My biggest fear is that people grow and then they can't hold that new level that they're at
Welcome to builder nuggets hosted by Dwayne Johns and Dave young. Hey, our mission is simple, build freedom. We are a couple of entrepreneurs turned business coaches who have dedicated ourselves to helping our builder remodeler clients create the most rewarding businesses in the industry. My co-host Dwayne has been a successful builder and remodeler for over 30 years. He's seen the highs and the lows. From the beginning though, Dwayne has been on a quest to find a better way to run a contracting business. In 2016, he found that better way. That's how I met Dave, a lifelong entrepreneur and visionary who measures his success by the success of those around him. He reached out one day with a formula on how to transform my business and the rest is history. Since then, we've teamed up to help hundreds of contractors like you build better businesses and better lives. Now we've decided to open up our network and share our secrets so we can start moving the needle with you. It's collaboration over competition. Each week, we bring together industry peers and experts who share their stories so that we can all build freedom together.
(01:09): Today's guest comes from a long line of builders who have been in the industry for over 110 years, dating back to his great grandfather. His career in marketing began while working for his uncle's business, where he helped successfully execute the company's shift from only offering home building services to including a remodeling division during the 2008 housing crash.
(01:26): Since then, he has proven his expertise in helping hundreds of builders, remodelers, and contractors in the U S and Canada generate leads and close more sales by using the power of their own online presence. He's an expert at turning websites into lead generating machines that work 24 7. Yes.
(01:42): My pleasure to welcome fellow podcaster and founder of builder funnel academy to the builder nuggets community. Welcome Spencer. Hey, what's up guys? Thanks for having me.
(01:50): Yeah. Great to have you on. And when you and I spoke a few weeks ago, and I think he recently returned, he mentioned that hiking is one of your passions. It's certainly one of mine. I know with you living in Colorado, that offers some pretty cool options for getting to the outdoors, exploring things. What are some of your favorite spots?
(02:05): Yeah. Gosh, it's hard to go wrong and it feels like you could explore Colorado hiking for decades and still not, not even scratch the surface. Honestly, we have some good hikes just right out the back door here in Colorado Springs. So section 16 and then there's the Manitou incline. If you haven't done that, Google it and check out those those stairs there, but that's kind of the bottom of basically the trail that leads you up. Pikes peak. There's your REI outdoor nugget of the day. That's Spencer. You got it. Dwayne mentioned.
(02:37): Yeah. It's that you come from a long line of builders and you know, 110 years of lineage back to your, your great-grandfather. What did that look like?
(02:47): Yeah. It's looked like a lot of different things over the years. You know, I'm a little fuzzy on the early, early history, but yeah, basically got in the building, built a lot of specs, a lot of communities out in the area. And then over the years, it's morphed and added on. And, you know, from just specs and communities to building custom homes, remodeling handyman, division, property management, kind of, you name it today. It's really more property management and managing their own family assets plus some third-party stuff. And then kind of got out of all the operational stuff. A few years ago, I came into it. It's probably the first generation to not actually be building houses and doing all that. And I got into it on the marketing side. So
(03:33): Yeah. Well, tell us about your involvement and how, I mean, I understand that things changed a little bit in, there was the 2008 housing crisis ended up being a, a pivot for you. So maybe tell us before what led up to that and then what ensued?
(03:48): Yeah, for sure. So my uncles had the operations side of the business at the time, so they were doing a lot of specs. And as you guys know, spec building went to pretty much zero, you know, around that time. And then so they, they had a custom home division, but they also spun up a remodeling division, said, Hey, we gotta, we gotta pivot. We gotta make a change. And at the time I was recently out of school and was getting into social media and kind of how that was being used for businesses. If you kind of rewind, you know, 10, 11 years, this was the early days of, Hey, I can create a Facebook page for my business today. That's very normal. But back then, it was like, I don't know about this. And it was basically Facebook, Twitter, and kind of some early blogging for businesses.
(04:32): And so I was starting to get into that world. I had spun up my own company and then was, I dunno, we're merging a lot of family things. So depending on how much history you want, I started basically I have merged into my dad's direct mail company, which was direct mail is going through a decline. And we said, Hey, we need to figure out digital. And then we connected in with my uncles and they needed some help figuring that out. So they were our first client along with our direct mail company, our own company. And yeah, we ended up taking them from about 2 million to 10 million over a few years. And then we said, Hey, I think we're onto something here. And I think we can help some more remodeling businesses, custom builders, you know, that sort of thing. And it really just started with blogging, Facebook and Twitter.
(05:16): And then it just has expanded as you guys know, digital marketing is pretty robust and the landscape changes all the time. So that was kind of the first ending or so real quickly ad builder funnel kind of things. Do you help folks with? So really our goal is to build you a really strong marketing plan and especially around digital, you know, so a lot of people will jump into tactics and you know, they'll start doing some SEO or they hire, you know, a social media company. And they think that's like the magic bullet when at the end of the day, like those things all work towards a goal. And only if you're doing them strategically. So we start with strategy. So we really help people with strategy. You can find out more on our website, but then from there, if people want us to actually do the work for them, that's really where we'll take the reins and we'll write all the blogs and do all the social and do all their technical SEO. We'll do the lead conversion on their site and kind of all those pieces, which we can hopefully dive into some of those today. And people can walk away with some pretty tactical things. I could just hit pause and start doing. But yeah, that's basically what we do.
(06:21): It's always intrigued me. Cause I know it's the one thing that people feel like they need. They're not sure where to start. They're not sure who to believe. They don't want to do it themselves. It's, you know, it's, it's a struggle. It's a bit of a mess, you know, online lead generation, all right, you get the leads. Then you have to manage the leads. Then you have to close the deals, follow them through CRM, convert them. Why are so many people
(06:42): Struggling with this Corona business and a lot of work, you know, as you're talking and you're gone, you got to generate the leads. You got to manage the leads. You've got to close the leads. I'm like, yeah, that's business. You know, it's the toughest sport out there. It's endless competition and landscape's always changing and there's no defined rules, right? There's some, but you know, those are always changing. But I think at the end of the day, like in this space, a lot of people got into the business because it's their craft. You know, it's their passion, you know, it's whether it's building remodeling, whatever it is. And you quickly, if you're good, which I would assume a lot of your listeners, they're really good at the craft. You quickly have more work than you can do and you can manage. So now you're hiring. Now you're a manager, you're a leader, you're a business person.
(07:25): You're not just the craftsmen. And I think that's big hurdle. Number one is that transition. And so then you get to a point where you've built up some overhead and you've got your business running and now you need to sustain this machine because we're in a project based industry. Let's say you're doing 3 million a year. You're like, great. Well, you got to resell 3 million every single year to be a 3 million. You know, it's different than a recurring model where you just have to add more than you turn. So if you don't have a marketing system to back that up, then suddenly you get to three and you drop to two, and then you hear this. A lot. People are just, they're like, I'm on this roller coaster. I, I I've touched this revenue, but then I can never hold on to it. It kind of flows away. And that's because they haven't actually built a marketing engine. They just get a lot of word of mouth referral because they're good at the craft. And that's so unpredictable. And so I think the biggest reason is they just never started marketing. Their beginning. Marketing was word of mouth referral, and they just kind of built on that until they hit a wall,
(08:24): Sort of have something. And you, you were talking about building a marketing system and they come to you and most builders have something in place. They have a website, they have a bit of something all over. When you have your initial consultation with them, how do you assess the right starting point for each builder? Because that's probably going to be a big thing we got to, you know, I almost wanted to ask you, Hey, what's the most common model you see? It's like when we talked to builders, they're so different from each other that not any one thing seems really that common, except a bit of chaos. Chaos seems to be the, the defined, the defined model. So if somebody is listening and they're like, all right, this is kind of me. I know I have bits and pieces of this. How do you go about just assessing where they are?
(09:11): It's a really good question. It's kinda like, I would imagine, you know, a really good doctor, he's gonna go and do some checks and diagnose, right? Like where are you and where are you trying to go? So I always start with those questions, you know, like, Hey, w why are we on the phone? Like something's not working. What is it? And usually it's around lead gen either a quantity or a quality issue, right. We're just, we're not getting enough leads or all of our leads are junk. Right. And then goals, where do we want to go? You know, are you trying to grow the business, go from three to five over the next few years, are you trying to stay at three, but just boost your profitability. So you want better projects, better margins. You know, those are different pathways, right? For how we're going to approach, creating a solution to that.
(09:54): That's why I kind of started off by talking about strategy because I can just dump a bunch of tactics on the table and they could be tactics that are working for somebody else. But because those are a part of their strategy. And so it really just comes down to where are you going? Where are you starting from today? And then we get some baseline benchmarks. Like, what is your traffic look like? What is your current lead flow look like? Where, where are those leads coming from? And then what's producing customers. So you can get into the weeds and that's where you need to go. But at the end of the day, it starts with goals. Yeah.
(10:25): Yeah. We oftentimes, when we're, we're looking at how we're going to help somebody, we're asking them, what have you already tried and why aren't you still doing it? And it's interesting to see, okay, well, we tried this and it didn't work well, why didn't it work? Well, I couldn't get any my people to use it. Well, did you train them on it? Like you didn't have buy-in so yeah, probably an important element is to look at what have you already tried and have you discounted something that works really, really well when it, when properly applied.
(10:51): And that's a tougher question to answer sometimes because maybe they didn't track it right. Where they did it incorrectly. So the answer could still be yes or no. Sorry.
(11:01): Yeah. That's, that's exactly where I was going to go with that quick was I would think if you're going to really start to think about a strategy, of course, you've got to look back at, it will work, but a common thing that we hear, especially from a lot of successful folks is, and right now with things being as, as hot as they are, but you know, their answer will just be w w well, it's word of mouth. There's going to be a time where you need a lead generation strategy. It'll come quick. The market will cool off. And a lead generation strategy is real difficult to make that happen. In 30 days. It's something that over a course of years, that strategy works gets better and better. So I get where I'm going with this is that even if you've got, you know, you're, you're very busy right now, you've got a great lead source. You should continue to have a strategy so that you always want to be in a position where you've got really good quality leads coming in, just opens the door up for much more often.
(11:48): I totally agree, Dwayne. And obviously I'm a marketer. So I'm like, of course, I'm biased to say you need. But my biggest fear is that the last 18 months people have exploded their businesses. They've doubled, they've grown 50% in a year, whatever the numbers are. And then the demand isn't there. That's just from pure demand, right? You didn't do anything different. You just kind of you're in the right industry at the right time, you got a bunch of demand. You go from 4 million to 8 million, and then the demand kind of slows a little bit. And you go to five and a half million or 6 million somewhere in the middle. You don't have the marketing engine to maintain 8 million. And if you made overhead decisions and hiring decisions based on 8 million, now you're in a really uncomfortable spot. My biggest fear is that people grow and then they can't hold that new level that they're at.
(12:35): That is a, an absolute risk for sure. And it begs w looking into you're in a position of strength right now, as a builder, you have all this demand. If you don't have the, if you don't have the bandwidth to build it all, you do have the ability to pick and choose your clients and increase your bottom line that way and increase the experience that your, your team is going to get as well. But this is the perfect time where, where you have these elements to build the perfect strategy. When you're in a position of strength around all of these assets that you have instead of scrambling, when you're screwed, because you need one now, and it's going to be put together on the fly without as much forethought, you know, it's a life raft at that point.
(13:27): It's kind of interesting, as you were talking, I was reflecting back to like March, April of last year. And all the like stuff we were talking about is like, Hmm, this is tough times. Like, here's the things you need to be doing, but really it's, you should have been doing these things during the good times. Well, guess what? Very quickly we went from bad to good. And now we're in the gut. So let's not repeat those mistakes.
(13:51): You know, I look at it as, even if you're busy, you've got the leads. What a great time to work on the quality of the leads to say, Hey, all right, I've got plenty of leads, but you know what? We all know. You can have plenty of leads. They might not all be the right project or, or customer. So yeah. Keep, keep improving your game. I love it.
(14:09): There's another business coach that I know Adam McKay, and he tells a story of a criminal trial lawyer. Who's like 29 and oh, and everybody wants him because he's got this perfect record. You asked the lawyer, Hey, what's the, you know, what's the secret. He says, I only take cases. I can win. They're all slam dunks. So put yourself into that slam dunk zone as a marketer. And yeah. Think of the business you would have think of the experience your team would get in those, in those areas.
(14:40): I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, really getting our heads around what online lead generation is. That's a very broad, vague term. You know, you just think of, oh, it's Facebook, it's Instagram, it's SEO. It's buying leads right now. I mean, I guess in this environment where we are with the different social platforms, I mean, what really is online lead generation? What, where should the focus
(15:01): Your website? Yeah, it's a great question. We look at the website as the core for everything. Like you mentioned, like social is a part of it. Third-Party sites, part of it, Legion sites, a part of it, all those types of things. But at the end of the day, you own your website and your domain. You don't own Facebook or Instagram. And so when Tik TOK takes over the world and the other platforms go away, hopefully that doesn't happen, but could right. Well, now you've got to shift any audience you've built on Facebook or Instagram now is dying, you know, or you've got to somehow hope you can build it up on another platform. So if you're only reliant on those channels, I think you're at a higher risk. I'm not saying you shouldn't leverage those channels and invest into those channels, but your website at the end of the day is where people are going to come find you most of the time, especially in our industry where they're doing Google searches, how much does it cost to build a custom home in my area?
(15:57): How long does it take, do I need to find land first? Does a builder help me with that? You know, do I need a realtor? Do I like all these questions that you know, the answer to, but your prospect doesn't right? Cause maybe they've never built a customer. Most likely they haven't. They might do that once in their life, maybe twice. So those are Google searches, not social media searches. And so if you think about getting into the mind of your prospect, most of the time they start at Google or Yahoo or Bing or whatever they're using, and they're going to find a blog, a forum, a website. And so that's where we want to drive all the activity to. That's also the place where you can track everything through forums and tracking cookies, and you can re target. There's a lot of fancy, fun stuff you can do.
(16:38): We look at social as kind of an amplifier and maybe a trust verifier. So somebody finds you on Google. They look at some things and I'm like, I'm going to go check out their Instagram and like, learn about their company culture and see what they're up to, or check out their Facebook and learn a little more there. But the odds of them stumbling across you on Instagram and being like, yes, this is the builder for me. It's only the like top two, be top percent of builders that are investing daily into content. They're doing stories, they're commenting, they're engaging. Most people aren't really going to spend the time and do all that. So we just say like do enough there to be present, build trust, verifiers, like build some culture stuff. You know, that can be a good hiring tool. But when I look at the data and I look at all of our customer portals, Google search is going to drive 90% of the leads, or if you're doing paid ads, Google paid ads, those are going to drive a bunch of leads. Third-Party sites. Those could drive a bunch of leads. Usually the quality is a lot lower. The quality is typically highest on Google organic search. And that's just pure data answer, you know, looking through all of our portals, one of the things that that we,
(17:49): And we've even done it ourselves here on the show today is sort of a client centric focus and over the last, well, it's just clear now that that a comprehensive marketing strategy needs to be an attraction strategy. And what you, what you talked about is that verifying and showing who you are through social media. When you look at your target audiences or your ideal audiences, yeah. Clients are a big part of that. They, depending on what you need, if it's raining clients, you may need project managers more, right now you may need access. You want to attract the great, the best trades, or you really want to grow a design driven business. And for you, you need to have marketing to the top architects. How do you guys, you know, when you're working through your strategy, how do you how do you layer in some of this stuff with your,
(18:41): Yeah, it's a really good question. I just was on with my president earlier today, recording something we're talking about using social in terms of attracting and retaining talent and, and mostly attracting. I think that's where a lot of like the personal brands within your company can come through, especially the owner. You know? So if you're, if you have a LinkedIn profile, you're connecting with other architects, realtors, like people that can send you work, or, you know, designers, interior designers, those types of things, where you can be connecting with them. And then you're sharing content on those platforms, especially LinkedIn, more with that audience in mind. And then Instagram, I think is dual purpose, right? Cause it's very visual. So part of it is showcasing that you're a caliber company that somebody like that would want to work with that you want to attract those people with. But a lot of that is more of a B2B strategy where you're looking at, oh, I can actually go out and target these people so I can find them on LinkedIn and I can find them on Instagram. Okay, Cool.
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(20:04): You know, the strategy part is obviously it's huge. And I just think about, maybe you can touch on some of the different when you think about strategies, but they're different for all businesses. I mean, at the end of the day, most builders, remodelers want a good quality client to come through different channels and end up in their CRM as a hot lead, but there's nurturing to be done, right? There's maybe you want to get some of the right client to, to continue to follow you and get you into, if you have some kind of a newsletter. So maybe touch on some of those different things there that why that importance of having a strategy versus, oh, I'm just going to go out and get, buy some Google ads. Yeah.
(20:41): Yeah. I love it. So let's, let's see if we can do like a tactical example. Let's say you're custom builder. I'm in, we're gone. Okay. You go to a conference and you hear the tactic, do SEO, do blogging. It's going to help your business. So you come back and you just start writing about stuff. Kind of at random, you know, you're just writing about topics. Like here's some design trends, here's some blah, blah, blah. I would put that under like, okay, you're doing some of the right things, but did you really think through like the strategy to your question versus, okay, you're a custom builder you're trying to grow, you're trying to attract a clientele. Maybe you do custom homes between 701.2, you know, something like that. Okay. Now we have kind of a clear idea of who we're writing to. Well now we could feature some of the things into those blogs that would only go in that type of home.
(21:35): You know, it might be maybe an outdoor kitchen or movie room, or, you know, some of those things that are speaking to that type of buyer. The other thing is when you get down to like cost and timelines, you can say, Hey, how much does it cost to build a home in custom home in the Denver area? Well, it's going to be between typically 600001.4 million. Here's why, and you're not saying you can do it for less or saying, you can do it for more because that's not who you're trying to speak to. So that's like getting down into the weeds at the strategic level, we're going to know, Hey, this person is probably going to shop and think about it for a while. They might not even reach out to builders for nine months while they're just educating themselves. So what kinds of topics are we going to write about?
(22:19): And then you kind of mentioned nurturing. Like once I've got them on my email list, then now I can be in touch with them every couple of weeks with new blog content, with a video, with, you know, showcasing a project that we just completed. That's more in line with that type of a buyer. So all of the little details start flowing up into your ideal prospect, but strategy is also in relation to your market area, your competition. So it's important to study, like what is the population in my area? What's the population in this specific zip codes that I want to build in, who are my competitors? Who do I think they are, but who does Google think they are when I type in custom home builder in Denver, you know? And that's going to show me the people that are winning online. Now I've got to make sure my site is beating their sites.
(23:06): So what, how can I run an audit on what they're doing versus what I'm doing? So the strategy really opens up the door to actually get in the weeds and look at a lot of these things that I think people kind of shortcut over and they, or they just skip over and they go, I'll just, yeah, like you said, Dwayne, run some Google ads and target custom homes in Denver and figure that'll get me the right type of people. What about the role of video in all of this? It's huge. It's and it's going to get bigger and bigger, I guess. I see like some of the big value points in video right now. One is that people get to know you before you know them. And that's extremely powerful from a trust building standpoint. You know, we started doing video several years ago and now when I jump on a zoom video sales call, you know, most of the time people are like, yeah, I've been watching your videos or I've been listening to your podcast for a year, you know, whatever it is.
(23:58): And that like instantly that conversation is a million times easier because they already feel like they know me. So their trust is up and the barriers come down and we can just have a conversation versus, you know, your first meet. Like now you've got to go through all that. I still have to go through all that on the sales side, but that's okay because they don't. So they're comfortable, I'm already comfortable. So we're good. So I think video is huge for that. You can be educating through the process, the cost, the timelines, you know, all the, all the things that are involved. And by doing that, somebody can be sitting there on their iPad in bed, watching these videos, and they're getting to know you and you shot at once. And that video is going to work for you if you know, forever until you need to update it or replace it.
(24:41): And I think it's like we're in a very visual industry. So like, why not be able to showcase that pictures seem to be a struggle for some companies getting professional photos. That's like table stakes. Now I think getting on the job site and showing like stuff in progress, but getting video walkthroughs of finished product like that, you know, they say a picture's worth a thousand words, a video's worth like a thousand photos. So literally what it is to yeah, there's just so many ways you can do it. I'll add one more little nugget in there is in the nurturing, you know, so say somebody comes to your site and they download a custom home guide. So you grab their name and email. They're just browsing. They're not going to buy for six months. They don't even want to talk to somebody for six months, but now you can deliver to them in methodical fashion videos that educate them on, Hey, thanks for stopping by.
(25:33): Here's what we're all about. Hey, here's the process. Here's some design trends we're seeing, Hey, here's the first step. You know, you need to find some land or, you know, whatever it is, you can set that up. And that just runs in the background. So as you pour leads into, in, through your website, they're all going to get educated in this track that you designed to build trust and educate them. So by the time they get to you, they already know a lot of the stuff that you would have to be relaying in the sales process. Not that you don't need to walk them through every step of the sales process still, you don't want to skip steps, but you've, you've just got a lot baked into that sales process. That's working in your favor and
(26:08): Oh, how valuable the relationship is. Think of the advantage you have over the competition when they've developed the relationship with you. You don't even know it. But the relationship is developing instead of walking in and having it be, as you said, that the transaction James Pagano talked about that in, I think episode 18 or an early, an early episode, but it's really it's really another phenomenal opportunity to show who you are. And like you said, produce it once and it, and it works over and over. Do you look at a platform or a technology or a particular strategy or tool right now and go that's, that's the next thing? Or I wonder if that's going to be the next thing, what things do you look at and are you keeping an eye on where you think I'm going to get my builders onto that, but I'm still not sure yet, or, or even if there's ones you're sure.
(26:56): Yeah. That's an interesting question. It's kind of like getting out the crystal ball and trying to make some strategic bets, you know, on where you think it's going on the technology side, we've been partners with HubSpot for about 11 years. In some ways we might've just gotten lucky, but they, like, they have been on the, kind of the bleeding edge of a lot of this change and they kind of spearheaded the whole like inbound marketing concept and like education marketing online, and really like, I think did a good job of getting a lot of businesses on board with that. They're kind of the tech tools behind helping you implement something like that. So we tend to follow them and try to be kind of a fast follower behind them, figuring that we'll make a lot of mistakes and then we can kind of come in right behind them.
(27:41): But a lot of it is just trend watching. So we follow a lot of like SEO thought leaders in that space for kind of like seeing what the Google changes are going to be. There's several like social media, you know, forums and blogs that you can follow to kind of see what's up and coming there. And then on the tech side, like there's like 5,000 plus digital marketing tools. Like your, you just kinda gotta pick a good one and run with it. And I feel like that's just purely from a like what are the tools that are gonna allow me to do the things that I need to do and give me the data that I know I need, but honestly, I think it's the general trend that we're seeing is like more personal brands as a part of business brands and more media.
(28:23): So we've kind of got, got through like heavy SEO blog land and that still works. But then we just talked about video, I think podcasting you know, podcasting, even if you just did it to build relationships, you know, Hey, I'm a builder and I'm going to invite every top architect, every top realtor and every top designer in my area onto my show and promote their business. And what do you know now? I've met them all and they all know me and they can send me work, you know, so, but you're also creating content. So I think it's, it's multimedia paired with personal brands at the intersection of the company brand because people want to work with people.
(28:59): Yeah. I'm sure you see all ranges of adoption and belief probably starts with belief a lot first and follow through. You must have some, you must've seen some epic fails. Tell us about some of the success stories. When you think of a client that was like, that came to you with the right mindset, or it could have even been a tough client coming to you, but when you think of the best clients that you have, what makes somebody a good client and what can they achieve if they set this up in their business?
(29:29): Good question. I was thinking through a few, as you're asking that one, that's coming to mind we've actually been working with them for either eight or nine years now. It's been awhile. They're one of our early clients and custom builder, not a huge builder. You know, they were maybe doing two or 3 million or something like that, but they really bought into the idea of like being the local thought leader and not just as it pertains to custom building they're in the Poconos. And so it was kind of like a retirement second home, like kind of place where I feel like Poconos had its height. And then it kind of fell off as like one of those spots that people wanted a lot of vacation and second homes, but they committed to being the thought leader for the whole area. They just love the area.
(30:19): They're a huge advocate. You know, they support lots of local things, you know, as their, their business. And so we started creating content around building, but we also did around like the best hiking in the Poconos, the best lakes in the Poconos, like different activities, all of these types of things where you're going, why would I be blogging about that? But the strategy was we wanted, if anyone was thinking Poconos, like they'd land on this site. And we actually, interestingly enough about maybe 18 months in, or I'd have to go back and look, but they hit a tough spot where they're like, I don't know if we can keep going anymore. And they just said, we're in a cash crunch. And I just said, we'll keep working for the next few months. Don't pay us. And then we'll make up payments for 12 months after that.
(31:04): It kind of like, I wouldn't do this in every situation, but like really gotten to know these guys are awesome. Just felt like we're all, like, we're almost there today. They're booked out for two years. They get well over 10,000 visits a month to their website, like the site just cranks, traffic and leads because they just built up this. Now it's really a moat around their business. I would put that as a huge competitive advantage that if you're typing in anything related to the Poconos, like whether it's custom home building or activities related, which is connected to what those people want to do, that's their target audience they're showing up. So I feel like they had the vision, they stuck through it. We had to help them kind of stick through it there for a second, but it was an open conversation and they were committed to being a thought leader and just, you know, building out that content, even when most people would say, I'm not wasting money right. In that blog, like that's not even related to my,
(31:58): I was going to say that it's like some, but some business owners may look at that and say, well, I don't have time for that. Like the typical stuff. Right. I don't know if that's even going to work. I don't like the idea of it. How do you get access to resources who are in here's the problem? The person who is not passionate about the topic should not be writing the blogs should not be like, don't just write something for the sake of writing something, because it'll just come across as horrible. How does a builder, you know, what should the expectation for their role be in this? And how do they find people who are passionate about these things to take on these tasks? What are those tasks what parts of the strategy do you guys implement? And what's the right way for them to go about building a comprehensive marketing program around this? Not around them.
(32:52): Really good question. Easy answer would be like, Hey, just hire a builder funnel. But like, that's not the answer, right? Like you have multiple options. You could hire us or an agency like us where you're saying, Hey, I'm trusting this company. They've got past success. Like they're going to do it. That's one path. The other path is okay, I'm going to do it. And that's usually only good when dollars are at a huge premium you're early on. Like, you're actually just saying, Hey, I'm the owner. And I've got to like build mountain marketing engine
(33:20): Spare time. Cause I don't have any business. This is what that's. Yeah. That's the only time you should ever be considering doing that. Cause I'm broke. I have no business. I'm the only one to do it. You got it. Yep. And then the other option is, Hey, I want to build this internally. And you can either do part a or part B part a is I've got an office manager that maybe I can dedicate some hours each week towards writing content. I've got a, I'm going to hire a marketing intern or you're just going to hire it out to a freelancer and say like, I'm still gonna manage this, but I'm not going to actually write the blogs. And there's a bunch of freelancing sites. You can find writers and that sort of thing. And you give them a title and a little bit of direction and they'll go do the heavy lifting. So there's always options. I'm partial to either hiring a professional or building the core competency in house. And I think long-term, that's probably your best option if you're really bought into content and media. And at the end of the day, I feel strongly that the owner should commit or somebody at a high level should commit to being the one on video in front of the camera, have somebody else write the blogs, do all the editing, do all the sharing, do all the other stuff. Like you got to create that content in front of the camera. I think that's kind of the highest, best use of time in terms of media.
(34:38): There's a word we use a lot on the show is highest and best use. And so thank you. That's a perfect segue because I wanted to get into the kind of where the conversation was headed anyway, was you can do this yourself. You can hire somebody to do it, but why you shouldn't try to do all of this yourself, know the same reason your clients don't try and build their house themselves
(34:58): General. This is not going to be your highest and best use. And then there's also so many other things to this. You know, it's not just putting the strategy together, getting the leads, all the different ways. You're going to, whether it's through advertising and SEO, and then you collect the leads and they go into CRM and you got to manage this stuff and you've got to track this. There is a lot to do, having someone rock solid that you can go to to commit to this. Like you said, it allows you as the owner or a leader in a, in a team to, to focus on what you should be doing. Probably getting yourself either in front of the camera, maybe helping to supply some content. Yeah. But you shouldn't be producing and mixing and editing videos.
(35:37): Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. And it is very, a very overwhelming bucket. Digital marketing is, you know, we've got over 20 people on our team and we're in it every day and it always feels like there's something new popping up that we didn't know about. And we're like, what we should have known about this. You know? And so for the typical person that's not in marketing all the time, then there's just so much coming. That's new and foreign. And when you're not in it, you lose the context of, is this important? Or should I just discard it because, oh yeah. That's not a big deal. Like that's just a little update.
(36:09): One of the things that we see people lose sight of when they look at okay, they start to go, what's my cost, what's my return. And they forget about how much value is this adding as an asset to the business, to have this piece in there. And especially if it's recurring and it's especially as a de-risk or an insulator and your business, what kind of advice would you have for somebody when they're, when they're considering what is the right type of investment to make in my business? And I know you're going to say, well, it depends on where you want to go and who's on your team, but how do you invest in something that's scalable? And it's going to have tangible value as an asset, to a future buyer or a project manager who wants to acquire equity or, or whatever it may be, because this thing should be a system for life in there.
(36:52): Yeah. So the first, like high-level thing there is, if you, if you eventually want to sell or hand it off or whatever, people are buying future cashflow. So if you can't show them that you can regularly produce a certain number of leads, which leads to a certain number of clients, it's just going to look like unpredictable revenue or, you know, but if you're like, Hey, I have these marketing engine set up and these channels and they produce on this regularity, like that feels good to a buyer. So predictable revenue is valuable is what you're saying, Mike.
(37:25): Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. But the next piece is like you mentioned the term asset. I'm really glad you did. We look very much at content as like an analogy to a stock portfolio. Like, Hey, we're building blog posts, we're building videos. We're building blogs as those blogs and videos and podcasts like start ranking for different keywords. Now they're paying you dividends and you're getting traffic every month. So year one, you write two blogs a month, you've got 24 blogs. Like now they're starting to get a little stronger. Maybe some are getting some traffic year two, you write some more blogs. You go back to those old blogs, refresh them, update them, make them stronger. Now you got almost 50 blogs out there working for you. If all of them are bringing you five or 10 visits a month, now you're compounding that. And so, you know, we have blogs from eight years ago that still crank us traffic and leads every week, every month.
(38:20): And so I think if you have that long-term mindset with content marketing, that's really the asset that you're building is you're creating things that are marketing related that you can create once and let them ride forever. Or you periodically update and kind of maintain. But there requires a lot less effort. So cost per lead at the beginning will be higher. And then it will start to drop off dramatically. As you get that year two year three, year four compounding effects. And most people don't want to look out that far, to be honest, they don't in investing and they don't in marketing. And in most things, fitness, you name it. So if you can combat against human nature and just say, Hey, I'm building an asset and this is going to take some time. Then you'll do really well.
(39:03): It gets here in this episode. Great advice. Thanks for sharing it with a Spencer. What do you have on the horizon? What are you excited about? What's coming up for you and your team.
(39:12): Thanks for asking. Yeah, we just shifted too. So I wrote a book called the remodeler marketing blueprint and we actually just kind of reinvented a lot of what we're doing and now we're doing blueprints for people. So we're doing really high quality strategy plans. And I think part of it was like, man, nobody's doing this. Like we really need to solve this problem. Like people are here at so many times I've been working with this SEO company for six months and I don't think they're actually doing anything for me. You know, I'm paying 300 bucks a month, 500, whatever where I had this social media company and the, you know, they're posting three times a week and it's like, okay. Yeah. You know? And so I dunno, it just eats at you over time. Cause you feel like there's just a lot of waste of dollars. And so it was like, how do, how do we start solving for that? And it's like, well, if people were starting with a good strategy, then all those activities would be heading in a better direction. So that's, we're putting more and more emphasis on strategy versus just like, Hey, we can do all this stuff for you. And kind of like, we're baking the strategy in because we've been doing it for 10 years now. We're just pausing, taking more time digging into that. Like let's set this up right from the start. Cool.
(40:20): That is cool. Again. Thanks for taking some time with us today for listeners out there that want to learn a little bit more about you or build their funnel, how can they find you?
(40:29): I would say build your funnel.com and if you want to learn more about that strategy piece builder, funnel.com/blueprint, and you can book a meeting, but yeah, if you feel like podcasts or social, just type in builder funnel and you'll, you'll find us in most places. Yeah. I really appreciate you guys having me on this was fun.
Hey, thanks for listening. Dwayne and I love hearing from you. Your stories are inspiring and your challenges can be overcome. Got a cool tip? Idea for a show? Problem that you haven't been able to solve or maybe just struggling to figure out what you need next and where to get it. We can help. Hit us up at BuilderNuggets.com and start building freedom.
