How Door-to-Door Marketing Is Driving Millions in Home Service Revenue

What are the ways you can get leads off the internet that you can still scale? Today we're talking door-to-door marketing. For 2025, like 10% of revenue came from field marketing. Like it'll probably be 15 to 20 this year.

Not a small piece of the puzzle.

No, this is millions of dollars. Like why do I need Google at all? I know companies that drive 50% of their revenue through Meta. What happens if that changes? Like you are fucked.

If you find yourself in a position where that is the only thing you had, you are really in a bad situation.

That's canvassing, man. No algorithm, analog as hell.

Mind blown.

I think that canvassing Is the secret superpower for Welcome back to Owned and Operated, a top 200 business and entrepreneurship podcast where we dive into the home service industry. I'm your host John Wilson, and for fun, I run this podcast where we talk about the home service industry. And professionally, I'm the CEO of Wilson. which is a home service business, plumbing, HVAC, and electric in Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee. If you're in Kentucky or Michigan, we'd love to talk to you. We're actively looking in those areas. Today, we're continuing our series with my good friend, Sam Preston, the CEO of ServiceScalers. And this series is called Clicks to Calls, where we dive into a different segment of marketing for home service. We've talked about Nextdoor and Google Ads and LSA and a bunch of stuff. Today, we're talking door-to-door marketing. Which is kind of weird, kind of awesome, depending on the team, uh, or depending on the trade. So Sam, welcome back.

Welcome back. Thanks, man. Uh, I feel like it's been a minute since we've recorded something, so excited to be back. And I saw a tweet by you saying that you basically skipped the $30 million and just went straight over to $40 million. Is that true? And was that done by door-to-door marketing?

Last year we finished a hair under $30 million, and the goal was $30 million last year. And this year it's, what is it, April 20th? It's April 21st. We've done 3 acquisitions and then we're prepping for our 4th one that'll close at the end of May. But yeah, we have those 3 put us at like $39 million budget.

Okay.

And the, this 4th one puts us at like 43. So we have, we have, uh, essentially skipped, yeah, the, the entire 30. Just like, all right, you know what?

I'm tired of this. Yeah. Pretty, pretty much.

Pretty much.

Oh my gosh.

No, pretty, yeah. Pretty, pretty crazy. Um, but yeah, so we skipped—

I know y'all have the Breaking 5. I'm, I can't wait for the Skip 10 Million. Conference. Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, that's gonna be great.

I mean, I, the '30s were boring, you know? I didn't, we didn't, well, I said the same thing about the '20s, um, which was kind of funny. Yeah. I'm sure I could find this on a podcast like a year ago, but I didn't find the 20 millions very interesting, which is like probably a ridiculous thing to say or hear, but I just didn't find it very interesting.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, um, so she's, yeah. Are you a Love Is Blind fan?

'Cause I was watching an episode last night with the wife, and this guy just kept saying, I don't want somebody to love me because I'm rich, but then just kept talking about how rich he was.

Okay.

Yeah. So is this one of those moments where you're saying, I found it boring because you find this moment exciting?

I felt like it was boring. So the 20s depends on how you do it. But for me, the 20 millions were, we were running one big branch. And like, it was cool because we figured out a lot. Like, we figured out how to run a $20 million business, which was awesome. Like, that was an aspirational number for me at one point. But yeah, so, but it wasn't like I always had the itch to drive real scale. I mean, that's half the reason we do the show. Like, my stated goal is build a million-dollar, $100 million business plus.

Yeah.

And that's not gonna happen in one location. So for me, the '20s were, they just genuinely were not that interesting because I didn't feel like my brain was being stretched in the way that I wanted to. I wanted to figure out real scale. I wanted to figure out new markets. I wanted to do the stuff I'm doing today.

Yeah.

So yeah. But last year I was like, yeah, we're going to try to just only have one year in the 20s. We just like, because I did 22 or something in 2024, And I was like, let's just go straight for 30 and let like one year in the 20s, that's enough for me. Like I'm ready for whatever comes next.

Yeah.

So we didn't hit that. We hit like 28 or something. And so I was like, okay, all right, a second year in the 20s, fine. And then, and yeah, so it was sort of funny. We just sort of skipped over. Yeah, I think it's around a 50% growth year for us. A lot of it through acquisition. But a lot of those acquisitions have grown substantially since we've taken them over.

Which is insane.

Yeah. I mean, 2 of them have doubled and then one of them will probably be 75% higher than last year. So yeah, we acquired a ton of revenue, but then those things are growing absolutely nuts.

And then when you're buying these, and I'm sure it's all over the board, but is this founder-led? So you buy into a company where the founder stays and they necessarily, they're running a double, the size company, or are you buying people out? Like, how's this work? How's that working?

Have you ever bought enterprise-level software and realized that managing it really just became a full-time job? Well, that's pretty much exactly why my restoration business switched over to FieldPulse. We were tired of software that promised efficiency but came with endless training sessions, onboarding, and frustrated techs, and using it began to feel like it was a job all on its own. FieldPulse was built for owner-operators who don't want more dashboards. They need scheduling, invoicing, and job tracking, and they need it all to live in one place without the chaos or the learning curve. FieldPulse is simple to roll out, it's easy for your team to actually use, and it was 75% cheaper than the other titans of software we were using. Right now, if you book a demo with FieldPulse, you'll get an exclusive partner offer. It's 20% off an eligible annual subscription and 50% off Premium support for your first year. If your software upgrade has turned into a time suck, it might be time to make the move. Book a demo with FieldPulse and see if it's a better fit. Yeah, both. Um, so like we had my Jack, my really good friend Jack Carr, uh, we partnered and that was less of a buyout and that was more of like we merged. Um, yeah. And he stayed on and he's running with, uh, he's running Nashville with our GM Jeremy down there. They're doing an incredible job. They're just absolutely exploding. It makes me look really smart, but really the team is just killing it and doing an awesome job. And I happen to step in at the right moment, so I look brilliant. But yeah.

Love that.

But no, they're doing an awesome job. So yeah, that's sometimes the case. Most of the time the seller steps back. So the 2 other, and the 3rd one we're about to do, The seller stepped back from all of them. And then we sort of built a machine around our ability to do this, which I have been told is unusual. And I don't know, 'cause this is the first time I've ever done it, but we've basically built a strategy to be able to take over somewhere between a $2 and $8 million branch.

Wow.

And we can take it over in about a week. Like, doesn't take very long. It takes us roughly 20 to 30 days to close. Like, you know, from the LOI to closing date is like 3 to 4 weeks. And then our integration playbook is in total around 60 days. But most of the heavy lifting happens in those first 2 weeks. And we can take a business that is doing 10, 15% margins and we can drive 35 to 45% depending on the trades, like is it plumbing or HVAC? If it's HVAC, it's lower. If it's plumbing, it's higher out of that branch. So yeah, so that has been shocking because that was our thesis that we could do this the way that we thought about automation and AI and—

Yeah.

Our offshore team and our in-house team. But yeah, I mean, honestly, we blew it out of the park. We had a spreadsheet that we're like, I'm pretty sure we can do this, but this feels optimistic. And then We beat that. It was crazy. Yeah, it's been really crazy. So yeah, we're having a lot of fun. We're having a lot of fun. Our goal was to do 2 or 3 acquisitions this year, but the first few went so well, we'll probably do 6.

And what's stopping you from doing 8? Is it just finding the right companies? Money.

Dude, I'm like a broke boy. Who's going to pay for this? I unfortunately do not have a rich uncle, so I'm just sort of running around doing my thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, okay.

Honestly, capital will become the constraint. I think once we get to probably, I don't know, 5 to 7 locations, cash and capital won't be the constraint. Execution is going to be really hard. Leadership's going to be really hard. But we were able to sort of go from 1 to 4 locations in 90 days. And it didn't feel that challenging because we built up the disciplines to just sort of springboard into it really fast.

Yeah.

But that's not a forever thing. We're going to struggle a lot, I think, after 5 branches just because we're going to run out of leaders to deploy. To these new, these new branches.

Well, I mean, then is it more beneficial if you're like leaders as part of it? Because I'm thinking from a market, like if I'm gonna go buy a marketing agency, I generally want founder-led agency. Um, like somebody that wants to stay in and wants to grow, but just wants to leverage, you know, what we know and how we can come in and how we can make it more profitable and stuff like that.

Yeah, it makes it easier. Uh, like we're talking to a couple companies that are like that, but we're also talking to full buyouts. Um, But yeah, I mean, having the owner staying on can make it easier. We're looking really hard at Michigan and we're looking really hard at Dayton right now. So like Detroit area and Dayton are like big areas of focus for us.

Yeah.

And Kentucky, there's a, but there's just not that many deals there unfortunately. So yeah, we have one closing in a few weeks, but that's an add-on to our Indiana branch. So that one, like, it doesn't really, like, you know, change, change a ton. Yeah. But yeah, Michigan and Kentucky would be new. Dayton would be new. So we'll have to figure— we'll have to figure that out.

Well, man, congrats on going from 29 to 43, accidentally skipping the 30s. That's insane and incredible. Yeah, that's an accomplishment. So you should be proud of yourself and I'm excited to hear about these next couple deals. You gotta keep us up to date.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the integration playbook is doing a lot of work. It's really, it is crazy how well that worked. Like it blew us away, to be honest, because we had expectations and then we far surpassed them. So we're really excited to see what this looks like at at true scale, which I think we're starting to enter that zone of real scale.

I feel like we should do like an episode maybe in like 6 months from now where we just do a 6-month look back and then a 12-month look back of here's the business we bought. This is in order of like how much they were, the capital we invested, the marketing we did, and which one had the best results and why. Yeah, I feel like that'd be a really interesting episode.

Well, I think so too. And I think, I mean, we're talking about door-to-door, but I think it's kind of interesting because all these businesses have the same problem. It's all the same problem. You walk into a business between $2 and $5 million of revenue and they all have the same issue. So if you know the answer to those issues, and if not even if you know the answer, but if it's quickly deployable, like, hey, I know how to get you leads, I know how to upgrade your sales process, I know how to help you hire better, Yeah. It is a very fast change, like a shocking speed. I think we shared this, but the company we bought in January doubled in the first month. It just doubled. And it wasn't hard because it was just like, which sounds ridiculous, but it, and that's not me being an asshole. It's just like I was surprised at how not hard it was.

Yeah.

But like we have the tech stack, we have the— and when you think about it, it's like, okay, well of course it wasn't hard. Like we have all the vendors, we know the way. We literally teach every 6 months, we teach a program on how to do this. So like if I didn't know how to do this, it would be very embarrassing. Yeah, it would be very embarrassing if I couldn't, you know. Yeah, I'm on my 6th Breaking 5 workshop, but I'm really struggling to break 5. But to me, I think it's kind of exciting because I've looked at these. There's a clear path. There's a really clear path. This will be one of the most interesting Breaking Fives because we're probably just going to crack the book open on the 4 deals we would've done by that time. And then here's what we did. Here's exactly what we did. Here's the P&Ls, here's the ServiceTitan, here's what happened. Because I think when I look at that, like anybody could do it. Like, yes, some of it was me and like what we had from pricing power and all that stuff. But the biggest wins were we turned on more marketing, we added a speed-to-lead software, we raised their pricing, and we hired more techs. And like, that was the playbook.

Yeah. So yeah.

Okay. Yeah, if you're at the Breaking Five in a couple weeks, we will be doing a deep dive on all the acquisitions And you're— I'm sure it'll help you break 5 quickly.

I was hoping to be there, but unfortunately, or fortunately, I'll be having my third child and there's no way my wife will let me, uh, will be there.

Or, yeah, Aaron's like, no, I gotta, I gotta see a guy about a, you know, about doubling my business. So, um, yeah, yeah.

It's funny. So no, no. Yeah. I've got a third one coming in. So I will not be there, but yeah, definitely the next one.

I'm gonna start this off with a little bit of a shout out to our field marketing leader. His name's Solomon. Solomon is incredible and Solomon's done an amazing job. And I think that that is an important thing to note because as we talk about this strategy for your business, Who the who the leader is driving the bus on door-to-door is what makes this work or not work. Like Solomon's incredible. He didn't he's doing an incredible job every day. He's and so one there's a shout out, but two who runs the program for you is really important. And the we've been doing door-to-door. I think we just hit two years. I think we just hit 2 years. Yeah, because it's not 3 years, but yeah, we just hit 2 years. Took a while to get our feet underneath us, but we hit our stride at the end of that first 12 months. And now it's a real part of what we do. It is like, I think it was 15 or 16% of revenue in March. It's a significant—

Oh, wow.

And growing share. Last year it was 10% total for 2025, like 10% of revenue came from field marketing. And it'll probably be 15 to 20 this year.

Geez. Okay, so this is not a small piece of the puzzle.

No, this is millions of dollars. Yeah, millions of dollars a year. Yeah.

I like that. Yeah.

I like that. Okay. The way people call it door-to-door, they call it canvassing.

Mm-hmm.

And there's a few other things that like you can kind of add in there, like home shows or retail partnerships like Home Depot, Lowe's, Menards, Walmart maybe. I know Costco's got a program and that's like you can buy your HVAC system, water heater, generator, whatever through like a big box store. So people often throw that into the same team. So the core concept of door-to-door marketing is there is a— there is an individual that is generating a lead, same as like Google generates a lead or Facebook generates a lead or whatever. So someone out there is personally generating a lead. I think it depends a lot on what industry you're in. Like, do you have any clients that are like door-to-dooring?

Uh, roofing clients, we get a lot of that. Um, same with fencing. I think fencing feels really natural to do that. Um, so yeah, we get, we get quite a few. I haven't heard that in HVAC, although I have, I've heard, uh, HVAC in like, uh, department stores.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, I think it really depends on the trade. For HVAC, it's very, uh, like, it's frankly, it's kind of weird. Um, like people don't really do it. Um, depending on the state, I think it's actually illegal in some states. Like someone told me it was illegal in California. I, I don't know why. So like check your legislation.

Yeah.

Um, for Ohio, you just have to pull permits like where you are. But yeah, it, it's, it's interesting and it's kind of fun 'cause as you start opening the can of worms, it can take you so many different ways. Um, like as an example, there's those 3 archetypes. You've got home shows or like, shows in general. Like you could do neighborhood events, you could do farmers markets, you could do like, and we have done all of them. Like you, so you could just run an events team where you're at every event in your community, which I feel like is an awesome way to like be a part of the community. So we do that. I think we did 20 or 30 events last year. We'll probably do around the same this year. So like that's an important part of the team. So that's one way to take it. The other is like just knocking doors, which there's a ton of different ways to handle that. And then the third is big box store relationships, which are harder to get into. And like, there's some good and bad with big box store.

Well, I mean, I know, like, I feel like knocking doors gets a bad rap as kind of like this annoying thing, but I had someone knock our door and said, hey, there's a hailstorm that came through and we just checked your neighbor's roof. Can we just check yours? And I'll just show you what happened. I'm like, knock yourself out, go for it. And got on there, found some hail damage, and then basically said, hey, we will deal with the insurance company and we'll let you know when this is approved. And so they went and dealt with the insurance company, came back to me and said, hey, if you want this done, it's $5,000. Yeah, yeah, go change my roof for $5,000 right now so I don't have to pay $20,000 later.

Yeah.

And it was easy. And honestly, it felt convenient for them to just handle everything.

To that point, and I mean, I think roofing, I think roofing makes total sense and anything exterior makes total sense. Yeah, roofing, fencing, I think garage door, landscaping.

Yes.

Concrete leveling, asphalt sealing. Like we've talked about a lot of these different opportunities. Like anything that's easy to like look and point at is very, very easy. Windows, Doors, porches. Yeah, it's a really natural part of the process. Personally, I love door knocking. I think it's freaking awesome. And I love having that team. It's been one of the most important strategic resources that we've built over the past 2 years is our ability to drive that team. So I want to explain that. Yeah, I love it. So first off, there's a bunch of industries that it just makes sense for. It also makes sense for plumbing, HVAC, electric. So depending on where you are, like, it can just make sense. It could make sense for carpet cleaning. It could make sense for whatever. Yeah, it's not complicated. It's just hard.

Yeah.

Like, it's just tough. Like, yeah, you're— someone's walking around knocking on doors. The way to think about it, what I talked to a guy, I met a guy I don't know, five, six months ago, and he came into the office, and he was running a really big window company in I think Canada. I don't remember which side of Canada. They had eleven locations. Each location was like three to four million bucks. So like I want to say thirty-five to forty million total. So big, big window business. And what they did was they had 2 org charts basically. And he came in and it was me just trying to understand canvassing at scale, because it just hadn't clicked yet. So he had, I don't know, 200 team members, I want to say, and 110 of them were on the sales and production side of the business. So they're going to go out and they're going to sell jobs and install those jobs. How you would think of a window business, window installation business. The other half of the business was canvassing. Like 200, so 100 people total was canvassing.

Jeez.

And he laid out this org chart for us and it was beautiful. So he's got this like director of canvassing. Under the director, he's got regional managers of canvassing. Under the regional managers, there's team leads. And under each team lead, there's 6 canvassers or 5 canvassers.

Okay.

Because each team is 6 because that's how many people you can fit inside a minivan. So each team gets a minivan, you go park in a neighborhood, and so you build a team of 6 and that's your team.

Yeah.

And then the team lead drives. So yeah, kind of funny, easy to figure out. So every team is 6.

Yeah.

Every field manager manages like 2 or 3 teams, maybe 4 teams. Then they report up to a training manager. And then the director on top. It was 100-some people. And that was their only marketing channel. Which when I first heard that, I was like, well, that's crazy. But the deeper we dove into it, it was like, holy shit. I mean, this is kind of beautiful. Google's algorithm doesn't matter.

Yeah.

This is your spend. And it was 12 to 13% of revenue. So, and that, sorry, I don't know if we said that, that's the way to think about canvassing is it is marketing budget. So these are wages that are marketing budget. So when I give our marketing spend of, I wanna say it was like 7%-ish in March, that is inclusive of the $40-some thousand that we spent on our field marketing team. So that $40,000 is inside that.

Yeah. Makes sense.

Yeah, it's a lead. It's like same as Meta, or it's spend, spend to get a lead.

Yeah.

But yeah, it was really interesting to watch that cascade out. So what he does now, and I'm kind of obsessed with this idea, and when we were thinking about greenfielding instead of acquiring, this was our plan. So we were going to go like, hey, let's go to Columbus, pop up a branch, knock on a bunch of doors, and stand up a plumbing company next to it. So that's what these guys were doing. This was their go-to-market strategy for new window branches is they're going to go launch a branch an hour away and they launch with 3 canvassers and 2 salespeople and that's the new branch. And then they install from whatever the branch is that they just left. And so it was really interesting. They ran essentially 2 organizations in tandem, this at-skill canvassing team and the You know, sales and fulfillment side of the business. But it was incredible. I'm sure, and I'm sure that's similar to what roofing looks like. Maybe like a roofing business is like 30 canvassers and 5 salespeople and 10 installers or something like that. But it was, it was wild. It got our juices flowing on canvassing. When I first started growing Wilson, I was obsessed with the numbers, books, podcasts, and checking the bank account pretty much nonstop. But as the business grew, I had less and less time to obsess and I lost clarity. That's a Exactly what CFO Made Easy solves. Tyler works directly with home service owners doing a few million a year and helps you understand your numbers in a way that actually drives decisions. Things like pricing, hiring, equipment purchases, all of it. I know what you're thinking. This is just another consultant, but Tyler is different. He built and exited a $25 million home service business himself, so you know that this isn't just fluff. His clients routinely improve profit by five to ten percent just by tightening up their pricing. labor, and overhead in finally getting that oh-so-juicy control over cash flow. If you've got a bookkeeper and a CPA but no real financial partner, this is what you're missing. Go book a free 20-minute strategy call at cfomadeeasy.com/owned and get the financial clarity that you've been craving all along. And do me a favor, let Tyler know that OAO sent you.

Yeah. And then what's like, what is the, what's the script like when you're getting on there? Like for plumbing, plumbing's what I'm trying to like wrap my head around because normally you're not calling a plumber Unless there's a situation.

So plumbing has surprisingly been the easiest and best.

Okay.

So like, just like everything, we track channel ROI, we track cost per lead. So we've got the metrics on this, and plumbing has consistently been like our best booker, highest revenue, highest ROI channel out of field marketing. So what we actually ended up doing is we pivoted the whole team in field, 'cause they were like, they would go to the door and the script was like, hey, we're Wilson, we're here in the neighborhood.

Yeah.

To, and that would just be like the way we'd neighborhood select is like old neighborhood that we want to do more work in. Not complicated. And we would say plumbing, HVAC, electric. We'd sort of go through like a suite of options and we did a good job. Like that's what we did last year and it was 10% of revenue. What we did this year was we started saying like, hey, let's just focus on sewer replacements or sewer lining.

Yeah.

Let's pivot the entire team to focus on this one thing and let's see if we can deliver this one thing better. And that has been humongous. We're about 45 to 60 days into it. And I mean, it's been huge. The average ticket's much higher and our closing rate's higher. We have, we've actually, we're hiring 2 additional sewer salespeople right now. To keep up with it because we've like it's been too many leads from like knocking on doors. Yeah, they're doing an awesome job. Yeah, Solomon and Don run Don's the canvassing manager, and they're they're doing an incredible job.

Solomon, man, my mind's blown right now. I'm sitting here like thinking of the implications.

Well, we we got into it a couple years ago because you know LSA was being weird. So the idea was like, hey, do we need, like, why do I need Google at all? Like, there has to be a better way, which I think is actually similar to, you know, our conversation we were gonna talk about next was like email, SMS. And a few weeks ago we talked about direct mail.

Mm-hmm.

And I think there's this idea that like, I don't wanna be beholden to Google to grow my business. And I think that a lot of businesses got in trouble because they, they are or were completely dictated by one channel. It doesn't have to be Google. I know companies that drive 50% of their revenue through Meta. Okay, well what happens if that changes? You are fucked.

Yeah.

So if you have one channel driving too much of your revenue, I think you're in a risky spot. So for us, we had LSA was driving almost all of our revenue in, I don't know, 2023, 2024. And we started focusing really hard on diversifying channels and ideally diversifying off-internet channels because we wanted to be able to control just if there was a weird algorithm, I didn't want to be dead in the water.

Yeah. Which the algorithm's changing so often now. It used to be once or twice a year and now it's once or twice a month. Every day.

Yeah. It feels like it's daily. I'm sure it's not, but it's just like, this is crazy.

Yeah, no, yeah, we're always making adjustments now.

Yeah.

And you should, you 100%, like obviously I'm a big fan of Google, but like Google's only as good as it returns. And as soon as it doesn't return or it becomes a problem or they change something, you know, you kill that and you move on to something else.

Yeah.

Now, if you find yourself in a position where that is the only thing you had, you are really in a bad situation. So you need to be trying to get other marketing initiatives going as soon as possible.

So yeah, so we got into it for a de-risk, we got into it for a de-risk, and it turned into a real channel for us, like a really big channel. And like strategically, it's about to become one of our most important channels because we now have a few branches and we have 4 branches now and we're starting to prepare to launch field marketing in those other branches to keep driving.

That's fascinating.

Yeah. And I think for like my personal take, you know, one of the— I think that canvassing is the secret superpower for launching a new branch. Like, I think that's probably the most valuable thing you could do because if I was launching a new branch tomorrow, like the problem is leads. Like you just need leads and hey, I've got a GMB with no reviews. And nobody knows me in the neighborhood, so like PPC might not work as well because I'm like unrecognized. Meta maybe, you know. So it feels like a lot of your channels get kind of weird. So you need to have like a very diversified set of channels digitally. Like hey, do you have Angie set up? Do you have Modernize set up? Like do you have all your lead aggregators like set to pump? Is LSA going to drip you some leads? Do you have something going on with PPC and Meta? Like What are all the ways you can get leads on the internet? And then maybe most importantly, what are the ways you can get leads off the internet that you can still scale? Because you can run a— you know, I could drop 6 people in Toledo tomorrow and have a $4 million branch like year 1.

Okay, so what size? Like, I mean, I'm trying to think of like the applications here. Like, my instinct is like, oh, well then let's go. Like, hey everybody, what are you doing? You got to have your LSA and you got to have your Yeah. Your door knockers. But like, I'm assuming it doesn't make sense until you are a certain size company. And I'm assuming also that it doesn't make sense unless you have not Solomon, because no one's going to replace Solomon, but like someone that—

Yeah, I should have changed his name for the show. I just— yeah, I wanted to make him sure that he heard it, but it's Charles.

It's— yeah, Charles. Why'd you mess that up? Uh, so yeah, no one's gonna find their own Charles. Um, So are you thinking, if you're going to go about this, are you going to go hire the Charles and Solomons of the world, or are you going to start smaller from there?

Well, yeah, I think, to be honest, I don't know the answer to this. I should have asked the guy with Windows, how did he start doing it? Because he actually moved from a primarily digital lead source, lead channels, To this at like ten million, he switched. So I'm sure. Well, you know Cole Simpson. Maybe we need to have him on to talk about this because I think he sold his roofing business. But when he first launched it, canvassing was like the entire channel that they were driving energy through, and I think they had like fifteen guys. So like apparently you can start with it right off the rip. I want to say that you can start with it off the rip. I also totally acknowledge that that's a lot of money. And if I was a one-man show launching my plumbing company, I wouldn't do it. It's too budget, it's people and yeah, it was hard.

Yeah.

But that said, I'm sure there are people that have done it really, like Cole, people that have done it really successfully. And Cole, I think in his first 12 months did like $6 or $7 million of revenue. Like, he was the fastest growing franchise in that space. And I think a big part of it was they just hit the freaking pavement.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah. You should have Cole on here. That'd be great. He's awesome.

Yeah.

Okay. And I'm assuming it's not— I mean, do you— if you wanted to like dip your toe in it, it's not just hiring one guy to canvas. You are— you probably need to go ahead and invest like for an entire team of 6 or something like that.

Where do you think one— so I have seen a lot of people attempt to replicate our success with this because we've been doing this for 2 years. Maybe I need to be quieter about it. I just think it's crazy. Yeah. But most people, who you bring in to launch the team is really important.

Mm-hmm.

It's a tough job. So the canvassers themselves, it has relatively high turnover for better or worse. So you need a strong team leader, you need a strong manager. We were really blessed to get some really awesome people. off the rip. And that's what made the program work. And now it's one of our most important marketing channels.

And how are you paying the canvassers?

I could be off slightly, but I can give a general idea. I believe it's $17, $18 to $21, $22 an hour, plus a bonus per lead that sits. So lead that sits means I got a lead and someone ran that lead. It encourages us to set up high-quality leads. Yeah. So the earning potential's pretty good. On a successful day, you could book 2 to 5. Yeah, it's an important part of what we're doing. So right now we're prepping, probably over the summer we're hoping to go launch canvassing in a new market. I kind of want to experiment with a greenfield, but that's probably a terrible idea. Versus like, you know, into somewhere that we already are. But, but yeah, I'm, it's been awesome. But we've seen a few people try to do this and they just go straight for the canvasser and they don't understand like, hey, this has a lot of turnover. Like you need to, it's not just like a person, like this is a program. Like you have to develop a program. It's, this is the same as building a team of technicians or a team of salespeople. Like, Our canvassers are salespeople. This is a team of salespeople. They get trained once a week. They're working on scripts, they're working on objections, they're working on close rate, they're working on their sit rates. Like you are building a sales organization inside your business with canvassing. Ours, our canvassing, like field marketing team now, I want to say is 15 people all in. And it's— and we're about to launch a new team, which means it's going to jump up into the Into the 20s.

That's awesome. And it's something AI's not about to replace. So, yeah.

And we, yeah. Well, and that was the thing with, um, yeah, it, it's not like you, you can, you are just immune to all of those issues. Now granted, it brings a lot of other issues. It's not like it's free and easy, but like, yeah, it, it's analog.

Yeah. My impression of this is this is the, this is a hard road, but it's hard if done well.

The results are worth it. Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I think it's the same with Isaac. Isaac was talking about, and we've had him on the show, but for direct mail, he's like, hey, everyone's chasing digital and he's getting a 10 times return on his ad spend on direct mail right now. And it's not small, it's like $100,000 a month. He's getting a lot from the most old school analog shit out there. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. It's kind of interesting. Old school, man.

Old school. Door-to-door canvassing. Knock 'em, get 'em. Let's go.

Yeah.

Let's go.

Yeah, it's kind of wild.

Is there somebody that like, this is a terrible idea for? Like just business cannot work?

I don't think, I don't know.

I don't know, somebody like remodels houses, like the chances of somebody else in that neighborhood also wanting to remodel.

Honestly, I think it would probably work. So it tends to be easier the bigger the ticket is.

Yeah.

So like maybe appliance repair would be tough because appliance repair like might be only like a couple hundred bucks as a one-time job. But like, you know, landscaping, if you secure a landscaping contract and maybe that's $5,000 over the course of a summer, Yeah. It's $5,000. Like, 'cause you have to be able to afford the wage and the commission.

Right.

So like asphalt sealing is $3,000 to $6,000 or whatever. Roofing is obvious that, you know, $5,000, $20,000, like somewhere in there, like roofing makes sense. Windows is a lot of money. Doors is a lot of money. So yeah, if your service is like a couple hundred bucks, it probably makes less sense. I'm trying to think of another example besides appliances, like duct cleaning might not work very well.

I mean, I spent $3,000 to get my ducts cleaned, so.

Did you?

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe it would work.

Wife was having, you know, allergy issues.

Oh, totally.

And we like ripped out the carpet and we were having a bunch of issues. And so we got 2 different quotes and one was very affordable and one was 3 grand. And let's just say we wanted to make sure it was done right.

That's funny.

So we agreed to spend more and, you know, got the full thing.

Nope, that makes sense. We, um, yeah, I mean, so maybe duct cleaning if you're like high-ticket duct cleaning. Uh, yeah, I think there's a lot, there's a lot of different things you could do. But like, I, I would say as a benchmark, if your job, $3,000 is probably a great benchmark. If your average job is in the $2,500 to $3,000 mark, you are good to go. If it is not, then you're less good to go. And that's another part of the reason we started focusing on like sewer replacements too. Like, The program's easier to pay for if the average sewer replacement's $14,000.

Well, I mean, that's, that's just another home service problem, right? Like, you don't focus on leads if you don't— if you have a sales problem. And then you don't focus on— so it should be fix your sales problem, fix your appointment problem, then go to leads. Yeah. And so let's get your average ticket up and your close rate up, appointments rate up, and then go figure out where else you can get leads, because otherwise you're not gonna It's not gonna work anyways.

Yeah, that's canvassing, man. No algorithm.

Mind blown.

Analog as hell. Knocking doors. The other thing that blew our mind was that roofing guy in Canada. I was like, hey, you're in Canada, it's cold. When do you not canvass? He's like, it has to be below 5 degrees, bro. Otherwise, 5.5 degrees up and up.

Dude, he's built different.

They're built different.

Oh, shit.

I mean, and that was the thing is like, this is the business, their canvassing business. It was pretty inspiring.

That's insane.

And I mean, for us, the best part of that is I think this is the craziest hack of all time to launch a new branch. Like, you can just do it day one where like, for better or worse, a lot of digital services, take a couple weeks or a month to get like queued up and functioning. This, you can get a lead on the, on the day you want a lead, you can go get that lead. You're not losing jobs because you're bad, you're losing them because you're busy. It only takes one missed call, one delayed text, one forgotten follow-up, and that job and customer is gone. And that's exactly what Quo fixes. Quo brings in every customer conversation like calls, texts, voicemails into one shared Thread your entire team can see, so whoever jumps in next has the full context right away. There's no scrambling, there's no crossed wires, nothing slipping through the cracks anymore. It keeps your team aligned, speeds up your response time, and makes your customer experience feel dialed in every time. If you want tighter communication and fewer lost leads, check out Quo at quo.com/owned. You'll get a seven-day free trial plus twenty percent off your. first 6 months.

Yeah, it would make sense. And specifically for someone like you who you already have the director, like you already have the mastermind in place.

Yeah, you just have to deploy a leader. You gotta go deploy a team.

6 team members.

Uh, now I wanna, now I wanna do this in like Columbus or something like that. Instead of buying that 6th business, just gonna start one from scratch and find out. Yeah, yeah.

Can I build an entire company just off of canvassing?

I think you can. I think canvassing is like the most hilarious thing ever. I think it's incredible.

I support canvassing.

I would've never in my life thought that I would've like done this, but now that we do it, I'm like, yeah, like any business I ever get involved in, we're gonna drive canvassing 'cause this is awesome.

Yeah, I love it.

Well, if you like what you heard and you wanna go knock some doors, like and sub, man. Thanks for tuning in to Clicks to Calls.