Growing A Business Through An Email Newsletter With Alec Stevanovski

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we have Alec Stevanosky with us. We're going to be discussing utilizing an industry specific email newsletter, ways you can use email newsletters to even grow your business. Thanks so much for joining us, Alec. I appreciate it, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Phil.

Yeah. Okay, so if you could take us back. You were working at Pacer, is that right?

Yes.

Yeah. And you were working. You were selling to H Vac contractors, I believe, the. Their software platform, is that right?

That's correct, yeah. So Pacer is ultimately a software company. And so our product was really an end to end business management system. So we helped contractors schedule appointments, send out estimates, invoices, process payments, and a number of other things. But. Yes.

So you were selling to H Vac contractors and then you realized that there's no media outlet or newsletter for these guys. Is that kind of how it progressed?

Yeah, so I was there. I was at Pazer for three years total. And two of those years I spent on the sales, like the direct contractor sales team is what we called it. And I started paying attention a lot to the industries because I would hear contractors that we were selling to talk about their problems and what they were experiencing in the industry, what they were thinking about. And so I got curious to research and try to understand which outlets existed that covered all of that from a media standpoint to keep people that were owners and managers, like, informed on all these developments that were going on. And so that was where I saw, like, it's not that there weren't any that existed, but there were a handful, really just a small handful of companies that were primarily print publishers that had been around for a number of decades. And that's really it. And so I guess without. I can go into a million reasons, but like, I just. That was ultimately what I found.

Yeah. And. And so then you're like, well, someone should make this thing. And so how did you. How did you, like, did you. Did you. Do you still work at Pacer? Or are you like, hey, like, how did you make that transition? Or the decision to.

Yeah, yeah. So. So I'm not there anymore. No. So I left about. I mean, keep in mind, this is extremely. So I'm like, really in the weeds of like, building.

Yeah, yeah.

So, like, it by no means have I, like, there's still so much that I haven't done. I'm trying to figure out day to day. But I did leave PACER. So I left about 7ish. Months ago or something like that. And I mean the decision itself, I knew that I had really marinated over this whole thing for like a year. So this was like way before, like I actually left that I was like talking about this with some people intern at Pacer and like just around me. And after again, a give or take a year, I was like, okay, I think like I want to go do this. I've been thinking about it for a year. And so I left and set it up. Got a part time job just to literally pay my bills and break even every month so that I could spend all my other time, you know, building. Building out the newsletter and trying to figure out, you know, build out that business. And so that's, that's how I looked at the, at the decision and did that. But I left about. Yeah, seven months ago.

Nice, man. It's so, so crazy to hear that because I kind of had a similar situation. I started a blog and email newsletter and stuff like in 2015. And it was about personal finance. Nothing. And in my day job I was selling fleet management services to H vac contractors. And when I would be meeting with the business owners, I'd be like, so what are you guys doing for marketing? Because I knew like SEO and all this stuff and they were like, I don't really know, you know. And then I ended up going and working at an H Vac at a duct cleaning company for. And I'm in there and I'm like, dude, like there's so many things that we could do from a marketing perspective and we implement a lot of stuff. And then he was like, dude, you should go be a consultant. And he kind of like pushed me to start a consulting company. And then it took like, kind of like a similar trajectory. Like I saw that these people have an issue. I was selling to them, I knew what their problems were and then, hey, here's a solution that we can make.

Totally. Yeah. That's awesome.

So. So what's your background with media? Like how did you. How do you even know like what to write or how to write?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So a couple. Well, I guess so. Media. I don't have a background in meat in the media business. Like, I've never worked for a publishing company or another media company. Writing specifically has been something that I personally have done for years just as an outlet to just express myself and just to kind of get my thoughts out and stuff. So I actually love. Writing is like a hobby of mine. I do it all the time. I love doing It So I knew that going into it was like an advantage a little bit because the actual work itself I can do and I know how to do at least I think decently. Well.

Yeah.

Now as for like what to write, I think initially it was I have some data now to understand like what. Which kind of stories resonate more with contractors and which don't as much. But what to write started with my gut really. And that was based though on my three years at pacer, like just talking to contractors every day trying like knowing what things they care about, what things they don't care about, what do they think about on the day to day. And I just, I had some like initial idea of what the big things were that like that was the start. So that's how I knew at least, at least the start what to write about. But then yeah, the actual writing itself, I enjoy the writing itself.

Okay, what would you say are some of those things that you see the data is like pinging on like AI and technology stuff or what? What are you seeing?

Yeah, so mostly so yeah, the breakdown is like and is most, most engagement are what I define as a couple categories. There's economic related articles which that could be everything like mergers and acquisitions and who's buying who. That's what's happening with lenders in the space and how does that impact and the economy and how does that impact consumer financing, approval rates and inflation and costs in supply chain and labor. So I bucket all that under economy. So those types of stories are popular because they resonate with contractors day to day and also from a high level. Okay, what's going on so that I can understand how this impacts me day to day and how it will impact me down the road. So those stories do well. Technology like you said, does well.

Yeah.

So things like AI and trying to understand what the software companies are doing, those stories do well. Manage business. I found one thing that surprised me. So when I first start, when I like day one, I was like we're not going to do any business management type stories like in terms of like here's how to operate a company day to day. I just, I wanted to be more business news high level. That was totally wrong. I realized that really quickly that people really resonate with stuff that they can implement right away if they can take a nugget from an article or something like that. So business management related stories like really in depth, how to operate, you know, how to control your inventory costs or here's how contractor X does this. Like people love that. Then the Fourth category is what I consider legal. And so that's all everything around government rebates, incentives, legislation, regulation, etc. And it's funny. So it's actually funny. What I've, what I've learned from that is, again, this is just at least so far, so things could change. It could sway. With the more data I collect, it could sway. But, like, the legal stuff is super contractors think it's. They believe that it's super important because it is like they have to follow certain regulations or whatever, but it gets the least engagement. And so it's like it ranks high on importance, but then in terms of engagement, it ranks lower. And I think a large. I'm still, I'm trying to still think through why that is, but I think so far, like a big part of that is because at least on the, for example, the Inflation Reduction act. And we can talk about this if you'd like, but like, there are rebates that are getting rolled out across the country, state by state. Well, there's a lot of details that haven't been ironed out yet. And so I think contractors look at that and they just say, okay, well, this is cool, I need to know it. But, like, until I have very clearly defined rules for my state, like, it doesn't, I can't do anything. So I think that's a part of it.

Yeah, it's of high importance. But it's also the minutiae to like, weed through all this stuff and figure out what's going to be effective for me is like, do I really want to spend my time doing this? Like, maybe before I go to bed to fall asleep or something?

Right? Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah.

So one of the things, I think. So the business owners that listen to this show, a lot of them, they should, because we talk about a lot like retargeting your customers, retargeting your prospects that have come through your funnel into a newsletter of some sort, whether it's monthly or quarterly. I think you did mention something that's extremely important, is that those nuggets, those takeaways of things that, whether it's in yours, which is to business owners, or if a business owner and you're sending it out to all your customers and prospects, you got to give them something that they can take away and say, I, I want to subscribe to this. I want to read this every single month because there's something that I should get away from this.

Right.

And to your point, it's nice to get a rundown of all the news or what's happening in my local area or something. But it's another thing to actually add value. And how can you do that? You could give them something that they could take away and like it helps them. Yeah, the other, sorry, the other thing that I wanted to ask you about, I think you send yours out on Tuesdays, right. Your newsletter right now, have you found that that's when you get the best open rates or is there any calculation or stuff to that?

Yeah, so I've looked a little bit into day, like timing from a day perspective and also time of day standpoint. Right now it's just, you know, I picked Tuesday because I figured I just kind of pulled it out of thin air at the beginning. I just said, look, Monday people get in from the weekend so they might have a lot to catch up on. So I'm not gonna do Monday. Tuesday is kind of the day that people are really sort of starting like in the, like they're in the groove officially of the week or like right about to do that. And so I just, I don't know, there wasn't really much logic behind. I just pulled it out of thin air. There is some data on that I've looked into on open rates and engagement per day and then time. I'm not paying too much attention to it right now because ultimately long term for our business to be successful, we have to end up publishing way more than just once a week. And so ultimately it's not going to matter because it'll be more close to every day.

Yeah. What we found as a business is we probably send out, I would say over 300,000 emails a month for all of our customers. And so we found that Tuesdays at 10am and Thursdays at 10am are ready to roll. Like we have some of the newsletters that we run point on for companies and they get 50, 60, 70 open rates.

Yeah.

And so definitely that would be the time. The worst time is like Friday afternoon, Saturdays, Monday mornings. To your point. I think definitely if you, if you have a newsletter or email newsletter, there's really like kind of a couple of things you got to focus on like your open rate. You mentioned that your click through rates and open rates could be like your subject line is terrible. Do you have any tricks or anything for subject lines? Do you have any testers or anything or.

Yeah, so. So I, I haven't done a ton of AB testing, but I do, I have a couple simple principles that I stick to really. And really the. Well, I guess one big one which is just. I don't, I, I do. I'm very intentional about not making them that long. So subject lines are, I mean, they're never more than, I don't know, seven words or something like that. Exact number. I don't know. But like, they're just. I always keep them sweet and short and sweet. I've noticed. I've tested with emojis or tested emojis in the beginning of subject lines. And so that's the big one. I mean, I just, I try to keep it very simple, short and sweet from a subject line standpoint.

Yeah, we have a subject line tester that we use. It's called Omnisend. Okay.com subject line tester. I can send it to you after this. But for people listening to Omnisend.com subject line Tester, it's free. We actually have it in our standard operating procedure and we test on that. And it, to your point, Alec, it tells you like, okay, this is longer than seven words, which, that is one of the points. You're not using a number in there. You know, there's a bunch of different things and it will give you recommendations to make it better and it will score it out of 100%.

Nice. That'd be great.

Yeah, that, that works really good for open rates. And like I said, we have people that get 70 open rates on some of their email newsletters, so. Cool. Okay, so. So, so you're working at pacer. You said there's an opportunity here. How did you. I think when we were chatting before, I mentioned about Sam Par and my first million guys and like Morning Brew and the Hustle and all this stuff, was that like in. Are you listening to those podcasts and you're like, hey, we should do something like this for my industry? Or how did that come. How did you come about.

Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think so. I'd always. So at the same time that I started thinking about the industries and like trying to like study them and try to figure out what the industry specific media landscape was like. I started studying digital media in general, so started studying companies like the Hustle and Sam Par and what he does and Morning Brew and Politico and Axios, et cetera, et cetera. I've always been a big news consumer myself, so I was pretty familiar with all those companies in general. I just did more of a deep dive on them at that point. And so I did learn a number of things from doing that, which is like, oh my God, I learned so much and I'm still learning so much. I'm still doing all the same thing. I'm still researching and trying to figure all this stuff out. But a couple things that I picked up from that one is there's a big difference between consumer media companies and business media companies. So consumer media company is like the morning brew, for example, or the hustle where it's a, you know, you're reaching a, you know, consumer and you're, you're ultimately giving them general news, general business news. Well, business media is industry specific. So that could be like if you're a healthcare executive and you read a healthcare publication or if you're a, I don't know, if you're a C suite banking executive, you read certain banking publications like you might read Bloomberg and you know, Times. And I learned that business media is, in my opinion. The conclusion I came to is that business media is much better place to be than consumer media. Not that consumer media is bad, but just that for example, in business media you don't need 5 million readers to build a big business. You might need 100,000 of them. Because the, from a revenue standpoint, the advertising rates that you can charge vendors or that vendors will pay to get in front of those executives are multiples more and multiples higher than consumers in the consumer media business. So I learned that, I mean, I learned so many things. Distribution. Yeah, all this stuff.

And I would completely agree with you that a lot of times companies, when we partner with them, we say, hey, we gotta do some email retargeting, email newsletter to your past customers. And they might have a thousand people or 500 people or 5,000 people. And just even if they only have a thousand people and they get a 30% open rate, you're getting in front of 300 people. And of those 300 people, let's say even 10, 10% of them, 30 people need your stuff and your average ticket is a thousand dollars. Like you just made $30,000.

Right.

So to your point, there's a lot of opportunity and I think people get so nervous. When I had my blog, I had like 600 subscribers or something, but I still had affiliate there and other things that I was working because like if you have an audience that is into your stuff, it doesn't matter about this huge size. It more matters about engagement and trust, I imagine, right.

And the right people, you know, so like you can have a list of, you know, if you're trying to, like for example, in your case, your personal finance, I don't know who your, your readers Were. But, like, I'm just. I'm gonna. I'm gonna twist your story. Let's pretend that you had a thing that was geared towards, like, bankers, for example. Like, it's one. It. It's one thing to say, oh, my list has grown to, you know, 26,000 people or whatever, but if it's just people that. If it's like me reading it, like your thing, like, that's not. It's more important for you to have a thousand banking executives than it is 10,000. Like, you know, just random people. Yeah, so.

So I got a question about that. I think, like, substack or something or those types of things are. Do they help you with targeting the right subscribers or how does that work? Do you use a platform like that?

Yeah. Great. Yeah. So I use. I don't use. I use Beehive, not substack. So beehive. And they don't necessarily. I mean, at least in my case, they don't help, like, go reach the right people, but they, they do have certain features, like they have recommendation systems or features in the product that you can go and leverage their network of other newsletters to, like, boost your, you know, your newsletter too. So it helps there. But in my case, in our case, it doesn't matter because there aren't a lot of other H Vac focused, you know, business newsletters, you know, in the network. So not in that sense.

That's what I was. Yeah, that's what I was curious about, though, because you're so niche. And I think when I was doing some research for this, for this episode, I heard you're, like, heavy on LinkedIn, looking for H Vac CEOs and stuff. And it's more like word of mouth and maybe leveraging other, like, like we talked about Rilla off air, but like, leveraging other platforms that kind of tie you into this group.

Right.

So you use LinkedIn pretty extensively, I would imagine, to connect and. And get. Connect with people. Can you tell us a little bit about what your process looks like for that?

Yeah, yeah. So the main thing that I've done or that I'm doing, because I'm very much so doing it every week, is I will go on and I will filter, search for a keyword, like heating, for example. That's like the main one I do. So I'll type in heating on LinkedIn. It'll show me. I'll go to people and it'll show me tens of thousands of people that have heating in their job description. So what I'll do then is I'll filter it another level down and I'll say, okay, show me people tagged to heating but that have their title as owner or manager or something. And I rotate through them and so I'll do, you know, manager, for example. Then it'll give me 100 pages of managers of heating companies or at heating companies.

Is this. Is this the free LinkedIn?

So I use premiums. I pay, I pay. I think it's 70 bucks a month or something like that, or 70 or 80. So I know there are a couple levels. I don't believe I'm paying for the most advanced one. Yeah, I could be wrong, but I don't think so. So, yeah, I'll go in there and it gives me literally 100 pages of managers at anybody who has heating in their chat, their. Their company, but description. So then I just connect with them. I max them out every week. I think it gives me about 200 a week. And so I'll connect with 200 people in 30 minutes. And then throughout the next few days or over the next few days, there will be a waterfall of people who accept, accept, accept, accept. And then after about two days, starting then over the next few days, as people continue to accept, I just shoot him a DM and I just say, look, here's who I am, here's what I'm doing. You know, I noticed you're in the business. If you're interested, you can check this thing out. And then I always personalize it. So it's very manual because I personalize. I don't want to. Yeah, there's a lot of talk about automation, and I know, I think it's great. But the problem with in my case is I want to add a little PS at the bottom. That's like, hey, I noticed you're from Rochester Hills, Michigan. I was literally born there. Or something like that.

Yeah, I think that's good. And I think for. So for business owners or if you are listening to this and you have some type of a sales funnel that you think about. We talk about this a lot on our YouTube chann, which is the B2B relationships. Yeah, because like if you're an H vac contractor and you don't do electrical work well, why don't you go and build relationships with all the electrical contractors and then refer business back and forth and instead of opening up electrical arm, then you have referral partners. If you do duct cleaning and you. And you go build relationship with all these H Vac contractors. But people always ask us, well, how do we do that? And it's like, well, go to Google and cold call these places and like, ask them if they do this. But I think what you're saying is there's another opportunity here, which is exactly what you're doing, where instead of, you know, introducing them to your newsletter, you could also introduce them to your company and maybe build a partnership where you can refer business back and forth on.

Totally. Yeah. So I'm definitely. So that. That definitely is applicable and what I'm doing on more of the vendor side. So just in terms of partners, because, like, right now what's important for me is distribution and awareness. So companies like, you know, even yours, and other vendors in the space that want to reach business owners and contractors, like, what I'm looking to do is build relationships to ultimately strike, like distribution partnerships. So it's like, you know, that, that, that, that could be where I, you know, we collaborate to create some content together through an interview or some sort of spotlight or a case study or something, and just to kind of drive whatchamacallit, sort of awareness on both sides.

For, for both people, for both win win situations.

Yeah.

Have you heard of this platform called Haro? Help a reporter out?

Yes, actually. Yes. Yes.

Okay. That was a game changer for me when I was blogging and doing more about distribution. The reason that it helped me so much is because. And for business owners listening too, these are reporters looking to interview subject matter experts to put into their articles. And so what I would do is I would go on there and like, let's say there's one from CNBC or something, I would pitch them my story, which is like, you know, I did, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I have this blog thing, whatever. And then they would link back to it in their article. Yeah. And so then you get the backlink for SEO, which is great, but for you, from a distribution perspective, then you also get to reach all those people.

Right.

One of the things that I used to do was I would go on like, Yahoo or something, and I would find articles that I should be featured in, and then I would tweet at the author on Twitter and be like, hey, I read this article. Like, you definitely should put me in your next article if you're looking for good content. So that's, that's a really good strategy to get into these articles and to get some distribution. I'm not sure if you ever tried that before, but maybe that could help you out.

No, Yeah, I was actually going to say so I was familiar with it vaguely, but now that you explain that, I'm going to note it down because I think that is super interesting and I agree with you.

Yeah. One of the ones that happens to me, it was, it was like a very small website called Student Loan Hero about paying off student loans. And I didn't know this at the time, but I was featured on their thing and I tweeted at the company owner and was like, hey, thanks for featuring me in your story. I didn't know that he was a Forbes writer. You know how people sign up to be Forbes writers and then they basically use it as their platform. Then he, he connected me with his ghostwriter and then I ended up was featured in Forbes just through that, like just literally I was on Student Loan Hero. Then this guy is a writer for, for this and then he wanted to showcase me on this thing and I'm like, this is just wild how this can go from that to that.

Totally. Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome.

So I definitely think that that could be something that would help you out.

Yeah.

So what's the ultimate game plan? I think I heard that you were saying eventually you want to kind of build out niche for different home services, maybe have different newsletters for all these different home services. Is that kind of the goal?

Yeah, the goal is really, I mean long term, big picture, long term, whatever is basically, it's basically this. It's basically there are, you know, give or take 10 to 15 industries that are considered home services, you know, and that includes roofing, even rent, full restoration, renovation, pest, landscaping, pool, et cetera, et cetera that are all multi billion dollar industries where collectively home services, I think in the US annually, the last Angie report like from a couple years ago was upwards of, that generate upwards of $500 billion in revenue a year in the US just so they're just these ginormous industries that are huge parts of the economy. And so long term I'm looking to do is. And in each industry there are hundreds of thousands of people that work within them, if not millions. And so and a big chunk of those are decision making people. So it's owners or managers, executives. And so what I want to go do or what we want to go do ultimately is go into all of those industries and be the media layer that sits in the middle of all that activity and covers the crap out of it and goes and tries to target not just the, you know, not just the, you know, x hundred and something thousand or so H Vac owners in the US but to go out and capture Half a million executives from 10 different industries, including plumbing and electrical and roofing, all in different publications, different newsletters. Eventually, eventually different events and summits and things like that. That's kind of the, that's the big picture.

Yeah, I think that's awesome. And it's, it's probably crazy for you because it's like blue ocean and there's no one doing this. And it's like pretty much I just need to get the ball rolling and get the processes in place because there's so much. Great opportunity to capitalize on these markets.

Yeah, absolutely. I think so. And for me, it's, it's very much so. Like, it's. I, I struggle with, with balancing my patience versus impatience because it's like on one side, you know, I set out and I said, look, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take a year to like, develop a playbook or take 12 months or whatever it takes to like, develop a playbook and build the relationships, understand, get the product right, understand the readers, what works, what doesn't. Because the theory is that these industries are so similar that what works in H Vac for the most part will work in plumbing and roofing down the line. And so doing that, though, and being methodical about developing the playbook, but then at the same time being extremely impatient and just wanting to go run 10 million miles an hour and go do it right away is a struggle. But, you know, I have the right people around me, I think that try to center me or like, you know, look, just, you know, like continue doing, you're doing, you know, inch forward every day. So.

Yeah, and I think also you picked the right vertical. Like H Vac has all the buzz right now. And it's, it's had that for the past three or four years, like PE firms. And I think you mentioned roofing. That's kind of like the next buzz, I would say, in the whole space. So I think you're at least going at it the right way where, like lawn care and pest control, it's like, ah, okay. You know, not, not as, not as exciting, I guess you had mentioned about events and this kind of stuff. I think there's like three different kind of revenue streams inside of this. Can you explain what that looks like or how that.

Yeah, so long term, basically, I think there, there could be three revenue streams. The first one, and certainly the most, the most, the most important and the biggest, at least in the mean medium term, is advertising. So that's. Companies like, you know, Even yours and the software vendors and the supply, the equipment suppliers that would, that are basically buying placements in the newsletter. And so that's just, you know, that's advertising, sponsorships, marketing, whatever you want to call it. That's the first one. And the second one is when you have a, when you build up an audience in a certain vertical and then in multiple verticals, there's value in bringing these people together in person or even online, but mostly in person. And so events is an important revenue stream for a lot of media companies, I've learned and I think there's a really good opportunity to do that in H Vac, just given the dynamics of private equity and best practice groups and how these people like to come together anyway. And so I think there's some opportunity to do interesting events there. But events is another one. And then I think really long term this is just. I haven't exactly flushed this out yet. I'm not really thinking about it. I think it's a distraction right now. But is this idea of subscriptions or paid research and data which is basically, you know, there's value and I've learned that there's value in contractors understanding what their competitors are paying from a marketing standpoint in their market or what they're paying their technicians wage wise or even suppliers having access to certain data on what contractors in different regions are doing. So I think there's some value there or so there's something there. But again it's mostly just kind of a thought.

Yeah. Do you know John Tory with Searchlight?

Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so his newsletter is like. I love his newsletter. He was, he's, he was on our show and it's, it's like talking about the data and I think yeah that there's so to your point, there's so much value in like okay, here's how I benchmark my company and here's the data. Even though his mostly structured for marketing stuff. But to your point like Service titan will have one about what the pay rate, what the pay scales are for, you know, this. Or like what's the average lead to job booked ratio. Service titan will provide that data. But I think you're absolutely right that there's so much power in that data that is just. No one's doing that. It's like piecemealing it together all over the place.

Well, right. And yes, because what happens is you have individual vendors that have expertise in their certain corner and so it's like to your point, right, like so you might have, you know, one Company that's really good with sort of like the marketing side. You have one that has insight and by the way, that's just on their software platforms. Service data is just service side customers. That's not, that doesn't count the, you know, whatever big chunk. Yeah, right, exactly.

Yeah, I agree. All right, so I think you definitely got a good, a good game plan there. How, going back to like the actual newsletter stuff you like to write, how are you. And you talked about the kind of the four different topics that you're talking about. But like, how are you coming? How are you actually writing this stuff?

Yeah, I mean, so I try to spend a lot of time with, with readers, both just like on the phone and in person, whether that's going to events or visiting people near. I'm in Charlotte, so it's visiting people around here. And what that does is that helps me understand every time. Like even every time I spend 30 minutes with a contractor just talking to them, it helps me understand more of their perspective and how they view things. Because I want to tailor everything to the contractor. They're the reader. Like, they are the ideal reader. And so I have certain. I literally have individuals in my head that I envision when I'm writing them. Like standing there trying to like write for them. And so, so that helps the writing, you know, in a huge way because it makes it very clear like who everything should be tailored to and who should be for. So, so that's first, but then the actual writing, I mean, I have my own process, like writing process where it starts with, you know, if there's a story that goes on and I come across it on Wednesday or something, I, I usually write on Fridays and then also on Mondays. So it depends. I have to switch things around sometimes, but I, the first thing I do is always do all the research. So I, I need to understand what the thing is that's going on. Like, what is going on at a very, like, I need to, I need to really understand it. I need to have a very clear understanding because if I can't understand it myself, I can't write about it. So I do a lot of notes taking and research on individual stories and then once I just kind of put them all down on a piece of paper, I use Google Docs and so I take a ton of notes and then I go through and I read through them. And then what I do is I start kind of sectioning off what I think the story should look like and kind of like in a flow in order so it's like, okay, here's the thing that's happening. Here's the big picture, here's why it matters, here's like some additional context and then here's what it means for the future. And I've tried to make the writing structured like that. So I section it off and then I go ahead and I write a draft that usually sucks at first, and then I walk away from it and then I come back to a little later and I revise it. Revise and revise. And I just kind of do that.

Yeah, I think that's good. And for people that are listening, they're like, okay, Phil and Alec, like, yeah, I understand the newsletter thing, but like, I can barely spell, you know, five words together. So like, what do I say? And I think you really hit the nail on the head with this, which was when you write, you gotta write to your audience. So if your target audience is a stay at home mom in a single family home in this specific area, then you need to craft an email that's going to resonate with that person. So like, what does that look like? You, you even mentioned about listening to your customer. So maybe you go and read some recent reviews that you received. Totally the other five star or whatever. And what did that person say that they really liked? Maybe it was this service or that service.

Right.

And then you can put whatever they're saying in there and then you can use the lens of like, is this what that person's going to want to look at?

Right.

Are they going to want to link to my Facebook page or to my TikTok or do they want to link to my YouTube channel? And I think to your point, if you can visualize your audience sitting there reading this and saying, yeah, oh wow, that's great. That is really what you have to get in the mindset. And I know it's hard because it's like I never owned H vac business before, but I have to get into their shoes. To your point. And that goes back to the sales acumen. You got to understand what their problems are and be able to decipher what, what the solution is going to be for them.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think that's the biggest part of it. I agree with you. And then I think like, maybe for those that are wondering, like, okay, down to like the, on a more granular level, like, okay, the actual. How do you do it then? Like, you know, in terms of like, for example, if somebody can't necessarily punctuate or if there's grammar, you know, like there are tools you can get Grammarly for free and it helps you. It'll correct every spelling error you make. It'll tell you to change certain words out. So there's a lot of tools that can also help with the actual writing part.

Yes. And, and I think you would also echo this sentiment as well. There was a recent study that Neil Patel put out, he's a digital marketing guy and he said the, the amount of words that you want, because I've seen your newsletters, you kind of have like sentence Y writing. It's not like big bulk chunks of.

Paragraphs, very short, bullet pointed. And that's kind of, that's a part of the whole company's thesis, is that the writing itself nowadays needs to be punchy, it needs to be to the point and it does not need to be too long. And I think that's one of the problems that I noticed. And so that's what I'm trying to build the whole thing around. Yes. Yup.

And Neil Patel said if you have under like 300 words on your email, he's getting 3.5% click through rates or something. And some of the times when people send us the newsletters that they've been sending, it's heavy paragraphs, no pictures, no links. And I mean, I've seen the ones you do. We have a newsletter too and it's like, here's like a link to this video and here's a quick synopsis of why you should and then a punchy like call to action.

Right. That's it.

And that's what people want more of a curated list of content opposed to like all of this information to read.

Yeah. And I think that goes to like. And I don't think that there's not a place for long what's called like long form writing, like where it's, you know, a thousand words and it's paragraph, whatever. Like there's definitely some, there's definitely value in that. And there's companies that build their whole business around that. I just think it depends on what you're looking to do. And so for example, maybe contractors, in the case of a newsletter going toward, you know, to homeowners like you just. I think what I've learned is to study the reader, which is, and what is their, what are their behaviors, what are their habits? So like these people are busy. So in my case, contractors are extremely busy. So there's a ton of value in give me what I need to know in as little time as possible. And I think it applies in the homeowner sense, too, because, you know, people are busy.

Yes. Well, this has been really helpful. This has been really helpful for a lot of people. And I think if you're a business owner, even if you don't own an H VAC business, like, I don't, and I subscribe to your newsletter and, like, you talk about Tommy Mello and Rilla and other industry things, and we talked about H Vac as kind of like the behemoth, the pe, all the bells and whistles. But if you're in lawn care and you want to see what the big companies are doing and maybe utilize some of the tools that they're doing, this is a great way to see what H Vac companies are doing so then you can bring it to your industry before it even gets out there. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity to. To subscribe to your newsletter because you can learn other things that are maybe outside of your industry, but can also help you inside of your industry.

Sure.

Cool. So how do people get subscribed to your newsletter?

Yeah, so you can go. So. So we have a landing page set up. You can just go to read home pros.com so it's R E A D and then home pro s.com and it's just literally a little email box. You can pop your email in, and then from there you'll start getting emails every Tuesday. And then we also have a LinkedIn or Facebook that you can follow. And that's the same username, just eadhomebros.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Alex. This has been great, and I really appreciate your time and sharing all your information and wisdom.

Yeah, absolutely, man. Phil, this is great. I really appreciate having me on, and I just. Yeah, I had fun. I enjoyed it. All right, cool.

Thanks, man. Talk to you later.

Thanks.