In this live episode of Lazy Leverage, host Jon (Speaker A) and guest Peter Lohmann discuss the challenges of marketing and growth in property‑management, home‑services, and home‑improvement businesses. The conversation opens with personal anecdotes about sleep deprivation and a car‑mirror mishap, then pivots to a deep dive into why traditional outbound tactics (cold‑calling, webinars, deadline‑driven sales scripts) are failing for property‑management firms. Peter shares data from monthly webinars—250 live attendees for a spur‑of‑the‑moment property‑management audience versus 20‑plus for a heavily promoted series—illustrating the limits of demand generation when prospects aren’t actively searching. They contrast the long payback periods and low CAC‑to‑LTV ratios of property‑management with the faster, higher‑ticket, demand‑driven dynamics of home‑services (plumbing, HVAC) and home‑improvement (kitchens, decks). The duo explores acquisition as a growth lever for property‑management, the role of branding versus direct‑response, and how competitive intelligence (monitoring consolidators, billboards, farmer‑market flyers) can surface viable channels. They also map the buyer’s journey (unaware → problem‑aware → solution‑aware) and discuss how messaging must align with where prospects sit in that pyramid. Throughout, they emphasize testing channel longevity, learning from other sectors, and pairing inbound education with outbound outreach to improve CAC, LTV, and overall growth. Key takeaways: 1. Outbound cold‑calling rarely works for low‑intent, high‑stickiness services like property‑management; focus on capturing problem‑aware prospects via search‑driven ads and content. 2. Home‑services thrive on urgent, need‑based demand; home‑improvement relies on brand‑building and demand creation. 3. Acquisition of existing portfolios can shortcut long payback periods in property‑management. 4. Competitive intelligence—tracking consolidators, channel experiments, and duration of campaigns—helps identify truly effective marketing tactics. 5. Align messaging to the buyer’s stage (unaware, problem‑aware, solution‑aware) to improve conversion. 6. Pairing a high‑margin, low‑effort lead source (handyman) with a higher‑margin, higher‑effort core offering (garage remodel) can boost overall profitability.
Chapters
I'm well. Uh, my little ones are starting to sleep in bigger chunks, so it's like a gray fog is slowly being lifted. I backed my car out of the garage the other day and just clipped off the rearview mirror because I hadn't slept in like 3 days. Oh my— just completely nuked it.
My dad did that. My dad did that when we were kids. He was in a bad mood one morning, and he, he would always leave at like 6:30 in the morning for work, and he just slammed that thing in reverse and floored it, and he rocked the side of the garage so hard with that mirror that the whole house shook.
It's unbelievable. I was just so tired. I had gotten like 5 hours of sleep over the last 3 days. Yeah, just nuked it. So yeah, man, other than that, doing good.
So, uh, shouldn't your vehicle be smart enough to back itself out or something like that?
Theoretically. I don't know, I'm so tired. I'm just now like not in the pain cave. I'm only like mildly in pain. So we're getting there. I mean, if we get up twice in a night, it's a great night.
So how many weeks old?
Almost 6 months.
Okay.
So they're emerging from it. So, so today we are talking about marketing. Why don't you tee us off since you had a lot of energy when we started?
Yeah. Let's get into it right off, right off the rip. So I was just talking with Andrew, my marketing guy, um, who does all marketing for me across multiple businesses now. And We were discussing the fact we've been running these client and prospect webinars at RL once a month all year. So we, we've done 7 of them now. And by the way, I just came off a live webinar that I did for sort of my other audience, which is property management business owners, and we had 250 live attendees. Yeah, we're going to talk about this, which I just spun up in 2 seconds. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It was like barely promoted. Meanwhile, we've been running this webinar at RL Property Management for property owners all year, every month, heavily promoted across multiple channels, and we barely— it's crickets. We get maybe 20 live attendees, half of them are my employees. We get another 15 replays or whatever. And so I was just talking with him like, you know, I'm really feeling like this isn't worth it. And I started pulling a couple threads together. One is our outbound marketing efforts also stopped working completely, if they ever were. So we've, we've shut off our outbound marketing motion and we also experimented with a couple different, um, sort of like deadline-driven sales tactics once we got on the phone with somebody and my BDM, my salesperson reports that they really didn't move the needle at all. She tried a couple different things and a few different ways and she's just like, it's just not, you know, some of these people signed up, but I could tell they were going to sign up anyway. And other people just, it didn't even. It bounced right off of them. So I was kind of relaying this back to you that we're sort of making this discovery that it seems like when someone's ready to hire a property manager, they are ready to hire a property manager. But if they're not like actively searching and Googling for property managers, no amount of cold calling or education is going to convince them to sign up if they're not at that point. And you said something kind of funny, right, right in reply, which I thought was great, which was what? You're muted.
You can't cold call somebody and say, hey, do you have any leaky pipes?
That's such a funny image, the idea of plumbing companies cold calling. Hey, hey, anything leaking? How's your plumbing? I mean, is it good? Are you sure? I don't know.
Like, yeah, you want to check?
Yeah, you want to come by and just look at everything?
Yeah, but, but it's, it, it's you know, reductum ad absurdum, right? Um, which is reduced to absurdity. Yeah, it's reductum ad absurdum, reduced to the point of absurdity.
Yeah, correct.
It's what lawyers do, which is, so you're telling me that based on this logic— and then you take it all the way to the logical— it's a, it's a rhetorical device, right? It's the same idea. And so I think, I think there are lots of implications for this dynamic, even so much as that dynamic that you mentioned is actually one of the reasons why people acquire property management companies, because inorganic growth is easier than demand generation in property management. So you're better off just acquiring 150-door chunks than you are versus something like, say, solar, where there is demand generation. You can do door knocking and cold calling and direct mail. It's less— I think this may or may not be a real-world acquisitive, Is acquisitive a word?
Acquisitive is a word, yes.
Meaning there are less acquisitions in certain parts of the ecosystem because you just, dude, I'd rather just go hire 15 cold callers and rip the neighborhood. I don't need to buy the customers from you. Also, given the nature of the revenue, is it recurrent or reoccurrent or project-based? So I think there's a lot of implications to the way that you acquire customers. What channels you use, what your CAC to LTV is, what your intro offer is, what your value— I mean, all that stuff. I think it all comes from that core premise.
Yeah, property management has a really long payback period as well. Um, I'm, I'm thinking about other world— other scenarios like realtors cold call. Yeah. Um, and one would think that the, the idea of selling your home would not be affected in any meaningful way by a cold call from a realtor you've never met.
Could though. Hey, we see lots of buyers in your area. Would you be open. Yeah, I mean, I could see that.
Yeah, but the other thing about that I think makes that work out is that the payback period is so fast. Like, if someone is going to sell their home and you end up getting a listing agreement after 2 weeks and they sell it 60 days later, you make all your money and then some. Whereas in property management, um, unless you charge leasing fees, which you don't do— well, leasing fees help for sure, but even then, I mean, yes.
Yeah, I am not a property manager and I now know that you can recover your cat quickly with I don't even know, barely know what that means, but I've talked to you so much.
But most time, you know, even then you're still talking about a multi-year payback period because our monthly fee is so small. Yeah. Uh, relative to the, you know, the effort expended. I always, I always use a back-of-the-envelope estimation that we lose money the first year we manage any property. I don't care. I didn't care any bit, any of the details. It's years 2 through 5 that we actually turn a profit.
So, wow, that's crazy. But it's super sticky, right?
Super sticky. Annual—
yeah, your annual renewals are super high. And so it's like easy come, easy go.
Yeah, right.
I mean, I think, I think the dynamics of that too, and I was talking about this on the last pod, uh, which hasn't been published yet, just on my Twitter with Isaac Zimmerman, uh, who runs J. Blanton Plumbing, a very successful plumbing company that he's grown. Uh, I, I, I used this analogy with him in the last episode about the difference between home services and home improvement. And I said, this is so— everybody uses those interchangeably, and that's really dumb. Home services in— I'm gonna speak broadly here. Home services: electrical, plumbing, HVAC, um, even a handyman you could put in home services. Okay, here's the hard part about home services, uh, you have to meet the demand, right? Meaning, um, when they need a plumber at 2 in the morning, it's extremely time-consuming. Yeah, right. Extremely time-sensitive. Generally speaking, the constraint is skilled labor. You only have so many electricians, so many plumbers, so many whatever. So you have to be open to that game. And generally speaking, it's lower ticket, right? But it's usually a need, not a want. And they're, they're valued. They tend to be valued higher because there's more recurrent revenue models associated with it. It's just, you know, once you get somebody on an HVAC maintenance plan, they're not fucking going anywhere. Right? Broadly, not 100% of the time, but broadly speaking, I would argue, uh, that that is a search-driven— people are problem aware and then they go out looking for the solution. And that is things like Google PPC. So the clicks are more expensive. Property manager Columbus, Ohio is an expensive click, but when somebody clicks that, they're not there looking for a Buick. Yeah, right. They're there, they are problem aware, and they're like solution shopping, and they're going to make make a decision by today. Right? So you have to kind of be there. Now, the way you grow those companies, which our friend Rich Jordan has done, one of the ways other than meeting demand, of course, is branding, which is we do billboards so that when they're driving, they're like, shit, my air conditioner has been making a rattling sound. And you blow out brand, brand, brand, because you can't do just direct response marketing for the exact reason you said. Comparatively, home improvement, which is what I did, is is not necessary. That's kitchen cabinets, that's, um, decks, patios, garages. Yeah, uh, all that stuff. That to me, way higher ticket, way higher ticket, meaning it's a 30G, it's a 50G.
Yeah, right.
It's usually project-based. There are less demands on skilled labor usually, right? It's easier to get cabinet installers than it is to get a master HVAC technician.
Broadly, you can schedule it out.
Schedule it out, but it's demand creation, which is in many cases they're not even problem aware. So there is some traffic when people say, you know, new deck San Diego, there's some traffic there. But your real thing is agitating the pain through things like Facebook, which is like, you know, we ran a campaign at GarageXL, which is, do you have garage embarrassment syndrome? And it was, you know, afraid to open up your garage door. Your neighbors will judge you, you know, call the experts, be proud of your garage. They didn't know that they needed a new garage until I said, look at this ugly garage.
You order.
And that is a much more marketing-heavy game, much more sales-focused, you know, doing things like price drops and, you know, two-for-ones. You don't do that shit with plumbing. In plumbing, it's like, yeah, dude, I unclogged your drain. And by the way, do you want like a maintenance plan? So it's a less sales-intensive exercise.
Yeah.
But that's, that's a broadly like a very rough way that I think about it. And there's advantages and disadvantages to both. I actually think the best thing is to pair the first with the second. So if I would have stayed in the garage business, I was going to start a handyman business. I was going to start a handyman business because there's unlimited demand for handymen and use that just as lead gen for the garage business and say, like, look, I keep my handyman busy. And as they're walking through the house, you go, oh, by the way, I noticed your garage is dirty. Do you want a free design? And so I can run that at even because it's easier to get in the house like that and then run that at even or at a small margin. Which is never that exciting of a concept. Who the hell cares about handyman? But if 1 out of 10 appointments they generate a $30,000 garage sale at 60% gross margins, that is a take over the world model.
Yeah.
So, so that's how I, you know, that's like a broad-based way of how I think about this, at least in our sector, which is kind of like stuff in the home, home improvement. I'm sure that there's— I'm kind of butchering some of the concepts, but whatever. That's how I think about it. I'm doing this off the top of my head.
Yeah, that all makes sense. And hearing you distill it that way, it's so clear. And I sort of wish I could have read something about this a long time ago, because what ends up happening is when you're operating in an industry like, like I did in property management, you're just— you only ever run into other property managers for the most part, and they don't have the context to articulate what you just did because they're, they've not operated across multiple sectors. And so we have ideas about things that work in marketing and things that don't, but we don't have the broader context into which, into which we can hang those ideas. And more importantly, we then don't have the, the larger layer of understanding that would allow us to innovate in marketing very effectively. Instead, we kind of go down these blind alleys like outbound marketing, figure out it doesn't work, and then every 5 years some guy tries it again and posts about it and like You know, you know what I'm saying? Like, I wish there was like a—
you're not, you're not gonna find the answer within property management, right? What you're saying, you're gonna find the answer to a new channel in something Rich is doing or something I'm doing or something. It's not going to be within that because it's time-tested, right? Or it's— yeah, those are kind of well-worn paths, I'd say.
Yeah. And anything that works gets, um, gets immediately vacuumed up and, and, you know, it's all, it's all absorbed into the capitalistic soup of competitive, you know, dynamics.
And although less so with geographically, uh, geographically bound businesses, it's in something like global talent, absolutely, where it's the internet, there's no real, you know, geographic— but something— I mean, how many sophisticated marketers in the Columbus property management market are there?
Well, what's going on right now though is, and has been for years, these large groups, consolidators. Yeah, consolidators. They have a presence now. The largest one has a presence in over 50 markets. Including Columbus. And so when the big dog starts doing the A, B, or C marketing tactic, it immediately reverberates throughout many local markets, and then everyone has to end up adapting. So the cycle is much faster now, I think, than it used to be.
I think that we're going to re-circle back to a concept I talk about though, but even that to me is an opportunity in terms of market development in that— and I wrote a newsletter about this, but we've talked about this— which is like the 3 value disciplines about customer intimacy, product innovation, or operational excellence, which is Okay, you're tracking these competitors and you're seeing that they're doing a lot of billboards. They're not idiots. And so if billboards work, I think you have to ask yourself the question, how well do you stack up to them? Because if they crack a channel, one of the best places for you to find new channels is them. And you look at them and they're like, wow, they're at every farmer's market. They're at every farmer's market. They have a 25-year-old person just handing out flyers at farmer's market. That's probably because it's working for them. And we know that toe to toe on a bake-off, we kick their ass. 'cause we're local, we're 20 years old and they're a year old, whatever. And so at least depending on how you feel like you position against them, that's also a wonderful source of channels is the consolidators, right? Like, Sagan has stayed off Facebook because I've watched Huber try to make Facebook ads work for 3 years. I watched them turn it on and then I watched them run a bunch of ad sets and then I watched them turn it all off 'cause it's just like, we're doing Facebook 'cause we need to grow beyond Huber's Twitter. And then I watched them after about 60 days, turn 'em all off and then they try new ones every time and it doesn't work. I'm watching them do it in real time. Yeah, I don't just watch them. We have an organization that does this.
But how do you know? It's just you, just 15 monitors, all Huber's Facebook.
Yeah, it's not just Huber, by the way, but we watch them because we want to see what they're doing.
But how do you distinguish between a company that's doing what you just described, which is kind of shot in the dark or spaghetti on the wall, versus a channel that's actually working for them?
Uh, Lindy, how long, how long have they been doing it for?
Okay.
That's easy. That, that's super easy. You don't do it the first time, which is it's a Facebook ad that got positive 3 days ago. Eh, it's an ad set that you've been seeing for the last year and they've just been running variations on that. You don't run Facebook clicks for a year. So it's all, um, how, how long they've been running it for. Not the first instance.
Yeah.
But that's like a good, good competitive intelligence program. The thing too, that, that's just a review here in ca— I think you know this of course, but in case people listening don't, unaware of the problem, problem aware, information gathering stage, top of mind. That is the journey of a buyer. So unaware of the problem. Did you know this?
I have something funny to report. I have to interject.
Okay, please.
Having done nothing, Facebook is now working and we have 4 live viewers. So the secret is just do nothing and it actually works. So hello to everyone watching live. We have 2 live viewers on my YouTube as well.
Oh, got it. Okay, cool.
All right.
Um, I didn't understand what you're saying. Okay. Uh, I, I— making sure that you understand when you're looking at your ICP or your avatar, which I use interchangeably, which I shouldn't, but are they unaware of the problem? They didn't even realize that they need property management. They're problem aware, which is my cell phone's been bugging off the hook, I really need a problem manager, a property manager. Are they solution aware, which is I'm shopping and I've called 3 other Columbus area property managers, or like, I'm, I'm buying and it's just, you know. And so I think your messaging needs to be— your messaging needs to be— it's very different based on where you think the majority are. I suspect your folks are probably solution aware. They understand that property management by a third party is a thing. Right? So when you market to them, you're not trying to bring new people into the property management market, right?
There's a fantastic image that shows this. It's called the buyer's pyramid. Yeah, I'm gonna pull it up right now and just share it because I think it's really relevant. Um, and this is what I had been thinking about when I was starting to do cold calling and stuff, is I was like, okay, great, The 3%, you know, those are the people that are reaching out to us and we're getting calls inbound, you know, from the 3%. I want to get— I want to get in front of the 7% and the 30%. How can I do cold calling or do outbound or do, you know, webinars, educational content to try and reach these people? That was my thought process and it seemed really well thought out. And there's a bunch of other thought leaders in our space who have kind of articulated the same thing. But it just didn't work. And so I think this goes back to what we were saying earlier about like, I was trying it because I'd heard about other people in my industry and they, they showed this graphic and I was like, yeah, that makes logical sense. But when you, when you say you don't— plumbers don't cold call and say, do you have a leaky pipe? I'm like, okay, I get it. Like there's nuance here that isn't captured in this image.
But here I don't want to say but, but let's build up, let's tease that idea a little bit because there are absolutely other ways to do this, meaning you can build your database via— or you can even make money with
