HVAC FULL BLAST, EP 15: Small HVAC Company? Here's How to Beat the Big Guys at Their Own Game

Join hosts Mary Carter and Stephen Ross as they sit down with Rob Rotondo, CEO of Robert Anthony Consulting, for a masterclass in HVAC marketing strategy. From bootstrapping a brand with nothing but a website budget to competing against industry giants, Rob shares battle-tested insights on building marketing programs that actually drive growth. Whether you're a startup trying to create your first Google Business Page or an established contractor looking to optimize your marketing spend and align sales with your campaigns, this episode delivers the practical guidance you need to grow smarter, not just bigger. Let's get started!

Welcome back to another episode of HVAC Full Blast. My name is Mary Carter.

I'm Steven Ross. We've got a guest, so let me introduce our guest. So with us today, Rob Rotondo, um, who is CEO, founder, Robert Anthony Consulting, um, which— Rob, help me out— essentially means you're a fractional chief marketing officer. So you're working for lots of big companies, some smaller companies, just doing kind of big picture consulting. Is that right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. Cut my teeth in HVAC early on. And, you know, now with, with this consulting company, I work in all different industries, but also still HVAC. And that's, you know, selfishly, that's my, that's my passion. Love that industry. But yeah, spot on.

And some of the other industries are related in the sense that they're residential. I mean, it's whether it's windows or siding or roofing or pest control or something like that, garage doors, it's all kind of in-home residential sales. Is that, is that correct?

Yep, that's correct.

Nice. Nice.

What?

So here's— Mary, let me tell you a story. So Rob and I met, I think, in 2011. I have not seen him since 2011, but we've stayed in touch on LinkedIn and social media. And then about 2 months ago, I called him and said, man, would love to get you on the podcast. We caught up a little bit and I'm sitting in the airport in Nashville, and this— and I'm, I'm like looking at my phone because I'm just scrolling, waiting for the plane to board, and some dude walks up and is like awkwardly close in my personal space. And I'm like, this is getting weird. So I look up and it's Rob, and like, I haven't seen him in 15 years.

And oh my gosh.

And so we ran into each other a month ago after I had said, hey, come be on our podcast. So that's kind of funny.

Yeah. Rob, when you got the call to come on the podcast, were you like, who's this number? Like, that's crazy.

You know, from Stephen, true, true man with, you know, he's been in sales industry his entire life, but this man, I don't think has ever changed his phone number. And so I did, you know, when I saw him call me like, Stephen Ross, okay, wow. That literally, it's been years since I've talked to him other than the LinkedIn channels. But yeah, if that moment didn't tell you that that was some sort of divine experience to randomly run into him in a random airport, I don't know what did. And that is a true story, promise.

Yeah, that's amazing.

So here's— all right, so let me kind of set the stage because this is why I wanted to have you on. There's a couple reasons. One, you're an expert in marketing, but two, I want you to tell kind of the story of how we met because I'm gonna, I'm gonna make up some numbers and they're not gonna be right, so correct me when I'm wrong. So Rob was running marketing for a heating and air company in Detroit, Michigan, and in 2007, you guys did 6,000 new homes of new construction. Is that, is that number sound about right, Rob?

Something around there. Yep.

Wow. So 2007, 6,000 homes. Then all of a sudden 2008 hits, right? I mean, economy crashes, new construction grinds to a halt. And so all of a sudden you guys were like, hey, all new business plans starting tomorrow. We're going to go take care of existing homes, you know? And so So literally pivoted on a dime, switched, switched business models and just said, hey, we'll still continue to do a little bit of new construction. And I don't remember what the number was, but I think in like 2008, maybe you did like 200 or 300 homes compared to 6,000. But you pivoted and you had to start from scratch and build a residential retail customer base. You needed to sell maintenance agreements. You needed service techs to do the maintenance. You didn't just need an army of installers that were getting paid per piece like you do in new construction, like Rob. So just how did you pivot? What were some of the lessons learned? Just put us back in time a little bit. I mean, how did that work out?

Yeah, so even better, and appreciate the intro there and some context. I think even better on that side, you know, the timeline was I joined that business in 2010, and so they have come out of the 2007-2008 economic dismantling, whatever you want to call it. This company, to set the stage, was, you know, the bellwether of new construction install in the market. They were doing volume that was almost unheard of. And so the entire business was predicated on new construction, builder relationships. Everybody knows what happened in '07, '08. We don't have to go there. But I joined after college thinking, you know, this is a great career. You know, let's get into HVAC. Coming out of a complete spin around or 180 in the business direction. But I'll say, you know, with the founders of that company and their direction, I mean, I think they really understood that, hey, we need to go over with customers. We need to take this and turn it into a brand. They started to see, you know, inklings of this is opportunistic. Like, here we are trying to please builders and go through that process. There's nothing wrong with new construction, by the way, just when you're solely predicated on that for your business, you start with, as with anything, if you're focused on one thing, that one thing gets interrupted, you're gonna have challenges. And so, they started to experiment in the retail side and started to say, okay, well, we think that we have something here. And so, I had met these owners and I was doing marketing work for them, like graphic design work, and just getting outta college and trying to figure out life. And what do I wanna go into? Majoring in marketing. In business and wanted to go in that direction. And, you know, was easily coerced into joining this HVAC company. And it was awesome. I think, you know, as much of headwind that was in front of us, it was like clean canvas or blank canvas. You know, what do we need to start doing? And so that not only was my first introduction to the trades, but it was my first introduction to a professional career with a ton of pressure on me to try to build this with this group. And so it was starting from ground zero with like We had— the marketing budget was website. That was essentially like what we were working with. And so it was like we were at a point in time where there was no formalized marketing budget. And so it was really an opportunity to say, okay, well, let's test a few things, let's start seeing what might work and then kind of go from there. And so I use this line a lot when I work with clients because, you know, I have experience, but that's only because I've screwed up way more than any of them ever will. We had to test, model, reset. The great thing about this business that I was with is that they understood, like, they had no other choice. And so, you know, it was test, succeed or fail, and then keep, keep going forward. And so it was a really cool eye-opener for us to just start from ground zero. And so I kind of take that approach a lot into client engagements today, even though the businesses that I work with, you know, more sophisticated, it's more modern-day marketing, it's easily accessible compared to when it was when I started. But A lot of that does kind of revolve around, you know, let's look at the basics first, right? And I think that goes into a lot of stuff that we'll probably talk about today. But to me, I always revert back to that starting point because the foundation is what is important to build off of. And no matter what your business is, now that I'm in multi-industries, it's still the same complex. You have to start with basics. You have to make sure that that's covered. And, you know, then, you know, sky's the limit in most cases.

When you say that that first budget was website, do you remember how much money it was? How—

Oh, that's a good question.

I don't. 3 figures? 4 figures?

You know, you know, it wasn't a ton. It wasn't that much. And that was what I had to work with. And it was funny because that was the joke, because as we were evolving and creating new initiatives, it was always like, take it out of the website budget. And so that sort of evolved into our full marketing spend. But it just shows you, like, you know, as, you know, you go to today, there are so many different areas that you can divert funds and allocate funds to. And, you know, sometimes it is just, you know, hey, something simple, like just watch it, track it, either optimize or replace it. You know, a lot of companies kind of get stuck in that cycle because it is overwhelming at times, right? But I'm always humbly reminded of what I had to work with you know, on day one.

Yeah. So, all right, blank slate. You're starting from scratch. I mean, you guys have a very well-established existing company, but your quote-unquote brand was only well-known to builders, not to the homeowners that bought the homes.

How—

what, what was your— I mean, on one hand, so we, when we think about marketing, a lot of times we're talking about branding and then also just kind of that direct response, running a promotion, trying to get a customer to respond to a phone number or a click or something like that. So you had to do both at once. There wasn't an existing brand, so you had to create a brand and then do all the typical marketing that you would do to get homeowners to respond. How did you— let's start with branding. How did you build a brand from scratch?

Yeah, good question. So, you know, thinking through that process, we had had sort of a head start because this company was doing thousands and thousands of installs a year. And so we were able to put— I mean, this group, new furnace stickers were a thing. And so we were putting furnace stickers on furnaces in these areas. And so we started, you know, planting seeds really for our future. But, you know, I was at the company long enough to see a lot of those come to fruition on the turnaround. So it was kind of cool to see some of those old stickers come back. And we would always joke because we obsessed about the furnace stickers. And so like the ownership, we would always go back and maybe tweak one little thing. And to them that meant everything, right? And so it, you know, you have to start evolving if you're going B2C. You've got a lot of other channels to start working to get customers in, not just a furnace sticker or, you know, even your trucks. Like, we, we never thought of logoing trucks for the sake of customers. We were technically builder customers for the most part. And so the ownership really started getting ahead of it where, you know, they utilized their name and everything like that, but they wanted to start to get that out into the public. So we started refabricating, you know, truck wraps, what customers are seeing, that website that was more or less catered to builders like, hey, check out our website. It was funny because as we went through it, and if you ever get a chance to use the site Wayback Machine, you can go back to that time frame. And it's a, it's a site that goes back to historical archives of websites. And you can do this with a lot of brands. But it's funny because you can see the complete change in tonality. You can see the complete change in language because we're not targeting builders. It used to say, or we used to say, hey, go check out our website. You can see the work that we do for other builders. Now it's like, okay, we've got to completely change. Excuse me, how we go through that process, how we communicate to customers. And so a lot of that focus went to, okay, we have a website, I need to fix the way that it communicates to customers. That was step one. Then it was like, okay, nobody's coming to our website. What do we do? You know, we've got trucks on the road, we've got all these furnace stickers that we're not going to care about right now because they don't matter. Then we started getting in— that was 2010, '11 was when Google really was like you know, you can, you could get into it. You know, I remember we started this company with a Google AdWords Express account. Some marketers will know what that is. Most will not even know, but that is your introduction to Google Ads. And it is like 101, like you set up the account. I remember setting up the account name, building everything. Who do you want to target? And then I'm like, okay, let's pick a 5-mile radius. You know, it was like, that's how it started. And, you know, honestly, We kept to the basics. I mean, at that time, I was really learning Google. And I remember the owners were like, "Do you know what you're doing?" I'm like, "I'm able to measure it. I'm able to see if we're winning or losing. So yeah, I think I do." And so, we ended up, you know, gradually working through that process. And then it was like, "Okay, we were able to generate some form of leads, nothing crazy." Then it was about, "Okay, we need more people to know about our brand." And we, what was cool was we literally walked through this. It was like bubblegum and twine. Like we were trying to figure out, okay, we have visibility, we have website clicks, we don't have leads. More people need to know about us. What do we do? So it was like, do we invest in TV yet? Do we look at other forms of large-form marketing? We started doing magazines, printed publications. We ended up eventually getting into TV and really trying to scale in with that. And that's where we really started to see some harmony between all of the marketing initiatives that we were building. And, you know, as we grew, grew again, it was exciting, also nerve-wracking, but you start to realize that, you know, as you grow, your marketing strategy changes, right? And I know that sounds like a really dumb comment until I explain it, but, you know, when you get to that $5 million mark, it is about, it's about lead generation, it's about clarity and what's actually working and then executing. Like, people forget to get to $5 million, you have to operationally deliver. Marketing can't do it. Marketing is not going to put in the equipment. It's not going to schedule the calls. Like, you have to really, like, work on operations. And so as much as it was stressful to build a marketing program, it was also stressful keeping up operationally to deliver on new contacts.

That's so true. I had a similar experience at a startup company, and the better we got at our, our marketing, our website, and, um, I, I don't think I was on Express, but Google AdWords. I can remember sitting in my desk bidding on words like they were stocks and like looking at tickers of how words were doing. And like the CEO would call down the hallway and be like, did, did you use this word? And I'd be like, I don't know. And like, like it was, it was a crazy, crazy time. But, um, but it was like, for his, for every investment and improvement we made and having a customer be able to find us, we had to be that much better on the ops end because they didn't want to come find us, do business with us, and then have a bad experience. They wanted to come find us, use us, and walk away satisfied. And I think that's an amazing distinction that you're pulling through there because we always talk about marketing as like this unseen ROI, right? Like, how do I figure out the ROI? But a lot of times the ROI comes through with how you handle them on the ops side.

Mm-hmm. That's so true. And I think a lot of times too, I'll work with clients where, you know, everybody's going to say it's always a leads problem. I'm sure you've heard that in your engagements too with other companies. But, you know, when you look at things like, okay, well, what's conversion rate? What's your booking rate? Ultimately, what's your closing rate? And, you know, you have— there's industry benchmarks everywhere, but, you know, you start to find those gaps where it's like, well, you You know, if you improve the booking rate, then all of a sudden marketing starts to make sense. Then you can execute better. Now closing starts to make sense. And so when I jumped out into my own world with my own company, you know, I operate as a fractional CMO, as you said, Stephen, but I do try to bridge the gap between sales, bridge the gap between call centers. I mean, I've helped stand up call centers. I've helped manage sales teams. I think being able to, you know, kind of expose myself to all sorts of different areas, like you said, Mary, I think that's what really generates growth at any level, like being able to understand the mechanics. That's why I love HVAC, because it is such a cog and wheel system where so many different things have to work together. And when they do, it's magic. When they don't, you're in for some long meetings and lots of discussions. And, you know, but ultimately you can kind of boil it up where you know, you got to start optimizing all things, not just one, to get the benefit of it, you know.

So let's say Mary and I start a company and it's, it's going to be Mary and Stephen's Heating and Air Company. We're starting from scratch.

Wow. Obviously, we got a real original name. Do you love our name?

Yeah. So we might need some help with the branding and naming, but TV, right? I mean, you mentioned like, do we have enough money to do— I mean, obviously TV's out, radio's out, like some of those big things we just can't afford. We're super small, give us like, what is the foundation? Because you said, hey, you're gonna have a different marketing program at $2 million than you do at $5 million than you do at $10 million. Not just you're doing more of it, it's a completely different marketing program. So start small. We're— help us, help us get a good foundation. What would you include?

Yeah, I guess my only question would be, is Google Ads Express allowed?

Or—

I'm just kidding. You know, I think that that's a great question. And, you know, from a startup I'll give you one more.

Our marketing budget is website.

Yeah.

All right. Now I'm comfortable. I feel like I can work with this. So, you know, oddly enough, website is some of these things that from a startup side, like you don't have a ton to invest. You know, I think when with marketing investments, there's always that time to get to your results, right? You invest $10,000 today or whatever you invest today, you're not going to see it tomorrow. We wish we could. And believe me, I have owners that say, where's that marketing investment coming in? Like, it's like, it's been 2 days. Like, we gotta let things set up. But, you know, from a startup side, like, businesses now, like, yes, it's easy to start up a new company, but like the basics, again, it's not difficult to get a website up nowadays. It's not difficult to get a truck wrapped and branded right. You know, you can work with that even if, you know, with AI and Canva, you can be really dangerous. You know, when you start building a brand, you start having your truck that's visible on the road. Now, you know, you can start a Google Business page and then you can start social channels. Like, all of that stuff could fit into our website budget when you look at starting up a business, because at the beginning it's about just lead generation. And I think a lot of customers too nowadays, being local and small is not necessarily a disadvantage. You know, I think if you have that right connection to the community. And like, when you're a small business, you're not saying, okay, I'm gonna take a 350-square-mile market and serve it. You know that that's not possible. You're taking a 5-square-mile market and saying, I'm gonna be everywhere in this market. I'm gonna show up to the community events. I'm gonna show up to, you know, my neighbors are gonna know about me. I'm gonna sponsor a school breakfast thing. Like, those are things that are not incredibly expensive, that really do draw impressions that are engaged. You know, there's impressions that are just delivered, which are like your mainstream, like if you see an ad, great, but are you engaged with it? Those types of things often have more power to them. And ironically enough, those are the things that the bigger companies find it more difficult to stay disciplined with because of their size. And that's where their strategy shifts. But yeah, so your company, Marion Stephens HVAC, like, Start with the website, start with a truck. You can come up with, you know, logos or something that's memorable. And to start a Google Business Page and social channels and start making like video content, that's not expensive. And, you know, again, it's easy to start getting engaged with your audience and start generating leads that way too.

So I'm just taking notes. So website, probably step 1, vehicle wrap, step 2, make sure your Google My Business Page is sharp, looks good, all that kind of stuff. And then the socials. So Facebook, Instagram. I mean, I don't know what else is there. Your Snapchat, TikTok. TikTok. Yeah. I mean, that's how old I am. I don't even think of TikTok.

All right.

TikTok, right? What else? I mean, are those the— would you prioritize TikTok over Instagram or Facebook?

I mean, I'm probably at the age where I still, I still like Facebook and Instagram more than TikTok. But you know, again, but you're still, you know, you're getting TikTok is going to have a future audience of customers as well. I mean, gosh, I still know, I know like 50, 60-year-olds that are on TikTok. So, I mean, I guess I should take that back because they've honestly gained more share in that age group too. So, it does make it, you know, a palatable marketing source to start bringing into your business. And again, remember, you're a small business. Those are the things where it's that intimate connection with potential customers. That's your advantage right now, and it won't be here forever. So, those are the things that I think you prioritize. And then, you know, I think CRM's often not necessarily tied to marketing, but it's tied to the data, like what's actually working. And I know that CRMs have come a long way where it's actually fairly easy to get involved with a pretty decent CRM to start you know, start tracking leads, start tracking performance, and then you can understand like, okay, these areas in my little market are doing really well. What's actually working, you know? And then you can set up those channels appropriately and kind of scale there because at that point it's about like 2 leads a day matter at that point. And so that's sort of how that balance works. It's like once you get to that point, you're like consistently 2 leads a day, you're doing pretty decent for a small business. And I know that's microscopic compared to some of these other businesses, but, you know, you can— it's all scaling up from there, you know. All right.

Two follow-up questions. One is websites. I— here's my challenge with websites is like every 2 or 3 years you almost got to redo it because it's out of date and it looks out of date. What I mean, how do you know when your website's out of date? If I've had the same website for 3 years, is it by default default out of date, or is it like, eh, you probably want to have somebody look at it, or what do you think about that?

Yeah, this one, man, there could be an entire conversation probably based on websites. And a lot's happened over the years, especially with the onset of AI and how it's changed the fabric of the internet. Um, you know, you've got a lot of, a lot of clients that I work with, you know, we kind of started this year seeing organic erosion, you start to see your website behave a little bit differently. You know, I think it starts with data. I mean, understanding how much traffic you're getting on your website first and foremost is probably the starting point. You know, you can look at that historically too. You can see, you know, a Google Ads account. You know, if you have a Google Ads account or you're pretty sophisticated in that space, you probably have a Google GA4, Google Analytics account. So you can sort of track web visits and understand who's coming to your website, how long are they engaged, You know, what sort of actions are they taking? You know, you can get sophisticated to know if they're booking appointments or clicking phone numbers to call. If you start to see that data start to slip and those trends start to dip down, then it's time to probably start optimizing, right? And not everybody needs a new website because of performance issues. Sometimes, you know, what the bigger problem is, is some of these websites haven't been touched in 6, 7 months. Now it's becoming a point where, you know, if you're not doing, you know, compound SEO efforts on your website, which happens, could happen weekly. I mean, sometimes even every few days, depending on your business or your industry, that's where you start to lose some of that traffic. And the way that Google and some of these other search engines are prioritizing website performance is so much different than it was even a year ago, 2 years ago. I heard an interesting stat, you know, in terms of how websites are crawled and, you know, robot text files or Googlebots, they crawl usually every 30 days, and this is probably plus or minus. Web people, please don't get on me for this. But with AI LLM bots, which is a new requirement for AI visibility, those are crawling sometimes even as fast as every 4 days. So it's looking at content changes, it's looking at pictures and anything you put on that website that's different. You know, if you were to search, which most people are doing, you know, they're going to ChatGPT and saying, hey, I'm looking for a new furnace. What's a good company that I could go with? They're going to look and see if websites haven't been updated in 7 months. They might still have access to reviews and other content that's more consistently updated, but the website plays a big role in that. And, you know, for those that aren't doing that sort of stuff, those are easy things to start implementing, whether you're doing it yourself or you have agencies that work on that. SEO has been the big topic because it's everybody's least favorite marketing investment because it's not necessarily instant gratification. It's more of that long game approach. But I hate to say it now, it is creating more instant gratification for those websites because of how often they're getting crawled and that sort of stuff. But those websites are even more meaningful tools in any business's arsenal, right? And so the other piece that I would recommend is, you know, we look at website performance. So, you know, Google has tests out there. You can Google PageSpeed Insights. You can look at how your website performs to, I guess, the internet, right? And you can see where does it rank, how good is it, how fast is it. Google will show you like, hey, these are issues that you could potentially be flagged for, for performance. And that's also a good indicator to kind of say, okay, should start investing in this, you know, because you're sending traffic there. And especially if you've got a paid budget, you know, Mary, you're sending through your Google Ads Express account customers to this website. If it takes 9 seconds to load because you've got a video on the homepage, I'm out. People's patience is like a third of that now, if that. And so you're going to lose the customer. And so that's where you start to get into some trouble because magnify that over a, you know, $1,000 a day budget, you start to get into some real issues. So those are things that I would recommend looking at.

Yeah, I'm, I am my own barometer and if it's taking longer than a flash, I'm out. I mean, I just don't, I just don't want to experience the Wait.

Yeah, same. And that's a big thing.

One of the things that, again, small companies— I bought a company a few years ago. We were doing $2 million in business. We had, we had a, on a $2 million operating budget, we, our marketing was like $50 grand. So I got to squeeze as much out of that $50 grand as I can. And, and so website was in there, vehicle wraps, all that stuff. So I put a chunk of that into direct mail. And I love direct mail because I think nobody does it hardly ever. And so, you know, in 2000, if you went to your mailbox and opened it up, I mean, you might have 50 postcards in there today. I don't even think I got mail today. So if I had anything in there at all, I would have looked at it at least, right? So, you know, we built— we went from $2 million to $3.5 million in revenue basically with just a website, a little bit of paid Google and a bunch of postcards. Is that still a valid strategy? You know, that was 2017, 2018. 2025, direct mail. What do you think?

You know, I mean, I think I'm not going to argue with any strategy that seems to work in the data, right? I mean, I think the important thing is that every market's different. You got a different area, you know, different demographic that could be opening up that mailbox. I mean, in my neighborhood, there's, you know, half of them get excited to go to the mailbox, half of them go right to the mailbox, to the garbage can.

Can.

So, you know, to each their own. But I think when you're putting enabling strategies like that, and anything can work, right? You just have to be able to measure it and understand the areas or pockets. Like direct mail, for instance, I've seen companies cancel complete campaigns because they're looking myopically at like, okay, this didn't work. But what they're not, what they're missing is like, okay, you're taking the entire campaign and throwing it out the window. But in reality, you had like, you know, a 26% engagement rate in these 3 zip codes. But yet we canceled the entire campaign because we said, okay, well, we mailed 20 and the rest of them didn't work. Well, that just means that those pockets were off. Like, understanding the data and the makeup of your market, I think, brings more gratification to strategies like that. Because to your point, you're getting into direct mail because there's absence there. There's not a lot of competition there. And so To you, it's like, okay, well, there's a hole, I'm gonna fill it. But if you go too broad or too large, that's a sort of tactic that can easily be dismissed when in reality, that's a golden star in like 2, 3, 4, 5 different zip codes. So then my goal would be, okay, let's bring this campaign back. Yes, let's get rid of the zips that maybe didn't perform. Now let's look for lookalike zips that match what actually worked for us. And that's how you can build those mini strategies that scale up. And I will meet clients that, you know, they'll be like, I have a very interesting direct mail strategy. I mail to 37 specific zip codes all over the map. No EDDM. It's all like straight targeted. And they've been doing it for years because they know that that's how they had to get there. So I think it's a great strategy. And, you know, it's one if you know the data and you can measure it, that's something that you can stay with for a long time.

So speaking of measuring, because you mentioned it, in the beginning a little bit, and then now here too. What is the right length of time to measure a new marketing experiment?

Good question. So I think sometimes it would depend on the sort of experiment. And what I mean by that is, you know, everything that you do in a marketing channel could have, you know, maybe 1 impression, 10 impressions. There's a marketing term that we use, frequency. So how often are people seeing this sort of campaign, whatever it may be? If it's a TV commercial, it's like, okay, well, you might have a $10,000 budget that's running, but what's the frequency? How many times is a customer or an impression actually seeing that ad? And that has a big impact on the results, right? You could have the best marketing campaign, whether it's a direct mail postcard or a TV commercial, and if it only hits one person one time, that might not be enough to get them to engage where you'll see some sort of results. And that's why a lot of even direct mail campaigns, they don't just have one drop. They have one drop, then a second drop, or maybe even one drop right after that. Like, there's some tactics behind understanding when to get those results or how to get those results. And so, you know, being able to measure— excuse me— like, for a postcard, we would put tracking numbers. You could put QR codes. And so you kind of understand engagement there. Being able to measure that after, call it a 30-day run rate. And then going back and optimizing. Sometimes it's quicker depending on the type of mail, but I think in reality, when no matter what you're doing, you do got to give time for new marketing campaigns to sort of marinate. I've met a lot of people who— and I'll speak to myself— I don't have a ton of patience in real life, but like with marketing campaigns, I have learned that, you know, my disadvantage would be to pull the plug early on something without truly letting it kind of, you know, grow some legs. And then I learned that, okay, this is also specific to the type of marketing. If you change TV creative, new messaging, and you've got promotions going on, like if you're changing that promotion every 30 days, you're not even giving your customer base or your audience time to even understand what you're doing, because then by the time they get it, you're switching it again. And the same thing goes with direct mail. It's like, you know, you send out a postcard with a message and you get impatient because you didn't see the results, so you send out a completely different message. Well, in a marketer's eyes, usually that like resets the parameters here, you know, because now I'm not getting hit with the same maintenance tune-up for November to get it in by November 15th. You hit me with maintenance tune-up, then you're like, man, let's do a full replacement. Oh my gosh, let's finance this thing. And so you start to get all over the map and you lead to analysis paralysis in a lot of those engagements. So my rule of thumb I always try to at least, if we're going to launch a campaign, give me 30 to 45 days to see if we've got any traction. And then if we can see, then can we sort of isolate to those pockets that are performing and go from there? Anything before that, I'll usually try to convince people not to even do it because if you're not going to give it time, then it's not going to reward you is kind of what I've learned through failure, I'll add.

That's fair. Yeah, no, I'm thinking of some like jingles that even like I know off the top of my head and write like Like, I've never had a structured settlement, but I could sing a company that handles them.

You know, like, now that's in my head.

But, but, you know, but that's like exactly it. Like, that's a consistent— and the only reason I know that is because of frequency. Like, and they, and they didn't change it. Now maybe they've changed the way they've gone about and delivered it and whatnot. But, um, just, you just think of those things and, you know, or when I, um, I always notice this with like medical ads too, like when I'm browsing around and then all of a sudden after a couple weeks I'm like, why? Why do I know how to sing like that? This thing has everything I need. Like, and, and then it's, it's because of that frequency. So very good point, I think, to say, um, it's, it's going to depend on the medium that maybe we're going with, but then just have to have a little, little bit more patience than maybe you're willing to admit out loud that we got to go for frequency and, and maybe reach.

Yeah, it's, it's a good point.

So what is the right— I mean I'm glad Mary mentioned. So frequency and reach are the two things that I hear a lot as a business owner. So reach, meaning how many people, right? Frequency, how often are they going to see it? So if I reach 10,000 people but they only saw my ad once, it's, it's horrible, right? Because nobody's going to buy anything. They don't even remember it. By the same token, if I only reach 10 people but they saw my ad 150 times, I probably oversaturated it and killed them and they all hate me now. So What, like, is there, is there a happy medium? Like, what are you trying to reach? Like, do you measure frequency on a 30-day monthly basis? Is it we want to touch them 7 to 10 times in 30 days? Is it— what are you, what are you trying to do there?

Yeah. So again, this will be— I don't want to give the excuse on it being market dependent, but when you do get into these conversations, it's like, okay, well, reach and frequency means something completely different on Times Square versus like some city in Kansas, you know? And so when you look at those, I think you have to take into consideration the audience right now, what you make up in reach, you're getting more massive volume. So those are some considerations to take into play. And you'll kind of go another layer deeper where it's like, okay, well, if my reach is low, or sorry, if my frequency is low, What I would do is it's not like don't do the campaign. It's okay, if I'm going to hit them, if I got one shot, if I have one shot to deliver a message, I need to make sure that this is like 3 words. Can I get it done in 3 words? Because I've only got one chance to make it memorable, to make it engaging. And I think a lot of companies also, they try to cram too much into that reach, right? So it's balance. I've seen some companies be very successful with a campaign that has a low frequency, but they wanted broad reach because again, More frequency means more expense when you consider reach and, you know, your audience size. And so, you know, you kind of have to have the economics in play with these decisions because some of these campaigns can get fairly expensive. So you have to have a balance of frequency and reach and messaging. You know, I think all of that kind of comes into play. And so, again, run these campaigns for 30 to 45 days, you see good results, and then— or you don't see good results, you can adjust and sort of optimize based on what you are seeing. Unless the campaign does zero, then, you know, there's always ways to tweak that and get it to a sweet spot because those types of campaigns are a little bit harder to compete against, right? So I think there's a valid strategy there, you know, similar to what you had said about owning the direct mail space. You know, you start getting into— we're talking like paid, sort of paid media strategies, you know, it's tougher for competitors to kind of line up with you in those sequences because It's sort of you putting your creative, your theory into play, and not as easy as, you know, oh, they're on TV, I want to be on TV now. Those are easy to combat. You know, we saw that, I saw that through my entire career. We'd run a commercial or promotion, we'd see a competitor run a similar commercial or promotion. It's tougher to do that when you get in some of the bigger marketing pieces like out-of-home or digital. But yeah, hopefully that helped explain that.

All right, I got questions. Like, this is, this is, this is my theme. All right.

Surprising no one.

Yeah. I, I mean, yeah.

All right.

So I've got opinions and then I got questions. So, so I had a small heating air company. We had, we were in a midsize market and we had a couple very large competitors. And one of those large competitors was pretty effective at private labeling equipment. So as a small company, I'm like, okay, I got to combat that. So my way of combating that was to affiliate with a national brand, right? Because I got a, I got a small brand. I'm going up against a large brand. They have no equipment brand because they're private labeling. They're doubling down on their own brand. I'm like, I need to check. I want to take a chunk of their customers. So I go find the biggest, baddest brand I can to affiliate with. Give me a little rundown. That worked well for me. So in that market, in that size market, in that space, hey, I'm the little guy, I'm chipping away at the big guys. Um, that's how we went after it. What are your thoughts on just kind of that branding? How do you maximize your equipment manufacturer's brand? How do you get the most out of that? Or maybe you're the— maybe you would say, ah, forget that, man, private label. Or I don't know, what are your— what's your opinion on on that?

Yeah, I think, uh, I've got opinions too. You know, I think when, when you look at a strategy like that, I think you have a choice to make, right? And I've had a lot of, you know, throughout my career working with, I mean, gosh, probably over 40 different HVAC companies, different marketing strategies, you name it. We had some that had adopted the private label because they thought that it would help them sort of keep their brand more in the spotlight And that's really when I think about it, which I mean, now that I'm thinking about it, that was their strategy, which was we don't want to distract the customers from our brand name. We want to be the brand. We want to be the one to, you know, it's our equipment. You know, of course they can show you who makes the equipment. It's not like the company's making the equipment, the manufacturer is. But their strategy was we want to keep focus on our brand name and what we are, right? Which I think works. Other companies, even some big names, they would still like to bolt on to some of these manufacturers' names. And I think that there's pros and cons to both aspects. You know, you're going to run into customers that are going to look at private label and say, I don't want that. Like, that doesn't suit— I don't know what this name is because they all come up with very creative names. But it's like they can't look it up. They don't feel like that's reliable or trusted, even if there is a manufacturer backing it. And that's going to be an objection that that company is going to have to always encounter. Here and there, right? Other market or other companies, you know, you're going to have, you know, now they're going to be brand— they're not brand agnostic. Maybe they want a specific brand and then you're another dealer of another brand. So then you're like, well, now you've got to convince that this manufacturer is better than the other manufacturer. And so, like I said, there's going to be challenges either way. I think for me, like if I were answering this question as a marketer, I would want something that's not distracting. So if I'm propping up a manufacturer alongside of a local brand, I can see that being confusing. I mean, we've had customers call us at times, not even naming a company name, but they think we're the manufacturer, and that's not necessarily what we want depending on the nature of the call. And so there's a lot of ways that you can kind of come to that conclusion, but I think ultimately it comes to, you know, how do you want customers to perceive your brand? How do you want them to look at you as anchored to the manufacturer? And I think that the, the unsaid truth, or maybe it is the evident truth, but, you know, a lot of these manufacturers, they do, they help a lot when you bolt onto them as the preferred manufacturer or the preferred brand of so-and-so company, of Stephen and Mary's Heating and Cooling. You know, you have a lot of marketing tools, you've got marketing support, and sometimes you can kind of ride the coattails of that brand power. I mean, no matter what you know, since this is a Train podcast, but when we're pushing Train, that's a huge name. I as a company will never compete with Train, you know, and so a lot of companies that would work with different manufacturers, it might be to their benefit to ride the coattails of those massive manufacturers behind them if it helps, you know, with their objectives and sort of what their goals are.

Well, our hope is that you'll never compete without Train either.

So we love that.

Well, it's interesting. I mean, I saw like, you know, tracking cost per lead. Lead, you know, once we put that Train brand with our brand, we saw our cost per lead drop because we're getting a better ROI on the dollars that we're spending. So that's kind of what made me a believer. And I'm, you know, I'm aware that like my personal experience, you know, it's going to vary market by market, company size by company size. Who are your competitors? What are they selling? But for me, and like, I mean, we went from $2 million to about $3 million to $4.5 million to $5.7 million to $8.3 million. I mean, we rode that coattail. I mean, um, and, you know, within about 7 years, we'd gone from $2 million to $12 million, and we did it on about a 3.5% marketing budget. And I think that's the other thing. Rob and I had a pretty good discussion a couple weeks ago with a company outside our industry that does garage doors, and it was interesting to have that discussion because a lot of companies will look at, hey, what's our marketing spend? And they'll say, oh my gosh, we, we did $5 million in business and we spent $500,000 in marketing. So our marketing budget was 10%. And one of the things I've found is you might roll into the year and say, hey, our marketing budget's $500,000 and we're projecting doing $5 million. But if you have good sales processes, to Rob's point, like you, you're the sales and marketing have to work together. You got to know what the promotions are. You got to have your salespeople talk about it. You got to have your technicians talk about it. But if you roll into the year with a $500,000 marketing budget and then you do $6 million instead of $5 million because sales delivered on its end of the bargain, well, now your marketing budget is not 10% anymore. It's like 8%, right? And so it just makes the marketing look so much better when your sales team's performing. And that's what we saw. We might roll into the year budgeting 6% for marketing, But at the end of the year, it turned into 3.5%. So we went from on paper $2 million to $12 million on a 3.5% marketing budget each year, even though at the beginning of the year we were budgeting 6%. We just outgrew that budget. So it's, you know, it's interesting to look at those numbers and go, okay, I mean, if you're struggling, is it a marketing issue or is it a sales issue? I mean, that— and sometimes you're troubleshooting to figure out where's the issue. Is it that we're getting leads and the leads are junk, or is it that you're getting leads and leads are fine, the salespeople stink? I mean, that's, you know, sometimes that's the issue. The leads were fine. Just go get better salespeople. So, no, that's true.

I think it speaks to the alignment too of those. You know, a lot of times you go into companies and those are siloed departments. And, you know, when in my experience I had to kind of embrace all of it. And so it did teach me a lot about that. Like we kind of created like an accountability loop between those departments where it's like, I don't want to hear leads are bad. I want to hear what's going on. And then honestly, sometimes I had to eat dirt, like, okay, promotion didn't work, campaign didn't work. So sorry, let's tweak it. And then when you start to balance or create that balance between those groups, like you said, Stephen, that supercharged effect of collaboration, I mean, that's compound growth when you've got marketing and sales both working together to create those, you know, that end result, I think that's where you start to get into the sweet spot in balance between marketing and sales for sure.

Can I tell you the best marketing thing I've ever done in my life, Mary? You want to hear this story?

I swear, every time you ask me if I want to hear a story, and one day I'm going to say no, but not today.

Well, to Rob's point, I mean, I was managing sales at a pretty large heating and air company a few years ago, and we were we were the largest in our market. And so everybody imitated whatever we did. And it started to really bug me. Like if we ran a TV commercial advertising, whatever, they ran a TV commercial advertising, whatever. I was like, man, I got to find things they can't do. So I went and sat down with like the local YMCA one day and I go and talk to this lady and I was like, hey, how much, you know, what's— it was, it was the fall. So they were starting with football, right? Flag football for kids. And I said, hey, I want to come talk about a sponsorship. And she's like, sure. So we walk in, we sit down. I was like, how, how much is it? How's it work? She goes, well, it's $300 to sponsor a team and for $100 you can put a sign on the field. And, and so I just kind of— she gave me her sales pitch and then I said, okay, kind of curious, how many teams do you have? How many flag football teams you have and how many locations? Because there were 6 YMCAs around the city. And so, you know, there are about 30 flag football teams and there are about 45 soccer teams. And they were like, we just kind of add it all up. And I'm like, hey, I'm kind of doing the math in my head. It's $36,000 is what you're trying to bring in. And she goes, yeah. I said, I'll take them all. And so we took every sports team, every sign in the outfield. And when you look at the demographics, like, who are you going after? Well, you're going after people with kids in sports. Like, if they've got the disposable income to put their kid in soccer, they probably You know, I mean, you can sort by age of the home, like when you're doing direct mail or I mean, you're looking at what demographics are you going after? Hands down, best marketing thing I've ever done. None of my competitors could get in there because I bought them all. There was absolutely nothing that they could do to get in. And it's like I'm not even at that company. And this is now like 10 years later, they are still doing it. It's— they'll never stop because they got them. They got them all.

It's awesome.

So I love it.

Sometimes I'm just petty, Mary. Sometimes I'm just petty. But if I can be petty and make money, boy, that's the best of both worlds.

I think we would call that a monopoly. And but in this case, we'll allow it because you're supporting youth sports.

So it's fun. It's fun.

Well, this has been really interesting. It's always fun to kind of— I just naturally find marketing and just interesting and learning about campaigns and how things work and I am a shopper. It's, it's true. So I just kind of like figuring out how people are marketing to me. So Rob, thank you so much for giving us just such a diverse insight on how we can maybe can apply some of this into home services.

Absolutely.

Since we've talked about websites for a good bit today, so it's Robert Anthony Consulting. How would somebody find you?

They can visit my website that no Google Ads Express account, but robertanthonyconsulting.com. Also on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the channels. So, but really appreciate you both having me. It's been really fun and great conversation.

That's so great. And of course, you can always reach Steven and I at HVAC_Full_Blast@TraneTechnologies.com. We would love to hear from you. Lately, all I get is messages from AI bots. So come on, real humans, hit us up.

Sounds good. Thanks, everybody.

Have a great day, and we'll see you soon back here on HVAC Full Blast.