Social Snowball Effect with Michael Stearns from Ascend Marketing

Hey, everybody, it's Jim Josin here, your host with Contractor Radio and founder of Contractor Coach Pro, where we help contractors get control of their business so they can grow their business and achieve those personal and financial free dreams that they had whenever they started their business. And today we're going to be talking about a popular topic in our industry. It applies across the board. Like, we talk a lot about roofing in here, but this is for all contractors. These are things that we should be paying attention to, especially when it comes to marketing. And my guest that I had on. I'm always a little bit hesitant to put marketing folks on, not because they're not good and they're not, you know, fine people. It just. There's too much of it sometimes. I want to. I want to broaden our conversation here. And whenever I talk to a marketing person, it's like one out of 10 that I allow on the show. Not because they're bad, just because it's the same old, same old. And I asked this guy, I'm like, hey, what do you want to talk about? And I expected the same old, same old. And I go on my way. But no, he gave me some new and cool stuff and the one I really want to get to. And I didn't ask him to explain it. He just called it the social snowball effect. And I went, okay, that's a new. I hadn't heard that before. So I am excited to get this guy on for you guys and introduce our audience to him. But before we do that, we got to do what we got to do. Keep those lights on around here. We're going to go ahead and listen to a little word from our sponsor and premier partner, Atlas. We love those guys.

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We love the amazing team over at Atlas, and I'm excited because this year at the International Roofing Expo in Dallas, Instead of, like, hanging out at my booth the whole time, I'm going to spend some time over in the Atlas booth doing some educational content for contractors. So come by the Atlas booth, check us out, and be talking about a lot of different things. Some of the things we coach on. I'll answer any question anytime, anywhere. There's no holds barred, lots of free information to help you guys do better out there. But today, we are here to talk a little bit about marketing and some areas in marketing that we haven't really touched on yet here. And this guy is pretty solid. We had a conversation before he got on, and I want to introduce the owner, founder, and, as he said, lead janitor at Ascend Marketing. We got our. Our guy, Michael Stern. Welcome, Michael.

What's up, brother? Thanks for having me. I gotta tell you real quick, the. The lead up to my entrance, I mean, I felt like a kid running out of the tunnel, waiting to be announced at football. To run out of tunnel, right? So sitting there watching the Atlas commercial here, and you could talk. I'm sitting back there, I'm getting giddy.

You know, hey, that means I'm doing my job. I mean, I'm doing it right. And that's. It's. It's one of those things. Like, when I first started this whole podcast thing, I didn't really know what I was doing, but anything I do, I'm kind of almost neurotic about it. So I watch a lot of other podcasts, even. Even, like, folks I don't necessarily jive with. I go and watch their shows and see what they're doing. Well, and one of the guys that I really have a lot of admiration for, I don't know if you've ever heard, heard, or seen his podcast, Pat McAfee. Ever see him? Yeah, dude is hilarious. But he is the best at introducing people, is just unbelievable at doing that. And so nowhere near that, but I'm working on it. We're trying. We're trying to get better at it. So, Michael, you're a marketer. There's lots.

I'm a marketer.

You know that, right? Like, you're not the one, though. I don't think that sends the, like, the blast emails and the Facebook post and messages, hey, I can get you 30 leads and 30 days. Is that. Is that you guys? I just want to know. That way we can end the show if we have.

No, we have more attack than that. We asked you if you can handle 20 to 30 exclusive leads. No, no, it's not. What a great running Joke. Yeah, we don't. We don't do that. Nope. Promise.

Good, good, good. So give me a little background. Like, we always like to kind of understand who it is that we're talking with here on the show. And we want our audience to know a little bit more about you. We talked a little bit about it before the show, but just kind of. How did it all start in marketing? And what brought you to being the lead janitor over there at Ascend?

Yeah, well, I always wanted to be a janitor. I like cleaning up people's messes right now. So my first exposure to marketing was with a roofing company handing out flyers. I don't know, somewhere between the age of 13 and 15. And I tell everyone I've changed a lot since then. I mean, if I'm being honest, right. I want to be transparent. I didn't hand out all of the flyers that was paid to hand out. And that haunts me to this day. Right. So sorry, Vinnie, because, you know, I feel like I owe you an apology for that. But that was like my first exposure into like grassroots style marketing. And it was really interesting. I went to college. It took me eight or nine years to get a four year degree. So I'm not the brightest bulb. And that's fine. I was just hoping to win out on drive and amb, like you're not.

Giving yourself enough credit there. There was a. I. I think you skipped a grade somewhere in there. You graduated early. You had to be pretty sharp.

Yeah, you know, I did. I skipped a grade and second grade, it was, it was interesting. You know, it was one of those things where I finish up work at school and they're like, you know, now I distract people. And that, like, that's my, my comments, my report. I was riddled with Michael's, a pleasure to have in class. And then immediately after that, Michael won't stop disrupting the class. So the remedy, right, so the remedy in their mind was like, hey, you want to skip a grade? So I went from like a first to a first transitional second class, took the second grade exam at the end of the year, pass it. Great, you're going on to third grade. Well, you know, then the same things were happening. So then they're like, well, now you're going to go on Ritalin, right? Because obviously it's a you thing. It's not a matter of you being challenged or not. You just need to be medicated. So I was on Ritalin for a long time. I don't know, I didn't really Notice the difference. But whatever it gave me what was nice is like, typically when you're in class, you got to take like a hall pass to go to the bathroom or something. So I found a way to systematically get an additional break twice a day. I just wouldn't go to the nurse's office when I was supposed to between classes. So they'd always call me, right. And I'd get a free like seven minutes out of the class every time.

I mean, I really think, like, this would be something that teachers are taught in like their training. The kid that makes good grades, but he's also disruptive in class. Just put him on the sales and marketing track. Like, just go ahead and put him there. That's where he belongs. That's what he should be doing because he. He's like a BB in a fruit jar and he needs all the time. So.

Keen observation. I like it there for sure.

So you were handing out flyers and then what happened?

So, like, you know, I mean, I had a few jobs in between there and starting school, but started school was a political science major. Well, I switched majors. I was initially hotel management, then accounting and then political science. And I want to be an attorney. You know, I always thought it'd be good, right? You get to argue with people and persuade people. I'm like, this would be a lot of fun.

And another disruptive guy.

Well, it's like, as a kid, As a kid, I collected like football cards and Pokemon cards. And like, I would always be at like KB Toys, if you remember, like KB Toys, if they had it in your area. But they would have like card tournaments. Like, I wouldn't play the card games, but I would go understand the values of all these different cards. And then, you know, broker deals, sometimes like three party deals to where I'm winning, I'm on the winning end of it to net up every day in these transactions when we go. So it's like, yeah, I can persuade people. I'd like to go do that. And I did collections throughout college, you know that almost 10 years in college, which was great.

I learned an attorney for sure. Collections, like, get that down.

Yeah, it was a really, really tough job. And I got into it. It was 2007, 2008, like, rated the meltdown. Right. So you had so many people that were just in terribly unfortunate and completely foreign situation than what they're typically used to. So it taught me. It taught me a lot. Taught me empathy. Right. I wasn't the type of person that you would see on like Dateline where It's like, oh, we're gonna come take your car and, you know, take you to jail if you don't pay your debt. It was a lot more different, but it taught me communication in a way that I had never previously been privy to, I guess. Right. Or, or had in my tool belt. And that was really helpful. Well, I mean, every day there on out, so grateful for that experience, but I told myself, go ahead.

Can I ask you a question about that real quick? So I find it interesting, like you, you're there as a bill collector, for lack of a better term, right? And people are defaulting. It's, you know, the crash in 2008, um, and you're calling them and you're supposed to be a hard ass, right? Like, hey, you got to get us paid. You're going to take your house, you're going to do all this bad stuff. And your approach is a little different. Like, it sounds like you went, man, I can kind of understand it pretty much sucks. And did you find that successful with that approach? Like, were you able to get people to get things paid? Were you a little bit more like, hey, we can break this up, that kind of stuff? Like, yeah, I think that's.

Yeah. And that's a really good question, Jim. And I think there's a few things to this and there's parallels with, you know, what, what guys in the industry are doing every day, what I do every day, to what I was doing back then. So the first thing is be different, right? So you said 90% of marketers aren't going to come on the show. Mike said something about a social snowball effect. I'm different now because of that. And we're going to get to have a conversation about it, right? So being different is really good. A lot of people talk about, especially in marketing, be different. You can be the best, but also be different. It's really competitive. It's competitive advantage. I took a different approach. So, like the typical structure in a, in a, like a bill collection scenario is you're going to sit in like an automated dialer, you're going to have your headset on and go, boop. You're going to look at the screen and see who you're calling and you know, you're calling people. And I'm like, well, this is just wildly inefficient. Like, I get that it's a numbers game, right? We got to talk to so many people to have so many conversations, to close so many people on doing, you know, paying their bill. But like, what if we could refine this process and take, like, a tactical approach to this. Right. So then I was like, what. What information do we have available to us so we have access to their credit report? Why aren't we running credit report queries to people that have less than three derogatory accounts, people that have available credit, people that have a mortgage to where I can now provide a solution to a complex problem that's really had a negative impact in their life and help them explore ways to get out of it. I can give them multiple options to solve this issue that's been lingering for whether it's six months or three years. But most people don't take the time to look at it that way.

Yeah, it sounds a lot better than give me the money. Right. You're actually trying to solve a problem for them, get one of those pieces of stress off of their back. I would say they're probably a little bit more ready to listen to you than maybe some of the other guys. That's. That's well done, man. We talk about the same thing. Be different all the time here at Contractor Coach Pro. Whether it's your business itself, the culture that you have, the sales process that you do, the marketing that you're doing, all of those things being unique makes you stand out, makes you be heard and listened to in a world full of noise. It's ridiculous. So eight, nine years of college. Bill collector while you're doing that and get out of college. We're not an attorney. It doesn't sound like. Because.

Not an attorney.

Not an attorney. And so what'd we do?

I made a promise to myself that once I graduated from school, I wouldn't do collections another day of my life. Because while I was good at it and there were definitely elements that were rewarding, it was an incredibly challenging job. And I was broke as shit for quite some time. And I'm like, oh, God, what am I going to do? Like, I got bills to pay, I've got a daughter, and like, we're on month two and a half and I still don't have a job. You know, it's really interesting, you know, when conventional measures as far as, like, recruitment for jobs, it's like, I want to be a salesperson. That's what I want to do. I wanted to do sales. Every job I applied for, like, you don't have sales experience. In my mind, if I get an opportunity to sit in front of a sales manager and explain to them, like, my process of how I've gone about prospecting and Convincing people to pay no debt. I mean, I feel like I would get hired, but I couldn't get to that point. Everyone's like, you don't have any experience. Until one day somebody, you know, finally gave me an opportunity to have a conversation in person. We had an interview and, you know, I just explained to him, essentially, I know I'm prospecting now. It's. Sure, it's a different way. There's nuance to how you guys want me to do it and who that customer is that we're trying to ultimately connect with. It's the same, but different. I get it. So we got to the point where, you know, they took a shot at me. They, you know, if I. I'm like, if I can convince somebody to pay $4,000 for a TV that they haven't had in two years because, you know, rent a center came and took it back, I'm pretty sure I could sell somebody something that's actually going to make an impact on their business in a positive way. Right. So they took a shot on me. I did sales and, you know, I always want to learn. I keep learning. I think every day is an opportunity for improvement. And kept learning and learned a lot of the fulfillment stuff outside of just sales. And one day, you know, if you're. If you're answering the call at your roofing company, if you're going to see the customer and you're meeting with adjusters and you're getting the claim filed and you're ripping the roof off and you're cleaning it up. Right. And you're going through the supplement process, whatever that is for you, and you're doing all those things. At some point, it's like, well, why don't I have my own roofing company? You should probably try it.

So. So I think that was a little, you know, what were you selling?

So I was selling the same thing that we do now, digital marketing services.

Ah, see? So digital marketing services, you were having to stand in the gap on all these things that you really weren't your responsibility, it sounds like. So, hey, yeah, this person. We're going to do some digital marketing for us. See you later. You guys take care of them. But they didn't get taken care of. Came back around to you and you had to start taking care of it. So you learned quite a bit about the marketing side of things.

Yeah. And a lot of it was, you know, facilitating where things are siloed. Right. So if you have a business and you have, let's say, sales, and you have production and you have marketing, you have all these different segments of the business. It takes, you know, you want those things, especially if, you know, as a result of that synergy, things are going to be improved as far as what the deliverable is to the client. So going above and beyond, spending that additional time to understand the fulfillment side, you know, give feedback on how maybe the process can change. And then in the meantime, doing what I can to be like a conduit or a facilitator for those. Those different silos to connect was. Was kind of what I was doing. Right.

Okay. And so wasn't going real smooth. So you said, I'm going to start my own. How long. How long has this been around?

Two years.

Two years. And how. How's things going? Good.

Yeah. You know, it couldn't be better, honestly. We. We are very fortunate to have really good clients. I feel as if. I mean, we're growing. Right. And there was already. There was a point in time last year where we had to stop taking on new clients. You know, I tell everybody, like, growth is great, but there's also toxic growth. Right. Any comp. Any company, right. You can, like, scaling is not necessarily as challenging as some people make it out to be, but facilitating growth in a way that's going to be meaningful and healthy for you, your bottom line, your customers and your reputation. Different ballgame, right? And sometimes we got to pump the brakes.

Yeah. I learned about pumping the brakes when I was 29. We took a company from three and a half million to 41 million in a year. And I literally had, I thought, a heart attack in the office. My wife thinks it was a panic attack. The doctor was like, I don't know which one it is, but you have got too much stress on you. You're working too much. You need to chill out a little bit. So, yeah, I learned about that thing myself kind of the hard way. So as soon as out there helping marketers, and I asked you like, hey, I want to talk about some things that maybe aren't things that we normally talk about. So first thing is like, understanding where the money. Like, you're spending money in marketing. This is pretty common, I think, among contractors. You're like, I need more leads. And there's a guy, and there's a guy and there's a guy, and there's this thing, and there's this thing, and there's this thing. We just start like, okay, Facebook and Instagram and. And we're going to do buyers, and I'm going to do this lead scout. Thing and I'm going to like there's a million different things, right? We don't track it though. We know what we spent, but we can't identify the leads that actually are associated. We are guessing most of the time. It's like, like I feel. And you go, I feel like we're getting more from there. So I'm going to go more there. Probably not the right approach. You got any suggestions on how people can tie the dollars to the thing?

Yeah, and that's a really good point because there's also recency bias, right? If you're, you know, if you're trying to go off of what your last, you know, what you did last year and the last four calls said, hey, I got, I found you on Google. You're like, I get everything from Google. Or if they said that your billboard, right? Well those can be the only four calls you got that year from the billboard. But you know, because they're the most recent, top of mind, that's what you go with. It's working. So I think it comes down to process, right? Like setting around what's your call and take process who's answering the phone? Are they answering the phone? Very important, right? And what, what's the process once they answer the phone? What are the, what's the conversation that they're having and is that information being documented? So having a strategy and a process within that type of system is super important, right? Because if you can ask that individual and then you can document and plug that info into your CRM, like that's a start to a very easy way to then be able to retrospectively look back and understand, hey, and now it's not going to be perfect, right Jim? Like they might say Google and well, did it go organic? Was it a Google Ad? Was it Google Maps? Let's crawl before we walk, right? Let's crawl before we walk, walk before we run. And we'll go with Google and then we can refine that, right? I'd say that's a good thing dealing.

With some of that here. Like, I never thought this thing was going to be a business. I thought it was going to be like, hey, Jim's going to coach a few people, go, go and fish in the afternoon. And about three years ago we actually decided, okay, this is like a real business, we better like treat it like one. And so we started the efforts of tracking things, but we're still like in this catch up thing and we're doing, we, we're doing what you just suggested. Crawl before you can walk. All right, so they came from Google. Okay, that's a good start. Now, how do we refine that to know, was it Google my business? Was it a Google Ad? Was it YouTube? Like, what was it actually? And we're learning how to put those things together and align them so it's more automated. Is that something that you guys do?

We don't do it. It's something that I preach to my clients because it's super important, and it's important whether or not they do it with me, whether they do it with somebody else. Right. To be able to go back at the end of the year and say, all right, I'm trying to come up with my 2024 budget. When we're at the end of 2023, what are your different lead sources that are in your CRM? And now let's pull a report. How many leads and then how many jobs did we close out of those leads? So now we understand the closing percentage by lead source and where the leads are coming from. Now you can start diagnosing where you spent the money, how much you spent on it, what your cost per acquisition is. Cost per lead and cost per acquisition. I mean, you can even break it down to, like, the sales rep. Right. And understand, you could see, you know, you can make database decisions like, hey, maybe Jim's better at closing Google leads and Brett's better at closing Facebook leads. He's got 2x the close rate on Facebook than Jim. We should probably funnel some more Facebook leads towards Brett and then let. Let Jim focus on the Google leads, right?

Yeah, we actually coach that. That's something that we talk about, you know, identifying the rep to lead equation, because some reps are just better at some than others and making sure we put the. Because every lead is money. I mean, you really need to look.

At it like that.

Like, I got this fistful of dough, I'm about to hand this guy, and I have a choice. I'm either going to give it to you and it's going to make me more dough, like a good investment in the stock market, or I'm going to literally set it on fire. One of the two. Like, one of those two things is about to happen with this money I'm going to give you. I think if more contractors looked at it that way. Like every single time you hand something, that's like giving somebody 200 bucks. Okay, go get that. Give that 200 bucks. Bring me 10,000 back, please. And thank you. Yeah, exactly. Lots of thank yous for doing so. You're going to get to keep some of that too yourself. I don't think enough of us look at it that way because you have all these levers that you can pull in your business. Like, I'm going to put more into this marketing thing because I'm having success with it. I'm going to put more into this because that guy is having success with it. Do you see this commonly with contractors out there that you're dealing with, like, not knowing which lever to pull and they're just kind of chasing shiny objects and the latest and greatest biggest thing out there?

Yeah. And I don't think, you know, not only within our customer base, just in general. Right. Over the last eight years, I've worked with hundreds of contractors. Right. And like, that's, that's my ambition is to try to make that impact. You know, we've invested a ton into like no strings attached content via my, my podcast. As far as the content I'm creating on YouTube and things like that for that reason. Right. Because I think that it's incredibly important because again, the. Let me take it off the top and make decisions for the next year of my business or the next quarter for my business. That can be a costly misstep. What's also important to understand is like, making decisions based off of shitty data that's not documented properly. And at that point, you're almost better off guessing because you're not spending the time to try to make an informed decision based off of bad data. Right.

Right. We're, we, like I said, we're going through some of this right now. And there's like these blank spots. Right. Like, no idea where those guys came from. We just know they came. Likely they came from one of two places. They came either from an event that I spoke at or one of my team spoke at and they interacted with us and came that way. Or they came from our organic social media. We're constantly putting out stuff. So one way or the other. And we get this. I've been following you for years. Okay, that doesn't help me. That's neat. But I don't know exactly where that's coming from. So we are now making that pretty mandatory for us. We're putting in measures to have QR codes and phone numbers and pixels and all the things so that you can actually track it back to the dollars to say, should I be doing events all over the country? You know, most of the time, like last year was home five weekends. Like, I don't know if that's necessarily the Right thing to be doing. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on events. Did we get the return on investment? We, I'm sure we did. Like we get a lot of customers from events. But I cannot tell you in black and white, I spent this much. I don't ever want to be in that position as a business, as a side project or you know, that type of thing, that's fine. But as a business, we need to know our numbers.

Yeah. And you know, I think when, when you're going and you're doing advertising and marketing and like I tell people, look at it this way and this, you know, some people might agree or disagree and that's fine. Try to understand what you're doing and is it a method of acquisition or are you trying to brand build? Right. And if it's a method of acquisition, we want to do everything we can to track as much of that as possible. And there's going to be some things that won't be accounted for. So when I land you a job from a Google Ad that I show you and you, you know, it's a $27,000 job, we're not going to track back the three contracts you sign around that neighborhood of people coming out because they see the catch all and they equipped it right. And that's never going to be associated with us. That's fine, whatever. You're not going to put that on.

The guy or the guy on your team that's posting his own personal organic stuff daily that just happens to be a friend of somebody in the neighborhood or knows somebody in the neighborhood, his truck driving. Like there's all of that kind of stuff that goes on that you go, I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to put a number on that. I know that it helps. And here's something I would say about that, just from us as coaching. I don't know how much you talk about this, but when we're at our top rep events with our high performance sales events that we do, we ask people who do people buy from? And 99% of the time they answer back to us, people they like and trust. And I go, you're right. But you're not completely right. They actually buy from people they know like and trust. And so if you can get no going first, like they're aware of you, you exist. They got something in their mailbox, they saw an ad, there was some organic stuff. You got a YouTube channel, you're floating around the neighborhood at baseball games and stuff like that. You're helping out and charities. Now you're known. You're not a, you're not this unknown character that just walked in the door that day. And you're much easier to like and trust. And now do you guys kind of follow that approach?

Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. And yeah. So I'll give you a case in point. So when I, when I started in the industry, right now everything we do is referral. We really don't spend anything as far as advertising. We do some shows, we do some branding stuff, but nothing to really acquire customers when we get consistent opportunities just based off reputation. Now before that was the case, I was, I was prospecting, I was cold calling, I was banging the phone. But I still didn't do the. I'm going to make 50 calls a day to get 10 contacts, to get two appointments, to have 10 appointments a week to sell one contractor. I took a different approach. Like I'm going to, if I'm calling Jim's company, I'm going to go on manta and I'm going to understand Jim is the point of contact. I'm not going to call you and say, hey, I want to call you about your Google listing or who handles your website. Hi, is Jim there? I'm going to assume I'm talking to Jim. Hi Jim. Right. Unless it's a woman, I'll say it's Jim there. But my point being is like the first thing that I would do before I did any of that is I would find your company on Facebook and I would like your page. Right. So now, Jim, you got a notification that Mike Stearns likes Contractor Coach Pro. Now I call you 15 minutes later. Hey Jim, it's Mike Stearns. No. Right, Yep.

Awareness. What we're top of mind on and what we're focused on is what we'll have relationship with. And I'm a big believer in that. That's, that's why you see so many people putting out content. But the ones that stick in your mind are the ones that are consistent even if the content's bad or silly or funny or whatever. I can, I could point to a lot of money like I cannot believe that that gets put out. And people go, that guy is famous. It's pretty wild. But, but it is this thing of knowing who you are. And then there's also this concept of it creates your target too. We all have our measure like that we have a voice that is our voice that sounds a certain way and it's going to be attractive to Some and repellent to others. And so you start to, like, gather around you because of that stuff that you're sharing. People that are most like you, it seems like to me we've only got so much time today, man. I could talk about this all day because I'm passionate about the know, like, trust thing, as you can tell.

Part two coming soon.

Yeah, Maybe another show. Like, it would be fun. I'm enjoying the conversation. And I got a lot of tracks I want to go here, but I want to make sure that we get this in. They listen long enough now. I think we got them about 30 minutes in, so we got to, like, give them a bit of the, like, point of this whole thing. Social snowball effect.

Yeah.

What is that? Like, first off, great job of naming whatever that is. And it's probably something I know already or seen already, but it's got a cool name. I love that about it. Like, whenever you put a cool name to something, people go, what is that all about? Right. Like, that's, that's, that's, that's different. So that you caught my attention with it. Share with the audience, at least at a high level what a virtual snowball effect is.

Yeah.

So.

Well, thank you for the praise on that. Spent countless hours thinking of the perfect name. And I'm glad all these things.

I'm going over here. Hey, what kind of effect can I have with this thing? No, just kidding.

Exactly. Yeah. So one of the things that I see, like, especially on the retail side when I work with contractors, is we get these salespeople in and they expect leads and they, they're. They're entitled teams that don't want to do their chores but want to get their allowance.

Oh, you're hitting on my365 hard. I don't know if you've seen that. For me, I'm doing 365 days of valuable. This is probably what I think you're leading to is the topic the sales guys that go, I don't have enough leads. So.

Yeah. And they. And then they sell the owner on that being the case and that needing to be the expectation. And like, I always. I came from a place where I'm prospecting, I'm hunting. Right. I hunted for everything. I didn't get handed leads. I think in my five and a half year tenure at my old company, I think I got like three opportunities and they were, you know, nothing noteworthy. So with that being said, it's like I come from a place where, like, they're out there, but it Starts with you setting that expectation, who you're recruiting, where you're finding them, the expectation that you're setting with salespeople. Right. But to not get too far off track. This is an activity that your reps can do and that you can train them and if implemented in a systematic way, can be incredibly profitable for your company. Systems and processes. Right. Like that shit has to get done or shit doesn't get done. Right. You have to create these processes within the systems and then you have to manage them too.

It's our client's favorite part of working.

With us, of course.

Yeah.

Right. So with that being said, you know, if I. I can go into a community group and say. And find Facebook and I don't know where you live. Jim, you're in Texas, right?

Yeah.

You can go in your community and find probably 10 or 15 local Facebook community groups. And some of them will be, you know, obscure and irrelevant. And a lot of them will have homeowners. Right. So you do a little digging. You find which ones make sense as far as, like, what you offer as a roofer. Like, are there homeowners in here? And there's ways to go in these groups to locate them by proximity to you, to search those groups and find what people are talking about. And you'll see all these people that are being recommended. And it's like the opportunity there is so vast because one, it scales on autopilot. Once you get people being brand ambassadors, tagging you all everywhere. Like, you don't have to. It doesn't require any input from you.

Yeah, we. Where I live in Texas. If you live in Texas, you probably had a hailstorm the last five years. At least a couple years ago we had one. And I just moved into this neighborhood and I had noticed that we had a. Like a Facebook group. Now they have questions. To join the Facebook group. You cannot. Just anybody can join. And you have to have your address. They line up the address with like, the role and everything. Like, okay, you're in hailstorm hits and these people are. I mean, the healthcare hit at 1:15 in the morning. By 1:30 they were already asking, does anybody know a contractor? Does anybody know? People are good, that kind of thing. I'm like, hey, new guy moved into the neighborhood. I have three clients. And I'm going to let you guys know about these clients, what they're good at and what their strengths are, and call three, have them come talk to you. And it was like instant. These clients that I had had a bunch of work out of my neighborhood and my neighborhood has 1785 houses all on two acres or more. So as you can imagine, they're pretty decent little houses. Finding that person like that was lucky. I mean, it just happened to be that I was in the neighborhood, but I noticed there was other people in the neighborhood that knew roofers in the neighborhood. There's a guy like, I'm gonna see his office from here is at his house. And they are, man, once they're on it, they don't stop. They're just like, that's your guy, that's your. That's your guy, that's your guy. How do I get into a group like that or what do I do to find somebody in that group?

So there's different. There's different levels to it. Right. And the most common thing that I hear, what I'll go through the entire, like, topic and. And guys will be like. They'll say, like, I join a group and they ask me questions and I. Or I've been posting and I'm like, so here's the thing, Jim. You go into Roofing Insights, and if you ask who the best digital marketing company is, and Mike Stern says Ascend Digital, you click through to his profile and you see he owns Ascend Digital. Inherently, you might trust that a little bit less than somebody who doesn't have an Ascend Digital shirt ripping out of a spacesuit and listed as the CEO of Ascend Digital. Right. Because it's my company, I have a vested interest. It's a conference, of course.

It's the best one, right?

Yeah. Now, with that being said, the way that you can get people in there is this would be my process. And just to give you an idea, like, I did this in roofing and have done millions and millions of dollars in business because of it, because my customers do this for me. So it starts with setting the right expectation and doing a good job for your customers. Those are two. Which makes it great because those chucks in a truck that everyone complains about undercutting them, they can't compete with you in this space because they can't mobilize people the way you can if you're doing a good job for your customers right now. So what you do is, you know, let's say you're going through a quality control walkthrough after the install, having a conversation, let them know that you'd like them to share your experience. Are you willing to do that small favor? Sure. Send them a link to your Google profile right then and there while I have you here. Listen, I don't want to ask the world from you, and I'm not asking you to go out of your way, but let me ask you this. If you had to refer somebody to a roofer, who would you refer them to? Well, you guys. Okay, great. Fantastic. Hey, can I invite you? Like, we're a small business in the local community. Can I invite you to three local groups where we seem to get a lot of business from? It would mean the world to us. If you happen to see somebody asking you, just tag us and let them know your experience. Sure. I mean, think about it, Jim. If you do. If you service 300 customers and you're doing this on every single call, and 10% of those people ultimately accept the invite and start advocating on your behalf, you got 30 people tagging you throughout these communities and your service areas on autopilot that are going to generate you opportunities. And it's not always the guy posting. In fact, in my experience, it's almost never the guy or girl posting about SEO that ends up reaching out to me. It's one of the 26,000 other members in the group, or five of those other members, or 10 of those other members are like, man, I've seen you everywhere, Mike. Yeah, we got. We got to work together. I mean, I've seen your name for years. Like, you have. I'd be happy to work together, please. Yeah, yeah.

If. If I hadn't heard of you before, I probably wouldn't have even asked you, like, hey, what do you want to talk about? So I had heard of Ascend. I was aware of Michael Stearns. You're pretty active on Facebook. I've seen the comments in groups before where people go, hey, does anybody know a good marketer? Yeah. Michael Stearns, Ascend. I'm like, okay, so he's in the list. Like, that was outside some third party saying, he's good.

Right.

So they must have had some experience. We hope we can do the same thing as roofing salespeople in this social world of being in the. That's a great idea. Do you. So I'm trying to put the dots together here.

Sure.

Marketers do a lot of different things. Okay. There's all different kinds. They all have kind of their little specialties. Some of them say they're great at everything, which I always like. I'm not sure about that. But you got guys that are good at social media, marketing, running Facebook ads and stuff like that. We got SEO, Google guys. You got marketing strategists that combine a few things, like direct Mail with social posting. That's organic with this overall brand story and Persona. And then they feed that with Google Ads and stuff like that. How does it look to work with Ascend? What does that look like? What exactly do you do for people when it comes to marketing? Because there's a billion different ways to skin this cat and get it naked.

So we do, we focus on three main things, right? Which is going to be like very custom coded websites for roofing contractors. 34 of our 35 clients are roofers and one that we have is in Memphis. Who's not a roofer? They're passing along company. They were referral from one of our roofing clients. We do Google Ads and we do SEO. There's going to be some distinct differences on how I operate versus how other marketing agencies operate, for better or for worse. So, you know, typically when we initially connect, we do like a 10 to 15 minute intro call and I, I'll tell you what, Jim, you always get Mike Stearns and I'm the same dude if I'm sitting in a boardroom or at SRC or in your green screen room, you know, And I was like, you know, it is what it is, but you might not like that flavor, right? And you might decide this dude is a crass New Yorker and I don't ever want to talk to this dude and I'm blocking them and like, it's okay. I'm fine with that. Right? Because there's going to be people that I don't ever want to talk to again. It's all good. I try to embrace everybody, but whatever.

Yeah, like I said earlier, we all have our measure, right? Like, there's, there's the people that are attracted to us and that's cool. And we're probably going to have a good relationship. It's when you feel like you have to force it that you go, eh, maybe I shouldn't start this, right? The best, the best word that a sales guy can ever learn is the word no, I don't think we're a good fit. That's okay. Like if and whether you're the salesperson or the person buying, you should be able to say that word and just go, hey man, it's just not for me.

It's such a good point and something. I mean, can you scream that? Can, can you yell?

You knew when you signed that person.

They were having a problem.

Tell me, tell me you didn't. Tell me you didn't know. They gave you every indication it was going to be a problem, right? Can you do that? And do you have that? And do you have this? And, like, they were just completely outside of what your target is and how you work. Say no, because all they're going to do is waste your time and really kill your chance at new opportunity because you're spending so much time with them.

Right? And so, like, there's. This just happened at the conference. There's a guy's like, I do $15 million a year. I want to do this, this, this. And I'm looking around at what he's got going on. It needs a lot of work. And I'm like, well, how do you like your website? I love it. It's not a great website. It needs. It needs to be redone. It's hard to say that, right? So I'll just keep asking you questions. And, you know, every time that I go to give him a suggestion in a very consultative way, he shuts it down and starts telling me what needs to happen. So after the third time, I'm like, look, man, I'm like, this just isn't going to work. I'm like, and it's fine. Like, there's no hard feelings, but this isn't a good fit for us. He's like, well, what do you mean? It's like, I can't. Every time that I try to give you advice, and we're not at the point where we have an engagement, every time I've tried to give you advice, you talk over me and tell me what you need to do, and I can't help you. I'm like, I can't help you. But there's no situation where this relationship would end well, and that's okay. So our process is after we do that intro call, there's a paid consult, and I spend three hours with somebody and I teach them a lot of things, that whether or not they choose to move forward with anything else, they're going to leave with much more value than what they paid in a consult fee if they decide they're going to do business with us. I credit that back towards whatever it is they decide to move forward with. So it's fine. So it's free in a sense. Right. But, you know, we do things like we help you optimize your Google business profile. On that call, we talk about your lead intake process. Who's answering the phone? How do you have, like, instant booking on your website? Is it a general instant booking? Is it around Robin? Are you booking directly with your sales reps? Because here's what happens. Somebody calls the phone. And let's say Tiffany answers the phone. Yeah, we'll get somebody out there. Let me have. We'll have Jim give you a call when he's ready. They'll shoot out a text message. Three hours later he calls back because he's in a sales call. They've already got their three people booked up. And you don't, you lose that opportunity. So why aren't we doing instant booking with the technology that's available?

Oh yeah, speed delete is just so important. The second they hang up, if they don't get what they're looking for, they're calling the next person. And they're looking for one thing. I need an appointment because it's on my task list and I need to get that off my task list.

Right. And we're not doing list.

It's on my stress list and I don't like stress. So hey, I'm calling the next. I mean can you imagine like you call your. That you would have this. I would not. You call your barber shop or stylist, whatever. I don't know which one you go to. Like you're in, you said New York. So maybe it's a stylist, I don't know. But they say, hey, yeah, no problem, we can get you appointment as soon as one of our stylists is free. They'll give you a call back and set up a time for you. What is the next thing you do when you hang out?

The phone, Call the next person.

Call the next. I need the hair appointment. I need to get that off my list. I'm not gonna wait around for you. Right. Same thing in this home services world. Like you gotta be able to set the appointment now. And a lot of it you can just automate now. Just book an appointment, click my name, my email, my address. Done. Thank you.

Yeah, right. And you know, there's a little heavy lifting in the beginning, you know, especially if you got eight sales reps, you're doing a round robin and you want to make sure. But like it's a one time investment to make life infinitely, infinitely easier for your customer and it's going to ultimately lead to a better success. Right? So we talk about things like that.

More referrals, all these things, the byproducts of doing these processes and systems that just makes the world easy. So hey, consult, you're gonna give them a bunch of value and stuff during that three hours, stuff they can do right away. Then they got an opportunity and, and it's like, I don't know, If I sat there through three hours and watched all the stuff you did, I'm like, God, man, rather stick a hot poker in my eye. Could you do that for me instead? Like, is that some of it, like, you just go, well, you know, about.

20% of it at most would be us talking about what we do and how we can help you or even showing you the problem. A lot of the other stuff is really digging into your business, understanding what systems and processes you do or don't have, and then just giving you ideas. Because I've worked very closely with my clients in the last two years and, you know, we took a client from, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue to almost 12 million. And I was. I was riding shotgun for it, right? And I watched the eggs that, you know, we broke to make the omelet and, you know, so I don't proclaim to be an absolute expert in scaling roofing columns companies, but I've seen some shit, right? And that experience is valuable and I can help maybe avoid some mistakes that other people have made along the way. So just being there and just asking questions sometimes and not even giving a solution can help people immensely, right? To get them thinking about the right things. Then we talk about how to hold a marketing company accountable, things to look for. What are the KPIs like, how do you know? I tell people, and I just said this on Ty's podcast the other. Well, two days ago. It's like, I don't want you to feel the way I felt when if a mechanic told me at 18 years old, it cost me 2500 to fix my car, the wheel was going to fall off and, you know, we were going to crash. Are you being true? I have. Are you being honest? I have no idea. Right? So I'm not a fucking mechanic, okay? But the stakes are high and I don't want to test it. So I'm going to find a way to get your 2500 bucks and hopefully you're not being dick about it. I don't know. So I don't want you to feel that way about the marketing company, whether you're choosing us or somebody else. So let me at least equip you with some concepts and some baseline information that you can use to make an informed decision whether it's to send or anybody else. Right? And then we kind of go into what we've done, how we've done it, why we do what we do, and determine what makes the most sense.

It's pretty awesome. We actually follow a Similar process. Like, I think most of the time you hear this discovery call thing, we're going to hop on a call for a few minutes. That's just to figure out where fit is, right? Like, which one of our programs might be the best fit. And then we're going to have you do an assessment of your business. Like, we coach holistically across all kinds of things in the business, and we have specialists in a lot of different areas. From that assessment, we go, all right, let's do a coaching call just so you can see what one's like. This isn't a sales pitch. We're going to coach you on the things that are the biggest issues in your business and hopefully give you enough knowledge that if you walked away from here and didn't get any coaching from us, is going to keep you out of trouble and probably help you grow your business. We find that's a good way to do things. You know, they want to work with us. Most everybody that's on a call wants to work with us, whether they can afford to or the timing is right. Those things are, you know, they are what they are. But I don't know how many times I've had somebody call me back, like, three years later and go, hey, man, I met with you three years ago and it wasn't the right time, and I didn't have the finances to do it, but I'm ready now, and all that stuff you said was going to happen to me actually happened to me. So I'm tired of it. I want to get it fixed. I'm like, all right, cool. And we end up helping folks. I like that process. It gets them understanding that you actually give a crap. I mean, you really do. To take the time to share the true valuable information instead of, here's all my stats, all my case studies. This is all the stuff that people have done and how much money they've made and selling this BS dream, because everybody's different. Like, every single person you work with here at the end, what's the best way for somebody to get a hold of you? Like, do they go to your website? Do they fill out a form? What does that look like?

Yeah, there's a form on the website. Www.ascendigitalexperts.com. i'm accessible via Facebook Messenger. That's where I spend most of my time. We've got a ton of free content on the ascend digital agency, YouTube. You just pop that into Google, they'll bring you there. And we do podcasts with. With great People in the industry that are much smarter than me and I try to ask them thought provoking questions to share value with the audience. I'd love to have you on this show, the Mission Control podcast.

You're the one. It has been around longer than. It's kind of funny. We, we do an event. The event is called Mission Control Retreat. Our coaching. Our coaching. Coaching is what we call mission focused coaching methodology. In other words, we're going to create a mission for the next 12 months together that you can believe in, have timelines to it, things that need to be executed, and we're going to help you get there. We're going to be right beside you, filling in all the gaps. And so when I saw the Mission Control podcast, I was like super pissed. I'm like like, damn. I should call mine the Mission Control Podcast. But sorry, no, no, it was one.

Of those things where it was, it was on brand. I look at it like ascend. Like we're trying to take. Your business is a rocket. We're the guys at Mission Control trying to guide that rocket to make sure it gets to where you want to go. Right?

No, I love it. I love it. That's good synergy, man. I like it. Maybe you should come to Mission Control Retreat next year and check it out. We, that's what we do. We help people build a strategy at that event and then we help them execute that over the next 12 months. Awesome show, man. That was a lot of fun. I think there on the table that maybe we'll get back together in the future and talk about that. Where at? New York? Where, where are you?

Buffalo.

Oh, man, I feel bad for you. Are you a fan?

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. I think you have to be to live in Buffalo, right? Like, you're not allowed to be a fan of another team and live in Buffalo. No.

You'll get excommunicated.

Yeah. I kind of figure like, the guys are kind of like us, the Green Bay Packers. Like, I'm a Packers fan. And so I lived in Wisconsin for 18 years. Oilers left Houston the year I moved there from Texas. Now I'm back in Texas, but I'm still a Packers fan. But you don't live in Wisconsin as a fan of another team. You just don't. This is a bad idea. And I figure the Bills are kind of like that. I was, to be honest with, I was really rooting for you guys, mostly because my best friend in the, in the world is a Chiefs fan and I don't want to see him go to the Super Bowl. So, yeah, I love the Bills. I love the Bills Mafia. My son is. That's his AFC team. Like, he's got an AFC team and NFC team. So he's Bill's Mafia over there, packers over here, and has a lot of fun with it. So.

Amazing fun fact. My last two games that I went to were Green Bay and Buffalo this year. And then I think it was three years ago, I took my daughter to Lambeau to watch the bills get beat 13 nothing. Maybe it was four years ago now.

Lambo's wild, isn't it? Like, you walk in it.

It was amazing.

Did the hair stand up on the back of your neck like, the first time you walked through those?

Yeah, I mean, it was. It was incredible.

I. I remember going to my very first game there. I was like, oh, my God. This stadium has been here forever. This is where, like, Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr, the Ice bowl, like, all this stuff in history and NFL championships and Super Bowls, and it's still got, like, metal benches. There's not seats. It's like. It's like you went to a high school game. What's going on here? Can we invest in seats? Maybe just a little. But, yeah, it's. It's a good time at a Packers game. I. The Bills strike me very similar. Yeah. Kind of the. The smaller market with a very fervent fan base. You guys are pretty serious about it. You're not like Philadelphia, though, right? You're not jackasses.

No.

Good. Good. Maybe.

As long. As long as you're not, like, a plastic table, you're safe, right?

Yeah, that's a. I don't know where that came from. I don't really understand the science, so it looks like it could be painful, but everybody's got a thing, right, Packard? Thing is, how much beer can we drink before we go into the stadium? Tailgating is huge there. It's pretty crazy. So.

Awesome.

Hey, man, good show. Glad to have you on. Maybe next year for the Bills, and we'll catch you in the future.

Thanks, brother. Appreciate you.

All right, man. Have a good one. All right, everybody, that was Michael Stearns with Ascern Digital Marketing. Go check them out. Go find him on YouTube. He shares a lot of information. I kind of did a little bit of research before I had him on the show, and there's a lot of really good stuff out there. Shoot. Go fill out a form, hop on a call, and get three hours of free help with your marketing. I think that's. That's pretty cool. And if it. If It's a great fit. Go to work with them if it's not. Maybe they gave you something that is helpful for you. On our way out of the show here today, I want to let everybody know that here in about a month we're going to be doing our top rep high performance sales training here in New Braunfels, Texas on February 27th and 28th. Now this thing has been a thing where we usually do three or four in the spring and then another three or so in the fall. We're not doing that anymore. We're going to do one in the spring and one in the fall and so much bigger event. It has had outstanding results and we had a guy that like came to our last meeting, he's like, hey, I want to come see this event and see what it's all about. There's a bunch of hype around it. Is it actually what you guys say it is. I just want to share a little bit from that experience.

Hey, this is Patrick Blue collar media group. I had no idea what to expect coming out here to top rep and Philly, I'm from Orlando, came all the way up here to see it and impressive stuff. I mean, this event is for sales reps. I mean, if you want to take tangible things away back to your business that are actually going to improve your bottom line, man, these guys have really figured it out. I can't wait to get back, implement some of the stuff in my own business that I learned here from Judge and Jim. Great stuff, man. Really can't thank y'.

All. So if you want to improve your sales this year, I mean, imagine if you just bump your closing percentage by 5%. The effect that that would have, the results have been far better than that. It's an easy to learn flight plan that we teach the what makes it really unique is the competitive aspect of it. We break out into what we call dog fights where you got five, six guys and gals sitting at each table and they're competing on what they just learned. They're actually role playing, grading each other on that role playing. And somebody gets the highest points, somebody gets the lowest points. Go through six rounds of that and somebody is going to be top rep, they're going to earn the title belt and then there's going to be a top 10. They get black shirts. The only way you can get a black shirt is by being at the event and finishing in the top 10. And the results have been off the chart. Go check us out over@TopReptraining.com and if you hear it on this show and you use radio 200, every person you send will save $200 off of the regular registration. We look forward to seeing you there. I'm Jim Johnson, your host here on Contractor Radio.