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Join John and Jack in this episode as they share practical strategies for thriving in the home services industry's shoulder seasons. From tech tips to customer connections, learn how to boost your business year-round with proactive and strategic marketing methods. Ready to up your home service game? Tune in now for actionable tips to enhance your business during shoulder seasons and master strategic marketing methods!
Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on Twitter
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on Twitter
Looking to scale your home service business? Service Scalers is a digital marketing agency that drives success in PPC and LSA.
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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
https://www.wilsonplumbingandheating.com
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
https://rapidhvactn.com
Owned and Operated Episode #62 Transcript
John WIlson: I'm John Wilson. Welcome to Owned and Operated. Twice a week, we talk about home service businesses, and if you're a home service entrepreneur, then this is going to be the show for you. We talk about our own business in residential plumbing, HVAC, and electric, and we also talk about business models that we just find interesting.
Let's get into it.
If you're a home service entrepreneur that's just starting out, or is early on in the journey, and you haven't broken the five million dollar revenue mark, we've got an event for you. This spring in Cleveland, March 19th to the 21st, we're hosting an event at my office. It's going to be awesome. Honestly, some of the most impactful visits of my career have been visits to companies that were larger than we were, that we could take lessons from, and see how they're doing stuff.
Like get a behind the scenes look, how are they structuring warehouse? How are they thinking about call center? Can I talk to their managers? Can I understand what their KPIs are? We're going to dive into all that stuff. We are here to help people get above 5 million in revenue. So join us in Akron, Ohio, March 19th to the 21st for a breaking 5 million event.
Love to see you there. Details are ownedandoperated. com
Welcome back to Owned and Operated. So today Jack and I talk about how to survive and thrive in the shoulder season. So the shoulder season is that time of year where your seasonal business, especially HVAC tends to have lower demand. So we talk about the few different steps that you can take short term and long term to make sure that you can win during the shoulder season.
Thanks for tuning in.
Dude, welcome back. We're recording owned and operated. How'd your week go, Jack?
Jack Carr: First cold snap. It's been nice to be busy, I'm excited for plumbing. Let's just say that because realistically in HVAC, it's feast or famine.
Unless you're rich Jordan or yourself for the vast majority of small HVAC companies. I think that we have a very cyclical nature and it's weather based and we had our first cold weather. So with that, we had our first big push. Everybody was running six, seven calls.
It's been wild.
John WIlson: Yeah. I'm sitting here like blankly staring cause I'm trying to remember because like our HVAC is like an emerging trade for us right now, where, I looked back a couple of years ago and our HVAC was like 60, 000, maybe 50, 000 in February of 2021 and like, we're now doing, 600 grand a month, maybe 500 grand a month, something like that in HVAC.
So like that's 10 times in two years.
Jack Carr: Yeah. So I was going to say, I've seen your numbers and Rich's numbers and nothing has made me more excited. Not that I'm going to be able to match it, but like, I saw your last year's numbers and it's where we're at right now. If I can just pump that up to you next year and then Rich the following year, that would be, I hope you hit Rich's level, Rich hits new highs and then I get you in the level. That would be really nice.
John WIlson: I hope Rich hears this episode so that he can hear what I'm about to say next. But, like, we're about to pass him. Cause we're bringing on our second comfort advisor here in the next month. And we have the lead flow to support it.
And we've been working really hard. Obviously we've been talking about this, but we've been working really hard on lead flow to basically push us through quarter one, which is usually our harshest time. But yeah, I think HVAC, I think it's a, weird one. Like you guys shared your calendar and how like.
I don't remember seeing yours. Yeah,
Jack Carr: no, mine's not as bad as Nathan's. Yeah, we can't say, but he drops two thirds. I did the math, we drop about not exactly 50%, it's about 40 percent in the shoulder season.
John WIlson: Honestly, a topic that would be interesting for today is, like, handling Shoulder season and like how that looks because how we've thought about that has really adapted over the years as the business has grown and like the stakes are higher like there's more people on payroll. If you handle it bad it goes really bad and like how we think about it has really changed even just in the last two years.
Jack Carr: I'm good to talk about that today cause it's something that we're going through. We went through the last two months, September and October, always just brutal as well as, February, March, the four hardest months and we just got through them. And I think we did pretty well.
What it comes down to us is the realization that our business runs on give or take about a 10%, 15 percent net. So if you look at any, the goal is to stay positive. It's dollar plus one all September, October, because the minute that you drop into the negatives, right? It's so much harder to get that back later on.
For example, you lose, say if you're running 15 percent nets you had taken negative 15, 000 one month. You have to make 150 K to get back to zero. So whatever it takes to just zero. Two, three, ten, ten, ten dollars, that's all I want. And so we effectively did that. Which was nice in October, September, October, which I can't say we did the year before.
I think we took negative, 20, 000. And so now that we're lining everything out, like I said, we're dropping a lot less, and then our baseline's higher, which has been really nice. So we're able to cover a lot more from the summer into the shoulder season, but idealistically, right? We'd run what you guys run.
And that's where we're trying to really push on is how do we really force September, October to be the months that, Hey, they are equal and, or maybe just a slight 10, 15 percent drop, not 30, 40, 50,
80.
John WIlson: Yeah. So we have a unique advantage that other companies don't have. And that's the size of customer list. Like we've talked about that before. But we have this massive customer list.
And HVAC is like the up and coming trade. Right now I think it's up 50 percent year over year. So that's a lot. And there's a huge amount of opportunity.
We actually don't market for HVAC. We can't market for HVAC because if I turned on that lever, we would drown. that is the unique advantage , like, I want to put that out there before I start talking about what we've done. Because I think that's important to understand that like, in most three trade companies, HVAC drives the bus.
Whereas for us it doesn't. So we get most of our new business through plumbing, like new customer, net new customers. And then all of those net new customers become new customers of the other verticals, including HVAC. So HVAC basically is riding on the coattails of the other trades, which makes it a lot easier.
Jack Carr: Do you feel that the HVAC rides that best or plumbing? Because I've always heard plumbing keeps the lights on, HVAC is the cherry on top. And that's what I've been... I'm told throughout the last two years.
John WIlson: Yeah. I don't know. Everyone that we compete against and everyone that I know that is a meaningful sized three trade business, HVAC is like 50 percent of the revenue.
Plumbing is 30 and electric's 20 and, that's not our ratio at all. So like plumbing is 50. Electric is like 30 and HVAC is 20.
Jack Carr: Yeah, that's interesting. I think in our market it's probably plumbing, at least the couple companies I know it's flopped, right? So plumbing is the big 50% driver, and then 30% is probably HVAC and electrical picks up 20.
It's interesting I'm curious out there for other people who are running multi trade business is what that looks like. Yeah. And what the breakdown is.
John WIlson:
So I think one of the things like I have some tactical stuff. You can go implement today and then I have stuff that you cannot go implement today, but has helped us quite a bit.
So the stuff that you can't implement today is like you go buy another company in a different industry. That was how we got our customer list to be so big. We have a hundred thousand customers, but like 35 of those were from a company that just did HVAC and then another 30 was from a company that just did drains and then this 40 over here was from a plumbing company and this five was from a plumbing company.
So you combine all those together and then you can cross sell their services using any of the stuff that we've talked about in the last couple episodes of like, Hey, are you calling them? Are you emailing them? Are you sending postcards to your own customer list and getting them into the other verticals inside your business.
Jack Carr: We talked about this, what, three, four weeks ago? Great Avenue. I mean, that is our driver of plumbing right now. We're booked out three weeks and it's all current customer base.
I have tried PPC three to four times. No joke. Three to four times. Yeah. Nobody is figuring it out. Nobody could figure it out. And I'm talking like little podunk small companies, I'm talking about big agencies working for Ford. Yeah. And maybe they just didn't care, but they weren't good stewards of our money.
Service scalers, even if they weren't sponsoring us, even if they weren't sponsoring us, honestly they have done a phenomenal job first couple of weeks. I think we're at like. 60 per lead and 5, 6 cost per click across plumbing and HVAC. Like that is nuts. Blow my mind.
John WIlson: Totally.
Jack Carr: I'm so excited about that.
John WIlson: Yeah, it's good. If you get the right partner, and like I said, I've used them since this is a little bit of a tangent, but like I came from Scorpion on to them. And the thing that ticked me off about Scorpion was like, they locked you into these multi year contracts.
The way they charged management fees was a percentage of spend. And they wouldn't give us access to anything, like anything at all. So we couldn't get analytics. Like they just like served us up their version of a report. And I didn't really understand how bad that was until I was like, man, I don't think PPCs work in the way it should be working.
and then we start diving into this and I'm like, Oh my gosh, this is crazy. Like it's not working at all. And like, they're not doing it. And then we go try to get out. And it was like a 12 month battle to get out of this contract. It was insane. It was crazy. So we actually still have a portion of the contract for the next five months.
We have to pay them 500 bucks a month in like severance. It's wild and then you get a taste for like what a company can do like, hey, they linked up into our service Titan to give us like real actionable data in a way that we've never had. And like, that was freaking awesome. And honestly, I didn't even ask them to do it.
They just did it. It was some guy named Leo on their team. Leo's sick, dude. He's friggin awesome.
They've been killer where like, if the account...
I don't know how they determined this, honestly. You'd have to ask them. But if the account is large enough... they integrate into your slack channels, which like that's insane. I've never had that much communication with a marketing vendor in my entire life. So them being able to be directly inside my marketing channels or like my slack channels for marketing, talking to my marketing manager diving into like specific things like every day, he's in DMS, he's in our channels. I don't know. It's been really good.
Jack Carr: When I was doing my onboarding meeting with them, I have two twin little one year old girls, and they're running around in front of me because my wife was out doing dinner nails or something that day. I had to be home. And they're rubbing bean burrito on my leg. They're just
being the worst they could be, potentially, at that point in time when I was trying to onboard, and the whole team was great with it. They sat through and... We're really cool about it. So
John WIlson: I think it's the same thing. So like, obviously I'm going to preach service scalers.
Like I believe in it. I've been using them, but like, I think when you find something that works, same as like our tech stack episode. It's like, yeah, we're going to talk about a lot of different stuff, but like, really, we're going to talk about service Titan. Cause that's the, that's the thing that works.
But when you find something that works, it's magic. So yeah I'm excited that PPC is like a part of our life again. PPC is a way to drive leads actionably, like immediately calling your customers is a huge one. And I think that like, that's something that we're getting better at right now.
And that's actually how I think we're going to skip the slowdown in quarter one and not even that, but that's how we solved our most recent shoulder season. Like you've seen my revenue graphs. Like we don't really take 30 percent revenue drops. That's not how that works. So we are not used to that. Normally we just keep popping along up into the right. Typically yeah, like, it's seasonal. It's like trended seasonal, but we don't take like shocks. We don't take shocks to the system very well. So our business isn't built for it. So when we took a 30 percent revenue punch to the face, it was like you know, the place is on fire.
So yeah, I was really afraid of that. And I had this, it wasn't even a realization, rich Jordan and I were talking and he was just like are you calling your customers and all you do doing this?
And I'm like not really like not in like a strategic way.
Jack Carr: I was going to say,
Let's break that down and how you. Yeah.
John WIlson: Cause I really think that this is how you solve your shoulder seasons. Like this is it, we're in November right now. I just posted the best September of my life.
Also the lowest revenue drop for September. Like that revenue drop was like a few percent. Yeah. It was not a big deal.
Jack Carr: As someone coming into it, I feel like the first step that we need to touch base on is. It's capturing information, right? So you can't really outbound until you have a large enough list that can support that.
And so we keep talking about PPC, we talk about Facebook, we talk about all these marketplaces and everything and how you grab leads. The key, in my opinion, to the first step as a smaller business that doesn't have that already built in. the focus is to mine all those lists into a singular location that you've been working on all year round, right?
You've been working on since April, May, June, July, August, and then September you should have six months worth of your customers who are on contract or on agreement. Then you have the, which should be warmer, right? Then I want to say customers who have done work with you, but aren't on agreement.
And then third, you have cold customer lists, just, those are the ones you're going to get a bunch of removes and take me off the list and all this kind of stuff. They either didn't go with you, but you still pick up a percentage of that. So that's like the number one place you have to start is how to get as many customers and customer information as possible going into
these seasons.
John WIlson: Yeah. And I'll say that this has been a really big learning for us. So I have all the way up until three months ago really undervalued the customer list. I haven't really thought about it with acquisitions. It's been like a thing, but not really something that I like place any meaningful dollars on.
And the reason is simple. I didn't have anything good to do with it. I was just like, okay I'll send them an email if there's emails. And that was as thought out as it got. Whereas now, like I went back and looked at some of the deals I didn't do. And one of them had a 65, 000 customer list.
And now I'm like kicking myself like crazy inside our business, we're building a customer contact machine. And like 65, 000 customers, that is a lot. Like that would be worth the purchase price of the business alone inside our customer contact machine.
Jack Carr: Yeah. It almost becomes, I think of this model is a sub model almost to like the newsletter list, right?
Like people who send out newsletters, grab emails, and then they put an ask in their newsletter to try and convert.
John WIlson: Honestly, when we started talking about this a few minutes ago, I was like, why don't we do exactly that? Because I think if we get data capture from larger pools, so this is something we're putting a lot of thought into, is like, okay, we've got this list over here, and this is this list that we've done work for.
It's a warm list, it's 100, 000 people. What if we could build a list, out of like, thin air anything? Same as like, owned and operated. How do we take listeners or how do we take viewers or how do we take something turn that into a list so that way we can do something with that list.
That's something that we've started to work on. I don't think very diligently, but what I wonder if you could even like, what if you spent 100, 000 a year, you built like a bespoke publication that somehow people would like a home and garden stuff type newsletter or like what Andrew from tiny Andrew Wilkinson does where he built a hometown newspaper that only cost him like a quarter of a million dollars a year to run. and That's marketing budget. That's what we're talking about here. That's twenty grand a month of marketing budget. So you build out this newsletter, you get a massive list of people.
Like in my market, we have four and a half million people. So like, that might be a million people that you could build out this thing for and just go crazy with it. I'm saying this so that I don't forget and then I can have my marketing manager listen to it,
right?
Jack Carr: Yeah, no, an interesting idea.
It's a different take too. I don't think that anybody has really capitalized yet on this kind of marketing idea of really, you know, we have a lot of people going after PPC. There's a lot of people going after LSA, a lot of people going after Google ads, but who is.
John WIlson: People aren't creating a contact machine.
Jack Carr: Yeah, exactly. You create value somewhere else and then you turn that into a contact machine and you also, in the process I'm walking through this in my head too, but also in the process you're gaining kind of eat those throughout the whole thing.
We are the. The home and garden, newspaper, whatever for this area. Like we are the best. We know this area. We're you guys. Yeah. And I mean, that's best marketing as you can get.
John WIlson: Yeah. I think I want to do it. Jesse, we're going to do this. But I think there's a company next to me that is doing something similar and then I promise we're gonna get back to like how to touch this into like reducing shoulder season.
I think mainly the point here for reducing shoulder season is become a contact machine. And that was the big thing that like rich really led me to the water on was like, are you calling your customers? Are you being strategic with when you schedule tune ups? Can you pull them up? And we did the best job this year that we've ever done and revenue showed it.
We're up 50 percent in HVAC. Like that's a lot, we went from 3 million to 4. 6 is what we're thinking by the end of the year. That's a big jump for us. Especially in a market where everyone's HVAC is not doing great. But the way we did that was we were really strategic with our tune ups in quarter one.
We were strategic with beginning our AC tune ups in April. Instead of, typically we used to wait until like May, June. Because April, there's still snow on the ground here. So like, most people aren't thinking AC. So we had to like really train our customers that this was an acceptable thing to do. And our philosophy has become... We will fill the schedule with retail calls in October, late October, November, and December. So we don't want or need membership tune ups during those times.
Jack Carr: You don't want membership tune ups in the middle of December when it's negative three out. It's just, you
John WIlson: You're going to have plenty to do during those times. So how do you get strategic about pulling stuff up into August, up into September, up into early October? That's what we're Or out into January, February. So right now our biggest thing is we got through this shoulder season. We gotta get through the next one.
Our plan is to book out as far as we can with our memberships and with retail tune ups and all that stuff. So we can have our no heats. And then we will go book basically through the end of February. And in March we will immediately flip to aCs and it'll still be cold out. It'll be 30 degrees, but like our team will keep cranking.
So That is the current strategy for us to resolve the next shoulder season, but it all starts with Are you being strategic and are you contacting your customers?
Jack Carr: Yeah, and so let's break that down So the first step is you got your list you did what you're supposed to you built it A thousand, two thousand, six, eight, ten, fifty, a hundred thousand like yourself, you built a big list. Or you have one. Yeah.
John WIlson: I'll say that you don't need a hundred thousand. No, you don't. Rich has like eight thousand and he's doing this more effectively than I am.
Jack Carr: I was going to say, we have, I think, four or five and we, we're, like I said, we're not as effective as you, but it saved us.
John WIlson: Totally.
Jack Carr: This season. Completely. It saved us from huge hits that we otherwise would have taken if we weren't actively pursuing it. So you build the list. The second step is, in my opinion, and this is an important one, I think is missed. So there's two types, two ways we can do this, right? You can blast everyone.
Just blast, new customers, old customers, and it works. You get people, it's what we did. It's less effective than I think what Rich and you do. Yeah. The next step is, one of the hard parts is gaining information, right? So you want to mass gather information.
So you have this person's phone number, you have their email, but if they're customer, you need to have their age of water heater, age of HVAC unit, age of anything, so that you can start putting and piling those up on these types of months, right? So you can feather in on the other end to keep your customers happy who you promised maintenance is to, but these two months really need to be hit with the 13 year old unit, right?
The 16 year old unit.
John WIlson: So this is like a small plug because they're also doing a great job. But we're an investor inside a company called Faraday. Are you using them?
Jack Carr: No, I don't even know what that is.
John WIlson: So they started off in like the blue collar education, like, create a text type space and they pivoted a few times, I think we're like, they're a Guinea pig for most of their stuff, which is cool.
But the big one is data plates. So what they do is they automate the data plate pickup while on customers properties.
Jack Carr: What does it mean? So you take a picture of it, you upload it, and then they have a software that scrapes and figures out what...
John WIlson: Scrapes it and puts it into Service Titan. Yeah. So then you could just pull reports.
Jack Carr: Oh, that's nice.
John WIlson: So they've helped us pick up tens of thousands of pieces of equipment in the last six months.
Yeah, it helps with a bunch of stuff like marketing.
Obviously it helps with marketing. It also like helps know what type of equipment you're about to walk into. So you can either bring parts or you can bring whatever helps with warranty information. Yeah it helps in general, but it's also clearly a marketing tool. Being able to build a contact machine has really been the big one for us. So I think as I say some of this stuff, like the thing that I want to be cautious of or maybe make people aware. I know and acknowledge that the resources that I'm working with our business are different than many of the listeners and yeah and Jack's. When I'm talking about this stuff, I genuinely believe that it can be implemented at a smaller scale. Like, I have to do it at a larger scale because our scale is larger. When I talk about launching these teams or launching these initiatives, like, the scale is bigger because we are bigger.
But, like, there are plenty of people that are doing what I'm doing. Scale down to their business.
Jack Carr: I think that's what the joy of this podcast is, right? Is we have you and suppose me growing. Yeah, both of us growing, but me growing at, that zero to five. Yeah. And you going in that much higher range.
And I think that me implementing these is proof in the pudding, right? I heard the same conversations that you and Rich. Yeah. Or had and we implemented it this year. And like I said, it wasn't as effective and that was mainly because we just didn't have the resources in place to and we haven't had service titan long enough to really gather that Equipment data on each customer that we have and all this kind of stuff So
it still works
John WIlson: Equipment data is part of it But the other part and this is like honestly, it's so dumb, but it's been the most important thing that's happened in our business in the past three months for marketing is like, are you contacting your customers?
Like, that's it. We have not only the responsibility, but we have total control over that schedule being full every day. And I think that once I owned that and accepted that as like, that is correct. That is when things started really changing. Once I understood that I was actually accountable and fully in control of that, then you can build processes to make it happen, which is what we did. It wasn't like, we're going to think and then grow rich or whatever. It's like. No, we're going to believe that we are accountable for this.
And then we're going to build teams out to solve this problem. Cause like our shoulder seasons are the single largest barrier to growth in our company. Like that's it. Because when that happens, like layoffs, you lose momentum and momentum is like invaluable. It takes so much work to kickstart a company in and out of growth mode.
Like so much work. And the moment you start doing layoffs, cause you got slow, you're out. So like, you can't take six months to kick back in because then you won't actually get back in there till August. And then you only have three months. So contacting your customers, knowing that you're fully in control of that schedule being full and coming up with a strategy to fill it regularly, it could be clubs for sure.
Clubs play a big part of what we do. But also just non members too. A lot of people do tune ups.
Jack Carr: How do you
contact them? What way do you prefer? So we did email blasts and text message SMS. Do you have a preferred method or you just hit them with both as well?
John WIlson: Our most successful has been phone call.
Jack Carr: Actually like physically calling them?
John WIlson: Yeah.
Jack Carr: Oh my gosh. See, I don't know why I didn't think of that. We've just been texting.
John WIlson: I know. And that's the thing. Like people just don't do it. And that's probably part of why it works. This is like a funny thing, but a lot of the stuff that we're doing in and investing in heavily right now, like no one in our market's doing it and that's part of like, why we're doing it as aggressively as we are is because like, if no one's doing it, that probably means it's the right move and when they do get around to it, I want to be so far ahead of them with such deep talent.
They just can't catch up. Yeah.
Jack Carr: Speaking of that, that anyone out there is a retired pest control door knocker and wants to come to Nashville and start up a door knocking, I'm convinced man, door knocking in the HVAC. If it does any kind of same numbers as pest control,
it'd be absolutely huge.
John WIlson: No, we're going to do it. So we're actually, this is like on our roadmap for 60 days.
Jack Carr: I offered first.
John WIlson: Yeah, you did. So, well,
We actually hired somebody. Our guy starts next week he'll probably start the team and knock on the doors a little bit, but, like, he was an award winning door knocker for like a cable company. One of his like first orders of business is launching a door knocking team.
Jack Carr: It's one of those things where if you can handle the pressure, I think it is so valuable. proves in the whole pest control industry.
Yeah.
John WIlson: I think the only downside but like the big thing to think about here is cost per lead, and I don't think it gets thought about enough because my cost per lead going to my own customer list is dramatically lower. So now when we're thinking about any of our marketing mediums, we put it into what we technically put in four buckets, but like the two first buckets are, is this a new customer or is this a customer reactivation? And we might be sending the same thing. Like, do I need to send 4, 000 postcards and start up an aggressive postcard mail campaign, or do I really just need to send that same exact campaign to my own customer list? Cause I think everyone's so obsessed with like, Hey, we need new customers.
We need new customers. And I'm like, yeah, you do. You for sure do but like how effectively are you currently mining your own list? And we're finding that we were never doing it very effectively at all. When we're thinking about, even PPC, like, how do we track our own existing customer list with all their data?
Through Google. How do we track them through Meta? How do we follow those people around? Because our conversion cost is going to be much lower than it's going to be for, like, your TikTok. Yeah, it's already worked. We already have them in the system. So now, like, that cost per lead might be, like, five bucks.
Instead of 50 bucks to activate a brand new customer that we have to convince them that we're the right party for them. Yeah. That's how we're looking, like, holistically at those two buckets. Is this new? Is this existing? When we're thinking about who we're speaking to if it's existing, here's the list of 100, 000 people.
Let's segment the audience how we want it. If it's new, we did a data study to create a lookalike audience to these 100, 000 people. Like, the best of those 100, 000 people. So that way we're targeting people that look a lot like that. That way we can continue to get people that we have the highest close rate on.
Jack Carr: Yeah. That makes sense. That's fairly, if you've done anything on like Facebook marketing and creating lookalikes and it's all fairly standard. So that makes a lot of sense. What do you think that the door knocking, I know we've kind of gone off the mind of your own customers.
John WIlson: I think you can door knock your own customers. That's how I got onto that is like when you're thinking about a list I really think this applies to every single marketing medium that you have. That's not like TV. But my argument for TV would be, can you retarget your existing customers using YouTube and use the same ad?
So I think it's every marketing medium. So for door knockers, it's, can you just knock on your existing customer's doors?
Jack Carr: And I think that's amazing too. When you get into that, that three trade or multiple trade business too, because you want to keep your customers a top mind across all three, they might love you for HVAC, but you want them calling for electrical and plumbing too.
Do you know what like just general rule of thumb for the average lifetime? Customer and not cost but value across the
three trades as yeah nationwide
John WIlson: we don't have a good measurement on that and I think that there's like conflicting
Jack Carr: That's what my problem is I've heard conflicting things.
I've heard. Yeah, 60 100 and somewhere in there but point being is across three trades if you can keep That customer in your wheelhouse over the course of 10, 15 years, it really adds up. And so I think that's part of the strategy is you keep marketing back to that customer base and let them know that you care about them and that they're top of mind.
And in the long run, it really pays out..
John WIlson: All of it bringing back to surviving the shoulder season.
Jack Carr: Surviving the shoulder season.
John WIlson: Yeah, so my firm belief is if you can master your shoulder seasons, like the only season that you ever need to worry about is the shoulder season, because your peak seasons are going to take care of themselves.
Like that is already going to happen. You're always going to have a record month every year. That's always going to happen. Like you basically throw that in the books. Doesn't matter. The only thing that you really need to worry about is surviving and ideally growing. In those shoulder seasons, and how do you maintain a strong gross margin?
Jack Carr: I Agree. I mean like, summer's always good. We beg for summer. We're jam packed. We don't have a single day, really, that's slow.
John WIlson: But the company that's gonna win is the one that, like, does okay in March.
Jack Carr: And I think we're seeing actually though in the industry of full baseline lowering for some companies, like they just miss the market even in the summer and winter.
And I'd still say, Hey, if you are not producing in any way, shape or form to your standard that you're looking for. That's always a lever that I think is valuable to pull at some point if you have a large enough customer base and in the end,
John WIlson: like adding a new trade.
Jack Carr: I don't recommend adding a new trade if you're missing your mark by, say you're 20 percent down in the middle of summer on HVAC.
John WIlson: Well,
That's what all my competitors are doing right now, which I think is like, that sounds like a death spell to me.
Jack Carr: That's what I'm saying is you shouldn't be reallocating money somewhere else.
They should be focusing inwardly saying, hey, I need to focus on getting HVAC right. Let me pull that lever to talk to my own customer base. And I don't think it's happening.
John WIlson: No, it's for sure not. And I'm so grateful.
Jack Carr: If anyone's in Nashville, stop listening to this. I have a lot of competition
John WIlson: There I have a group of competitors right now that are normally like strong competitors. And I think maybe I over estimated their capability. Cause like, I don't think that I'm as strong as some of the people I compete against in a number of ways, and the reason is easy. We got here from acquisitions.
We did not get here from being best in class marketers. But like, we're catching up quick. But these guys did get here by being best in class marketers. that's how they got to 15 or 20 million so it is shocking to me when like, they're losing at their own game. It's in an embarrassing way. Not understanding core principles.
Jack Carr: That's exactly it though. Is I know we had this conversation on why companies are seeing that drop 20, 30 percent that we're best in class marketers. And I think I have a little different perspective is I think that the last few years have been so easy. In terms of PPC, lSA.
John WIlson: Put money in LSA,
it spits out something.
Jack Carr: And that's the same reason that there's some of these agencies out here that, the bigger ones, they're supposed to be the best, and they're just not producing. It's the same reason that these HVAC companies and these plumbing companies aren't producing. It's because they've been just throwing money into this machine and going, Facebook marketing circa 2016, 2015. Like, you just put money in it and it has ROI. Like, just because. And then now we finally got to the first year or the second year of, Hey, this, it's not like it's,
John WIlson: yeah, it's basically been nine months of LSA not being what it used to be.
Jack Carr: We had this conversation with Vasa.
Yeah. And he talked about that as well.
John WIlson: But yeah. Interesting time. so there's a few things you can do to help your shoulder season one It takes a long time, but buy a business in a totally different industry. That way you can call those customers and cross sell your services.
That's a long play. It worked for us, but honestly, it's just starting to work for us because we didn't even know that we could play that until the last couple of months. So I am not pretending to be Mr. Smarty pants over here. But I do think that like our own customer list is how we double in the next like 18 months.
It's that much of an opportunity. And then the next one, memberships is a big one and how frequently and how good is your customer contact? I would urge most people if you are slow and your CSRs are doing nothing, make them outbound. And we put that muscle into our business like a year and a half ago, and we've gotten a lot better at it as time has gone on, but like CSRs will typically just wait for inbounds.
And they'll do administrative stuff, they'll do other stuff, but like, what we put into place a couple years ago is if there's not enough inbounds, you start outbounding by 2pm. Like flip the script, let's go chase down calls typically to our members. And that's helped a lot too just acknowledging that you do have control over that, and that your team should be doing that.
But that's something that most people don't have their CSRs do, for whatever reason.
Jack Carr: I love it. That's it. That's a wrap.
John WIlson: We will all win this coming shoulder season in February, March.
Jack Carr: We'll report back.
John WIlson: Yeah, we'll report back. I'll probably be crying the depths of February. I haven't seen the sun in six months.
Yeah, it's gonna be terrible. I'm messaging Jesse right now that like, I think I want to do that publication. I think that would be wild.
Jack Carr: That'd be pretty cool.
John WIlson: Like, how do we create something that gets half a million emails and addresses and names and phone numbers?
And I don't know how to do that without creating just a media company.
Jack Carr: Well, This is it. Sorry everyone, I bowed.
This is his media company.
John WIlson: A second media company. Yeah. A local one. This is fascinating.
Jack Carr: Honestly though, people do this on Facebook you know on Twitter there's a guy, DeLong, was his last name. And zero to half a million dollar Facebook newsletter in six months. And every week he did an update on it. But he wouldn't tell you what it was until the very end because he didn't want to, push it
John WIlson: wait. What was he talking about?
Jack Carr: He wouldn't tell you so he just know like
John WIlson: what's the subject of the news like
Jack Carr: that's I'm saying he wouldn't give you this.
John WIlson: It'd be some totally random thing
Jack Carr: picked random thing like chickens and he was able to drive Half a million dollar newsletter by the end of it After six months of just Facebook only, just Facebook, catching emails, adding people to the group, getting their information, putting them in a newsletter, and then starting to talk to them that way.
John WIlson: This is just gonna take literally one full time person. Like, that's all it takes to do this.
Jack Carr: 20, 000 people. 20, 000 people in that group.
John WIlson: This is crazy. This was a good one to end on. Okay. So thanks for listening. We started off with how to impact your shoulder season and we covered. We seem to always just end up back on marketing, but that really is how to cover your shoulder season.
More, that's the key. Yep. That's the key. So thanks for tuning in to this week's episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you do, hit like and subscribe. If you hated it, tune in next time and maybe it'll be better. I don't know. All right. See ya.
Thanks for tuning in to Owned and Operated, the podcast for home service entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit the like button and subscribe to the podcast. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, feel free to reach out. You can find me on Twitter at at Wilson companies.
I'll see you next time.
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