Under $5M? Marketing Isn’t Complicated (Here’s the Playbook)

I have an opinion that people won't like.

Hot take from John. Let's go.

If you're under $5 million, marketing is not complicated.

It's super easy to do my job. You can just, you can do this.

I said people aren't gonna like it. Today we're talking about hiring an internal marketing team.

But I really think the first hire is a marketing manager.

If you're expecting somebody to sprinkle some Jesus juice and your total budget's $8,000, I'm like, okay.

I wanna speak directly to you, owner. This is not an excuse for you to not be good at marketing.

They assume one person can just do it all.

And the answer is no. As an agency, we prefer to work with a marketing manager versus the owner.

I'm deeply insulted right now. Welcome back to Owned and Operated. I am your host, John Wilson. I run a plumbing, HVAC, and electric company in Ohio, and for fun, I run a podcast where I talk to my friends about how to build home service companies. Today, we're continuing our series, Click to Calls, with the CEO of ServiceScalers, Sam Preston. Welcome to the show.

I am so happy to be here and honored to be called one of your friends.

We're buds. We're buds, bro. You just gotta accept it. If you are new to the Click to Calls series, I'd make sure you check out the past couple. And if you have any questions, like throw it in the comments. We're really like guiding this series through user questions, So far we've talked about how to budget for marketing, how to think about that, where to spend it. We've talked to LSAs. I don't know if we've talked to PPC yet. We talked to Google Business Profiles. So we're just, you know, every time we do one of these, we're breaking a little bit more down on how to build marketing as a primary discipline in your home service business. So it's worth a listen.

And what I hear is that LSA episode's kind of going crazy right now.

Yeah, that one popped the hell off, to be honest. People are liking that one. Yeah, it popped. It really popped off, which was pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, it's fun to do these, like me on my soapbox for a second. When I started this podcast 5 years ago, I always wanted it to be the resource that I never had when I first started off in my journey of growing our home service business. And there was just so much I didn't know, and it took me like, 7 or 8 years into owning this business to feel like I knew what the hell was going on.

Yeah.

Like, I had no idea. And it just took a long time. And like, stuff like Google Business Profile and like how to, like, when do you hire a marketing manager, which is today's topic? How do you manage LSAs and how do you spend $1 million on leads? Like, I don't know. I just didn't know. So I think it's really fun and I think it's really cool that we're able to— it's exciting that the episode's like popping off and doing really well. It's also just baller that we can create content and talk about something that is genuinely helpful to the industry. And I just think that's like a fun way for me to give back. So I'm grateful for everyone listening, but know that I'm really excited that I'm helping you.

I mean, I was literally talking to a guy last week who I just met and he has a $7 million business and he was— he asked me, so what's really the What's the difference between LSA and PPC? I don't really know. I'm like, you're a $7 million business. You should really— these are 2 really legit marketing channels. You've got to know the difference.

Yeah.

So for me, selfishly, I get to educate people on marketing services, on how they can handle this and how to think about all the different marketing channels and driving leads and growing your business, which is what I really love doing.

For too long, I was letting the wrong marketing agencies set my money on fire, and their marketing looked pretty good on paper, the reporting was attractive, but at the end of the day, it just wasn't driving leads. That's why I started using Service Scalers at Wilson. Service Scalers is a marketing agency built specifically for home service companies. They focus on the channels that actually drive leads, like targeted PPC, local service ads, SEO, Google Business Profile, so that you're showing up in front of your customers that are actively searching. They'll help you see exactly what's working so you stop wasting ad dollars on low-quality leads. Right now they're doing something crazy and they're giving the opportunity for one entrepreneur to get up to 12 months of marketing on them. So that's up to $100,000 in services for the right operator. If you are serious about tightening up your marketing in 2026 and want to see what this could look like for your business, go to servicescalers.com and book a free strategy call and let 'em know that I sent you. All right, so today we're talking about, I'm gonna give this 2 titles, Your First Marketing Hire or Hiring an Internal Marketing Team.

Yep.

But I really think for most people listening to this, the question that I get a lot, or I'm in a bunch of these group chats or Facebook groups or whatever, and it always goes something like this. I'm annoyed with my agency. I'm gonna go hire a marketing manager. And I'm like, okay, let's dive a little bit deeper. Like, first off, hey, maybe, right? Like, if your agency is Scorpion, yeah, fuck yeah. Like, be annoyed. But, you know, the people that I'm talking to that are like, yeah, I'm ready to do this.

Yeah.

They're spending like $8,000 a month total on marketing. And I'm like, my guy. You cannot introduce— I mean, you can, but it would be a very stupid idea to introduce a marketing salary at that size. So I think the things we're going to be talking about today is why do people go in-house in the first place? When is the right time?

Yeah.

And what's a good reason? How to find that person when it is the right time? Who are they? What's the resume look like? What's the background? And finally, like, what do they do? What does a marketing hire actually do in your business? What can you expect? And what can, frankly, what should you not expect? Because if you're expecting somebody to sprinkle some Jesus juice and your total budget's $8,000 inclusive of this person's salary, yeah, you're not, no one's salt baying your leads, right? Like, you just gotta pay for some freaking leads. Yeah, if you're not watching on YouTube, We're Salt Bae-ing actively.

I'm doing hand gestures for everything John's talking about.

Lots of hand gestures so far. We're only 2, 3 minutes in. Okay, so first off, why do operators want to go in-house? Like, why do people want to in-house this discipline? I mean, I can tell you from our perspective.

There's a couple reasons. One is control. Yeah, yeah, right.

Control is a big one.

You just want to hire the person to do the job and not feeling like you're paying for a portion of somebody else's as they're working at an agency.

Yes.

In which case, I've done this in my own business where we have different marketing channels where I hired internally and I failed 3 different times in finding the right person. So finally I went to an agency. So sometimes it's not as simple as just hiring that person, but the main reason I wanted to do that was 'cause I wanted to control that person's time.

Yeah, I think, yeah, control's a good one. Do you have any others? I have 2 others aside from that.

I think there's a perception of cost.

There is a perception of cost.

I'll just take that.

I wasn't actually even— I wasn't even thinking about perception of cost. So control's a big one. I totally agree. Speed is a really big one. So that was a pain point that we had, you know, 6, 7 years ago. We really struggled with speed of change. So, hey, I wanna— we're doing this coupon, we gotta add it to the website. Well, how do we do that faster? We have this SEO idea. How do we help execute on this fast? How do we increase our budget? How do we— The board sucks today. So speed's a really big reason. And in my mind, if your budget is enough, which we will talk about when is the right time, control and speed are good reasons.

Yeah.

I like those reasons. A bad reason is frustration with agency. So I'm gonna repivot that to focus.

Yeah.

When Brandon and I, Brandon's my partner and president, When we were like, hey, I think we're ready for an internal marketing hire, we were probably $13 or $14 million of revenue. Even if you have an agency, which like we have agencies today, in addition to like an in-house director of marketing, maybe I'll talk about my marketing team stack here, but we have agencies, we have an in-house team, and it's like a pairing together.

Yeah.

But what we were really wanting is like Brandon and I were spending a ton of our time on marketing, 'cause we had to fill the board every day. Like, that's an executive function, is that's the most important thing. Nothing else happens if we don't have the board filled that day.

Yeah.

No sales, nothing happens if the board's empty.

Yeah.

So it was us like directly managing agencies, it was us drafting SMS campaigns, it was us drafting emails, managing LSA budgets, trying to figure out how to make Angie's List work. So focus, was a big one. And I think smaller operators, it turns into frustration. But really, it's like, there's just a lot to do in marketing. It's kind of like one of the most important things. And it's changing daily. It changes daily. Yeah, it changes daily. It's hard to keep up with. So yeah, speed, control, and focus are the good reasons to I, I don't even wanna say go in-house because, um, nearly every significantly sized operator that I know of uses in-house paired with agencies in some capacity. Like, they're using mail agencies, PPC, SEO. There, there's an agency somewhere in the mix because it changes all the time.

Mm-hmm.

And marketing is like specialty driven. So, I'm going to be cautious with like when to go in-house. It's more like when do you, you know, when do you bring on that first?

Yeah. And you mentioned y'all went in at $13 million. I feel like that's a little high. I would go sooner. We personally, as an agency, we prefer to work with a marketing manager versus the owner. We love you owners. We love you.

I am deeply insulted right now.

But you're busy and you've got a lot of fires to put out. You've got to figure out so many different things.

I mean, this is focus. This is focus. This is like, this is a great reason to bring on that first marketing hire. It doesn't have to be a manager, it can be a coordinator, but someone should be, this should be their focus.

'Cause if we as an agency come to you on Tuesday and we say, hey, we need these 2 things from you, and then 3 days later you get it to us on Friday, and then we're implementing it on Monday, suddenly you're like, hey, we're like, what the hell, it's been a week, for 2 weeks, where are we at? And we're like, Well, we need that information. Whereas a marketing manager, we tend to get responses really quickly and we can iterate much faster, get results faster, which for us, the faster we can get quick wins and leads in the door, the better off the relationship's gonna be. So we tend to like working with marketing managers over owners. Some of you owners are phenomenal, but you really, at some point—

You're the best.

You get big enough, y'all are the best. At some point you get big enough to where you shouldn't be spending your time on where to put the budget. You should have a budget set and you should have a marketing manager that's going, oh yeah, the cost per lead's better over here, let's shift the budget that way. Oh, it's over here, let's go this way. We're having, uh, uh, we don't have any calls coming in or any leads or any appointments booked for today. We need to get that. So let's, let's throw more budget into this emergency situation, uh, red alert, and get some more leads in.

I think the next natural one is, okay, Got it. Those are good reasons. Frustration is not a good reason, especially if your budget's small. So when is the right time? You said 13 was too late. When do you think the right time is?

Yeah, and you can back that up into a number. So we talked about this in the last episode when we talked about budgets, but let's say we're gonna go with the very basic answer of spending 10%. If you're a million-dollar company and you're spending 80 grand Uh, excuse me, $8,000 a month, uh, on, uh, marketing services and you hire a marketing manager, just for easy numbers, let's call it 5. Well, then you only have 3 left to go into leads. That's just not a good idea. So I think it's closer to 4 to 5. And even then, I think that you— I think that's probably a good place to be like looking for them. What do you think of that?

I have an opinion that people won't like.

Those are the best opinions. Buckle up. Hot take from John.

Let's go. So here's the opinion that people won't like. I had this opinion. I shared this opinion with a friend of mine who, he's a marketing, I think VP of marketing is the title for a private equity firm that has 20 different brands. I was like, hey, this is my opinion. Like, what do you think? What do you see? Not just what do you think, but like, what do you see across 20 brands? Like, that's a pretty big like amount of feedback that you can get on this opinion. If you're under $5 million, and I've shared this like in the past, marketing is not complicated. It is, this is the unpopular opinion.

This is great.

This is not, this is, you know.

It's super easy to do my job. You can just, You can do this.

It's, I, you know, I said people are gonna like it. The reason is like you can roughly buy your way to pretty big. Like you can get, you can get pretty freaking big. Um, like you can cross into 8 figures, uh, revenue, um, without like very fancy marketing technique.

True.

Now it's like someone needs to know what the hell they're doing. So like you still have agencies, you still have like experts, you still have to do stuff. But my point is it's not super complicated. So when I think about like when's the right time to hire somebody, to me it's like a complication problem. If all you are doing, and I say this in like the best way possible, If all it takes for your business to grow is spending more money on LSA, you do not need a marketing coordinator or manager or anything out there. Like, you just don't because it's not complicated. Like, it's one singular thing.

Mm-hmm.

So for me, it's a complexity problem. Hey, when do you have, when do you have like a lot of different, channels going on? When are you emailing frequently? Like, that takes a person or AI, I guess. Uh, when are you SMSing campaigns very often? Uh, do you need speed-to-lead stuff? Like, do you need to really step up your level? Are you an 8-figure business? I think that's a good way to think about it. Another way I like to think about it, if you think about, uh, how does, how does an agency charge?

I mean, there's a handful of ways we charge. We tend to do a A flat rate based off of the level of service that you're needing. Right.

You could probably roughly back into like a percentage of spend.

Yeah, yeah, pretty easy.

So like, yeah, so that's a way to think about when's the right time? What is my percentage of spend? So that example that we gave where someone's like, hey, I'm spending $8,000 a month right now. And my agency charges 10% or 15%. Okay, well, if you hire an in-person marketing coordinator or manager or whatever you wanna title that, that's 70%. Like, the agency is a better deal than 70%.

Yeah.

So I'm a big fan of, can you beat 10%?

Yeah.

Like, if an agency is 10% or 15% or 20% or whatever that like, percentage of spend is, can you beat that efficiently? And that's when the math started to really make sense for us was, hey, I'm spending significantly more on agency fees than I would spend on the 3 or 4 people that I would have to hire, 'cause it's not 1 usually, 3 or 4 people I would have to hire to do this.

I mean, think about SEO in general, like the SEO strategist, the person that's just a wizard at SEO is a really expensive hire for me. And then I go find somebody who's good at backlinks, and then I go find somebody who's good at content, like just writing content, and then I go find somebody that is good at building out landing pages and development. So like right there, it's just 4 hires for your little SEO package.

This is the biggest mistake that I see people prepping to hire for. They assume that they can just hire this one marketing person and they can do, hey, they can do our social media, they can do videos, they can do funny TikToks, they can also manage PPC budgets, and they can, create SEO content and draft emails and not really. And that was a tough learning curve for us of like, oh yeah, okay, I have this guy who's really great. He's amazing at his job, but he does not do, he does not replace everything that I had. So the number that we chose, I think we divided spend at like $80,000 or $90,000 a month. And that's when, hey, this is a lot of money.

Mm-hmm.

10% of that is 9 grand. Can I bring somebody in, reduce a few of my agency fees, keep the ones that he cannot replace? And his background, we could talk about how to pick backgrounds, but the ones we kept were SEO and PPC. But yeah, it was like 80, 90 grand a month.

Yeah.

It was a lot, a lot of spend before we started, before we brought on that first first real marketing hire. So I think a percentage of spend is a really good way to think about it. And back to it not being that complicated, it's not that complicated. An agency, if you're not trying to do very complicated stuff and if you are talking frequently with your agency partner, you can get a lot done. Chris Hoffman, years ago, probably 2 years ago on Twitter talked about, and it was really helpful for me, treating your agencies like an employee. Like, are you talking with them often? Are you— do you have scorecards for what success looks like? Do they have a target to hit? Number of leads, budget, cost per lead, like whatever that— whatever the target is, like, have you set that target? Have you communicated about it? Or are you just reacting?

Mm-hmm.

And the reason why it was such a good learning for me is because the whole journey up into the 20s, We were just reacting. Like, we only called our marketing person when the board was light. And like, what are they gonna do? Like, it's too late.

We should—

we needed to do that 2, 3 days ago when the board was starting to be light. And, um, so yeah, I think that's the when. And those are some of the mistakes that I know we lived because we made those mistakes. But I see that a lot too, where they assume one person can just do it all.

Yeah. And the answer is no. One person can't do it all.

Yeah, definitely not.

Even within all the market, I'm good at marketing, I really am. And if you compared me to my PPC wizard, she makes me look dumb a lot. And same thing with my SEO person, they'll come in and—

Did you see how fast I agreed to that?

Yeah.

It's not like— No, yeah, I totally agree.

I'm good at this, and I realized the more what I have been good at is finding people that are really damn good at their specific service and allowing them to do this for other people. And so even within that, it's hard to be good at PPC and SEO, and like, it just really is. Yeah, I would say it's It's kind of like a diet, right? Like, you know you want to lose weight. It's not hard. It's very simple. Eat less, move more. It's, it's very much like that. But at some point, you want somebody to come in and go, oh, hey, we just want to adjust this one thing. We just want to change this one thing in the way you're doing it so that you can get better results.

Are we talking macros now?

Huh?

Is this about to become like a fitness show?

Dude.

I am here for this. I mean, we did start off flexing.

Yeah, flexing. Yeah, owned and operated is about to be—

Owned and operated, jacked edition.

Yeah, that's where we're going with this.

More like click to yoked.

We need a really good transition into that, so here we are.

Yeah, this is it. This is it, everyone. We are now a bodybuilding show.

Now, with all this, I do want to make a very clear— I want to speak directly to you, owner. This is not an excuse for you to not be good at marketing. Or customer acquisition. There is nothing, in my opinion— John, correct me if I'm wrong. I have been wrong at least once in my life. But there is nothing more important in your business than being good at customer acquisition. You must know this if you really want to get to that next level.

Yeah.

At some point, it won't be the only thing that you need to know. Like, at some point, you need to figure out how to scale yourself as an owner. and get yourself out of the weeds of managing the agency and holding them accountable. It's still your job, like you're still managing them through a marketing, marketing manager, but that is the number one thing is you want to be good at that and then put somebody in place to own that.

As Wilson has grown into a regional powerhouse, I have stopped having the time to be able to babysit our Google Business Profiles, and that's why we started using Big Reputation. It turns my Google Business Profile into a dependable lead engine without pulling me back into the weeds. Within the first 30 days of using Big Reputation, call volume from our Google Business Profiles went up nearly 27%. Jobs booked from Google also went up 20% without us spending any more time to manage it. It helps us keep our profile active, manages reviews, responds fast, and shows Google a business that's trusted, alive, and worth ranking. You also get real visibility into what is happening— your review volume, your sentiment trends, which techs, locations, or teams customers are actually talking about. There's no more guessing. So it's less babysitting, it's more signals to Google, and most importantly, it's more inbound calls. If you want Google working for you without becoming another job, check out bigreputation.ai. Let's talk, uh, who is that first person? Like, what's the title?

I, I think that you can go a couple different directions here. Uh, one, if you are paying too much, uh, for one specific service and you wanna cut those costs, I think that that is a place where you can go and hire one specific person to manage one thing. In those cases, you're probably looking at, uh, offshore talent. But I really think the first hire is a marketing manager. I think it's somebody that's job is to manage everything that you are already doing because it's going to make everything more effective. You, when you hire that marketing, if you hire the right person, if you hire the right person, then your, the channels that you've been using and dominating and winning should get better. Your PPC should get better. Your Facebook ads, your TikTok ads, your whatever it is, You should be better at managing the budget, getting more, a better cost per lead through these channels because you have somebody whose job is to hold agencies accountable and to make sure that that budget is going into the right channels to get you the most leads that turn into a return.

I think I agree. I think people start with a coordinator. My problem with a coordinator is marketing for our businesses isn't Complicated, like I've said, but it is expensive.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, like if a lead is $70, like somebody has to really care. And if you're spending $100,000 a month or $80,000 a month or $50,000 or like whatever it is, you are entrusting someone to manage that budget. I mean, that's essentially what they're managing is the budget and the process. And the problem with the coordinator is you've sort of like gone halfway in between. Like you don't have the expertise that you had at an agency, Maybe you have more focus, but it's also a lot of money and you're giving someone control over probably hundreds of thousands of dollars and with the guidance that you probably don't have, right? Like you probably aren't the owner, probably isn't like this rockstar marketing guru.

Yeah.

So I think that can be a little bit dangerous and Budget control, I definitely think is a manager hire. That's why we waited so late was we kept budgeting control. Like we had a few people help like emails and stuff, but like that's a very different thing than like controlling $1 million.

Mm-hmm.

I think what to look for. So with a coordinator, like obviously you can do it, but coordinators are usually just gonna coordinate. So they might be sending SMS campaigns, email, Maybe around arranging some outbound calling, reporting. Like if they can handle like reporting by lead source, so they can they can handle a lot of that stuff. Budget control is probably going to go to a manager. Like if you're talking about real dollars, that should probably be managed. And the the candidate that you're looking for, the people that I see that do the best are some version of a direct response. marketer. So that can look a few different ways. I've seen it a lot in affiliate.

Mm-hmm.

Like someone that can really— like affiliate for the layperson is like someone on Instagram says, hey, check out this, I don't know, Kohl's coupon or skincare product or whatever the hell. And then there's like a link in the bio and they get paid $5 for that affiliate link. And the reason I like that so much is because there's a very direct outcome. Like, I'm going to perform this action, I'm gonna talk about something and brand it, I'm gonna pay for ads to go to this page. And when someone does something, when I sell them that product via my TikTok or webpage or whatever it is, I get paid a commission. So it's very similar to how home service works. We're going to invest money into a lead, we're gonna drive that lead to our phone number, we're gonna drive it to our website, we're gonna drive it to our socials, We need something to happen there. They're gonna book the call, they're gonna do something, and the outcome should be revenue after selling it. So I found that that has really worked, and for our business, but for other friends' businesses who've also hired that type of background, very direct response. I do X, I get X.

Mm-hmm.

That is like a perfect candidate for this type of role. The candidates that I think tend to struggle are more ethereal type of marketing. So we were, like, I've talked with people that are probably really talented in the right setting. It's just like, this isn't the right setting. And they were really good at like graphic design. They had an incredible sense of design and they could do branding like nobody's business. And that certainly would be helpful, but that's not going to drive the business today, tomorrow, or the next day.

No.

The same way that a direct response type marketer would. And that if you put up a position posting on Indeed, direct response marketing could be a way to put it, affiliate marketer, you could put it a lot of different ways, but you will probably get people that, we've had a lot of people apply to marketing positions over the past for, hey, paid lead specialist, that'll be the title. Paid lead specialist. And, uh, we'll get videographers who are probably incredible at their craft, but that is a very different thing. Um, yes, they've touched marketing. Yes, they've been around it. But managing $1 million versus not is, is different things. And knowing the outcome, how to measure it, how to tweak it to drive better performance. So that's what we've seen as being, uh, successful.

I like it when somebody, for a marketing manager who has had experience in running campaigns or working with a team that has run campaigns. That's not too hard to find if they've worked at an agency before. Somebody that has been a part of a team that's run Google Ads and SEO, uh, can translate really well. And I would even say it doesn't necessarily have to be in home service because—

Oh yeah.

Home service is, you know, like you say, it's not, it's not overly complex. In comparison to some of the— It's just expensive. It's just expensive. So, somebody that has—

Yeah. I mean, guys that I know were like affiliate or like, hey, mortgage affiliate brokers was really interesting. I have a friend that hired somebody out of that industry. Insurance was interesting. Like, hey, I have to go market this insurance company and like I only get paid when someone buys their insurance product. Like, that guy's going to eat what he kills. Like, that's a perfect candidate.

Right, exactly. That's going to work really well. People that have, who have had almost a— I think you could do really well with somebody that has account management experience. So somebody that's worked at an agency that has worked directly with clients, they may not have the exact experience on running a paid account or an SEO campaign, but they have worked with those teams. So, they know how to ask the right questions. They know what they're looking for.

Yeah.

It's very similar to when I'm looking for a website project manager. I don't need them to have the development experience. In fact, I don't really want them to be developers. I want them to be able to look at the developers and go, what do you need to make this happen?

Great.

Let me connect those two, which might go into the coordinating. But I think the big thing you want to get away from is the more visual design manager, somebody that just wants to help you with branding. We specifically want somebody that understands the lead is the only thing that matters. How do we get more of those? And I can work with other companies, or if that's not working, I'm willing to get my hands dirty and go do it myself.

Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree.

One of the questions you might be asking is like, where do I go and find this? And I think depending on like where you're at in your business, you might go a couple different ways. One bucket is to just throw on ads. And I personally, I'm going to— when we throw on ads to go find marketing talent, we looked at— we look at LinkedIn and Indeed. I personally like Indeed— or excuse me, LinkedIn better. So go onto your LinkedIn, You'll see the For Business tab. You drop that down, it says Hire on LinkedIn. You want to go through those steps to hire somebody. If you are looking in— if you're, if you're, if you're looking for somebody like, I want to go a little bit cheaper and more affordable but still get good results, and you're looking offshore, uh, LATAM is really talented right now for finding marketing managers, people that have experience managing campaigns. You can find really good project managers there. I like Brazil, I like Colombia, I like Costa Rica. There's a couple different places there that you can find really talented team members there. You can run LinkedIn ads, have some conversations. My suggestion, if you're going to do this, or at least here's what we do, is when we're running these ad— these LinkedIn ads, we will then go through and try to find the people that are really qualified or kind of qualified. And then we ask them to give us a Loom video. In that Loom video, we want to know who you are. We ask you 3 questions on how you are going to attack this specific position. Like, uh, if you're looking for a marketing manager, tell us about a time that you were managing a budget. Uh, how do you, in a situation when there's not enough leads, go get more leads, things like that. And then the last question is like, well, what are you looking for in a company? Once we get all of those, I then want to look for one, do I want to work with this person? Is their, you know, communication good enough to be able to work with? And then we go into the interview process. We ask them even tougher questions to try to weed out people that are just pretending, people that are just fluff. And at that point, we then, uh, we then look to hire. The only thing I have done with a lot of success is the Kobe test. It's like a quiz where it figures out, kind of like a personality test, but it's more about how you work. And I have found that when I have people take this Kobe test, K-O-B-E, it is really successful on finding me the right person to do that. Now, That's if you're looking, hey, I want to go hire this person. The other 2 places I would look, one is agencies. You can find a lot of really good talent there to go, you know, get from. And the other one would be other home service businesses. These again will be like your main like marketing people. I would not hire like a director of marketing for your entire business, your hopes to really like grow your company in a big way and completely own it, I think that's, that's a completely different story than just a marketing manager to come manage your budget and your relationships with your clients— or excuse me, your relationships with your agencies.

I think I'm going to give a plug. My buddy Jack runs Quick Staffers and they do a good job. We actually just hired an assistant controller Oh, nice. From LATAM out of there, which was really cool. So good spot to look if you're thinking about offshoring and you don't know where to start. Good spot to think about.

100%. I've actually heard a couple clients say really good things about Quickstaffers. Do they do marketing managers?

I think so. They started in the call center and we have like, I think, 4, 3 or 4 call center reps from them. And then we asked them to help us locate Assistant controller, and they did. Like, the candidate was freaking awesome. We hired him yesterday. So I would assume they could do marketing manager. I don't really know, but like, those are the only 2 that I've focused on right now, but worth a shot.

100%. What I've liked from what I've heard on ClickStaffers is the people that you get are already trained to do the job. So it really is like kind of a plug and play. type of situation, at least for the call center. We like working with companies like that because we know that their SDRs, their call centers, already trained, which is a big problem that we, we've come up against all the time, is driving leads and not knowing what happens afterwards, or, you know, being sent to just a random admin who's never been trained to turn that into an appointment. That's where it's like, that's really hard for an agency. To overcome, insert marketing manager, insert somebody that already has that experience to help take that to the next level. I mean, that's what you want.

Yeah, yeah. Good, good spots to start for sure. Are you still missing calls after hours or losing leads while your team sleeps? That's why we work with Avoca AI, owned and operated exclusive call center partner. They answer 24/7, sound like a real human, and. plug straight into your CRM to book jobs, send quotes, and even revive old leads. There are plenty of AI call centers out there, but we trust Avoca because we've seen the results firsthand. More booked jobs, less wasted spend, and no more missed revenue. See it in action at the link below. Start winning more jobs today with Avoca.

Only other plug I would just throw in there is that we are holding an event early March right now. Dates will be probably live by the time that this podcast goes live.

Yeah, I would imagine.

We're looking at like the 2nd of March. where we are going to hold an event. Actually, I don't know if you know this, in your building. I've been working with your team.

Kristen told me yesterday.

Did she? Great.

She's like, oh yeah, by the way.

Yeah, we've just been working with Kristen this whole time. And it's called Booked Solid, where we're gonna come in and teach everything, everything we possibly can. So we're gonna teach you everything about PPC, LSA, GBP, budgeting, to, you know, how to hire your marketing manager, All of these topics in person, in details where you can ask questions so that you can figure out what, what the heck is PPC? Like, how should I be thinking about this? How do I get the most out of this? Uh, how do I set up my marketing in a way that builds out a funnel so I know how to get a return on my ad spend? We're gonna be doing this, uh, it's gonna be 2 days, no fluff, really trying to get into the nitty-gritty. So would love to see you there. And if you have a marketing manager, that'd be a great place to bring them as well so that we can teach them the different things. If again, if they don't have specific experience in one of those categories.

Yeah, the name is dope and apparently I'm pumped to see everybody. Sounds like fun.

Well, you know, early March, John, I'll be in your area.

Well, thanks everybody for tuning in today. For click-to-calls, this has been a lot of fun. I'm really glad that people are getting like a bunch of help out of this. This is one of our most asked questions: is when is my first marketing hire? What's the right time? Who am I looking for? So I hope we answered a bunch of those questions today. If you have any more questions on this topic or any others, make sure you comment it below. We do read them, and we are building this series based off of listener feedback. Also, make sure you give us a five-star. Review wherever it is that you listen to podcasts and hit that like and sub button. We are super grateful.