A Strategic Approach to Brand Awareness | Podcast Ep. 198 | Toolbox for the Trades

Foreign.

Barnes, you are the founder of Valve and Meter Performance. We are here live at Pantheon. Thanks so much for stopping by the toolbox for the trades booth.

Well, thank you for having me, Jackie.

I am very excited to chat with you. Your team has been chatting you up to my team for the last two days and it sounds like you've got a really impressive background and you know a ton about marketing. So I would love to just get right into it.

Sure.

How did you get into the trades?

Well, I had an experience several years ago where I grew a home services business from 2 million in revenue to over 400 million in revenue over the course of about 14 years. They were my client for the first four. Then we merged the businesses together and I became director of marketing. Ended up writing that out to the CEO's seat, did several zero to big number type of home services businesses. Dish Network, 0 to 50 million. H Vac and Plumbing, 0 to 35 million. Wow. And the foundation of all of this was let's look at the math before we start buying a lot of marketing. I felt like the way businesses bought marketing was broken and the way agencies sell marketing is broken and that there was space to reorient that with Valve and Meter.

Yeah.

So that people could have a math foundation, see the results, know that they were growing in a profitable way, have the power of their marketing dollar back.

All right. Are you a math person? Did you do well in math in school?

I did not. Well, nor did I. I got straight A's, but I had a horrible math teacher.

Oh my goodness. I have had so many bad math.

Teachers and they followed me from the same guy followed me from 7th grade all the way through senior year. I land in college and find out I'm woefully under prepared for math after being a straight A student. You can probably relate. Yep. And so my solution was let's avoid math. I did that for the first 20 years of my career and then I find myself working not only for a guy that was a math person, had an MBA in finance, was raised by a banker as a child. If I was going to succeed, I had to get mastery over the math.

Yeah.

And the abundance that was created for me in that was incredible.

Wow. So you had a lot of support in leveling up those skills, it sounds like.

Well, no, I taught myself, but I. No, Dave was great. The owner of the of Defenders, the $400 million company.

Yeah.

He made it clear that this was going to be necessary for success and I went to work on it and he pointed me in the directions that he felt like I needed to grow, and it worked out.

Oh, my goodness. Well, maybe after this session, you can actually be my math tutor and you can get me. You can get me up to your level.

No, I'll find you people that can do that.

Thank you. But I love it because that also, like that speaks to the valve and meter. I feel like that really speaks to the name of the company.

Right. We named the agency Valve and Meter because your marketing spend is a flow of energy through your business, and you can turn up growth by opening the right valves, Turn it back if you're going too fast, of course, but all the while metering the results. Because what has been working in the past may not continue to work in the future. Or it might work better and you need to do more of it. But it really gives you the power to dial in your marketing to hit your maximum profitability and growth rates.

As you're talking to me, I'm picturing you almost like with beakers, like in a. I don't know why. Chemistry. Again, I was not a STEM student, so that is the. That's the imagery that I'm getting. But it does sound like for every single client you work with, you constantly have to tweak and monitor and see what's working for them, what's not working for them, and make adjustments, probably daily.

Exactly. And you bring up an interesting paradigm of the chemistry example, because scientific testing is important. Forming a hypothesis and following good standard policies to test things are great in marketing, too. Yeah, we try a lot of things. People are throwing a lot of ideas out there, and you're throwing some budget here and some budget there. But let's stop and form a hypothesis about a program that may or may not work for us. Can it hit the right math result? Is it repeatable and scalable? And let's invest in those things that are amazing.

And now the clients that you work with, are they all across the United States? Where are they located?

Yeah, we have clients all across the country across home services. If you want to get in a home in this country, we know how to do it.

All right, fantastic. So on this show, what I try to do is I try to speak to experts like yourself and get some nugget of information that may inspire our listeners to take action or to really focus on maybe that squeaky wheel in their business. So given your experience, what are some of the things that you find successful home services companies do when it comes to marketing?

Success is defined by and can be achieved by many Many different paths. Some folks are out there knocking on doors and cold calling. Some folks do it through brand, some do it through customer experience, some through relationships. I think in today's home services environment we need to make sure that we have our digital properties, assets and space called carved out and anchored. And I just see a lot of times where the right investment's not being made in that we want to spend on things that are transactional, that have immediate gratification instead of taking the longer view of how do I build out a platform that's going to drive success and return for a long, long time for my business.

Oh, interesting. Let me give you back what I think I just heard could be me. It's very early in the morning so I may have misheard, but it sounds like focusing on items that provide that transaction that are easy to book, easy to drive those calls versus maybe longer brand plays or are you doing those in tandem?

Well, brand plays are a good thing, but they sometimes can override a marketing budget. Things that are more difficult to measure. The results can be a bit nebulous. And what's the investment to return ratio? TV, radio, billboards as top of mind awareness things? About 30 to 40% of a marketing budget or marketing spend I would say is appropriate there. But many spend much more than that and some not at all. And if you're a million dollar contractor and you're out there trying to invest in your brand, it's probably not time yet, right?

Yeah.

If you're a hundred million dollar contractor and you're putting 90% of your investment into brand, that's too much. You got to dial that in with some finesse. But let's take the website as an example. A website is not a destination. You build a website and you're done. A website is something that should be built onto all the time. Every year it should probably be about the equivalent of building a new website. What you're building onto a website to adapt to where search is going. We tend to look at the paid media like buy the Google click or buy the lead off of someone and get a sale tomorrow as the only path to success. And the truth is all of your competitors are out there doing that too. So your return is going to be lower. It may still be profitable, but deep profitability can come from things like good website development, content marketing, search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, all the pieces that drive an organic lead to the business and that has a super high return on marketing spend. Get you into the map pack allows you to spend more effectively in PPC and lsa, all the while balancing that brand and exposure with here's the customer that's coming into my business today.

So I'm in the marketing team at ServiceTitan.

Great. What a great job your team does.

Well, there is so many smarter people on my team than I am, and they are just. The way that we focus in on webs on our website is almost maniacal. But I think it's so important to think about your website as that main converting tool. Like I was thinking the other day, I was looking at a restaurant, again, a different, different example. But I go to their website and it's just their Facebook page. I'm like, oh, no, no, no, that's not what I'm looking for. Because I want to be able to access the menu. I want to be able to easily find a link to book a reservation or to order online. And so I think it's so important to focus on that website, make sure that it's actually converting the people that land on it and that it's optimized in such a way that it's going to grow your brand organically.

That first website described, that's really a brochure. Yeah, that's really what it is. But let me tell you how complex this is getting. We're all talking about AI. We're all trying to use chat GPT. This week I got my first lead that when I talked to them, they were telling me about their search that they made. They came in through the website, I knew that. They came in through organic search, I knew that. But what I didn't know was they had a marketing team of six people. It's a $450 million business. Their marketers got together and said, what are the top five things we're looking for in a marketing agency that we're about to hire? They came up with data driven decisions. They wanted a HubSpot agency. They wanted someone who understood accountability to results. They wanted a good content marketing team and they wanted someone who could work in their vertical. And so they did a chatgpt search on chatgpt. I can't even spell this stuff yet. AI, they did a chatgpt search, including those criteria, and we came out as one of four agencies they were going to interview. And we'll probably win that account, but we won that account because we have a page dedicated to HubSpot agency, a page dedicated to data driven decisions, a page dedicated to accountability, a page dedicated to math. Before marketing, the content was on the site to support a richer Deeper search. That's where we're going.

Yeah. You know what? It's so funny. If I see her, I will point you to the direction. Our head of web is here and she could probably tell you the amount of pages that we have on the service titan site alone dedicated for garage door, for electrical, for plumbing, and all of the different iterations of that. So it's so important to focus on that as you grow. One thing you mentioned about how when it comes to PPC and Google lsa, all of your competitors are doing that. And something that I hear a lot is that especially with PE entering the space, when your competitor gets bought up by P E now they have access to this incredible budget that you may not have access to. So it even further I think justifies the need to really tweak and tailor that website for an excellent experience. What do you think?

Well, I've been around long enough and watched a company become very big inside of a behemoth of a big, big publicly traded company, adt. At the time they were publicly traded. Today they're not. There is such a thing as becoming big, dumb and slow. And I'm not trying to anger all the private equity firms and their power with their budgets, but there's only so many things that you can pay attention to at one time.

That's true.

And so a really great marketing strategist alongside of you can find those places where their strategic flank is exposed that they're not paying attention to and go into that space for you. That's how surgical you need to be today to compete.

Well, I think you may have just given my listeners a sigh of relief coupled with like a pit of anxiety, like, okay, at least that's not happening. But now I know I have to really be strategic and look at what's working for me, what's not right.

You don't need all the business. You need the business that's going to be profitable and grow you in a good way.

Yeah, exactly. I'm curious, what is your thought on identifying target audience? Right. If someone says, hey, I'm an H Vac company and all of my customers, anyone who wants or needs or has a air conditioner, what's your thoughts on that? Or do you like to get really specific with Personas or, you know, identifying.

An audience, I think those can be helpful, especially as you shape brand too. But you want to apply those Personas to what is. Where is the search coming from? If you tell me that your Persona is families of six or more who have a pet monkey there's probably not a lot of search going on on that. So you want to be careful about that. And we want to be so careful of our opinions. I am an entrepreneur. I've been a business leader for many years. I've started four companies. I've had massive success. I'm not that smart. All of us are smarter than one of us, and especially if that one of us is me. Go to the data, do your research, get the numbers, and then march to what those are saying to you.

Yeah, yeah. All right. No one. They didn't tell me you were funny, too, so I'm really appreciating this.

Did they tell you I love Jesus and I cuss a little? So far, I've been good. I've been good. I'm being careful.

You know, every once in a while, I drop a cuss word, and my lovely producer loves to edit it out, give you a little nice little beep. So I want to talk about your book, but I have another question that I've been. I really would love to ask you, given your experience, is there a particular marketing campaign that either you worked on or one of your clients has recently worked on that was very memorable to you for whatever reason?

You know, I've always loved transformation. My favorite movies are movies about redemption, of people going from here to there, of that. That hero that doesn't know that they have what it takes, that has the coach come alongside of them and point out these are the things you have and why you can win. The Mr. Miyagi to karate Kid literally was a spezzato.

Karate Kid, Yeah, yeah.

Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi. I love this stuff. Donald Miller talks about it a lot in his book storybrand. I love those types of stories. And we were built. I created the agency to help people go through that process. So for me, I worked with a client in the south who, when they came to me, was a $3 million business that had grown 8% for four years combined, making 4% profit a year. Not great, bottom line. And they were in front of me because they had three adult children entering the business, and they couldn't do that. They were spending 12% of revenue on marketing.

Wow.

We went in and cut the marketing budget in half. The owner was sure he was going to go out of business. And I said, the data is showing this is the right move for you. And, you know, they grew 25%, and they made 12% profit that first year.

Amazing.

And the second year, I went back in and I said, okay. Bill, this year the marketing is going to be this amount. It's $20,000 less than last year. And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, Marcia. You said, when it's working, I'm supposed to put, put my foot on the gas and buy more of what's working. I said, well, we did. In year one, you had to go through the testing and build out to get to this spot. Now we know what's working and I've built in some money for testing new things, but this should deliver results. And sure enough, he repeated 25% growth, 12% profit. Did that for four years combined. Was growing so fabulously that his people in his market who wanted to retire were coming to him and saying, I understand you're growing. I have my people, but I want to retire and I want them to be able to get promoted. Would you consider buying this? And so he did a couple of acquisitions, ended up around 10 million in revenue and ended up selling for a huge multiple. The kids then ran the business for the new private equity company. Had bought them very successful private equity company and they're thriving today. So they were able to take generational wealth off the table.

Amazing.

And still run this fabulous business in their city.

You got emotional when telling that story, and I understand why. Because, you know, the men and women at this conference right now, they put so much of their blood, sweat and tears into these businesses. And a lot of them do it to leave a legacy for their children to create that generational wealth. When you were describing it, it's like you were like, this person's been working so hard, sounds like his name was Bill. And it's, I just want to help him so he can pass this along.

Right. And do it in a great way with it, you know, and not burden the kids with debt that they couldn't pay or that took forever to pay. So many times that transaction really does look like debt being acquired so that it can be passed on. But the debt being acquired is support the retirement of the parent. And I don't want people to have to do that, you know, yeah, if I can come in and increase the growth rate, the debt load becomes lower for that transaction. There's all kinds of ways that abundance can happen out of that. That's why Valve O meter was created, because lots of family owned businesses have the right to do that.

Yeah, 100%. I've talked to so many people in the last few days, so please tell me if I'm not correct in this, but I believe that is one of your points, is that you're trying to help businesses create generational wealth.

Right.

Tell me why that's important to you.

Well, that's what was done for me. Right? Right people, right place, right opportunities for the betterment of all.

Amazing. I have just a few more questions that I'm going to let you go. I could talk to you literally forever. You keep talking about going back to the data. Going back to the data. So all of my listeners here have got Service Titan. They're getting all the data in the world. If you had to choose maybe like two or three KPIs or two or three data points to look at right away to see the health of a business as it pertains to marketing. What are you looking at?

So Jim Collins book Good to Great. He talks about the flywheel effect in business where there's stored energy in your business and if you can release that stored energy, your momentum will carry you forward. And that the companies who do that are delivering consistent results and they do a lot of continuous improvement. I've come to think of a business as a flywheel where you invest in marketing, you create leads for a sales team. They go out and do the deals, operations replaces systems, repairs, remodels, fill in the blank of whatever your product is. You get paid, your finance team, pays your bills, pays your people, spends off profit, and now you reinvest in marketing. And it's true, the more things we can find that work at marketing, the faster that flywheel goes. However, there are also other parts of that flywheel, like the sales team. We need them to have a high close rate, to have the right revenue per deal. We need the operations team to get good reviews and customer experience. We need maintenance agreements, sold memberships, whatever your language is for that in your business. So we need that to be done either by operations or the call center supports that. A lot of times we need phones to be answered, we need booking rates to be achieved. And when those things are all working around the wheel, what happens is your marketing dollar is now optimized. We spend so much time buying optimization from our marketing agencies, but are we optimizing our own internal departments as well? Because every improvement around that flywheel gives you more bullets in your marketing budget. And if you are worried about the competitors deepening in your space, you've got to have the power of that dollar unleashed in that flywheel.

Yeah. Because what good is a fantastic lead if it goes to a salesperson who doesn't know how to close.

Right. So I would say if I give them top three answer the damn phones. The first one. A lot of times clients coming to me are not answering their calls and booking at a rate that is correct. And just the improvement for that would cover their entire marketing budget. So answer the damn phones. Sales teams, train, train, train, train until you think you're going to vomit. We think as business leaders, people listening to your podcast, they're above average. They're top of the market performers. Right? And we assume somebody tells us something once we go do it, and we keep doing it until successfully. Not everybody does that. We need repetition. You have to train in writing, train in verbal, train kinetically. It takes the whole of it to get people moving in the right direction. But we under invest in training. Most sales training will pay for itself. So I would say retraining and continuing to trade sales. That applies to the operations team. Finally, I would say that customer experience. Yeah. Get those reviews.

Yeah, yeah. So you've got a book here. We grow.

I do, yes. What experience that was in writing that.

So where can folks find this if they want to learn more about you?

Well, if you contact me, we'll be glad to send you a copy for free. Or it's on Amazon. And if you're saying that, well, I don't read books, Marcia. I only do Audible. Well, then you will pay on Amazon for the Audible version. The book is about my story of how we built that $400 million company. Talks a lot about this math before marketing system. Helps you learn how to buy marketing, how to develop yourself as a leader, leaders around you, and great culture.

Amazing. Amazing. The way I've been ending all of my mini conversations here is if you could. This is a megaphone to the industry. If you could share one piece of advice. And you've shared so much advice in the last, like 25 minutes. So if you can't think of anything right now, that's fine. But if one piece of advice, what would you like to share to our wonderful listeners?

Yeah, I'm going to speak to the owners of these businesses. There's something in your heart that's trying to work its way out into the marketplace. That might be the culture of your team and the people you're influencing. It might be your customers and the problems you're solving. But there's something in there that you are uniquely wired to deliver. Understanding the source of that and what it is is where your ultimate power stems from. You've got what it takes. So figure that part out. What is in my heart that's trying to get out and you'll build a beautiful business around that.

Wow. Oh, my. It's like you had that prepared.

It's too early for me to prepare. I'm not a morning person.

You fooled me. You fooled me. Marcia, thanks so much for joining me on Toolbox for the trades this morning. I so apprec. And I can see how much why your team really loves you. I'll just say that.

Yeah. Yeah. And you're a great interviewer.

Thank you.

This is what I wanted to do, and I studied journalism in college, and I wanted to be an interviewer, and so here we are.

Here we are. Here we are. Thanks so much for joining me today.

It's my pleasure.