiting, recruiting is like a cool sales tool to at a different level. But you're trying to go after and sell great talent on why they should come work for your company. I love that challenge. And I'll meet in Peterman talk about that. He loves to do that at Peterman Brothers. But it's like the, it's, it's the sale of, of getting, you know, great talent, but whatever it is, I'm a sales marketing guy. I love being creative coming up with new ideas, trying new things, learning new technology, trying to get attention because I like to create attention plans instead of marketing plans, because that's the first round of the game is you got to get somebody's attention. And that's the world I love to live. I love that stuff. I'm really, really good at that stuff. And part of that comes with understanding how your clients, how your, your customers buy. So if I can learn their buying habits, then I can serve you the contractor by, and then understand your industry, how your business works. And like, oh, like to me, that's the challenge of it. It's fun. And you could be competitive. I'm a, you know, I'm a competitive guy. I want to win. So, yes, I like being on offense. That's the way more fun, like as you're moving the business forward, and you can do it at your own speed. So, the other question is, well, what does playing defense look like in a private equity owned company? Why could tell you for me, it's sucked. And I wasn't always on defense, you know, after we did our deal in April of 2023. Why didn't we didn't do our deal to sell the business? We did it to scale the company. And we took our time 14 months for start to end of our process of finding the right partner. And I loved the previous, the CEO of the business at that time. I really respected them. Um, seems Jeff Moser shout to you Jeff Moser house a good friend of mine today, um, still to stay touches him too. And he was exited, which I didn't even think was a thing. Um, but we'll get to but man, I had a lot of respect for him. And I was eager to learn from him. I mean, he had, he had, he worked, there was an executive, a go daddy and had to acquire a company that he had been a part of and like had overseas skill with Amazon, like all kinds of cool stuff and he was an engineer Just a different thinker than me. I love like work with somebody like that who can diagnose my problems or architect my ideas faster than I can. But once we did a CEO shift to the next CEO, that person I couldn't be led by and I knew that immediately, and it turns out my gut was correct. Um, so I went from being on offense and trying to move the business forward. The whole portfolio company forward in a CMO role and then a chief strategy officer role. Jimmy Lee being on defense, meaning I felt like I had to now protect what I knew was coming from the new leadership. And that halts, uh, really all new development. Like you can try it, but it ain't the same. It's not genuine. If it's not genuine to me, what am I doing? It's no good. So I'm going to front being this guy who's moving and pushing the business forward at lightning speed and working crazy hours, all the right connections, all the right relationships getting on all the stages, doing all the podcasts, doing all the things to now feeling like I needed to protect what we had in place. Because the inevitable stigma of private equity coming in and now reducing expenses or reducing cost to try and you increase the EBDA to get more multiple when they flip it again like this was starting to feel a little bit more real and though you heard about it. You think maybe that won't happen to you because you picked the right person. Now, I'm just speaking from my experience, okay? From my personal experiences, what I'm sharing. So there's a lot of really great successful stories, too. Okay, just we're talking about mine. We should do that CEO. Um, yeah, I mean, I don't defense, you know, and I could tell I was in a, in a, in a, in a, in a C suite was sweet. A C suite position that honestly really carried no weight. It was almost like a courtesy keep me happy. Keep the founder of Rhino happy. Make him think he's got an opinion when really we're going to do the opposite of everything that they suggest, which is, which is what, what happened more often than not or the Anna suggested. Specifically with the integration. of Luca Rona and Torino, like, I felt like every decision that was made, we said the opposite, and they still did the other things, you bring a new leader, like the things that we knew weren't going to work. And so yes, you feel like you're on defense, and that is not moving the business forward, and that is a very unhealthy pattern to be in. So have you felt like that at all? One of you in you listening right now, like you're kind of on defense, man, it's a shitty position to be. And when you know that you're trying to take the last second Michael Jordan, your Larry Bird, your Magic Johnson, your insert, whoever I'm not going to say to the Brown James, but man, I am an offensive player and I want the damn ball when there's a second left. I'm not going to be the assist leader. I want to take the damn shot. So it feels good for me to be back on offense again and have all these possibilities in front of me. The volume of offers thrown at us over this last month has been incredible. Incredibly flattering and man and sampling. Just to see how many people really, really want us, it kind of, you know, like, you know, re-vigorating me again to be like damn. Yeah, like I got that fire. People know I got that fire and and I haven't been able to to be on offense anymore. Now I'm ready to be on offense and chill it and whether that's with somebody and a partnership back on our own. Whatever it is, I'm ready to go. But I am not playing defense again. That is not who I am and I'm never ever going to fucking do that again ever going to be that guy. So. I only got two questions in and I'm already 10 minutes into that thing. I got this probably going to be in the two parts. Number three, when I sold, what did I think my role would feel like? So actually, I was completely content with not being the man anymore. And being the leader of the business and stepping into a learning position, because I was always curious to like, I knew that I wasn't I had so much more that I could learn to become a better leader, a better businessman, to understand the financials better, to understand so many different things. So I was eager to learn those things. And I felt like it was a responsible move to make that decision because we did a pretty big number of business. And I thought, man, to get this thing to 50 to 60 to 70, 100 million dollars, like I don't know how to get there and I'm gonna need somebody to help guide me. So getting that intellectual capital was also important to me. And I was okay to recognize those things. So I was hoping that was what I was gonna get. not only the financial support to scale faster, but also that leadership and intellectual capital support. And I did for a period of time. But what did I think my role would feel like? I think it actually felt like I expected it to. I would say the one thing that for me for a little bit of a loop was when I had to go to my first board meaning, or sit in my first leadership meeting with now the portfolio executive portfolio company executive teams is like, you have imposter syndrome. Because you don't quite know if you just fucking got lucky. Did you just get lucky all through your career and like you made the right calls and stuff other right calls and like, am I really capable of building these big businesses just because I have one that I get lucky was it more and other than myself, it was a book like I don't know. And so you have imposter syndrome and it took me a solid year before I felt like, no, no, I completely belong. And actually not only do I belong, I think I understand more than what I'm sitting with. And then as I want to even further, I realize, oh, yeah. Yeah, these guys don't have any idea how to run these businesses. Guys and gals, not discriminating. And I started to learn, like, I know when do I fit in, but I probably could've done this without doing this if I knew them, but I knew now. And that was just, you know, you're going to have fun. So I think it felt kind of what I expected, you know? It's just that shift it when I had to go on defense. And that's when I would say it didn't, everything changed for me. So number four, what surprised me the most after the executive team was installed? So I'm gonna, when you're used to running the business and being the one making the call, you kind of know that you lose that if you give up majority of your business. So when you do your deal, You gotta be okay with giving that up. And I was, because I expected them to understand and make the correct decisions, more to help us make through it, but we would be a part of the solutions that they would ask our opinion. And I just don't, I think that the executive team that was brought in didn't understand their business didn't understand the people and the business who were leading other people And what happens is you start stripping benefits away from people and all this change is happening and it's not to their advantage because they do not give a crap how much to companies making all they really care about the end is themselves and I don't and I don't blame them. And if we're taking things away and feeling the change if you're in the pressure it's not the same like people, you know, start to get concerned and we're in they start leaving and you start losing good talent if you don't take care of good people and then you can lose good talent and you lose good people and then clients follow those good people. So you're degrading the company. And that's ultimately what was happening. And so here N and I are on the sidelines, put on the bench, trying to protect everyone and everything that we came within our control, which we gave up with our private equity, with our deal. So the last question you're in this first segment is was the tension about strategy or was the tension about control? I think it was both. Because we saw the strategy was going the opposite way. Now let me back up a second. I believed that the integration of the two big companies was the right call. In my heart, I believed it because I thought, man, you put these two incredible businesses together that have good brands and really solid talent that are complimentary to one another. You put them together and wow, we have got the, the all-star team of digital market companies for home services together and boy, we're gonna go. What I didn't take into consideration is how bad integration can mess that whole thing up, which is exactly what happened. So in theory, I still believe in my heart a heart that was the right move to make, given a situation, but it was executed very poorly. About as poorly as it could be executed. And what's awesome is that we still had so many loyal people, you know, that were excellent employees who just stuck to it, who still, you know, working at Rhino today. I mean, me, exited management team, I felt was very strong, incredibly strong to move the, keep moving the business forward. But you lose control, you know, you're losing the control, but it's very difficult to. To manage through that process when you have none and you know the strategies going the opposite direction, it's pretty helpless feeling to it to be in. So now listen, all this to say, I'm still incredibly happy that I that we did our deal when we did it the timing was right. I felt like it was the right partner at the time. It gave us a lot of opportunity to do so many more things. So I am super grateful that we did it. We were incredibly blessed, but we worked our asses off to you to that spot. Um, it's just this next phase, you know, isn't kind of going the way that I thought. But hey, that's not the end of the game. I say, I want more game to play. Now segment two is going to identity and energy. When the first question that asks me is, when I'm on offense, what does my weak look like? And when I'm on defense, what does my weak feel like? Well, I'm on offense. I'm continuously chasing down the sales team. What else are we doing to, are we going to ask him for referrals? What are you just sitting around waiting for customers to come in or what are you trying to do? Are you reaching out to some of your happy customers? Are you reaching out to just customers and general to check in? Are we connecting with our strategic partners and pushing on them? So they're not just taking leads from us, but they're also reciprocating and bringing us customers. So what are the new opportunities for us? Are there other events that we can go and speak at, you know, where we can share our wisdom to others? Is there podcasts that I can go and join or someone on the team can go and join and share the wisdom and stuff? I constantly doing things to get attention and to be helpful on the way, not take the give. To me that's being on off and to you every single day and I loved it. I loved it. I get to do it again today. It's just in different capacities with the different investments that I've had. But being on offense is so much more fun. I'm not saying that you don't have hardship. You got a deal with, you know, in the business, and you got to be on defense from time to time, but it shouldn't be your full-time fucking job. I'll tell you that much, especially if you're an offensive player. And it has a feeling of being on defense. It feels like you get the weight of the world and your shoulders and no one to help you take it off. You can't get it off your shoulders because you need to have the control to take it off your shoulders. And the only way out was to leave. And that feels like fucking quitting, and I'm not a quitter. So you kind of carry this burden with you. That's what it is. Almost burden burden and some regret. And you feel responsible. Like everybody in there trusted you to make a good decision. And the decision didn't go the way that you want. And now you're the one carrying the bag. You picked it for them. So you drop into defense mode and you can't do the things that you want to do that you know would make it right. And, man, that is a, that's a heavy, that is a heavy burden to bear that I hope none of you, none of you have to experience. Or if you're experiencing a now get like get out because the deal is that you can't, it is no matter how much you want. to help, and you don't have the control. You can't, and it's not your fault. You didn't pick it, hoping it was going to go shitty. You picked it, because you thought it was the best move at the time, but things changed. And you had to understand that. And I found that I got to that moment, which is why I decided to leave the end of the year. There was nothing I was going to do. That was going to do any good. I needed to shift for my own well-being. I needed to shift. I'm so thankful that I did. That's so good to be a senior advisor, which is cool. But I also get to do it with a lot of other companies, right? Those are other people who are asking my advice on things. It's giving me more opportunities to go and teach these other people how to be on offense the right way. I don't want to be on defense ever again. And it's said, the next question was, did I start the company to manage EBITDA? or as a lot of the financial guys like to say, Ibadah, God I hate you. And anytime I hear Ibadah, it already makes me think negative. Just say Ibadah, please. Okay, did you start the company to manage Ibadah or to build something meaningful? I think this is a pretty obvious one. I started to come to build something meaningful. I didn't even know what the hell Ibadah was until 2020. That's the first time I even heard that word. Ibadah from Goodrich. And that's when I started paying attention to like, oh, I've heard net profit, I've heard like, you know, what's the company, and I've never heard the term EBITDA, or understood what it meant or how it's calculated. Today, I completely understand it. I understand what the make above it is and how that applies to multiples and different industries like, but here's the thing, I never went into this thing and either did Anna on scaling a business focused on the dollar amount. Like, it could be a driver, but it was never the driver for me. It was, how do I continue to do as good as I possibly can for each customer that I have because if I did, we could scale this business very healthy because it's a lot easier to keep somebody than have to keep paying money to go and find new people. And part of that process is take really fucking good care of your employees, like really good care of your employees. Don't get, you know, stingy. You can't grow scale these things without them. I think that you, if people say, oh, it's more important to employees or your customers. And please, you don't fucking have customers to serve if you don't have employees to serve them. Take care of your people. You know, it gets harder as you get bigger, but that's when leadership and management matters. Like, as long as everybody's fallen the same values and you give them the right framework to work with them with the right benefits and you do all the right things with education, help these people become better, smarter people than the first day that they came in. If they exit, you know, more talented, making more money because they're better, you did part of your job, right? You made them better and they were better for your company. And, you know, If they don't leave, it's because they're very happy with their position, right? You're providing everything they need to be as successful as they possibly can. And if you are, and turn your client should be as successful. If that starts to fall off and you lose control of it, the business is in trouble. That was so important to me. Now what happens today is I've in the company's I invested in that I am actually coaching. I'm certainly thinking about EBITDA, but I'm not thinking about it like it's my driver, which is I'm aware of what it is, understanding where I'm trying to go and what it allows me to do with the scaling of business. Number two, what part of you dies when culture is sacrificed for efficiency? Ooh, this is a great question. What part of you dies when culture is sacrificed for efficiency? Well, someone like me who's very high eq, I feel that, you know, I feel people's feelings. Okay, don't laugh at me when I say this. And some of you that are listening right now are the exact same as me and you watch a show or move your whatever and there's that moment when you kind of feel a little tingly happening in your eyes. It's starting to water a little bit but you don't want to blink as if you blink a tear is going to come and you hope nobody's going to see it and like call you out on it. Yeah, I'm that guy. Except I'm okay with blinking and letting the tear drop. But I just, I'm proud of people accomplishing things, and I'm proud to see people get better, and I'm proud to see people getting to crappy situations and then dig themselves out of it and learn something new. I'm proud of people whenever they can go and buy their first home, and I'm proud when they hit their goals, and if I want to help them do those things, So, culture absolutely matters to me. It was the number one thing that I cared about was making sure that we ran a really solid, well, put together business. I mean, shit, we did community service one month every single, our one day, every single month for all the way up until we sold the business and a little bit past it. Like, it was that important to me. If you look at a piano to go and pay some, by now these were, These were typically on Fridays, which we did run four nines in a four or so, most people were only working four hours on a Friday anyway, because it's a half day. But I'm covering, meaning I were covering all their expenses to go into community service. That's zero business output. But you look at through this lens. When you go into your community service together for somebody who needs the help, it's not self-serving and it's not serving the business, it's serving someone else. The bond that your team builds together is so strong that it builds the culture nice and tight. It's just different than what others are doing. So if you look at it from a straight expense perspective, it looks crazy. But if you think about in the long term, your turnover, your turnover of employees is really, really low because you're building something special internally. And when you go and do something for someone else together who's less fortunate, my goodness, if you even have a morsel of a fucking beat heart, it makes you feel real good and the company paid you to go do that. So I'd encourage you if you haven't done that, maybe give that a try. I can just say about 25 minutes into this episode, and I only made two segments. So it looks like I'm probably gonna get through about three segments on this, so probably have to two part it. I'm gonna switch over to segment three, which is a private, this one says, private equity reality check, the balanced and mature. And I think this one is a good one because it's good to say some of these things. I'm not bitter. I'm learning a lesson. I've learned a lesson. I'm not bitter. Um, okay, maybe I'm a little bit bitter, but let me just talk through this. I think there's also, I understand some of the decisions that are being made. I just think they could have been done differently to accomplish the same end to result, which is make the business more profitable and continue to scale. First question is, is private equity wrong for reducing expenses? Absolutely not like that's also part of the game right you kind of hope that you bring them in so they can figure out how to reduce expenses. It's just how like how are you planning on doing that is that cutting is that doing a riff. Also known as cutting head count cutting, you know, laying people off. I think they're asked those questions before you go into a partnership if there's going to need to be a major layoff like you need to know those things. And it wasn't my it wasn't the case for us, but I could see where it would be now with the with the AI advancements on how that could be a thing the next time around right because maybe you don't need as many head count which is really goes to the bottom line. So you should certainly be aware of that, but are they wrong for reducing expenses? Of course not, like that's part of the game, like you need to find ways, or maybe they have because it's bigger as one entity that they can get better deals on things which reduces expenses. Like that's part of the game. I don't think there's any wrong that it all makes complete and total sense to me. It's just how you do it. Great piece of advice. How you make your money is more important than how much money you make. I'll say it again, how you make your money is more important than how much money you make. Let that one sink in. That's your integrity. Don't give it up for the sake of a dollar. In the long term, that shit will keep you awake at night. I'm glad I never fell into that trap. Okay, next question, what are founders naive about when they sell? What are founders naive about when they saw? Well, I'll tell you what I was naive about. I actually felt like I had a pretty damn good idea of every question asked, I mean, we took 14 months met with 20 some odd different companies that were wanting to acquire, right now. And I think of every question that I asked, except for one, that I'd never heard in all the complaints I heard about private equity. I never, ever, ever thought that the CEO would exit the business. A CEO, as equity in the business would leave the business, I mean, maybe I've only heard of one other person who's a good friend of mine, but I just had this conversation with like earlier earlier this week that that happened to same thing picked a private equity partner in the CEO change the person you've been changed. So I wasn't a heaped to that I will be curious to know what Anna's answer is on this. And I think also it might be. You think that your opinion and your experience is going to matter more than it actually does once you start to get into the relationship for a length of time. You can read between those lines. Okay, I'm going to move on to this next one segment for leadership style and self awareness. Okay, actually, I'm pretty good. We'll get through this. It says, are you built to scale something from zero to 50, but not 50 to 200? OK, this is a great question. And probably a lot of you in this position. I'm going to start to sing off by saying this. Whatever you think, more often than not, you're wrong. Because we have this limiting belief system. That says, even me, somebody who's like optimistic, I can do anything. There's, I don't see all the bad shit that can go wrong. This certainly happened to me. So I've got two answers to this. First one saying, are you built to scale something from zero to 50? And the answer is, apps of fucking Luley and why I built to do that. And I knew it then. Um, because I was a machine and I knew I had built a machine because I had Anna running operations and we were executing on all the things that we were selling and what we were saying and marketing was true. It was not and we were staying ahead of the market and trying new things that our competitors weren't featuring happy clients that were a major players of people respected like we did all the things right so I knew the machine was working. And once I knew it was working, I kind of knew we knew what lever's supposed to keep growing and scaling. And so, yeah, I mean, did it get harder as you got bigger? It did but not that much harder. Like you could still, you could start to see, okay, when I got the five million, when I got the 10 million, when I got the 20 million, like what's it gonna take to grow to 40? It started becoming a little bit clearer. Like you understood how you could take bigger chunks and that does happen, but you can only see, you know, so far ahead of you. Um, based on what your, you know, experiences been, which is why it's so important to go and visit, visit shops or things that are bigger than you who can kind of help you to really visualize what that looks like and understand it when you work backwards because if it's, if you're trying to be 50 million bucks or 50 million, you have 50 million, you know, dollar business and you're sitting at two, like, let's just back at that little bit maybe go to 10. You know, and like, let's just chunk this thing out because if it's if you if you did you said a gold no real no real crystal clear plan to get there with check points along the way, it's just a fucking dream. It's not even real. I'd say you shouldn't dream, but you know what I'm saying, like, make it a real estate go and it and it moves. But from zero to 50, I had a plan laid out where I was like, we can get to 50. It's just I pulled the trigger before we got there because I saw an opportunity to do a faster. Faster by getting to a private equity partner, which plays right into my thought process. It's like, hey, this is just one step in the process to get to 50 to then get to 100. And the highest we ever got to business to was $92 million overall as a portfolio company. It was a pretty damn big business. But the second half of this is 50 to 200. That went to me I couldn't see. That seemed unrealistic to me. They, as I said in this chair, it's crystal clear to me on how to accomplish that. And it's because the biggest blessing I had over these last two and a half years is the education that I got, of learning business at a completely different level, understanding how some of the big businesses get bigger. The different opportunities that you give yourself when you're a bigger business, and you've got more capital to put in things. The respect that you've built along the way in the industry creates opportunity. All this stuff creates opportunity for you to continue to scale. Relationships is critical in scaling. But if you don't see it, you go and find the help to get it. Like here's a good example. I've been messaging back and forth with Dan Martell, courtesy of Tommy Millibre, who's book is Bye Back Your Time. I've mentioned it a couple of times. Pretty spock-ass, it was on the episode, I listened to his, I listened to his. And even then, like I'm picking up four or five things, I'm considering delivering him on as a coach to help him make the path on this next journey of my crystal clear to get me to $100 million of net worth. And I don't have it all figured out. So I'm gonna get a coach who knows how to get there and can help me figure it out and hold me accountable. And that's worth whatever he wants to charge me for it. But I put myself in the position to be able to do that in the zero to 50 plan. plenty of people out there who are in that fifty to two hundred that are willing to help you. Chads in that ballpark, you know, Ken, Gainer, Tommy, Hoffman, Ishmael, like Toma, these guys are my friends and they're all willing to help you guys. Okay, I think what I'm going to do is, um, No, I don't think I'm going to go into any more of these things. I'll tell you why I am going to do is any more of the other checks. I think I hit the knee on the head as far as being an offense versus defense. Is that you can tell from this podcast where my heads out? And you should know where your head's at like you're an offense employer, too. People are complaining about I'm going to talk about marketing. Just saying the marketing section is hard. It's hard because it's like the one thing that you really can't completely control. You can create systems and processes in your business in all different departments. And you can control what happens in them. You can manage to the process. You can continue to, too. reinvent the process based on what you learn from your team or yourself or from others to keep scaling. And that's a normal part of the business model. But marketing is one of those things that is very hard to make predictable. And there's always moving targets in introduction of artificial intelligence. And the large language models, the chatchipities, the clause, proplexities, jim and eyes, all that shit does change the landscape a bit. Has radio and TV play and they're like, how do I attribute when I doing all this shit how do I attribute what to what they started on TV And then they went to my website how do I know which one to attribute it to like these are this is shit that is going to I don't know how how you how can you Tribute someone's thought process only way I know how to do is if they if they take action based on that thought process that's measurable But how do you know if they watch TV? I must say put in, I was watching your TV ad, and then I went to your website if most people aren't doing that. But you can start to see a lift in business when you're running all these different lead source channels, right? Most of you're just afraid to do it to go bigger because you don't trust anybody, and that's fair I understand. This is why I was always so like big on the reporting piece of it. And if you just really believed that the reporting was accurate, whether it was a good month or a shitty month, at least we could trust one another. And I was such a big advocate of those things. And I still am. And never gonna hear me be the, You know, the shit talking online, who's, you know, and they exist, though I have the freedom to say it, I'm not going to say it, but there's a few people online that I have zero respect for who taught themselves as digital marketing experts, but who just aren't good human beings. And there's a lot of marketing companies out there trying really, really, really hard to do the best as they can for you. There's probably something on it. I genuinely believe that people are trying to do their best for you, but if you can hold them accountable by trusting the reporting and good, that's one way that you can help do your part. But being involved in your shit, like it's not these days where you can set it for get it, like get you or somebody involved to hold them accountable. Make sure you get all the benchmarks correct, whether it be a number of service leads each month that they're supposed to bring your install leads, or whatever the number is a cost per lead through running too. Or if you have a customer acquisition cost, you're trying to stay within. I mean, I'll tell you one thing I was trying to do right before I exit right now that I thought was brilliant and I wish I would have done a couple of years ago, but I guess I didn't know this three years ago was I wanted every lead source. for you guys, you know, for not only for the marketing company, but for you, any which way that I had for a lead source, whether it be radio, TV, OTT, which is the streaming ads, BPC, SEO, Google local business listings, Google business profile, social media, direct mail, you name it, whatever it was, I wanted to know, but the LTV over calculus, the lifetime value over the cost for customer acquisition. And if that number for me was a four or above, I felt really good about my return on that lead source. So if you said one month, okay, I know that radio is giving me a blank, you know, a four to one ratio. But PPC is giving me a seven to one ratio. And any more leads, which one are you going to pick? The seven to one ratio, right? The one that's giving you a better LTV over CAC. And that's what I thought, man, if I had been doing that for Rhino specifically, On every single lead source, I would know the exact lever to pull when we need a more business to hit whatever our revenue goal was or whatever the goal was for the quarter or the year. And you can do the same thing you guys had to have somebody who understands it and make sure the attribution is correct and that you have a right and service Titan or whatever serum that you're using and that you can believe that the information is accurate and this is going to give you the correct information. Man, that's to right move to make, and with our roofing business, I'm thinking about the same way with the, you know, I bought a majority stake of prolific, you know, that's no longer just brand design, which I've been doing for 10 years, but also rolling in the email marketing side of the business, which has been fricking exceptional. Zach is killing it on the email marketing, 15 hundred bucks a month, and he's just crushing the sales, especially for us, or whatever he's been killing it. A lot of big players on board, you know, Peterman loves it too. Killing it 1500 bucks a month and you kid me and you can dial it up and go and re-market your customers and it's pulling in business. It's like a no brainer, some grassroots shit that's just working really, really well. And now I told him, hey, this shit's working so good. Offer a guarantee three months, if it's not successful, you'd fucking give everybody his money back. That's how confident that we are in the prolific brainer. Now, it's a really great position to be in. Zack's killing it with his team and it keeps growing. But the point is, if you can put somebody in your seat that understands your marketing and can give you a lifetime value over customer acquisition cost and you know your number and you know that you need more leads and you know which lever to pull that gives you the best return on the dollar spent, man, how powerful is that? Now you start to make your marketing become more predictable. How good of a position would you be? You say, man, I got all my shit figured out. I've got sales down, we've got tech turnovers down, we've got the CSRs down, we've got operations down, we've got our equipment costing negotiated correctly to where we feel good about that, we're getting the right co-op dollars from our vendors, or from our manufacturers, the whatever you got all that shit down in, but man, if we just could get more leads, that's my thought process on it as a marketing guy. Build that. Man, that's a hell of a way to build the business to make it more predictable. So, hopefully that's helpful, I mean, I kind of went on a little bit of a tangent there, but I genuinely believe that, like, that's how I'm running my business portfolio today. Because I am actively trying to build that out in these businesses. The ones that I have enough control into doing, and I think you should do the same thing. And if you need help on this, you know, who knows how much longer to the point podcasts exists, you know, with with the private equity company, you know, going back and forth with me on on owning it, you know, who gets ownership of it. Now I get to continue to get to do it, but not to worry because if for some reason it goes away, I won't believe that I'm an offensive player. Um, so anyway, hopefully this is helpful, you know, and if anybody's kind of in this position right now, you know, that you're going through it and like this shit can impact your family too, which really sucks. So you can't let it get to you when you're on defense, typically it has a negative impact on your on your personal life and nobody needs to mean that situation like this shit's hard enough businesses are enough for the impact you personally. So man, find a way to get on offense quick. one way or the other. Sometimes cutting it, like cutting the cord is worth every penny I potentially will lose just to be free and to be back on offense and to do good to this industry that I love so much. Like this podcast. I want to continue to give back to you guys. So hopefully this is a helpful episode. I don't know if it was or wasn't, but I thought to be vulnerable and just share you share with you kind of my experience. My thoughts were my heads been out with all this stuff and I got such a a lot of really great comments around the last one that we did, the internet did about being vulnerable with our position. And hopefully this does the same for you, regardless of what kind of business they're in. And if it did, then I did my job, which is always been my job, and that's to help you. Help scale businesses, grow them, care about people and celebrate to successes. And hopefully you'll continue to follow me along to this journey too. There's a lot of really cool stuff in front of me right now. And what I can go do with a lot of really great people that keeps me, you know, in this industry, which is where I want to stay. I mean, when I say industry, I'm talking about the home services world, I can not start an internet marketing company again within my non-compete and I don't plan to do that anyway. So not a problem, but hopefully this is helpful to you. So I'm not sure, you know, if I'll do a bunch of these moving forward, who knows, I'm just gonna kind of let it rip. Who knows if I even get slapped on the risk for doing this from my private equity? I'm probably a good chance that I will, because that's the nature of the people. Um, but I don't get the chip. So, um, listen, I care about you guys and that matters most of me. And I'll, I'm doing is telling my story and the truth of my story and my perspective. And if that's against the law, then this ain't America, you know, got to do everything. But dammit, you got to do something. No zero days.
