Ep. 160 - The Most Essential Part of Your Business | Charlie Gindele

I think if people looked at it that way, that they got to be spending that, you know, 8, 9, 10, 12% of their, of their revenue on marketing. Most of it is direct response. Some of it is brand, you know, brand building, but most of it should be direct response and experimenting and looking for lead sources that, you know, they've never tried before. Experimenting, looking, being creative. I mean, not being complacent. I mean, if I think if people do those things, that when this boom we're in starts to dissipate and wane, that they'll be situated to continue on and be very successful.

This is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast brought to you by G4 Marketing. Interviews with today's top home improvement entrepreneurs about marketing, sales, Money, mindset, and lifestyle. Now here's your host, Brian Kaskavalciyan. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. This is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group, and with me I have a return guest. Probably don't tell anybody else, but he's probably my favorite, Mr. Charlie Gundel, formerly from Renewal by Andersen. Welcome, Charlie.

Hi, Brian, nice to be here again with you.

Yep. Okay, so Charlie, I actually have the numbers this time. So Charlie has been here, uh, quite a few times before. He was on episode number 2, episode number 61, episode number 101, and episode number 125. He also, when the, the virus hit, he was one of the first people I called and we did a special episode back then as well. So Charlie has been here quite a bit. He's another person I can have on every week and we would never run out of stuff to talk about. But Charlie now is officially retired. Last time you heard from him, he was still in the throes of running one of the most successful Renewal by Andersen operations in the country. And so now you have been— it has been, what, 3 months and a week that you've been retired. How does it feel?

It feels great, Brian. It feels a little— it felt a little weird at first, you know, after hard charging for 50 years and always thinking about work and thinking about what's next and the things you got to do, all of a sudden have that come to a screeching halt was a little weird. But, but I got, you know, I got busy doing other things and some traveling and, you know, writing a book and spending some time, more time with my wife and playing with my cars and, you know, sleeping in a little bit more in the morning and staying up a little bit later at night. And anyway, so it's all good. I'm really enjoying it, you know, and I guess if you really stop and think, there's a reason why we do all the crazy things we do and work the hours we work and take the risks that we want to, that we take and all. And, uh, you know, it's the, you know, it's for those, that gold, those golden years, I guess, right? And, uh, yeah. And, uh, so I'm enjoying it. I've got some friends, some very close personal friends of mine that are a little bit older than me that I hang with, and, uh, you know, they've They've been good tutors as to what to do. So I'm enjoying it immensely.

You know what?

I highly recommend it.

Yeah. Well, and look, and you did it the right way. You built up an amazing company. It was bought out and, you know, they wrote a nice check and, you know, you did a lot of smart things throughout the years and now you get to reap those rewards. Now, one thing most of you listening to this don't know is that even though Charlie's retired, and if you can see him on video, he's not at home. He actually has an office, and he calls it WWH, the Worldwide Headquarters. You know what we're going to do, Charlie? I think when I'm there in June, I think we need to do a podcast episode from the worldwide headquarters and show everybody Charlie Gundel's worldwide headquarters. What do you think about that?

Yeah, let's do it. That'd be great.

I think it would be very cool. Yeah. So we got to do that in June. All right. So Charlie was one of our featured speakers at Accelerate a month and a half back, a couple of months back, and One of the things that we talked about at Accelerate was I kind of started the event off with two big warnings. One of the warnings, and they were both kind of the solutions to both of the warnings were the same. And essentially, we're in a time, an unprecedented time. This is one of the warnings. So we're in an unprecedented time. And And mind you, I'm not talking doom and gloom. We're talking opportunity here. These are unprecedented times. I mean, Charlie's been in the business a lot longer than most of us have. So you've seen ups and downs. Have you ever seen an environment like this?

No. I mean, you know, once COVID hit and a couple months, you got into it a couple months, then things came roaring back. I mean, it's been a rocket ship ride ever since then, you know, and I've never seen anything quite like that. Yeah.

And so what happens in times like this is people start to think, oh, this is going to go on forever. Well, we all know that it's— that's not possible. Nothing lasts forever. And so if in the last couple of years your business has been good, and I hope it has, and I hope you've been making a ton of money. But one of the things is that if you have not prepared your business and shored up your processes and your people and your profit model, when things turn, and they will, and we don't know what that looks like and we don't know when it's going to happen, but it is going to happen, are you going to be ready? Are you going to survive? And I did a podcast episode recently on this, Charlie, but what I wanted to talk with Charlie specifically about was marketing. Because again, in the last couple years, demand has been through the roof and leads have not been as big an issue as they had been in the past. And what I'm seeing a lot of people do is either they're cutting back on marketing or they've got this new influx of business that wasn't because of marketing or advertising that they did. It's just because people are desperately looking for people to do work on their homes. And so people don't have enough lead sources. So when things— so the thing is, is when this does contract, which we know it will, the first thing that's going to happen is leads are going to become more expensive. It's going to be harder to make leads. And so what I wanted to talk to Charlie about was the idea of having multiple lead sources, not just one or two, but many. And so, Charlie, let's chat a little bit about that. So first off, you— I remember when I first met you, I thought, oh my God, this guy is like one of the smartest marketing people that seen. And you were doing some really cool stuff, always have. Talk a little bit about, about marketing, the importance of marketing in the business, and what are some of the things that people should be thinking about today here in the beginning of 2022?

Well, I think that most of us who get into these home improvement remodeling businesses are not marketers by trade or by education, we're marketers out of necessity. And I also read a book years ago, The End of Marketing as We Know It, by a guy named Sergio Zyman, who was the chief marketing officer for Coca-Cola. And he had made a statement in there that he said, marketing is the most essential part of any business. And it really got me thinking a lot about my business. And that's when I was getting back in the, you know, 25, 27 years ago when I was really becoming a disciple of business planning and, and planning for the growth of my business and knowing how marketing and lead flow drives that. So I am a big disciple of marketing. I mean, a lot of the marketing tools that are available today are new and different than they were many years ago, but, you know, there's still some of the old tried and true direct mail and newspaper and things like that that are out there canvassing. So I, you know, I learned too early on that there were— there's basically two types of marketing. There's brand building marketing where you're just trying to get your name out there and build a brand. I mean, when you see a Coca-Cola ad or a Budweiser ad or a Nike ad, You know, you know, you already know about those companies. It doesn't make you want to go out and buy a six-pack of Budweiser, right? But it's building that brand, that top-of-mind awareness. But for us home improvement contractors, for the most part, what we do and what we need to do is direct response marketing where we're doing something to generate a phone call or generate an appointment. And, and I think right now You know, that maybe is not happening as much because people are gradually, slowly getting deceived into thinking that what's going on now in the marketplace and economy, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's been a rocket ship ride and leads are there and customers are lining up and customers are willing to wait 4, 5, 6 months for an installation, you know, and, and it's just, it's, it's an unusual and very unique situation. But I'll tell you what it reminds me of. Uh, in my former life, back in the late '70s and early '80s, I worked for Alcoa Building Products and I was marketing manager. And we had an aluminum shake roofing product that we sold. And actually, Kaiser and Reynolds both had aluminum roofing products, and They really dominated the Texas re-roofing market where contractors would go in and remove wood shake and wood shingle roofs and install these aluminum roofs. And in the late '70s, Reynolds went out of business and Kaiser got out of the building products business. So all of a sudden, these, these dealers down there who were pretty sophisticated dealers and pretty sophisticated marketers came running to us at Alcoa wanting to buy our Alcoa Country Cedar Shake Roofing. And I got really involved in that. And these guys were some pretty sophisticated marketers. And there was probably about, oh, 7 or 8 of them in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex area. And I was working with them and they were starting to sell our product and things were going good. And then I think it was like the spring of the following year, a hailstorm went through the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area, and it was what they called like a 100-year hailstorm. And I've got pictures of hailstones that are the size of baseballs and softballs. Wow. And it destroyed roofs and destroyed a lot of stuff, but it destroyed these wood roofs. And guess what? These guys got so busy that they just shut off their marketing. I mean, they were getting phone calls left and right. They were getting insurance deals, and people were just calling them, and people wanted the aluminum roof because it held up much better in the hail than, than the wood roofs that, you know, the, the hail might have dented them, but it didn't penetrate them and go into the attic. And so anyway, and it created more business than these guys could handle. And, uh, and so for about 2 years, and they had, they had like 1-year backlogs, they had 15-month backlogs of work. People were, you know, they were going out and tarping roofs and say, we'll be out next February to put your roof on, you know, and we'll dry you in and make you weather tight in the interim. And, and so it was a phenomenon that I had never seen, and these guys had never dealt with that either. So So they grew their production and they gradually scaled up so they could produce more, more work to eat into the backlog. But eventually, eventually they ate into the backlog and the new leads coming in from the hail damage went away and business started to return to normal. But what happened was they got caught asleep at the switch because they had completely turned off their marketing and their marketing had dried up. And all of a sudden it was like they were new business. They had to start generating leads all over again from the ground up. And a lot had changed in the interim. So that situation and some of those businesses then didn't make it while they had a boom time for 2 years while they were they couldn't recover once the leads went away and all the good times went away. The guys that did survive, there were guys that figured it out and got their marketing back up and running and, you know, realized what it took to generate leads. So I think there's probably some people out there now that have, you know, kind of been asleep at the switch. You've had your, you know, the phone's been ringing almost on autopilot and you got all the appointments you can handle and people are willing to wait. But that's going to go away. And I think some of the early signs of that are here right now. I mean, the interest rates are up, mortgage rates are up close to 5% now. And the Fed says they're going to raise interest rates another 5 or 6 times this year. And that's going to result in less affordability for housing and the appreciation in housing values isn't going to be there. And the easy money isn't going to be there. Uh, so I, I definitely think that, you know, we're in for some sort of recession. I hate to say it, but I, I think we are. And I think it, you know, probably will start third or fourth quarter of this year. And I think a year from now, you know, the good times that we're enjoying now, the high that we're on now, is gonna, gonna dissipate. And we're gonna be, you know, it's gonna be struggling time for a lot of people. And, uh, and if they don't reengage their marketing and get back to lead generating and direct response marketing, uh, I think they're going to be sorely disappointed.

Yeah, so it seems to me like there are kind of two big challenges or issues there, and one is that people are not budgeting enough for marketing. So I'm seeing that a lot where people are saying, well, I'm only spending 2 or 3% of of revenue on marketing. And I just like, I'm in shock because we know that's not enough. And the other side of that, and then the other thing that's kind of alarming too, is, well, I only got 2 lead source, 2 or 3 lead sources. So can you talk a little bit about both of those things, budgets and number of lead sources?

Yeah, I mean, generally we're looking for new customers every month, right? March is over, April starts. We're looking for new customers every month. We're looking for them every day. And, you know, but again, with the backlog that people have, some of them are, are taking the foot off the pedal. And I think that's a mistake. I mean, my experience is that you need to be spending 9, 10, 11, 12% of your revenue on marketing. And you build that into your selling price and you do it, you know, and to me, the worst thing that could happen is you get some leads in that you can't cover. But, you know, but again, you're still in them, you're still out there marketing, you're still— even if they don't call you to set an appointment, you're in front of them, you're building your brand, your top-of-mind awareness. I have this saying that whatever it is, roofing, siding, windows, doors, bathroom, kitchens, whatever, whatever you do, people don't buy that every day, but someday— but every day some people buy that, you know. And, and one of the things that I learned is that if today is the day that you want to buy windows in Orange County, California, and you don't know about me or my business, we have no shot. But if today is the day and you know who we are, I don't care if you call one company or 10 companies, I want to be one of the 10, or I want to be the one you call. If I don't have a chance to sit down and talk to you about your pain, your problems, your possibilities, and show you my solutions, you know, I have not— you know, I lose out on that opportunity. And I know that if I see enough people and can do what we do, that we'll get our share of the business. And it's, it's a mathematical equation. The other thing is that a lot of times people get stagnant in what they're doing. And I have a guy that I know and I've admired him because he's a great marketer in the home improvement industry. And his— he told me this years ago and it sounds pretty simple, but when you think about it and you try to execute it, it's not so simple. His goal is that every year 20% of his leads will come from new lead sources that he never used before.

Yeah.

And if you think, you know, that sounds simple enough, right? And maybe in the first year, if you're only doing a couple of things, it's easy to do. But to do that consistently year in and year out and always be, you know, reinventing the wheel, so to speak, and trying to find new lead sources. And they don't all work or they don't all work as well as you could. But, you know, part of the part of marketing is testing too. But I think if people looked at it that way, that they got to be spending that 8, 9, 10, 12% of their revenue on marketing. Most of it's direct response. Some of it is brand building, but most of it should be direct response and experimenting and looking for lead sources that they've never tried before. Experimenting, looking, being creative. I mean, not being complacent. I mean, I think if people do those things, that when this boom we're in starts to dissipate and wane, that they'll be situated to continue on and be very successful. And those that don't are not going to be there. They're going to, you know, it's going to— there's going to be another cleansing like we had back in the recession. You know, I mean, I lost 30 competitors here in Orange County that I competed with selling replacement windows and doors. They're all gone. And, uh, and by the way, we, when we competed with them, our price was always higher than theirs, and yet they're gone and Anderson is still going strong here in Orange County and across the country.

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I think some of that depends on the size of the business, but I would say, you know, probably a minimum of 4 or 5. And, you know, you could have 30 or 40. I mean, now there's a new, new thing, digital marketing, right? I mean, that just is a whole new frontier and all types of opportunity with, with the social media opportunities on Facebook and things like that. And, and a lot of the digital marketing and internet with all kind of opportunities and, and lead aggregators. I mean, that's the stuff that didn't exist 10 years ago. And now it's— and that— and actually, quite frankly, when COVID hit, you know, remember in March of— was it 2020? And when it hit and, you know, the world as we knew it was coming to an end and things were being shut down and we're wondering if our businesses were going to be ruled to be essential or whatever, uh, you know, the phones just stopped ringing. It was very much after— like we had after 9/11. For a week after 9/11, the phones just didn't ring. But then about a week or 10 days later, things, things started picking back up. Well, the same thing happened with COVID except it was longer. Now people were hunkered down in their homes and drove on the freeways and there's no cars on the freeway. And but about 3 to 4 weeks into COVID, I know the marketing folks at Renewal by Andersen figured out some whole new lead generating sources using social media, Facebook, things like that. And they actually were able to generate leads, more leads at a lower cost than, than we were finding.

I remember that. Yeah, I remember you and I talked about that.

So you talk about making lemonade out of lemons. I mean, it was, it was really a blessing in disguise. Yeah, I mean, because things shut down for 3 3 weeks or so, and then all of a sudden, about the 4th or 5th week, it just took up and it took off, and it was like business was better than it had ever been. And, and we were found all these new sources of generating leads that had a lower cost per lead issue issued than a lot of the traditional stuff that we had been doing. The other thing is, at that time, we got about 25 to 30% of our, of our leads from canvassing and events. Well, as soon as COVID hit, the events dried up in one weekend. All the events got canceled, and it didn't seem politically correct to be sending people knocking on homeowners' doors, you know, when this is worldwide virus going around and everybody was freaked out. So we lost about 30% of our lead flow from the canvassing and events just going away almost overnight. And yet through these new lead sources that I don't know, it was a stroke of genius or a stroke of luck, but that they found we were able to not only make up for the 30% that we had lost in canvassing and events, but go beyond that and at a lower cost. Yeah, but if you're not in the game, if you're, if your head's not in the game from a marketing standpoint, you know, you're going to be reacting to that versus be proactive doing that.

Yeah, as a point of reference, it's a little tough because you have a bigger business than most, but just for point of reference, how many lead sources, um, did you have, do you have, did you have just a few months ago at, at your RBA store?

Uh, I know this, you know, from internet and, uh any kind of print direct mail, shared mail, newspaper, anything like that, we had dedicated phone numbers, right? Tracking numbers, so we could track when the calls came in. And we had well over 50 dedicated phone numbers. Yeah. So I would say at any one time, we had 30 to 40 active sources, maybe more.

Yeah. So, and think about that. I mean, I think that most any any business regardless of size. I mean, you got to have it, like you said, 4 to 5 is a bare, I think, bare minimum. I— you got to push up to 8, 9, 10. Um, what are some of the, the ones that like almost any, anybody and everybody should have?

Well, I mean, you know, there's some people that I've heard people say direct mail is dead, but direct mail is not dead. No, you know, and there's two basic types of direct mail. There's shared mail, which is when you go out in a coupon envelope or, you know, a local home improvement magazine, you know, and you run a half-page or full-page ad. I mean, that stuff works, you know. Now, one thing I always like to tell people too is the fact that you buy the space and you run the ad and pay the money doesn't exactly assure you success because Number one, you know, you're still responsible for the creative part of your ad and, and the message and the offers and the compelling reasons to pick up the phone and call now. The, you know, the, the vendor is not going to say to you, Brian, this is a terrible ad, we're going to knock 50% off of it, right? Or they're not going to say, this is a phenomenal ad, we're going to charge you 50% more. You pay the going rate, whether it's a terrible ad or a great ad. So So, but you know, so you always want to excel in, in your messaging and your, your promotions. And I always use the term AMMO. You know, marketing is like hunting, and when you go hunting, you need ammo. And the AMMO stands for A is the audience you're trying to reach. So does a particular type of marketing reach your target audience? Uh, one is the media. Does that media you're using reach that audience? The third, the third, the second and the third one is message. What's your message? And then the fourth, the O stands for offers. What are your offers? What are your compelling reasons to—

That's really good.

You know, so AMMO. AMMO.

Did you make that up?

I did.

Charlie Gundel thing?

That's a Charlie Gundel thing. AMMO. That's good. Media, message, and offer. But so again, the tried and true ones. So you got the shared mail, which are easy to get into. You can buy specific zones or ZIPs around your, your territory. It's, it's, you know, it's kind of more of a shotgun approach. Then you can do highly targeted direct mail, which goes to certain demographics or whatever. It's going to be more expensive, but you can, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a postcard. It's a, it's a direct mail piece. It might be Now a lot of people are doing like, it looks like a handwritten envelope with a handwritten message. You know, they're, they're real popular, but they're, they're very effective. You know, newsprint still works. I mean, you know, you can buy some remnant spaces, you can do some performance-based advertising where they run the ad and they track the leads and you pay for the phone calls or you pay for the percentage of, you know, pay a percentage for the business you get. A lot of the, the newspapers that are still around are, you know, somewhat viable. So there's that type of stuff going on. Uh, you know, the oldest profession, second oldest profession in the world is canvassing, right? Knocking on doors. And, and that's coming back now that COVID's waning. And, uh, that's something people are doing. Events are starting to, to, uh, you know, take place now. People want to get out of their house and they go to street fairs and festivals and There's some home shows starting to take place. Another good one is retail. That's where you, you know, set up a little booth at a hardware store or a grocery supermarket or somewhere and, you know, you just interact with people and usually they're non-competitive leads. So there's, you know, and then obviously some simple stuff like signage on your vehicles, job sites, you know, uniforms, doing things like that to build the brand and put your number out there. I mean, I'm You know, so I mean, that's some low-cost entry-level stuff. Obviously websites and landing pages and pay-per-click and SEO and that type of stuff is— they're all basic stuff that people should be doing. Yeah. If you're not doing those things, you're missing opportunities. You're leaving dollars on the table.

Yeah. The most successful people in any business— and just for all the listeners, think about it this way— you are not in the window or kitchen business or whatever thing you sell. You are in the marketing of that. Marketing and selling is what this business is really all about. I love this AMMO thing. I don't, I can't believe I've known you for this long and I've never once heard you say AMMO. So you just talked about one of the M's, which is media, right? How do you get to your, A, the audience. Messaging is a whole nother long conversation that probably deserves its own episode. But let's wrap up here with your O, offer. This is a place that I see people really struggle. Like, what should my offer be? What's good? What works? How do you come up with your offers?

Uh, well, I learned this, I learned this, uh, probably 20 years ago. You may remember there was a guy out here in Southern California called, uh, uh, I forget his name. It was the, the, the king of big screen TVs.

Oh yes, I remember that guy.

Forget his first— last name— first name now. Paul. Paul. Yes, the king of big— this guy had one location in La Habra. Yep, Orange County. And he was the number one. Now, this is before all the flat-screen TVs that are out there telling you about, but this is when these Mitsubishi rear projection TVs were really big back in the '80s and early '90s. And this guy had one store in La Habra and he was the largest seller of big screen TVs in the country, more than Best Buy and Circuit City and people like that. And this guy was on TV and radio. He had newspaper ads. But I learned that every week, weekend, he had a reason to come in and buy a TV. You know, like this week, right now, I'd be advertising Last week it was going to have your TV in your home for the Big Four, the Final Four, right? The NCAA basketball tournament. This week would be have it there for the Masters, would have been have it there for the Academy Awards. It'll have it there for start of Major League Baseball. Every week he had a compelling reason to come in and buy a big screen TV. And I used to think, well, don't people look at these ads and say every, every week this guy's got a reason to buy a TV? But the reality of it is, is, you know, people got, you know, kind of immune to it. But if you— but if you were in the market, you saw that message and he always had an offer, you know, dollars off, percentage off, free upgrades, whatever, you know. So I learned a lot from studying Paul, the king of big screen TVs. And I realized that, you know, Paul was my competitor. I mean, Paul wasn't selling windows and I wasn't selling big screen TVs, but Paul was selling $3,000 or $4,000 TVs. And back then I was selling $6,000, $7,000, $8,000, $9,000 window jobs. And Paul, you know, and we were both selling big, durable, expensive items. And Paul had more reasons and more ways to pay for it. Then I had reasons to buy my windows or ways to pay for it. So I, and then I looked at car dealers every, every weekend. Car dealers have reasons. The big car dealers have reasons to come in and buy a car that weekend. Right. And so I studied that and I learned from that. And that's really what I realized. I had to become a retailer of home improvements, not a home improvement contractor. And that was the marketing. Part of it. And so I learned from the offers that they had. And, you know, you could say, do you want 6 or you want a half dozen? You could say the same thing different ways. And they would have— they would say the same thing, but they'd have it packaged differently so that this weekend it was different than last week, and next week it'll be different than this weekend. And just learning that and studying that, you know, is what, you know, led me to become a retailer of home improvements versus just a home improvement contractor.

So I don't know if you know this or not, but you were the inspiration for one of my most successful campaigns ever. Um, I, I don't remember if it was that one infamous meeting that I had with you or if it was some follow-up meeting or something, but Um, you were advertising a January white sale. Yeah, do you remember this? Okay.

Yeah.

And you said something to the effect of, if Macy's can do it, why can't I do it?

Right.

And back then, in my home improvement company, February was the worst month. January was still— it was Okay, we kind of broke even in January, but in February we would always lose money. And it pissed me off year after year. And you, by— when you told me that, I thought, whoa, wait a minute. Instead of my allowing January and February to be bad, what can I come up with that's creative, that's really designed to drive business in February? Some in January, but some in February. And I came up with the three— I won't go into all of it here, but I came up with a three-step campaign That killed ever since. And the one year I didn't do it, I remember, oh, I was so upset the one year I didn't do it. Um, but anyway, I digress. Um, but yeah, that's really good actually. Wow, to think about it that way.

Well, you know, the thing that happened, one of my transformations in business was that I really— to grow the business, to scale it up, once I got a lot of other things in place I really had to become a marketer and I had to think like a marketer. So I began studying what other successful marketers did. And I realized that most of my home improvement competitors were bozos. They were not very sophisticated, but I could see what a guy selling big screen TVs or a guy selling cars, you know, or furniture could do. And why couldn't I emulate what they were doing? And they were, and many times, you know, the customer had so much money to spend and they bought a big screen TV, they bought windows, they bought a, windows or they bought a car, you know. And, and so how could I emulate what they were doing and, and create a reason for customers to do it now? And, uh, and that was with offers and payments and learning to sell financing and monthly payments. And, uh, so as part of my maturation, I guess you could say, as I, you know, became, you know, became— went from being a contractor to a businessman to a retailer, marketer of home improvements, you know, and it's part of that journey, you know. And so if people do that, you know, regardless of what's going on around the outside of them, things you can't control, you know, we want to still be able to control the things we have control over. And sometimes we lose sight of that. You know, there's a lot we don't have control over. And this boom that's going on now, it's happened you know, whether we wanted it to or not. But it's going to be short-lived. It's going to go away. It's going to slowly recede. And then what are we going to do and how are we going to do it? And, you know, we got to keep our axe sharp so that, you know, we can still continue to be successful, you know, controlling the things we have control over and not worrying about the external things we have no control over.

Awesome. Well, Charlie, this was great. Um, I think, um, for sure we got to do the thing in June. And, um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have you back again. One of the things I'm gonna do this year, I don't know if I've mentioned it here or not, is I'm gonna keep going back to my friends like Charlie. Like, I had Brian Gottlieb on recently. I'm gonna have my friend Scott Berman back on again. And because these guys have so much to share and giving them just like half an hour to do it is, is usually not enough because this is a 2-hour conversation, 3-hour conversation that Charlie and I can have. So I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to be— especially since you're retired now, we'll, we'll work. We'll, we'll put Charlie to work. So thank you, Charlie. I appreciate you. Thanks for being here again.

It's always a pleasure. Anytime. Thank you.

All right, everybody. So until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group, and this is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. Let me ask you, did it help you look at your business in a different way? Did it spark an idea or ideas that you hadn't thought of before? Do you have a list of action items that you can take and implement into your business or your life today. I really hope so. If it did, I'd like to ask you a favor. Would you leave a 5-star review of the podcast? By doing so, you'll help other contractors find the podcast more easily so that we can help them achieve more success, wealth, and freedom. And before you go, make sure you subscribe to the Wealthy Contractor Podcast so you get access to the latest episodes as soon as they're available. We're always striving to provide you with great content, so you don't want to miss what's coming up. In fact, if you haven't already, make sure you go to thewealthycontractor.com and get your free copy of my latest book, The 7 Secrets to Becoming a Wealthy Contractor. Just pay shipping and handling, and I'll take care of the cost of the book. And finally, a big thanks to G4 Marketing for sponsoring The Wealthy Contractor Podcast. For over 12 years now, G4 Marketing has been the secret back office relationship marketing team for hundreds of home improvement and home service businesses just like yours. You get the customer and our proven system turns that customer into 5-star reviews and profitable repeat and referral business. If your home improvement or home services company completes at least 10 jobs per month, they have a solution that will work for you. To find out more, sign up for your free, no-obligation, 10-minute discovery call at www.gfourmarketing.com/strategy. That's gfourmarketing.com/strategy. Set your discovery call up today and they'll help you set your business up for long-term profits and success. So until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan.